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Comment by jim-jim-jim | Hacker News Reader

That's the weird thing about free speech. Any community explicitly built upon it tends to exclusively attract those in _immediate_ need of it: conspiracy theorists and racists for the most part.

There's still a (naive?) liberal side to me that thinks free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society, but I don't want to be a part of a community that is innundated with nasty weirdos who were kicked off of every other platform, so "free speech" is almost a red flag to me at this point. That's kinda sad.

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Seen differently, you may also notice that liberal discourse can only thrive under censorship.

Nobody forces anybody to be part of that community. And, frankly, neither Youtube nor Patreon not any other giant platforms are any kind of "community" anyway. Youtube is not a community, it's just a communication medium by now. It's like talking about community of people speaking English and trying to ban bad people from using the language (fortunately not yet possible, but if it were?)

> That's the weird thing about free speech. Any community explicitly built upon it tends to exclusively attract those in _immediate_ need of it: conspiracy theorists and racists for the most part.

Which is why it's better when giant platforms themselves allow free speech rather than relegating it to niche communities. Of course, good luck convincing them of that.

I agree with this. I believe one of the biggest reasons public opinion switched to support gay marriage so quickly was because of public exposure of extremists like the Westboro Baptist Church. If ideas are that stupid and extreme, it helps people understand the real reality (sometimes at least)

> There's still a (naive?) liberal side to me that thinks free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society,

Perhaps because the videos that get censored are only shitty to people who aren't you?

You're right about that. It's easy to think in terms of broad morals when you're not a target. It's also why I don't buy liberalism even though I'm defending a liberal practice in this specific instance.

I want to say that it's rooted in practicality rather than idealism. I'm uncomfortable with for-profit entities being arbitrators of acceptable content, because various "divisive" or "extreme" viewpoints outside of racism are threatening to their bottom lines as well. A distributed, censorship-proof network would have the side effect of allowing racism to propogate, but it could also protect viewpoints that lie outside of the stifling pro-market center-right consensus that grips most mainstream media platforms. The problem is that these alternatives only attract assholes for the time being.

It's a definite tradeoff where I can't stand behind any one position definitively yet.

It seems reasonable to judge for-profit entities by what they allow on their platform. Certainly this has downsides - the "free the nipple" would agree with your position on this.

>There's still a (naive?) liberal side to me that thinks free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society,

I was thinking today about the high costs of the stupid idea of anti-vaccinations, in this case children that are not at fault will die because of this ideas, should we block them or we should put billions of dollars into educating this people instead of using this money for better things.

it is not a black or white problem but in this case I personally think is better to block this idea.

I would argue that the billions of dollars needing to be spent on education is indicative of just how badly underfunded education is in society. You see knock-on positive and negative effects of that at basically every level of analysis and observation.

Pretty much. If you think people believing and sharing false narratives is bad then you need to be speak out and support funding education. All other avenues are just going to be whack a mole, chasing the symptom not the cause.

Fixing education will not help people that are already out of school.

Instead of blaming the actual bad party you are trying to blame the schools and the idiots that belive the stupid thing, I am not arguing putting people in jail , I want to have a discussion of ways to keep the "expensive stupid ideas" down, it could be a solution that does not involve laws and governments.

There is a saying in Romanian I am not sure if there is an English equivalent:

"An idiot drops a stone in the lake and 10 geniuses are struggling to find a way to get it out"

>free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society

It totally is! Stupid ideas are very dangerous. You don't want to hear about them from people with pitchforks at your door.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centrali...

Yeah, it’s almost as if the decisions by YouTube, Patreon et al aren’t, like, the end of civilization as we know it.

That's why you want to participate under a different pseudonym. If you're OK with participating at all, that is.

I don't want to participate at all. What I'm saying is that I'm pro free speech and decentralization, but if all the content is just racist shit, then what draw does the community have for me in the first place?

Assuming the motivations behind them are genuine (a big assumption), then there's nothing inherently wrong with BitChute, Voat, Gab, etc. But the actual content on these platforms is the polar opposite of the "diversity of thought" they claim to promote. That may not necessarily even be the site owners' faults (again: a very generous assumption), but a set of circumstances that arises from who actually takes advantage of "free speech" in practice.

I don't have any good answer for how to address that contradiction.

I don't see why the "contradiction" needs to be addressed.

If you want to publish non-racist videos, you can publish them on BitChute without endorsing the racist videos.

I don't publish videos. I watch them. I'm not gonna bother flipping through 90% nonsense on the off chance there's something interesting available. There's nothing technical that prevents sane people from uploading videos on BitChute, but there's not as strong as an incentive for them to do so.

The platforms are fundamentally good ideas. There just needs to be a way to bootstrap a diverse community before they're killed in the cradle by angry nerds.

To observe the ideological flipside of this conundrum, I invite you to browse many Mastodon instances, where discourse is driven by the most unbearable carelords imaginable.

It's a good point, although I think it's more about people waving the banner of free speech. As the variety of material available shows, we live in the best era in history for free speech. But it's not like people need to talk about that; they just talk about what they want.

Those banned from one distributor or another will of course wave the banner of free speech, because that sounds much nicer than, "Why won't people just leave me alone to organize purging society of all the Jews?" But it's not like the government is suppressing them; it's just that distributors have decided that they don't want to associate with a very small number of people. And that banner-waving has always struck me as a bit false; it's not like, e.g., Nazis are known for their tolerance of dissent, so I have to suspect that their fondness of "free speech" would evaporate the moment they had any real power.

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