How do you get this to not turn into a fascist/racist trash bin worse than 4chan/b/ as other Reddit clones have seemingly fallen into?
You let them speak and prove them idiots. It's really not hard. Unless you're constantly on the side that's losing, then it's pretty miserable.
But know that even though you're losing now you can reformulated your arguments and try again because no ones going to censor you. You have all the same rights because you, like they, are people deserving respect, no matter how much you look down on them or hate them. And that's what I tell them about you.
Less hate more love.
I'm very curious as to how we can get out of this, because I really have a hard time understanding people and this is an enormous laboratory.
Not just unresponsive to arguments, but will argue in bad faith, and it takes 10x as much effort to disprove someone's bad contentions than it does to produce them.
It's like a good sale, you identify what they want and then you show them a more social and friendly approach to reach their goal.
I really don't think you've thought your argument through.
In my opinion it's more important to let groups self-moderate and compartmentalize. We can have a peaceful talk because "they" are over there, where they don't disturb us.
> Not everyone is owed [...] even eyeballs.
Where to look is up to each pair of eyeballs.
And that's the key problem. People are more divided than ever, especially in politics, to the point where rational discussion is nearly impossible.
Instead of letting people separate into echo chambers, it seems much better to force everyone to be in the same space, which should result in people hearing each side of an argument. Use moderation to punish people who don't act civilly, which should eliminate the worst offenders.
I prefer things to be self moderated as much as possible, but not to the point where echo chambers can form. Some ideas:
- content gets removed after N reports - users with N reported posts get shadow-banned for some period (exponential scale) - users get N reports, which get replenished faster if reports result in content removal - users that brigade get their reports silently nixed (e.g. you consistently report content along with the same users)
Or something along those lines. Just having an open forum leads to one group out-shouting other groups, which leads to echo chambers. There must be some moderation, but not so much as to recreate the problem a different way.
In other words echo chambers are only a problem when they are large and even worse when you have to choose one of two chambers dominated by either extreme. The political analogue would be the 2 party system in the US vs. the multi party parliaments with coalitions and fringe parties that you can find in europe.
And I‘m not saying your point about large echo chambers is wrong, it’s quite true (again, see recent news). But the problem is with any kind/size of echo chamber. And „echo chamber“ is a different thing than domain-specific groups like HN – it‘s only an echo chamber when HN is your only source of (tech/entrepreneurial) news/discussions. Note that even where you live can easily become an echo chamber if you rarely break out of it.
Slippery slope fallacy.
No popular platform works like this. All working solutions involve hard moderation and separate forums/groups for different people.
>they, are people
Not necessarily.
Even if they are real people they may be paid propagandists, trolls or promoters. You need heavy moderation or access restrictions to make things work after the size of community grows. Eventually even moderation breaks down after the size grows.
I respectfully disagree.
ETA: Sunlight isn't actually a disinfectant here. If it was, moderation-lite platforms wouldn't be full of fascist trash.
What actually happens is this: 1. Someone makes a moderation-lite platform in response to censorship on mainstream platforms 2. Thousands of awful people flock to the platform, along with two or three principled free speech advocates. Most normal people avoid it because they don't realistically need to worry about being banned from mainstream platforms and they don't want to deal with fascists. (Besides, the racist trolls aren't actually interested in open and respectful discourse. That's a lie.)
The correct approach (IMO) is to educate people about these rather than to have some sort of censorship mechanism.
If a website permits members to be openly anti-semitic or racist or sexist then they will be anti-semitic, racist and sexist everywhere, whether that's a quarantined sub-community about anti-semitism, or a community about video games, make-up or curating art for galleries. No amount of education is going to encourage jewish people to spend their time talking to openly anti-semitic people about video games. If you permit toxic behaviour then you exclude anybody who feels threatened by that behaviour.
You cannot effectively allow people to individually "filter out" toxic behaviour within a community because toxic behaviour permeates all aspects of participation in a community. The views we hold are fundamental to all aspects of our lives: our lives are built upon our views. A violent anti-semite's beliefs are present in their views on politics, religion, video games, food, housing, travel, science, technology... you cannot effectively "filter out" the fundamentals of someone's view points without neutering their speech -- which is no different from de-platforming them.
A community is a group of people and a group of people is a collection of beliefs, a community is not a bunch of people who use the same website but are intentionally siloed because their beliefs are incompatible. People who favour the PlayStation 4 over the Xbox One can be part of a community with people who favour the Xbox One over the Playstation 4, but can people who wish death upon all jews be a part of a community with jewish people?
