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Comment by kylebenzle | Hacker News Reader

Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them. Once that happens, what would be the point of switching.

Facebook and Reddit are successful BECAUSE they are censorship machines. Facebook spends far more man hours on "curating" content compared to engineering.

Same with Reddit. Add up all the "moderation" time spent removing negative or controversial posts and I bet much more time is spent on content compared to programming the site.

You are not wrong, but even if a perfect decentralized clone existed tomorrow you'd only get young men and programmers to use it, the average TicTok users wants to see beautiful people doing stupid things, they don't care how it happens.

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Actually, that's not quite true. Reddit's first wave of popularity came from a lack of censorship. There was a decryption code posted on a news story on Digg that allowed one to decrypt a bluray. Digg got a cease and desist, took it down, and people started protesting on Digg posting the code everywhere. During this time was the first wave where people started jumping from Digg to Reddit because of the lack of censorship.

The lack of censorship was so bad Reddit used to have a lot of child porn on it and Reddit fought the US gov on it stating it shouldn't have to censor content.

I suspect The_Donald has been shut down primarily due to a lack of moderators. This causes drama to get escalated outside of the sub and the Reddit admins do not want to deal with it. Reddit is still very much anti censorship.

> Reddit is still very much anti censorship.

This is just not true. They are very transparently trying to kick off users/communities that they don't "like".

For example basically any subreddit associated with the "alt right", except I believe /r/DebateTheAltRight or whatever it's called.

It's very simple:

(1) Identify community that you don't like, generally due to association with anti-leftist political views

(2) Find an instance of a threat of violence, regardless of context (i.e. the threat coming from someone who isn't a "real" community member)

(3) Use (2) to have a justified reason for "quarantining" the community, which is just the first step in a long, slow death-squeeze. From my understanding, those at /r/The_Donald saw the obvious writing on the wall and thus migrated to the donald.win quite some time ago.

The sense of persecution and victim-hood I hear from the right seems rather at odds with how damn successful they seem to be at the moment.

It's like when the silent majority was anything but.

This is difficult because there are different definitions of 'right' as well as different environments.

They can be successful at the ballot box nationally but still be persecuted.

Remember that Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla for his views.

To be a professor in University of California one has to pass a political litmus test.

So yea I do think there is persecution.

> Remember that Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla for his views.

He was forced out due to a 1000$ personal donation to a political group that was Christian/right leaning. Political speak: "Incompatible/Hostile views"

I seem to recall there was slightly more to it than that. I don't have the time or inclination to get drawn into this now but I didn't want an incomplete summary to stand unchallenged.

That is about it. That, and that given the opportunity to apologise for it, he didn't.

He immediately lost the respect and trust of most mozillians and a lot of the public, which itself made him unfit for the role. I don't know if you can really say he was forced out; you don't keep a CEO around when nobody in a company of hundreds of employees trusts them.

> That is about it. That, and that given the opportunity to apologise for it, he didn't.

It was personal funds right? Why should he apologize? Should you apologize for buying something from a competitor? Who do you apologize to for making a private transaction with your own money?

> He immediately lost the respect and trust of most mozillians and a lot of the public, which itself made him unfit for the role.

He did? Was he unable to perform his job? They uncovered this after the deed was done. Was that faith lost while they didn't know about it? If you asked Firefox users right now: how many people would even be able to tell you about this situation?

> I don't know if you can really say he was forced out; you don't keep a CEO around when nobody in a company of hundreds of employees trusts them.

Did the employees get polled on this? (My bet is no)

Dude/dudette, you're barking up the wrong tree, I didn't care about Eich then and I don't care about him now. I'm just confirming the post YOU wrote above, so quit it with this weird tone.

Also, your expectations of a CEO of a corporation as large as Mozilla are out of whack. If Pinchai, Bezos, Satella, Musk etc were publicly put on the spot for personal views that were antithetical to their respective corporations and lost the trust of their employees and the public, they'd either apologize or lose their job. Weird hill to die on.

But that's exactly what I mean when I say political persecution.

