For all the uneasy feelings I get about the triggerhappy banning by these platforms, there's probably a light at end of the tunnel. Boot enough people and the better alternatives might actually flourish with network effects.
8chan, which was far better, went under for it though.
Cloudflare did drop 8chan for political pressure.
Both also have a very undeserved reputation. I saw news reports on 8chan as if it were something similar to Stormfront. The front page was mostly video game and pornography and one had to search very deep into it's hidden circles to find racial supremacy content.
ISPs could just drop their customers' traffic to that server. This happens all the time and has happened to 4chan before.
Or they could go further and refuse to peer with any ISP that doesn't block 4chan, or lobby to have the government compel ISPs to block it, likely on think-of-the-children or think-of-the-terrorism grounds.
Self hosting definitely isn't some magic way of preventing all censorship.
There is no perfect pill. People who self host have higher protections than those that don't.
With TOR you have to hire someone to fill captchas just to read things.
If a UK citizen were to post as offensively as a US citizen they would and have been arrested. The site doesn't give protection.
I steer clear of it, but wonder if with more EU like moderation a better site could be formed.
There are other anonymity networks that it doesn't filters out as well. But in principle, it does not allow posting from anonymity networks.
4chan is also quite mainstream and one of the largest websites on the internet, certainly larger than Hacker News. Similar Web ranks it around 800 world wide, but it's probably even higher, given that it's split into two domains that remain separate for advertisement reasons.
Passes can be used to get exemptions from i.p. address range blocks, they do not permit posting from Tor.
That page is probably very deliberately not super clear about that, but it you will find that buying a pass will not allow one to post from Tor.
> If a UK citizen were to post as offensively as a US citizen they would and have been arrested.
The idea of posting something and being arrested disgusts me. The bar around the world for such an action should be just as high as it is in America. If I post that I'm going to come and kill you, thinkingemote, at 10:17 a.m. at your place of work located at <insert address here>, then by all means I deserve to be arrested. I've made a credible threat with credible information, verified by the fact I know your name and your workplace address.
However, saying something "mean" to you, or "misgendering" you, or even calling you a racial slur, should never be enough to arrest someone.
It reminds me of one of the few (maybe only...) great lines from Ghostbusters 2: "Being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker's God-given right!"
So it should be online as well. If you don't like it, you can absent yourself from the platform(s), and in almost every case, if you don't want to do that, you can block the other person.
US citizens can be arrested for posting material such as child pornography too.
In that case the porn is like the specific death threat. A crime on its own. Actual speech is different
> A crime on its own
With that logic in the UK it is a crime to do what the posters end up being arrested for so it's ok.
That's why doxxing is also an issue.
> Nobody is dying from mis-gendering
And nobody is dying from CP, what is your point?
The sad part is, you forgot your own rule. You got your feefees hurt (which was clearly bullshit also) and said you were "done communicating" or some such nonsense.
That's the great thing about a troll. They're also liars.
People who can be easily radicalized or manipulated is just indication that they wasn't educated well enough to think on their own with their brain. And in any case chan culture is far better than some actual criminals or cultists who are much better at brainwashing people.
I'm not trying to justify some of chan content, but I consider that it's greater good that some people get a lesson about how easily they could be manipulated.
Subjected to enough propaganda, literally anyone will succumb to the propagated viewpoint with very few exceptions.
Being exposed to this kind of "humor" is deliberate choice. And even 4chan is not some single entity: there are plenty of boards on other topics that nowhere as extreme and sometimes they better moderated than e.g reddit , facebook or linkedin.
That link is now banned on Wikipedia even though...
This is what makes Youtube, Reddit and Facebook so powerful. They can choose who can stay on their platform, and how much discoverability their ideas have if they are allowed to stay on the platform.
The power in those sites is that they are not siloed and at scale, meaning you can reach a much broader audience. Parler would never be able to influence the mass market because it was so specialized - making it ineffective at evangelization. WSB would never be what it is without the platform of reddit. Going to a small specific site will not have the same power, even though I think it is better to host your own hardware and do that.
I'm very excited about it personally, I like disruption.