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Comment by BoiledCabbage | Hacker News Reader

Think about that for a min. Racism is allowed, but not Spam.

They will allow Racism, but actively moderate out Spam.

What type of joke is this? There is no hiding behind it, they intentionally and actively allow it to become a breeding ground for violent racists.

It's like what in the world did you guys imagining Al Qaeda recruiting msg boards l look like.

"No Al Qaeda msg boards have people claiming for death to Americans".

And 8chan boards are also doing the same thing. It's disgusting, but people are desensitized to how absurd it is.

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> They will allow Racism, but actively moderate out Spam.

Reddit used to be like that as far as I know, and though there's plenty to criticize I don't think Reddit was intentionally set up to become a breeding ground for violent racists.

8chan's policy about spam is very different from how a policy against racism would look. What it in practice means is that if someone posts the same suspicious link on a hundred boards they may be hit by a global ban instead of leaving the mess for individual board owners to clean up. Even very principled proponents of free speech usually don't mind that.

There's no guarantee that spam will be cleaned up, it just doesn't get the protection of it being up to the board owner. For a long time 8chan didn't even have a functional anti-spam system. It's a practical matter foremost.

A rule against racism would be much more thornier. It would have more edge cases, and it would have to be enforced more consistently. It would be a lot more work and it would be more arbitrary. And it would go against the sensibilities of the original founder, who's a libertarian (I don't know if he's racist).

8chan wasn't created to be a breeding ground for violent racists. It was created to be a make-your-own-forum website with minimalist rules. For the first year, before gamergate drove more people to it, it was just that. In July 2014 an innocent roleplaying board was the most popular: http://web.archive.org/web/20140701141242/https://8chan.co/b...

A global ban for promoting genocide or murder doesn't seem too complicated

It's still more work, because some people will get upset that they're not allowed to promote genocide. It still has edge cases (I've seen some hairy examples from Facebook moderation guidelines). It's also still more of a free speech issue than deleting spam is.

That doesn't mean such a ban would be bad, but it is complicated, and someone who doesn't like genocide might still not want it.

It's not that hard to understand.

A lot of people on Hacker News gets extremely upset when some site or institution decides to censor genocide advocacy, racism, or anything at all.

The closest such edge cases I found were mixups between enticement and reportage about Syrian war crimes and Rohingya genocide. What edge cases have you seen?

I don't mean banning racism, but enticement for violent action.

I think I sort of get it now.

Moderating spam is easier. Apparently it's hard to tell between "we should kill these people" and "these people are being killed" due to a language barrier sometimes, and it's hard to automate.

But wow. You all think "let's kill these people" somehow has more value than "buy my shit/here is a malware link", nice. downboat away

> It would have more edge cases, and it would have to be enforced more consistently. It would be a lot more work

Obviously it would be more work than doing nothing. That's not an argument to do nothing though. There are plenty of topics moderated away (interpreting the age of teens/children in images for example) and yet those get handled with all of the subjectivity just fine. So that's also unrelated to why.

Noone said that 8chan was intentinoally created to be what it's become - what was said was that it has been allowed to become what it has become with no intervention.

And to your final point, even it's original creator says it should be shut down given what it's turned into. If the principled founder says "this has gone too far", maybe it's time to take it seriously.

> They will allow Racism, but actively moderate out Spam

Moderating "racist" comments is very far from straightforward. No one can agree what it would be.

Which of the following statements would be racist?

1. Organizations whose members are exclusively white are appropriate.

2. Organizations whose members are exclusively people of color are appropriate.

3. Blacks are a minority but commit a majority of violent crimes in the U.S.

4. Average height varies by race.

5. Average IQ varies by race.

6. Nigeria is a hellhole.

7. South Africa is a hellhole.

8. I prefer not to date blacks.

---

Even Reddit bans spam but not racism.

Guess what? The world is filled with imperfection.

The line of reasoning "Since I can't come up with a perfect solution, so instead I'll do nothing at all", is a terrible approach.

The courts get things wrong, credit card fraud detection gets things wrong, anti-virus gets things wrong. Tons of things aren't perfect - that's the real world.

The answer of "well I can't come up with a perfect version of those so let's do nothing" is preposterous.

It is no stretch of logic to say that moderation rules should be clear, not according to the whim of the moderator.

There is also the practical side to be considered. It is very easy to police spam with bots, and racism basically requires human intervention to recognize and moderate.

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