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Comment by rangoon626 | Hacker News Reader

How do you reconcile the whole “if you don’t like Facebook moderation go build your own” bit.

You can still do it. Get your own server in a colo that's owned by someone friendly to your political viewpoint. Keep some spares in a closet for when the feds inevitably come when someone uses your unmoderated platform to plan crimes.

> Get your own server in a colo that's owned by someone friendly to your political viewpoint.

...until someone up in the food chain will either shut that down too or force them to disassociate with you.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/25/21532883/paypal-cuts-tie...

> Keep some spares in a closet for when the feds inevitably come when someone uses your unmoderated platform to plan crimes.

Section 230.

This is the free market at work. PayPal has a well known track record of canceling service to direct customers as well as business partners for arbitrary reasons. This is a major risk but companies too lazy or incompetent to build decent payments just slap on PayPal and everyone suffers. But businesses knowingly do it anyway. Well, this is the consequence.

> This is the free market at work.

It is not. The “free market argument” does not account for entrenched monopolies who buy up - or shut down -competitors long before they can become threats.

Anti-trust laws, which have absolutely no teeth since the 80s (and every then...), are not incompatible with free market capitalism.

>...Anti-trust laws, which have absolutely no teeth since the 80s (and every then...), are not incompatible with free market capitalism.

That's the first time I've ever heard that. Generally, libertarians will state that the existence of monopolies is an outcome of government intervention.

This is a strawman of free market advocates. SOME monopolies are the outcomes of government intervention.

That only works if companies are perfectly spherical cows, and the market is frictionless vacuum at 0K. In real world, monopolies are an attractor in the free market system.

I think most people don’t understand that the regime will define and redefine what hate speech is, over time.

It’s those icky conservatives now, but the same mechanism will be used against more people tomorrow, as needed.

Well, this debate has never happened before.

No one considers systematic consequences of rules and laws, these days. Everything is short-term pragmatic cynicism.

Well, Merriam-Webster dictionary changed the definition of "sexual preference" to justify the outrage against Amy Coney Barrett after the fact. You probably can't get any more Orwellian than this. I guess something about free markets and private companies though.

Do you have a link to a diff?

As usual, no one bothered to properly archive it and people took screenshots instead. So unfortunately, neither archive.today nor wayback machine has it and the last capture before that was in 2016. But even Snopes confirms it, if you don't want to take my word for it.

Snopes link for the curious: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/merriam-webster-barrett-se...

Is there a regularly updated official list somewhere of newly-considered-offensive words so one can proactively update one's vocabulary?

Other than regularly following Twitter drama or joining some Discord echo chamber, I honestly don't think there is any reliable way to know what is now considered offensive and what is not. The reason why All Lives Matter is considered racist is literally based on some obscure web comic about burning houses from years ago and everyone will get angry at you if you don't understand what the hell are they even talking about. Oh and by the way, silence == violence, so it's not like staying apolitical will help you much.

https://static.attn.com/sites/default/files/allhousesmatter....

I hadn't heard about this before, so I did a search. It seems from this Newsweek article that the dictionary is not denying that they made this change, but implying that it was planned for the future and then they did it earlier than planned because of the public attention it was being given.

https://www.newsweek.com/amy-coney-barrett-preference-defini...

If you build your own thing then it will be subject to the moderation of whatever service you build it upon. In this case, hosting services and app stores. If you don't like their moderation either, you are free to setup your own bare metal servers, even your own app store.

And then there is Tor. If you really want to live outside of any moderation, outside of even basic laws, then setup a Tor hidden service. If you aren't going to put in some basic effort to protect yourself (ie what ThePirateBay does every day) and instead run strait to the courts, then I have little sympathy.

Must have missed the part where Apple allows developers to set up their own app stores.

Apple doesn't block websites. If they cared to keep Apple users from being blocked they could have implemented a purely web-based option for accessing the service.

They don’t block websites yet.

The browser makers will find a way to make it happen if they need to.

vk did it. The profile/photo/video piece is fairly enough to duplicate. The app /games platform not so much.

Vk is very popular and has scaled well.

Does Facebook use AWS servers with TOC? Thats how. Parler is free to build it. With their own servers and own physical network if they want to. The fact that they can't is the market in action no?

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