Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder

https://www.thelocal.se/20200118/swedish-pm-calls-for-dramat...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A1LtmxkAYk

They're still very free to speak have no worry. Also if reddit didn't stop that, they'd be flagged as pro-racist. There was a need for a decision to be made, nothing else.

I find myself reading online articles in languages I don't command well, just to get a break from the one-and-only view.

Heck there are two primary subreddits for the Labour party in the UK - Labour and LabourUK.

A year ago someone asked what's the difference between Labour and LabourUK and this was pretty much the answer (I've quoted one comment but the same answer was repeated across that entire post):

>r/LabourUK is a Blairite echo chamber for bitter right wingers, and if you dare criticise Israel they'll call you an antisemite and ban you. You can call for the destruction of the left as much as you want over there but don't dare say anything against the Blairites, that's another bannable offense. Not sufficiently sucking up to the mods, also a ban.

>r/Labour is mainly frequented by supporters of the Labour Party and not by people who are praying for Labour to lose so they can replace Corbyn.

I tend to start at the top and up/downvote some of what I encounter. By the time I get lower on the page, I have several reasons to care less about each comment:

1) fatigue

2) an expectation that these lower ranked comments may be less worthwhile to read

3) the fact that any reply I make to a lower ranked comment is unlikely to have any impact or even be read at all (so why bother).

Even voting for low ranked comments has little payoff, because the ranking setup virtually guarantees that they are only being read by a couple people.

You can verify this fact by posting a quality comment right as the west coast is waking up on a story that has already been up for say 8 hours, where comments in the story have already garnered a lot of votes. Your good / interesting comment will likely sit at 1 point forever.

This seems to be a blind spot in the design of most comment vote ranking systems. Including HN.

So in case it wasn’t clear, although I agree it’s interesting, the part I disagree with is that the west coast has the last word. Technically they are the last, but for some stories that have already been voted on by other time zones, the ranking is already cemented.

1. It favors people who are more careless with their votes. If pro-Coke users only downvote poor comments and upvote well crafted ones regardless of beverage choice, and pro-Pepsi users downvote any pro-Coke comment and upvote any pro-Pepsi one, you're going to have pro-Pepsi comments at the top and pro-Coke comments at the bottom. The better behaved group is going to have less of an impact.

2. It favors people who skim and read carelessly. If you're reading the original article, if you're taking time to fully read someone's comments, if you're taking time to see who they are reply to and the context, your voting output is going to be less than someone who quickly skims things and carelessly throws out upvotes and downvotes.

3. It favors individuals that spend all their time online over ones that have a more balanced life. There is simply going to be more votes coming from terminally online people. This is particularly an issue in cases where you have to pass the filter of people who vote on new submissions in order to get to the front page.

4. It favors group think. There are a lot of people who think that a top comment must have some validity, and that a downvoted comment must have some problem with it.

5. It can give people a skewed idea of where the community stands. Even if everyone in the community had an equal impact on things, a 45%-55% split in the community could still leave someone with the impression that one view is completely supported in the community while another is almost universally rejected.

They don't. As the earlier points indicate, a small minority drives the conversation, and posting habits outside of the upvote/downvote system play a huge roll as well.

But the fact is, it is what it is precisely because a lot effort goes into moderating it. Acting like HN it's some kind of free speech place is absurd.

Claiming that HN is good and then going into outrage because another site applied significantly looser restrictions is dishonest. For that matter, trying to pretend the Donald or incels subs were merely normal subs merely discussing conservative policies is outright lie.

> When the unwashed masses are involved, rational argument doesn't work at all

I believe this is an extremely illiberal viewpoint. Someone who can make this argument could well be a monarchist, fascist, or totalitarian at heart. The foundation of a democracy is the belief that the "unwashed masses" can hold informed views on politics, and at the very least should have the right to.

Also, the average person DOES care what a rational argument is. A significant amount of Trump's 2016 voter base understood him to be a populist to the left of Hillary. His campaign rhetoric of isolationism and ending the wars spoke to large swaths of the population, which swept him into office.

Now, all the issues you point out are important, and must be tackled, but I don't think the right way to tackle them is to label groups of people with a broad brush.

If we understand that people are capable of being informed, we should ask: "how can people be informed>", and "what can we do to make sure that informing people in an unbiased way is possible?". I don't think social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have asked themselves these questions, at least not with any sincerity.

I think HN is a great example of the principles of (nearly) free speech in action. Look at the discussion we're having now!

I say movies of such acts. That's not the act itself. See Japan where comics that show sexual abuse of "young looking individuals" are freely distributed.

> These are all different things with their own problems.

> You're mixing up a lot of things.

No, they are all current limitations to free speech encoded in law. I mean to say (please re-read my comment) that "true free speech" already does not exist (just like "truly free markets" dont).

> Recruitment and instructional videos are speech.

Try massively sharing those to the wider public: I'm curious how long you stay free or your endeavors remain uninterrupted. Lol.

A video is a form of expression that falls under speech for all intents and purposes. There is no general caveat to freedom of speech which states that one cannot create a video of some illegal act. Child pornography seems to be the only exception in the US.

Further, metaphysically, 'physical acts' such as burning flags fall under freedom of expression, and all physical actions are themselves expressive. We prohibit child abuse because it is abuse, not because it is a physical act and therefore not speech.

The expression of copyrighted material, likewise, is speech. Disney is exercising its right to free speech by releasing a movie, even if that movie falls under copyright. Just as in the case of child porn, copying and/or distributing such media is a restriction on speech, albeit a widely accepted one.

