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Comment by yanderekko | Hacker News Reader

>It will be built.

I don't think we're going to get a "red" phone. Seems more likely that we'll just see people get Parler on Android through channels other than the Play Store.

>What then?

There's a lot of additional attack vectors. We've already seen Amazon move to boot Parler off its web infrastructure. If that fails to kill the platform, we'll likely see attacks on anything related to its financing, or things like CloudFlare protection. If that fails I could see progressives abandoning net neutrality to lean on ISPs to block traffic.

In reality I don't think we'll get all the way there, but we'll get close enough that a stable "red social media" ecosystem will emerge that's out of reach of cancellation. In the long run this may work out worse for everyone.

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I think you are right but people aren't thinking long term.

This will force people into camps and the camps will not see each other creating a massively re-enforcing echo chamber that will further inflame things.

That said, while I do vigorously support free political speech -even disagreeable political speech (if you don't then it's "speech I agree with"), unfortunately, you have people who don't know where to draw the line and cross into vile threats and other heinous crime.

It's a case of why we can't have nice things. A few people ruin it for the many.

But yeah, this is going to be disastrous for us. However, the social media companies and the regular media made this bed and they are happy swines right now.

I hope other countries wise up to especially social media platforms (be they from the US, China, Russia, etc) and build their own to avoid having large countries influence how smaller countries should conduct themselves.

That is basically, a few corporations are setting the tone of discussion for all people except China, North Korea and Iran (who, in retrospect, "wisely" banned them). That's not a good thing.

They are the culture barons and they are not shy about using their power to steer things.

>This will force people into camps and the camps will not see each other creating a massively re-enforcing echo chamber that will further inflame things.

Honestly it's already happened in my view, even when conservatives were not being purged wholesale from these platforms by administrators they were already being purged from user-moderated communities on these platforms. This is largely about people who already don't engage with conservatives wanting to leverage whatever power they can in order to disrupt the ability to communicate and associate with one another online. The pretext is of course stopping violence, but even a lot of people on the left see the rank hypocrisy of this hand-wringing given the kind of rhetoric that the left has been producing over the past several years.

This has nothing to do with conservatism. I am banned from /r/conservative for posting conservative beliefs. Don't be fooled by the labels being used. Being anti-left is not the same as being conservative. Fascism, just to give one example, is anti-left but it's not conservative in any traditional American sense of the word.

Maybe you could more accurately say this is about the "right wing"? Actual dyed-in-the-wool conservatives seem to want nothing to do with Trump or Qanon or any of this stuff, which seems to have little to nothing to do with conservative values.

I see a lot of conservatives turning towards Biden and Harris, who to me appear to be actually very conservative. Harris is a literal cop, and Biden's platform is basically "let's get back to normal". I'm not a fan, but I understand why conservatives would like them.

Do you also support terrorists planning and announcing attacks openly? Because that’s what was contained in Amazon’s letter to Parler - 98 instances of real threats against minorities, press, legislators, etc.

Discourse has always had limits of decency, and when that cannot be ensured - the very tool or network becomes a national security concern. Conservatives aren’t the issue - it’s the batshit crazy terrorists that aren’t contained.

I do not support violent threats issued by leftists or rightists. However, I do see leftist terroristic threats given more berth than rightist threats. ("Let's burn that mutherf*er down")

That said other speech that may contain lies and deceit, etc, should be protected free speech. Because, as we know, facts change. Just like Vitamin D & Covid. Oh, now it's okay. Before it was a lie.

My favourite thing was getting sitebanned from Reddit for advocating the use of face masks, especially for high risk populations (ie the elderly or those with pre-existing conditions).

Apparently I was spreading misinformation because WHO said masks don’t help the general public.

> My favourite thing was getting sitebanned from Reddit for advocating the use of face masks

Do you have any evidence of this? There were lots of people advocating masks on r/Coronavirus since January. I've never heard of a site-ban for conduct that doesn't violate Reddit's TOS.

"Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia"

That is odd because I have seen people advocating the use of face masks on various reddits since the begining of covid.

The question:

“Why is it that Leftist terroristic threats are given a greater level of leeway versus Rightist threats?”

has a companion question which is equally pertinent:

“Why is it that Rightist violence is met with restrained law enforcement responses versus the heavy handed responses during occasions of Leftist violence?”

Where was the heavy handed law enforcement response during BLM protests the last 6 months? I don’t recall any protestors being shot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_police_violence_inci...

