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Comment by herghost | Hacker News Reader

I think what I mainly worry about is that whilst I’d be happy keeping it pretty small - friends of friends, and family - I know that some of my family believe (and share socially) some abhorrent views, as too do some friends of friends, and so I’d necessarily be anointing myself censor-in-chief.

I left Facebook because it was a Sisyphean task to simply point out the glaring omissions and outright fabrications that my “friends” shared. Here? I’d have to actually deal with it, and probably also be somehow responsible for it.

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I think the idea is that such a social network is an idea space, not a family space, and therefore family members who don't share your ideas would not be invited.

> who don't share your ideas would not be invited

So, an echo chamber.

were loyalists invited to the continental congress? Sometimes there's simply no merit in allowing certain people into certain spaces.

It is not true at all that the Continental Congress consisted of people identical in thoughts and ideas. Much debate took place from people with very different ideas. It was not an echo chamber, which is what one gets when only people who already agree on things are allowed in a space. It's everyone's right to create such a private place, and it may be soothing to them if they only like to hear the sound of their own voice.

It sounds exhausting to have such correct views about everything and yet be surrounded by so many people of inferior intellect. If only we had more brave souls willing to publicly point out how the rest of us are all wrong... :)

So you ignore it. Then what? The only ones speaking have their ideas become the ‘truth’ simply because they’re the loudest majority. Next thing you know the earth is a disc or vaccines cause Autism.

>So you ignore it. Then what? The only ones speaking have their ideas become the ‘truth’ simply because they’re the loudest majority. Next thing you know the earth is a disc or vaccines cause Autism.

Sounds like a slippery slope argument, which I've been told are invalid.

Slippery slopes are a real thing, and slippery slope arguments are frequently valid.

What distinguishes a valid slippery slope argument from an invalid one is the details about the slope. Is it actually slippery? Does it slope in the direction the argument asserts it does?

Isn't this what block and mute are for? Or simply posting a better, more persuasive argument. Not sure why a top down censor is needed.

My own wish is that the tools social networks can use to change what we see would be democratised - I want to be able to choose the algorithms that define my feed, from anything goes to chronological to safe for children to only "authoritative sources" etc. Power to the people.

Those are fine tools as well. I’m not even suggesting a top down censor. I’m simply pointing out that the parent to my post is being ridiculous in mocking the grandparent poster for wanting to call out those who are pushing falsehoods.

If all of the ‘normal’ people just become silent and let the ‘crazy’ people run rampant because it’s impolite to correct them then we head down a path that I don’t want to go down. A path where society starts falling apart because common sense things like getting vaccines is no longer popular because the vocal ones have made it so and the people who know it’s a good idea have been silent.

Or you have standards of discourse. I was on a moderated email list at one point that had extremely strict ones, including that anyone could call on you to produce primary sources for your assertions at any time. You could post further until you did so or you withdrew the assertion.

It also had forbidden topics, including religion and politics. Very specific topics that verged in those areas could be discussed, but general positions were simply not acceptable discourse on the list.

The list was pre-moderated, mind you: every message passed through a moderator before posting, and might be returned to you. It was extremely labor intensive and basically had a full time moderator.

That's great for limited circles wherein everyone understands and wants to play by the rules. For the larger public (i.e., Facebook), it's not really scalable without falling into de facto authoritarianism. The "edge cases" in one part of the world might be the voices needed to defend freedom in another, and once you start applying a different set of rules in different scenarios or making exceptions, you've lost impartiality.

My response was directed more at people who avoid public discourse simply because they feel a need to correct people all the time. Funny thing is, real reason and facts don't need justice warriors. Science skeptics, fake news, and conspiracy theorists have always existed. Shouting matches haven't solved any of those problems. With time, wrong ideas tend to die naturally when thoughts and ideas (even wrong ones!) can flow freely and respectfully.

> Funny thing is, real reason and facts don't need justice warriors.

I don't know if that's really true...

Sounds like it could use sources for the assertion. ;)

Try changing a flat-Earther's mind using rhetoric, reason, and facts. Probably not going to happen.

On the other hand, geocentrism took a long time to die, but when it did, it wasn't because justice warriors were shouting louder (though many tried); it was simply a fact that could be independently verified by more and more people.

Real scientists don't launch marketing campaigns when they've made a discovery. They publish it in a journal and invite others to verify (or disprove) their findings.

You don't change people's minds by telling them what the truth is. You show them how to discover the truth for themselves and let them draw their own conclusions.

But don't take my word for it :) Look for the pattern in history and you'll see.

the article we're discussing this under is explicitly about advocating for such smaller spaces, and arguing against having to make everything scale to cover the entire world. not a public discourse, a private one.

When the call to action in an image macro showing a huge queue of brown people ostensibly coming to your country invites you to google a specific term if you want 'proof' of its assertions and yet actually googling that term furnishes you with multiple, thorough debunkings of the entire point it was making, and yet still it's being shared far and wide by friends and family, I don't need, your snark notwithstanding, to assert any level of intellectual superiority over anyone.

It literally invited them to prove it to themselves and yet seemingly none of them did.

But no, you're right. We should try not to be more right than other people, lest we're the bigots.

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