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The problem with the, "ha! now you're getting yours!" attitude is that the situation will inevitably flip, and "your" side will be on the receiving end. Again. Rinse, repeat.
Meanwhile, the power of the tools keeps growing until one day, it will be absolute. Whoever is on the wrong side of the ideological coin flipping when that happens will be in big trouble.
There are people trying to reverse that trend, of course, but the volume at which they're currently screaming that they've been silenced is, I think, a pretty good indicator of the trouble they're having trying to pull it off.
If you don't count Nazi Germany, for example.
Yep. Believe it or not, it’s possible for what’s seen as right today to be considered wrong tomorrow and this can be a sign of progress in society.
See slavery, bloodletting, alchemy. Although with Bitcoin’s popularity, it seems as though alchemy is back in again.
Of course I believe that.
I also believe that the tools the world uses to communicate are controlled by a small number of people who may not always share in whatever the prevailing tolerant attitude of the day is.
And let's be honest: we're not talking about people who are "being punished because of the horrible behavior done by other people years ago". We're talking about people who are being shunned in the present day precisely because they want to revive all those horrible things and start doing them again. They don't just want a platform where they can lob slurs at Jewish people all day long; they want to re-build the concentration camps and finish what Hitler started. They don't just want a platform where they can use the n-word at will; they want a return to at the very least Jim Crow and the lynching era, if not all the way back to full-on chattel slavery of dark-skinned people.
I'm OK with them being told "go build your own forum to talk about how much you want to do that". To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?
Hatreon launched as an alternative to Patreon. Know why Hatreon closed down? Visa shut it down. [1]
If Visa bans you, no payment processor will work with you. Not PayPal. Not Stripe. Not Braintree. Not Authorize.net. You are cut off.
So yes, of course Conte says he "welcomes competition" in the article. Any legitimate competition, that caters to the voices booted by Patreon, gets squashed by Visa. There cannot be any competition.
So all anyone actually has to do if he wants to share views the American elites find distasteful is go start his own bank (takes $12 to $20 million and jumping through a load of regulatory hurdles, according to Wikihow [2]), roll out his own credit card, get mass market adoption of that card, create his own payment processor to process the card, found registrars and hosting companies that use that processor, and start a platform.
We need a digital Bill of Rights set up before there's nothing left online but the most sanitized, P.C.-friendly content. A place where everyone has to act fake-nice and pay lip service to beliefs he doesn't really hold so no one will think he's guilty of bad-think. That might sound like a utopia to some, but to many of us it sounds like the opposite.
> To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?
A simpler way to put this is just "anyone who does not agree with me should go to a reeducation camp, or to jail, or maybe die."
People with views like these were behind the French Reign of Terror, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, and the Nazi concentration camps. In the end, in all cases, the instigators ended up on the receiving end of the same kinds of punishments they put in place for those who disagreed with them.
History is filled with examples of policies boomerang'ing back on those responsible for them. Just another way of saying, be careful what you wish for, because few wishes come without a catch.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatreon [2] https://www.wikihow.com/Open-a-Bank
I think a world without Nazis in it would be a better world than the one we have, and I think the fact that several countries already have laws in place to restrict the speech of Nazis, and they haven't led to your dystopian outcome, is a strong empirical counterargument to what you suggest.
A simpler way to put this is just "anyone who does not agree with me should go to a reeducation camp, or to jail, or maybe die."
You accidentally mixed up your scripts -- you're in favor of the people who argue for rounding up their enemies into death camps, remember? You think those people are great, and need special support and protection. So if I were to argue for rounding you up and throwing you in a death camp, you would suddenly be on my side and offering every resource you have to help me further my glorious cause. Right?
Please review the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
This isn't the first time you've been told this. It's not going to be the last time you'll be told this. And I know telling you this isn't going to change anything, but I have to try anyway. We know now beyond any doubt (and a legion of Cassandras were telling us long ago) just how easily social-media sites (and yes, HN is one) can turn into instruments and enablers of radicalization despite openly enforcing "civility".
You know what the solution is. You know, on some level, that civility isn't an end in itself; you know that the actual ends to which people use civility as a means matter. You know some of those ends are very, very bad. And you know how to recognize the people doing it. You also hold in your hand the power to do something about it.
Abandon the civility-at-any-cost policy. Stop being an enabler for the stuff I've been responding to in this thread. Take it from an "experienced user" who's had to learn this the hard way when moderating elsewhere. Or, in keeping with the season, treat this as a visitation by a spirit who warns you of the chain you're winding about yourself, link by link, and change it while you still can.
Among many other rules that your comment broke, there's this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." You're required to follow that rule, and all the others, whether the other person does or not.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like this account has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed, as the guidelines explain, and we ban accounts that do it. I've banned this one. If you keep creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with, we will ban your main account as well.
Would you please stop posting to Hacker News in the flamewar style? I'm sure you can make your substantive points without aggressive snark and internet shaming à la Twitter. Please do.