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Comment by catmanjan | Hacker News Reader

If you don't care about user experience and cost it's a pretty simple problem to solve - everything vetted before it gets posted

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Yup. It’s a hard problem to solve while keeping the business profitable. But so is safety in mining, aviation, oil drilling, medicine etc. Some tech companies won’t be viable businesses once regulations kick in. Good riddance.

There's something hilariously ironic in saying that tech companies should be treated like mining, aviation, and medical companies. How many natural disasters have the biggest mining companies caused and what repercussions have they faced? Do you really think Boeing is going to dissolve or that the pharmaceutical companies that kill tens of thousands each year by selling opioids and bankrupt millions more are actually held accountable by government regulations? It's all a circus show.

Just to clarify, is it your position that the FAA, FDA, and OSMRE are circus shows and that abolishing the FAA would make aviation safer, abolishing the FDA would make medicine safer, and abolishing the OSMRE would make mining safer?

Or are you saying those agencies don't do enough to hold accountable the companies that caused all those problems? Because that doesn't seem like an argument against regulating tech companies. That seems like an argument for regulating tech companies, and those other companies, more strictly.

No. He is basically saying that as long as we have these much larger problems, we should all of our time trying to fix those, instead of wasting time and money on a problem that is 1 thousand times less serious of a problem.

If social media starts killing 10s of thousands of people every year, then we should start talking about FAA, or FDA style regulations. But as long as that number is measured in dozens of people, we shouldn't be wasting billions worrying about it.

Lets take that moral outrage of yours and spend it on something a bit more productive, shall we?

Are you willing to pay someone for x hours a day every day to monitor and approve everything you post online? If your job is livestreaming then you will need to pay someone almost full time to watch you work.

Rules like that would cripple the open web. You can't only expect them to apply to unpopular companies.

Doing this at Facebook's scale is very much not "pretty simple".

The underlying assertion (and debate) here is that the value facebook is providing to society is worth the cost.

government censorship comes with a significant price to a society. Far to high as to push problems on it that amounts to bad parenting and consuming objectionable comments.

Do you reckon "de-scaling" Facebook would make the problem more manageable?

No, but it's more intuitive that it's unmanageable at smaller scales. Nobody thinks Reddit or HN could start pre-vetting all submissions in the first place.

The more 1984 process is that laws are put into place where all video can be tracked back and we can punish people for their speech.

Vetting first puts legal responsibility strongly onto Facebook and it's not something they'd accept.

If you don't care about heritage and politics then I'm the King of England.

I challenge the premise that anything needs to be “posted”. What is it with this incessant drive to give everyone a voice? It turns out that the majority of “user-generated content” is either trivial or outright harmful. Perhaps the time has come for this experiment to end.

If we abandon the idea that everyone gets a voice, then who decides who does, and how do they do so?

Professional guilds, such as those which have existed for centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild

> I challenge the premise that anything needs to be “posted”.

Agreed, delete Usenet. The web should just be for Disney, Universal Studios, Netflix and Amazon. The common person does not need nor deserve a voice.

Don't be so dramatic. The common person really does not have anything interesting to say. I'm sure you've seen Facebook: that's what the common person is like. This isn't new: people have been boring for a long time, but until recently we had no way to know exactly how boring. Now we do.

If you haven't been bored to death with this comment, I may have to try harder. Let me know.

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