If his political views cause him to lose the respect of his employees, and losing the respect of his employees causes him to be unfit, then his political views caused him to be unfit.

he donated in support of prop 8 in california (banning same sex marriage)

I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me. But the fact that that's considered a hostile view is precisely the kind of persecution that I mean.

I don't think they're especially successful right now.

Their President is barely holding on to majority support in Texas and is losing every purple state. He seems powerless to appease his law&order base by stopping the riots and indicting their leaders as he wants to do. Their Supreme Court justices keep ruling against them (another bid to chip away at Roe v Wade knocked down just this morning). Their online presences keep getting canceled (Twitch ban against Trump just this morning). The New York Times has decided that publishing a right-wing essay by a Senator, with which the majority of the party agrees, is a fireable offense.

Their right-wing legislature failed to repeal ObamaCare. The right-leaning Supreme Court prevented Trump from canceling DACA. Although the courts didn't explicitly prevent Trump Wall construction, they did the next best thing: allow it to get tangled up in litigation, injunctions, and counter-injunctions for 4 years, thereby preventing substantial progress.

Lots of people have lost their jobs for criticizing BLM, whereas criticizing the right is practically obligatory. I see a lot of rhetoric, and very little success.

> Lots of people have lost their jobs for criticizing BLM

I think you'd need to cite cases where it was for objective criticism of BLM, and not associated/ tangential calls for violence, and/or hate speech.

Here are a few dozen examples: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1269314030663012352.html

Quoting some of the extreme examples:

> 3/ Gordon Klein, a professor at UCLA, has been placed on leave after he refused to cancel a final exam following George Floyd's death

> 23/ David Shore, a 28-year-old data scientist, has been fired for tweeting an article by a biracial Princeton African-American studies scholar suggesting that rioting is politically counterproductive.

> 32/ Tiffany Riley, the headmistress of a high school in Windsor, Vermont, has been forced to take "administrative leave" after writing a Facebook post in which she said, “Just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I am a racist.”

> 37/ Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic truck driver, has been fired after a fellow driver put a picture of his arm hanging out of his truck window on Twitter and claimed it was the white power symbol. A BLM protest was taking place nearby.

I think it'll be a good thing, Reddit and most Silicon Valley companies hostile to free speech are going to decline as competition as alternatives that truly appreciate the constitution of the country they operate in are born.

I actually like how Reddit moderates for the most part, they do keep things relatively "clean", but they are also thoroughly corrupt politically, horrendously biased in favor of anything left wing and beyond reform. Outside of a few minor subs, I don't "browse" reddit anymore at all. Everyone fair and honest who visits /r/politics or /r/worldnews knows by now they're being lied to, constantly and without relent, so only one type of reader still goes there willingly.

> Find an instance of a threat of violence, regardless of context

Doesn't the fact that finding instances of violent rhetoric among alt-right posters, regardless of context, sorta make the case that maybe this is an endemic problem and not a purely political suppression?

There are a lot of really hateful people among that group, in ways that just aren't true for other politically aligned communities.

I mean, the Dirtbag Left folks have their assholes too (note that the Chapo sub was banned too), but they're comparatively rare, notable in isolation, generally have names associated with them, and (really importantly) tend to be shamed and controlled from within their own communities.

The alt right is a bunch of assholes, plus a bunch of people who make a habit of tolerating assholes. That's a toxic combination if you're Reddit.

> Doesn't the fact that finding instances of violent rhetoric among alt-right posters, regardless of context, sorta make the case that maybe this is an endemic problem and not a purely political suppression?

No? Because in an anonymous online forum anyone can just hop in and drop a “... kill em all!” message and whoops, there goes your forum. It’s impossible to prevent, at best you can only react to it. You are completely at the mercy of admins as to whether or not they believe such content is “inherent” to your community, and surprise surprise, they do.

Except, again, this doesn't happen on other large left-leaning forums at Reddit. When was the last time /r/twoxchromosomes brigaded the voting at /r/news to attack an inconvenient story? When was the last time a mod on /r/relationships was banned for hate speech?