Watching liberals morph into 2001-era Republicans is pretty funny. We should call the coming era the Orange Scare.

This has been and is already a thing: neo-liberal(ism)

And particularly, the New Democrats since the concept of neoliberalism crosses the aisle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democrats

The long run is difficult to forecast. My hope is that somebody, maybe the next Republican administration whenever it happens, will make walled gardens illegal.

I never liked them and it's the main reason for I don't buy anything Apple. Android has sideloading, let's hope Google won't take it away from us.

If walled gardens go away there will be at least one good consequence in what happened on January 6. Everything else looks bad for both sides. A blog post was posted to HN about one month ago, somebody from Sri Lanka writing about what happened there after the losing party contested the result of an election. The point was that Americans were blind to the consequences of destroying the legitimacy of the electoral process. It is easy to see now that he was right and there is a lot of space open for further escalations. I don't live in the USA but what happens in the USA comes to all the Western World, more sooner than later.

Edit. The post is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25171844 and I see now that it was flagged after I read it. Maybe we can see that it was prescient enough not to be flagged again now.

> If that fails I could see progressives abandoning net neutrality to lean on ISPs to block traffic.

Funny considering of course that republicans abandoned net neutrality years ago.. Now maybe they will support it?

Republicans want to deregulate ISPs but regulate .com because the most influential .com companies lean left. It's as simple as that. They were happy getting rid of the "fairness doctrine" for broadcast TV but want it back for .com platforms.

Trump is just the most ugly manifestation of this attack on non-right wing media and platforms: he threatened to veto an unrelated military spending bill unless Congress repealed Section 230 in hopes of heaping a DMCA-like level of liability onto Twitter et al. The actual result would be the neutering of the Internet for everyone: no comment sections if discussion was not the major feature, heavy moderation of anything that might offend anyone.

Amazon has announced they are pulling Parler off their web infrastructure. They are free to rent their own hosting from another provider, or buy their own computers and peer to the internet.

Until you people go after their peer, right? Then it’s “level3 is a private company”.

> Until you people go after their peer, right? Then it’s “level3 is a private company”.

Hey, if only the FCC rule that ISPs should be obligated to permit all legal content and applications without discrimination was still in place.

Who are the idiots that got rid of that?

Yep. At the the of the day, the internet is a network and a network requires two parties.

Turns out the net's administrators interpret some signal as damage and also route around it.

Yep. Minutes behind. Curious to see how long this knocks Parler offline.

The pirate bay manages to stay online

Gab announced a phone today.

That's interesting news. Do you have a link?

Yes! Looks droidlike.

[0]: https://news.gab.com/2021/01/09/gabs-statement-on-apple-and-...

Sure looks a lot like an ordinary android phone, using Google's OS

>we'll get close enough that a stable "red social media" ecosystem will emerge that's out of reach of cancellation. In the long run this may work out worse for everyone.

I would expect the same, but substitute "worse" for "better". Trumpism lives on conflict and trolling. There's nobody to troll on Parler. It's affective politics as much as ideological: they may believe awful things, but they're mostly out to have a good time. Parler is like a video game with all the cheat codes on; it will entertain them at first, but they'll get bored quickly.

What they'll do next I'm not sure, but the whole political success of Trumpism was based on turnout, which was based on enthusiasm. Facebook and Twitter are enthusiasm-generating machines, and cutting Trump supporters off is not much different than cutting off a bar patron who's clearly had seven too many. They might make new social networks, but they won't be as good, and that's enough.

> Parler is like a video game with all the cheat codes on; it will entertain them at first, but they'll get bored quickly.

When I was much younger - like, 8-9-10yo, PC games were hard for me: younger age, smaller-mind. I’d use my limited time on my 28.8 dialup to get cheat codes and burn hours of my life having fun in the single-player skirmish/instant-action-mode (as opposed to campaign/story mode - this was before always-on internet and built-in matchmaking, ofc) - and I never got bored of it. I didn’t get tired of winning. Not that “winning” was the objective, but just blowing stuff up in Streets-of-SimCity or spamming the easter-egg nuke-troopers in Age of Empires was enough to entertain me.

I didn’t stop cheating at single-player PC games until after I was old enough to understand how to actually play the game and started to appreciate the challenge and enjoy the satisfaction of overcoming that challenge.

