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Comment by npunt | Hacker News Reader

I get where you're coming from with the academic curiosity of seeing how people think.

That said, it seems you're assuming comments are simply a one-way output of different people's thought patterns, rather than a two-way process that has an effect on others. It's obvious it has a two-way effect - the point of reading and listening is to learn, and we can learn in ways that make us worse off.

The idea that we should have a super low-friction way to be exposed to the internal thought process of anybody who is motivated to post those is an idea worth challenging, and we're starting to wake up to just how negative the repercussions of it are. That level of reach without any filtering steps (such as community standards, social feedback loops, etc) is fuel for extremism, harassment, and triggering/exacerbating mental illness. Lets not give everyone PTSD if we don't have to, cause thats effectively what your argument boils down to.

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It's kind of like deinstitutionalization. When deinstitutionalization happened, lots of chronically mentally ill people started wandering the streets behaving erratically. You run into these people in cities--I've encountered one who loudly narrates her paranoid delusions about the people around her. Sometimes late at night you see people committing vandalism or doing drugs.

I think it's a better idea to give people the tools to control where they direct their attention.

Good analogy, the internet is entirely deinstitutionalized, but even worse, because:

a) people are more likely to have gumption to be negative in the absence of social cues of another person in their presence (global effect, whether or not user is mentally ill)

b) those motivated and possessing time to post are more likely to be suffering from issues (where those not mentally ill may just not engage because they have other things going on in life)

c) unlike the physical space where filters exist, you're often exposed to these people when navigating to entirely innocuous content (e.g. a kids video).

d) way way easier to find people with same or adjacent point of view on internet, reinforcing beliefs and potentially driving person further to extremes

Problem needs to be addressed from multiple fronts - as you say, more control for end users to tweak their experience (top down), alongside better platform-level filtering (bottom up), along with all the helpful designs therein like good defaults.

The open and free exchange of ideas isn't the same as deinstitutionalizing criminally violent people and self-harming drug users. Not in the slightest. The people "harmed" by Internet comments (live aside) simply have no recourse in U.S. law for their problem with it.

As a staunch supporter of free speech, being exposed to your internal thought process had some negative repercussions for me. None of my fellow pro-free-speech HN users were able to filter you, nor even were they able to socially pressure you, and as result I read an extremist opinion. I think it's important that communities control anti-free-speech comments, otherwise they will descend into extremism.

You haven't refuted my argument that super low-friction reach is valuable enough to preserve.

I have pretty decent karma in HN and there are much better filtering mechanisms in this community to remove bad actors and posts than there are on youtube. That's the context of my post that, while hidden, is nonetheless present in this community. There is no community for many youtube comments - its driveby comments that get free reach.

What's so bad about being exposed to the public id that you'd be willing to even loose a sliver of free speech to prevent it? You're already being exposed to the public id every moment, awake or asleep, because part of it is you.

> What's so bad about being exposed to the public id

I dunno, wake up and look outside.

Indeed, it's important for people to not think so academically about viewpoints all the time. There are ideals, and then there is the real world. It's fine to have ideals about things like absolute free speech in all domains, but it must be balanced against the constraints, rational and irrational, of society at large which never constrains its behaviours to anything resembling the ideal.

It's a classic question of the world not being black and white. Either people accept this greyness and work within it to produce the most desirable result possible, or fruitlessly wonder why nobody else is able to see what apparently is so patently visible to your eyes only.

and it is exactly the shifting of the Overton window into that machiavellian realpolitik approach that has the empire invading and performing coups since at least ww2, causing millions of lives lost and reverberation effects for generations to come. The same for any number of major constitutional issues such as the justice system, regulatory capture, etc.

We need more idealism, not less. Tempered with pragmatism is one thing, but the problem is then one is encouraged to temper that idealism a bit more, and a bit more, and one more time, until the original ideal is more a memory than anything.

For me this mostly stems from a lack of knowledge or respect for history.

I've downvoted this because it's clearly taking the piss, recontedtualising a comment for gainsaying. No part of the content reinforces nor advances the main thrust of your argument that I can see.

You can't exactly challenge ideas if the challenger ideas need to be approved or in an approved venue.

It's not that long ago that the Catholic church had people executed for heresy.

I didn't say that ideas need to be 'approved'. I challenged the idea that the ability to reach a worldwide audience should be free and available to anybody, regardless of content therein.

Filtering mechanisms exist in all forums, online and offline. Some suck, like certain sub-communities in youtube. The discussion should be about what filters we employ to best balance the positive value of conversation against the negative.

> I didn't say that ideas need to be 'approved'. I challenged the idea that the ability to reach a worldwide audience should be free and available to anybody, regardless of content therein.

If that "reach" should not be available to "anybody, regardless of content therein", then the logical and unavoidable conclusion there is some person or organization that has to decide what people and content are allowed access. You can hardly dodge the logical implications of your own statement.

Do you have a specific point? Or just picking a nit?