If someone dropped a message like that they'd get banned.

What happens when a large chunk of the community is like that and moderators are not keeping harassment down?

> They are very transparently trying to kick off users/communities that they don't "like".

They are now. But what we are saying is that reddit didn't used to be like this.

Reddit used to be much less moderated, and much more in favor of free speech, almost to a ridiculous degree.

They used to allow a subreddit called jailbait, for gods sake.

Things are very different now, obviously.

Reddit has banned left leaning subs too, so there is probably something more there than first meets the eyes.

I think it's not super useful to generalize things down to being about censorship in the abstract. It can be true without contradiction that many people are against censorship in defense of DRM, and are for censorship targeted at keeping droves of hateful comments out.

> Reddit is still very much anti censorship. //

That doesn't appear to be true.

Something like r/watchpeopledie, they don't have to censor, and it seems contained. I wouldn't want to visit it, not more than once, it may not be healthy in general, but taking it down seems to be "just" censorship?

Other than pornography they seem to have markedly cleaned up and taken a much more advertising friendly focus; seems much less to have the dingy back alleys it once did (but maybe that's a biased view).

Haven't they closed subreddits to quash some radical conservative talk?

Are you part of the Reddit administration?

Rightly or wrongly there appears to have been a lot of censorship over the last couple of years.

>Something like r/watchpeopledie, they don't have to censor, and it seems contained. I wouldn't want to visit it, not more than once, it may not be healthy in general, but taking it down seems to be "just" censorship?

I can say for me personally after spending some time on that subreddit that I am far more cautious and safe in everything I do. I always look out for falling objects, wear helmets and safety gear when appropriate, drive even more defensively etc. The sub opened my eyes to the dangers of planet Earth, all the ways it tries to kill us, and I don't think I'm alone on this.

> Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them. Once that happens, what would be the point of switching.

You could imagine a world where there's multiple apps that access the same decentralized platform, where the censoring happens at the application level. So if your favorite community gets banned in one app, if you want, you could switch to a different app. Not a perfect example, but it would be like how if Google Chrome decided to block somerandomcommunityexample.com you could just switch to Firefox.

Imagine? Isn't that how mastodon works today?

And how would a community deal with being brigaded by another, often larger community?

Wouldn't each community have their own userbase? So brigaders would need to make new accounts to execute the attack. Maybe a hill/gate could be introduced for new accounts to rate-limit the influx?

The likely outcome of that is that any app that didn't some communities would itself be banned from the Google and Apple app stores.

I like it! Every community could have their own "domain" and you could choose, at any time, which ones to visit and which to ignore and there would be a search engine to help find new communities for you.

(All jokes aside, I really love your idea of having different apps act like lenses or filters which give you different views of the same underlying ecosystem. That's the kind of conceptual novelty that's in short supply right now.)

The issue right now is that most content is presented over and communication conducted over HTTP interfaces without clear APIs. This makes writing independent applications to access this content or communicate via these channels challenging (though not at all impossible).

What would be really great is to go back to communicating via open protocols (and I don't mean a bespoke protocol over the open protocol that is HTTP). This lets people use whatever tools they want to participate. Like we have with email, Usenet and IRC.

EDIT: I initially wrote about content presentation over HTTP, that wasn't what I meant so I modified it. Specifically I'm talking about forums (like this one, Reddit, or any of the other popular gathering grounds) that are interfaced with via HTTP. They've taken over a large chunk of our person-to-person communication. Simple sites (like this one) are easy to interact with via a custom application. But Reddit, Facebook, and others are harder to use via anything but their primary site or their own application.

Usenet and killfiles.

In the olden days (when NNTP was a more popular protocol), almost anyone could post almost anything to almost any group. There was moderation, but mostly in more focused groups or announcement-centric groups where replies were not expected. To moderate, you, yourself, added people and subjects to your own kill file. This meant that the platform was mostly free of censorship, but the participants could choose to engage or not with trolls or charged topics. If they chose to disengage, they simply wouldn't see it. Like going on /. and setting a filter level of 5 for viewable comments.