As a comparison - I see similarities with the types of people on Parler: there’s no appreciation of /the system/ - just a desire to be-on-top, stay-on-top, and have fun blowing shit up. They either don’t enjoy “the game” or they’re unable to play it, so they’ve invented their own game. Hence, the “like playing chess with a pigeon” idiom: shitting on the chessboard is more fun for them than playing by the rules.

The game analogy is interesting because this is clearly a bunch of sore losers.

This is what happens when you live in your own bubble and don't even bother to talk to Trump supporters and look past the memes and trolling. The memes and trolling were a necessary part of "waking the sheeple" discourse from what I understand Trumpism is. There is a World beyond all that which only those who have looked past the memes and trolling can actually understand. But given that you live in your own safe bubble you'll never know it. That's the whole point of this situation. We are already living in a balkanized internet where everyone has found their ideological safe zones and no one is willing to learn and engage with the other. It is exact opposite to what the internet was in the 90s and 2000s where you would actively seek out people with different ideologies and characters - especially the odd and crazy ones. It is sad to see this happen because I have seen how internet evolved since the 90s. It was a fun place. It is no more. Now we have mapped our real life to virtual life to such an extent that we have melted the barrier that existed in the beginning. Internet was a place where you could assume any identity and would get respect from everyone and be treated the same. A 13 year old kid could interact with a 50 year old adult on programming topics and both wouldn't know their real identities except for the discussion at hand. That internet doesn't exist anymore.

> don't even bother to talk to Trump supporters and look past the memes and trolling

We did, but when we challenged their fundamental assumptions about the world or proposed alternatives in earnest reasoned debate and discourse they called us “cucks” and what can you do at that point?

Yes, there are people who have been left-behind and find themselves economically disadvantaged by the changing world (e.g. The rust-belt) - but that’s not the basis of “Trumpism” - Reactionary right-wing politics draws on that group but it isn’t the cause nor basis for it. Remember that Trump isn’t really that popular amongst actually poor people - he’s popular with people who grew up in an environment that promoted what we now call /toxic individualism/. And America has a long tradition of it.

If that is the extent of effort you went to understand the other side then you never understood it. Can you give a reasoned, principled argument against open borders, transsexualism, liberalism itself? if you cant, you dont understand. You went to Trump supporters like to an ATM expecting a full service withdrawal. Life doesn't work that way, people dont either

>Can you give a reasoned, principled argument against open borders, transsexualism, liberalism itself?

I've heard plenty of reasoned arguments against those things. Here's the problem: they weren't given by Trump supporters. They came from moderates, or in some cases, from Marxists.

Trumpism isn't just opposition to what Fox News says the Democratic Party supports. It's the belief structure that convinces people that "open borders" is even on the table in modern politics at all (it isn't). If you think that "open borders" is more likely in the next two decades than the country being destroyed by an asteroid impact, you're already in the disinformation hole.

> we challenged their fundamental assumptions about the world or proposed alternatives they called us “cucks” and what can you do at that point

That's not true at all for most Trump supporters. If you have trouble finding answers to your questions I can give them to you. I won't call you a cuck and will engage in a proper debate. Even though I don't subscribe to all of Trump's policies I'm a right winger and a conservative. Another point to note: I don't subscribe to all of Trump's policies because the right wing in America is different from right wing in my country in many respects. But there is sufficient overlap to be able to say I can agree to many of the conservative points in US politics as well. So if you have questions regarding my ideology fire away and I'll try my best to answer.

In no way does this describe conservative discourse. This just demonstrates how far apart the bubbles are growing.

I've given them far more than the benefit of the doubt. If you think your movement can survive without trolling, you're free to demonstrate that over the coming months.

>but we'll get close enough that a stable "red social media" ecosystem will emerge that's out of reach of cancellation

No it won't, because that platform already exists: Twitter. I follow lots of conservatives on Twitter who have no need to ditch the platform, because they actually are decent humans who don't promote racism, unhinged conspiracy theories, violence and sedition. All of those things are now confirmed as losing strategies for the party; businesses doubling down on a losing strategy will fail. This idea, that a certain person's particular brand of bad faith trolling represents all of republicanism, is senseless and divisive and it needs to stop. Retreating into a bubble with this attitude is going to be even more destructive for the republican party and make it even more vulnerable to getting hoodwinked by these bullshit salesmen. (Disclaimer: I don't personally belong to any political parties)

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