I'm not waving any hands. I'm firmly advocating self-filtering over authoritarian censorship as a means of regulating community content platforms. I am also explaining that I believe my stance is in tune with our guiding political principles in the US because it is the option that does not systemically promote oppression.
> that's not the world we've chosen to create,
What? It is exactly the world we intended to create in the US (you might have missed my caveat, and I noticed your spelling of favor). I'm referencing political philosophy from the federalist papers and from the prior art they're somewhat inspired by. Many of the people who founded the US were religiously oppressed and sought to create exactly a world that would prevent such oppression from manifesting again. It's where the whole separation of church and state comes from.
> and it's hard to understand how you can earnestly compare racism and homosexuality.
I'm not sure I follow. I'm not comparing homosexuality and racism. Where did I do that? But since you mention it, it actually sounds like you might not be aware of the extent to which homosexuals have historically been persecuted, experienced oppression, and had their liberties and even lives taken from them.
> Are violent racists oppressed when they're not permitted to deny the rights of minorities
Violent racists are jailed when they commit acts of violence. They could claim the mere existence of some class is oppressive and not allowing them to eradicate it infringes upon their rights. It's unlikely that strategy would get them anywhere because the right to genocide is not a universally understood and acknowledged human right (in the US, anyway).
Nobody is ever allowed to deny rights that we the people have agreed to defend--it's illegal because it's oppressive--that's the point. We are all supposed to enjoy the liberties we've agreed are core to our constitution, not just those of us who are "right". Saying, "Blacks aren't people" or, "Kill the Jews" does not deprive members of the respective class (or anyone) of their person-hood, or their liberty so we tolerate it even though it's stupid.
> Perhaps when you're philosophising (sic.) in comments on the internet about civil liberties they're the same but in the real world they are not.
I guess the internet isn't real life? If so, why do you care so much about de-platforming and censoring toxic minority views on internet community platforms? Anyway, I do not believe the ends justify the means. I do not support oppression or removal of civil liberties so that we can gosh darn it eradicate those pesky racists. To do so would required us to declare them sub-human (by constitutional definition) and strip them of their liberties and remove them from our communities. "Let's round up all the racists and get rid of them..." That sounds a little -ist or -azi for my tastes.
As to your last paragraph, anyone who thinks xbone is better than PS4 probably isn't human so they never had a chance anyway (;
> I feel like the cost of having open communication platforms is the existence of toxic communities.
This topic has been discussed through history by many political philosophers. In the US, it's one of our founding principles. A strict non-unanimous majority rule is by definition oppressive. So how does one craft a society that keeps the majority of people happy while keeping in check the oppression a majority exerts upon dissenting "factions"? You preserve certain fundamental civil liberties and human rights for all your citizens. You do this so that a mere majority cannot infringe upon the liberties of minority groups. On top of that, the civil liberties you choose to universally defend are selected such that they give social agency to members regardless of faction allegiance. A faction may begin to feel oppressed by introduction of an ignorant law or by global change in social outlook (including reinterpretation of existing laws). The response is for the faction to exercise their social agency in order to effect political change that they otherwise don't have the numbers to outright decree.
If you allow people to communicate, some are going to say something "toxic". We pay this price so that as a society we retain a means for oppression to be discovered. Indeed two "toxic" homosexuals one day may be the voice for marriage equality the next.
There will be a moderated list of subs (maintained by the main developer), but users will be free to try to find an join even the most controversial ones.
If the goal is shitposting and edge-waddling I think it can be done, for a while anyway. However, if the goal is to have a space where discussion is meaningful, good faith, charitable, intelligent conversation, I'm not sure we can currently do this in a completely open way and still maintain a signal to noise ratio where sane people would willfully spend their valuable free time.
In our current iteration of tech, society, education levels, culture, and politics it seems that (so far) every time we create an open space, the moment it reaches a certain level of popularity, the noise levels reach a point where it is pretty much impossible to have meaningful, contextual, and nuanced conversations.
At the point that signal to noise ratio reaches unacceptable levels, we lose a critical mass of the people who made the space "special"
I really hope we can get around this someday, but sadly, so far the absolutist free-for-all spaces really offer diminishing returns for those of us who are busy. Rather than sifting through rubble to find gold, at least for me, I can think of many things I'd rather do than engage in a conversation with someone when there is a higher than average chance they aren't there in good faith and when entire segments of the community exist who are literally only in the space to engage in and spread sophistry.
At least for now, outside of invite only communities or high barrier of entry communities, spaces such as HN or SSC --both of which are largely unknown to the general public-- seem to offer the best blend of openness and time-well-spent conversations. But I'm not sure either of these could maintain the same level of conversation at scale.