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Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

TikTok banned pro-LGBT content (until they were called out on it?), TikTok bans a bunch of things in countries that aren't illegal there (or in any civilized country, for that matter), TikTok bans criticism of certain political figures in some regions, so forth.

Positive, but at what price?

I don't like reddit, either, to be fair.

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The front page of hacker news is heavily moderated and political discussions are quickly gone.

You can either have productive interesting discussions (or in TikTok's case fun videos) or you can have free speech.

Its ridiculous to suggest that lgbt content prevents fun videos. Also there is a lot of political content on HN. Its just shit flinging and random off topic rants that get removed.

They have a moderation formula and it works. Any social media platform requires it to succeed. That is the reality of today's internet. lgbt content is controversial in huge parts of the world.

So are Jewish people/content, but surely you wouldn't suggest banning them would be "working" in any way but superficially: that's called racism. Banning people based on innate characteristics that do no harm is wrong, as most people agree.

Anti discrimination laws exist for a reason. It would be cheaper and easier for businesses to tell disabled customers to go away instead of building a ramp. A club might please its members more by banning black people.

But we had decided that this kind of action is a negative to society. Tech companies have just slipped around existing laws. Its time that the laws be updated to include web services. TikTok was also exposed to be shadow banning disabled users.

The president was impeached, and there was no mention of it on HN. To say there is political content on HN is absurd.

Political content is allowed as long as it's on-topic for Hacker News.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Julian Assange, a political prisoner, was on the front page yesterday, for example.

Tech-adjacent politics is allowed, and given current politics it has been happening more frequently.

There isn't really a tech angle for the impeachment.

Not just tech-adjacent political content, but intellectually-stimulating political content, too.

I wasn't arguing for free speech. I was arguing against homophobia, banning criticism of very specific political leaders (they don't ban political discussion), censorship of statues of religious figures and so forth. All of which things that TikTok has done.

There’s no reason we can’t make different judgements about different types of speech. I’m fine with HN removing political posts likely to result in flame wars, but I would have a problem with them blanket removing posts about, say, JavaScript. Likewise, I’m fine with TikTok removing harassing content but not pro–LGBT+ content. These are not contradictory positions.

> I would have a problem with them blanket removing posts about, say, JavaScript.

But even technical posts that reach the front page are sometimes removed. HN moderation policy is entirely vague and subject to the whims of moderators.

It's not entirely vague. Dupes are removed, flamebait is removed, incivility is removed, and pretty much everything is explained either by 'dang or by the Guidelines.

Reddit gives random moderators (who are often affiliated with companies or governments, without disclosure) the power to do all this and lots more.

Yeah, but it also gives any user the ability to start their own sub if they want.

Doesn't Supermoderators can hijack and own user's sub, too?

No. Admins aren't supermoderators, they're reddit employees, and the only way you can gain control of a subreddit if you're not an admin is by /r/redditrequest, which has very specific criteria. (Moderator has to have been offline from reddit for N days, so forth.) Even admins can't take control of subreddits arbitrarily. If they did, there are a few that would have been gone years ago.

Yep, make your own sub!

And then they shut it down, take it over, give it to other people, or quarantine it if they don’t like what you are saying.

The comparison to TikTok which is popular despite being Chinese run and Reddit which is acting in a way that makes me wonder if they are Chinese run is curious.

I wonder which service really has less free speech atm.

Well, you've just pointed out the problem with centralized social media platforms. Someone else owns them.

Yes, but, if you aren’t breaking rules and they claim to be defenders of free speech you could at least expect them to play the part. I’ve seen some real shananagans at Reddit including the CEO stealth editing posts.

Reddit acting as publisher is fine with me, they just still insist they are a neutral platform.

Lol. Huffman replacing his name with t_d mod names was a troll (a great one). It was isolated, not an example of a frequent occurrence. If you're upset that he was functionally able to do that, I'll refer you to my preceding comment.

I’m not involved in any of the Reddit communities... but... I can see past my own nose on this. It’s seems many people can’t.

It's not random at all. Moderators are appointed so as to suit a particular narrative. The subs are such echo chambers that it is hard to separate propaganda and truth.

Look at what you're saying: tiktok simply bans all political content. Reddit is a cesspool of toxicity because of how everything is political content. Do you see the difference?

TikTok doesn't ban all political content, and you're spreading misinformation.

Not every social app needs to be completely open to everything especially what may be considered controversial social issues. I'm not defending what they did, I'm just saying if their goal is to create a silly worry free experience, topics of controversy run counter to that.

They don't ban all political content, or all expressions of sexuality or romance, they do for a very specific subset of issues which just so happen to be discriminatory. Like I said elsewhere in the thread: Jews are controversial, a ban on Jews on a social media platform wouldn't be remotely justifiable in any circumstance.

There was also the case where they flagged the accounts of disabled users to partially shadow ban them so they wouldn't be bullied since few people could actually see their posts.

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