Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Luckily, "civilized societies" are some of the most deluded about this point.

From McCarthyism, to J.E. Hoover, to MLK, Gary Webb, to WMD, to the Patriot Act, to Snowden, to the "collusion" BS, to today's de-platforming, the establishment and the media easily stomps on whoever they don't like with impunity.

View on HN

So, can we as humans learn from history? Can we establish better, more thoughtful, and more balanced societies as time and our understanding progresses?

Or have we already built the pinnacle of society at some past point, and everything we ever do in the future is doomed to be as bad or worse than what we already have?

I'd like to choose optimism here, personally.

Well, starting with free for everybody speech platforms, and letting people make up their mind, would be a good start.

Banning ads would also be another good start, but I don't see the idea getting very popular.

No, it would not be a good start. How do we know this? Because that's what the actual start was. And it led to Facebook becoming the carrier of all the hate people could convince each other to accept. And people targeted each other, conditioned each other, to normalize this hate and acceptance of violence against 'others'. And so we have the situation we have today, where Facebook was forced to acknowledge that they became a platform for hate.

How about instead of a one-stop-shop social network, we go back to the random topic-specific forums of yesteryear? It decentralizes discussion, allows individuals to freely associate among themselves, and doesn't result in a "one size fits all" mentality when it comes to moderation.

Indeed, this is a decentralised problem in need of a decentralised solution. Also relevant are https://hypothes.is/ and IPFS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com