Indeed. The average user, especially women, does not enjoy having their boundaries pushed by an escalation of shocking (but not illegal!) and pornographic (but not illegal!) images, which you will get if you don't have moderation, and even a bit if you do. As proven by Slashdot twenty years ago.

Oh, and the plain spam. C1al1s spammers can fill your entire board if you let them.

Having seen countless female gore/porn artists on social networking I’m not so sure how important of a problem it is... especially the porn part

Consent is important here.

Logged in just to thank you for your comment (which is 100% correct). So few people understand the role & importance of consent and your comment is appreciated.

Thank you!

There are many many people. As such, the fact that many people like something does not imply that the typical person doesn’t dislike that thing.

> The average user, especially women,

It consistently amazes me that people deny the possibility that women enjoy pornography. On the contrary, a large amount, possibly even the majority, of pornography on reddit is posted and created by women. Some of them do so to make money, but a lot do it simply because they enjoy it.

Many women enjoy (for lack of a better word) gore, horror, and shock content too.

> does not enjoy having their boundaries pushed

Again to the contrary, the majority of people, especially young people, actively seek to have their boundaries pushed to one degree or another.

It already exists. It's called Gab and it's growing incredibly fast.

Facebook and Reddit are successful because it allows for the users to be social with people they know/recognize.

Spam removal is the biggest element of reddit and FB. Unwanted content detracts from the original goal. (Also moderating in it's self does kill a community if done badly)

> Same with Reddit. Add up all the "moderation" time spent removing negative or controversial posts and I bet much more time is spent on content compared to programming the site.

Well, but there is easy solution to this. Just do it in the exact same way the reddit does it, which is to have individual fiafdom communities that have self appointed moderators in charge of their own communities.

So, if a user doesn't like a certain community, with a certain moderation policy, they can stop reading that one, and instead go to a different community with a better policy.

Reddit particularly used to be a free speech platform where anything could go and then used network effects to gain dominance. Now that they have dominance they now implement censorship of right wing views comments. This is true for Facebooks deboosting capabilities.

> Now that they have dominance they now implement censorship of right wing views comments.

They did the same with chapo - so, it's really not just right wing views...

Those platforms don't lack on identitarian division and push of extremist views

There might be a slight point that those platforms end up being more of a right wing echo-chamber more than a left-wing one because of some factors. But the bias is on what's in there, not on the platform

That being said, nothing was lost of value with the shutting down of T_D (ok, maybe it would be a prime source of information on manipulative state actors, but they can work on what they have already)

I'm not seeing "school vouchers" or "individual responsibility", classical pillars of Conservative values, being censored.

I am seeing a ton of censoring of racist and hateful comments, both openly so and dog whistles. So unless you're claiming that right-wing values are inherently racist or hateful...

You aren't seeing that content censored, because that content has been censored, and its posters vilified so completely, for so long, that it has disappeared.

There are virtually zero republicans or conservatives on any social media site -- they know they aren't welcome, so they don't engage very much.

You don't see them being censored because, at this point, they self-censor.

Who wants to be doxxed and have their employer harassed into firing them just for trying to have a calm conversation with people who want to murder them anyway

i see them literally all the time.

there's plenty in this thread.

there's plenty on reddit.

there's plenty on twitter.

what are you talking about?

The reddit administration honestly does very little active moderation. It's a shocker that they actually enforced their rules in the title.

Almost all censorship is moderation. And that's "decentralized" and not part of the company itself.

Honestly, Reddit would be better if they started laying down the law.

Reddit removed The_Donald from showing up in All, changed their search algorithm, and changed the number of active users showing up on T_D (they screwed up and you could see the true number on their ad buy portal).

Those were all 100% admin actions to censor, not moderator actions.

And T_D should be banned years ago for blatant doxxing, brigading, and threats of violence, all clear violations of Reddit's rules.

The admin has repeatedly been too scared to enforce their own rules, just doing half measures like that to pass the buck.

> Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them.

> Facebook and Reddit are successful BECAUSE they are censorship machines.

Citations needed.

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