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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but this just sounds like a bunch of feel-good babble that isn't taking anything seriously.

Free speech? Fundamental rights? "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"?

Yes, these are all good things. But also all in deep, fundamental conflict with each other. Moral and political philosophers have been debating how to resolve them for centuries... and the disagreements are just as strong as ever.

His plan isn't taking any strong stances at all, which would involve actually making decisions between competing values. Instead, he's just trying to have it all -- which sounds good, but provides zero actionable guidance.

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It's even worse than feel-good babble. It's signaling TBL's shift from advocating a decentralized free internet towards a centralized censored internet.

"Free speech? Fundamental rights?" are what we want, but people who claim to want free speech and then claim they want "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"? ultimately mean that they want censorship.

It's basically what happened to social media and the internet. Remember that everyone from Reddit to Zuckerburg to news companies claimed they supported free speech a decade ago. Then money/politics/etc got involved and they started talking about ""Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"?" and we have a censored dystopia on our hands.

In china, they use "harmony" as a propaganda tool to justify censorship. In the west, we use "civility" along with "best in humanity", "universal human rights", etc to justify censorship.

I suppose it comes down to who defines "the best" or what good and bad is. Your definition most likely won't be the same as mine.

Times that by 6 billion (and different cultural attitudes in different lands) and it's obvious we will never always agree. The World Wide Web won't solve the differences between people.

I think we should stop pretending it will, or expecting too much of a collection of computer-served XML. That's all it is, fundamentally. I would probably say that politics and social movements should stay out of this serving of XML, as you can't keep all of the people happy all of the time, so why try?

Increasingly the machines we use are sending data back instead of serving us, frustratingly.

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