To me, there is no way to argue that child porn and unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material isn't a kind of speech, or at least a kind of expression. It is absolutely speech, just as sharing a video of a murder or theft is speech, and just as sharing some public domain music is speech, and it is also speech that most people agree should be restricted.

Let's say someone campaigns that all people that have gay sex should be killed: do you want this "speech" protected?

Well: I dont. That's why I think "intolerance of the intolerant" is good. Most law books in developed democracies agree with me. White supremacists, racists, fascists, extreme wahabists/salafits dont. They want to incite hatred/violence (to non-violent/tolerant people). I'd say shut 'm down and/or dont give platform.

Hitler never physically dragged a jew into a gas chamber. After 1933 he never shot someone or so much as brawled with anyone. Yet it was only words, his words, his speech, or ink on a paper, that compelled millions of people to commit some of the greatest atrocities in modern history.

Words can obviously be a more powerful thing than actions. In another example, if someone is depressed or suicidal, and they are close to you, you can probably make them kill themselves with words alone, if you choose them correctly.

Well, it already is encoded in law. Most countries prohibit hate speech and/or inciting violence, while most people consider that free speech is protected in those places. So it's already practical.

> Who decides what speech is hateful or violent and should be limited? You, me, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un ?

This gets coded in law and jurisprudence and gets enforced by police. Just like any other unlawful acts. Again: this is already how it works in most developed democracies.

> How easy is it to label something as hateful and ban it? Very easy.

See my other comment about pesticide. Please answer that question. Inciting hate/violence is quite easy to detect in practice.

> That's the flaw in your argument, the human element.

Please explain. I dont get it. It's all down to culture, true. But that does not prevent it from being pretty much universal.

> The revolution to create America had violent and hateful speech towards the British crown.

Yes. Which was behaving intolerant and violent in the first place!! Just like now with police brutality in the US: so much violence from them that expressing/inciting hate toward them becomes acceptable in my book.

> Private companies can do what they want, but in public sphere the parent poster was right free speech exists to enable dissent, not support the status quo.

Dissent have no need to exist when there is no oppression/violence/exploitation/marginalization. Hence dissent is the best example of "intolerance of the intolerant". Thanks.

Personally, I'm skeptical only to a philosophical level, as I am critical of both liberalism and the state, and in particular how the state would exercise its blunt power if free speech protections were weakened. In practical terms, I'm in favour of freedom of speech.

> Pretending that the exceptions which do not relate to political speech are relevant or even interesting is almost in bad faith, however.

My point was more to get accross the idea that there are political theories of free speech (actually implemented or not) which (1) have what is called a "free speech principle", that is, an explicit endorsement and guarantee, to some or any extent, of the right to speak freely (2) enshrine this principle into a law, or suggest that it should be enshrined.

>Things which you cannot say which are non-political are curiosities, things for lawyers to get excited about.

They're also interesting in philosophical thought experiments and determining the value and extents of free speech - most imporantly in the idea of consistency. If threatening letters are disallowed, for instance, what implications does this have, speaking in terms of principles, for more "interesting" sorts of speech? It may have no implications (according to one theory of justification) but it may have far-reaching implications for another.

>But "hate speech", which you offhandedly list among other largely irrelevant forms of expression, should most certainly be covered by any serious definition of free speech.

My point in listing the exceptions was to say that if there is some exception, any exception, it means the rule is not absolute, and caveats can be made under certain circumstances. For example, incitement to immediate and direct violence is often an "uninteresting" exception. This is because violence is a kind of harm. However, the law also recognizes various other forms of harm (such as psychological harms). Which harms should or shouldn't be included, and why?

The question that 1A scholars and political philosophers have tried to answer is what, precisely, the exceptions should be, what the existing exceptions may allow scope for (copyright infringement? child pornography? cyberbullying? obscenity? defamation? - by no means uninteresting), and in general, whether we should have a fundamental law to guarantee freedom of speech at all. I think they're valid questions, and I think that too often we take ideas such as free speech allowing hate speech (however those two things are defined[0]), or free speech being worth the cost of hate speech, for granted.

[0] To paraphrase Susan Brison, these are hard to define. That's okay, we can talk about it. We don't have to write the law before we can discuss whether there could be alaw.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MGTOW/comments/i3dqzi/very_superfic...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/MGTOW/comments/iwaqm5/we_equality_n...

California/Silicon Valley has a big issue of absolutely belief they are right. Big tech companies want to stop "disinformation" by banning people from their platforms.

A recent case is Dr. Li-Meng Yan who's been publishing research about CoV2 origins. There are academics who've taken issue with some of those releases/papers, and there is room for discussion for sure. But it should be discussed. Twitter just said, "nope, disinformation, cut and dry" and banned her account.

There are a lot of experts recently who have been banned on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, et. al. for spreading bad information. But science is not democratic. California companies have somehow become the arbitrators of what is good and bad science.

But coming back off of science to t_d, the same applies. It's a huge feedback loop of "he's bad" and a "fascists" and subs like these showed time and time again the massive media distortion of every one of his statements. There are a lot of agendas going on here and few of them are for the Truth.

u/soccer was a moderator of r/911truth and, according to archived versions of their user page, posted quite a lot of links to "Israel did 9/11" conspiracy websites like https://careandwashingofthebrain.blogspot.

r/uncensorednews essentially did the same thing. It posed as an "unbiased" source of news but the sub's creator and top moderator was pretty clearly pushing his own neo-nazi views.