There are vastly different ways in which the flow of communication between people or groups of people can be impacted, and the differences between these ways can be very important. Because of this, sweeping generalizations don't seem very helpful.

This is absolutely not the case.

Reach is about broadcast. There are plenty of non-authoritarian ways to reduce reach. The most obvious one is to make people pay for it (like they do on Facebook). Community moderation is another, and trust metrics is yet another.

All have tradeoffs, but - since you are nitpicking here - it isn't a logical and unavoidable conclusion that this has to be a decision about allowed access.

Yes, let's institute zones of allowed speech.

While we're at it, if you'd like to protest the White House, let's make it so that you're allowed to do so but your protest must fit within a 9' by 9' space that must be a minimum of 500 feet from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. No carried signs may extend above 8' from the floor and your total volume must remain below 90dB. Make sure you optimize your protest space to have the loudest (but not too loud), boldest (but not too bold) voices, otherwise it will diminish your potential impact.

Lest you go to an argument about public vs private property, in our society, social media _is_ the public forum... Just as when these laws were written, public spaces were.

To use reductio ad absurdum on your argument for a minute:

Everyone in the world has an earpiece which they must wear at all times. Everyone has a microphone which automatically broadcasts everything they say to everyone's earpiece. You can't take your earpiece off, as that would reduce someone else's ability to speak freely to you.

There are downsides to allowing everyone a global platform.

This assumes, that giving someone free speech forces you to listen to it. Do you have an example of where this happens to you?

Not, not forced, but then I did say it was an absurd example. Slightly different qualitatively from my hypothetical: there are plenty of examples of unwanted speech appearing in places, and while they are not forced to actually read it, the "owners" of those places are unable to stop it. For example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/27/facebook-...

You still can set your page to private if i am not mistaken. And you are also not forced to use facebook in the first place. I understand that its unpleasant and annoying in public, but the assumption that someone elses free speech in a public place affects you personally whether you want it or not doesnt seem necessary true to me.

While not so well worded, i do agree with the broad rational, that in order to restrict free speech in public, some sort decision has to be made about what is allowed and what not. Like it is with everything from laws to social norms. The methods for decision making are broad, from authoritarian, to economical, over technical to consensus based decision making. But they are all methods of decision making. Asking who, or better how that decision is made is a sensible concern.

There are two people needed for a conversation in a public place. You have the ability to leave. You are not forced to listen to anyone. In a private context this is another topic altogether. You can kick someone out of your facebook group, unfriend him or block him. If they then show up at your front door we are talking harassment not free speech. Which is why the loophole of anti abortion protestors being allowed in the streets in front of clinics is such a horrible situation.

I know its annoying to be confronted with stuff you dont like, when your private life takes place in alot of public places, but that is your choice. You dont have to have a public facebook profile, you dont have to have a public youtube channel. And facebook and youtube as a whole dont have to be a public place if they decided otherwise.

> I know its annoying to be confronted with stuff you dont like, when your private life takes place in alot of public places, but that is your choice. You dont have to have a public facebook profile, you dont have to have a public youtube channel. And facebook and youtube as a whole dont have to be a public place if they decided otherwise.

Thank you for understanding and better expressing my core argument.

The context is comments on videos of children.

In the context of that, I'm fine with youtube's rule, but we were already off on a tangent in the meta discussion and that is clearly not the context of this particular discussion.

Go up two levels if you don't believe me.

We actually already have laws here in the US about signing up people under the age of 13 for online services and have since the 90s. They're very lax and not enforced.

A very large measure that YouTube could take is to hide all comments if you aren't signed in and strictly enforce the over 13 rule in the US (or whatever other rules elsewhere). But they don't do that.

You seem to be missing the point.

This isn't about children making comments. It's about comments by adults about children.

My point is that if the existing laws were followed, children shouldn't ever be seeing those comments unless their parents are insane and allowed them to...Don't give your young children a youtube account. Youtube can and should add blocking _ALL_ comments to the parental controls.

If all of these services weren't being offered for completely free, you could require a credit card purchase to make an account and solve this problem in an afternoon over a cup of tea. That's how simple it is. The problem is that the economics of these services allows and encourages children into these spaces without restriction.

Part of being an adult is figuring out how to deal with a world where some of your neighbors are horrible monsters. You don't just drive them into dark corners where you pretend they don't exist.

If pedophiles want to self-identify, that's great, because it gives us the option of getting them the treatment that they need AND of keeping our children far away from them.

It's not risk to children reading them, it's promotion of pedophilia that is the problem.

You don't just drive them into dark corners where you pretend they don't exist.

You don't pretend they don't exist, but you don't let them normalize their conduct either. And that is absolutely what is happening with the previous approach.

You don't let them normalize their conduct. You loudly tell them how intolerable they are to society. You watch them at all times and make sure they don't harm anyone.

As someone who was on the receiving end of attention from pedophiles as a child and who has spoken to many of their victims, you do not want these people isolated in their own communities. You want to know exactly who they are.

Letting them speak, which at least where I live is still their right, is NOT tolerance.

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