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Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

If you block 8chan, the only thing that it will result in is people will move to more censorship-resistant technologies. You will push people to TOR, distributed P2P, blockchain forums, etc. Which will make even harder to identify them.

You can't stop the signal. ThePirateBay proved it many many times.

We need to address the sources of the problem, not the symptoms.

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Part of the problem is ease of access. Making it harder to get to is good.

It takes 60 seconds to find, download, and install tor. For people that's even less inclined, there are many tor2web gateways.

I don't want to go into specifics, but I spent time on some of the more unsavory parts of Reddit for a while. It got me into trouble with friends and family - I said some truly mean and hateful things. I was going deeper and deeper into it. But when Reddit banned those communities, I just... moved on.

I'm ashamed I ever let myself fall into the decaying orbit I did, but when the attractor was removed, I didn't seek out a new one. I didn't even have to install tor if I wanted to: they had just moved to Voat. Still, that tiny barrier to entry caught me. And I'm glad it did.

> download

That's already too much work for the vast majority of the population. If you can't just randomly stumble on it somewhere, it has no real discoverability.

Nobody in the history of the world has been radicalized because it was easy to access. They were radicalized because something they read resonated with something they experienced. People don't just accidentally turn into mass murderers because they read some pamphlet, a lot has to go wrong.

They don't in one step but in this analogy the pamphlet isn't static it constantly changes to show you more of what's engaging to you (or people like you as the algorithm understands you or as you engage more and more with that initial resonance) so that small initial resonance gets cranked up and up and up. It's hard to see how putting up a larger speed bump along that route won't decrease the number of people who get sucked into these radicalization spirals.

The internet has shown just how much making that slide easier means way more people fall into it. Used to be to get sucked into a world of neonazi/etc propaganda you had to know one and consciously choose to associate with it but now it gets lightly slipped into discussions online and is easy to find articles taking you to the next step.

Because the speed bump you are trying to erect only addresses the issue of people finding websites like 8chan, it does nothing to address the issue of why people stay on sites like 8chan as you described. Once they find the new site, they will be able to visit it again with ease. Furthermore, they will feel more victimized by society and point to their old sites being banned as evidence that society hates them; ergo, why they begin to hate society.

From the reporting and studying that's been done so far it seems like most people that wind up in this world get marginally attracted at first and then over time get sucked deeper and deeper into the more virulently hateful and violent edges of the ideology. My thought is that if you can sever the easy link between the on ramp and the end point people will still start over there but the jump from whatever weird subreddit or 8chan-alike to the violent side most people will stay on the clearnet.

Right. See flat earth, antivax, qanon, etc.

That's an incremental rather than a one-time process. Conventional wisdom on 8ch was that it takes about 2 years.

Torrenting isn't exactly easy, but it's insanely popular. Slightly complicated access will only stop some old people.

If someone creates an app that connects to some sort of distributed indestructible backend, it's game over, and all you need is an app.

Nowadays most people can't actually get anything off Piratebay cus they can't operate Tor

What are you even talking about? You get a magnet link off TPB, you put it into the torrent app or the seed box. No Tor needed.

There are alot of places where you can't really get to TPB without Tor.

I still wouldn't say "most people" can't access Pirate Bay. Install uTorrent, click the magnet link. Easy as that.

The very small subset of the population who live in a area where govt has blocked Piratebay can just use a VPN (which they likely already are for stuff like YouTube and Netflix).

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