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Comment by j-c-hewitt | Hacker News Reader

There are good arguments in favor of taking away section 230 immunity and probably better arguments against it, but the best possible argument for getting rid of the immunity is to get rid of social media forever regardless of the other consequences.

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You'd still have social media but then they couldn't moderate it at all and you'd have all the same problems plus 500,000% more spam.

Which means the discourse dies and the media is no longer social.

It only dies if it's out-competed by something else. When you make a change to the law that everybody has to follow, you can end up just turning everything to shit because nobody is allowed to do better.

It also dies if nobody uses it anymore. If all of social media was like 4chan, usage would drop by at least 90%.

Once again, people only stop using it if there is some better alternative. It's not as if people are going to stop communicating with each other.

Near a small town there was a small lake. Many people loved to swim in the lake. One year, a terrible accident resulted in harmful pollution spilling into the lake. No one swims in the lake anymore.

They haven't stopped swimming because of some better alternative. They stopped swimming because swimming conditions have changed and now it is a bad idea.

This story is directly analogous to the scenario described in the comment that started this entire sub-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23743161

If section 230 is repealed and social media becomes too toxic for most people to use, of course people would not stop communicating. The vast majority of human communication doesn't even occur on social media.

Systems that only work to converse with your "friends" (which I put in quotes, as we use that term so liberally online; just like, an opt-in follow mechanism where you can't be spammed by random strangers) are still "social".

Which just means you don't build the features that are spammable: you end up with friends lists (where users have moderated their own feeds by choosing who to follow) but no discovery (which is where a lot of the dangerous stuff is coming from anyway; good riddance) and no ability to message people who don't follow you (which is the default these days anyway as frankly it is already mostly spam). This sound a like a better world, not a worse world.

Right now peoples twitter feeds are[0] 49% spam, 49% rage-bait, and 2% legitimate content. If that changes to[1] 99.98% spam, 0.02% rage-bait, and 8.16e-4% legitimate content, most people will probably stop using twitter, thus contributing to the goal of:

> to get rid of social media forever regardless of the other consequences

0: 103% of statistics on the internet are made up.

1: 2+49+245049.

This is brilliant reply post. Upvoted, reblogged and flagged as spam. You win +1 internets today sir/ma'am.

> Right now peoples twitter feeds are[0] 49% spam, 49% rage-bait, and 2% legitimate content. If that changes to[1] 99.98% spam, 0.02% rage-bait, and 8.16e-4% legitimate content, most people will probably stop using twitter

That's assuming the spammers can't figure out how to effectively troll the people who came for the rage bait into propagating their spam, but they can, because spammers are Turing-complete.

Obviously the people who came for the legitimate content will be destroyed. Or take up spamming.

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