Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
Key point for me. Under the guise of 'hate speech' suppression is occurring. Of course every platform has the right to dictate users of their platform yada yada...
I get they're probably scared as hell, but they don't even take care of the child porn or child grooming Discords.
It's not even slightly paranoid to say that somebody gave financial incentive to make this happen, but for them to censor with absolute bullshit reasoning behind it... This is just not good.
I don't, what should they be scared of?
“ On April 23, 2020 at 1:55 p.m., the Marysville Police received a tip that child pornography had been uploaded while using a discord online service.”
There are groups like this all over the place. I know who this person is.
“A discord online service” is Discord.
Also kind of interesting in writing here you can see some local papers are just way out of touch with the tech community.
[1] https://www.unioncountydailydigital.com/articles/child-porno...
The problem with this statement is the shifting use of "you". I might know that a mob acts like a mob, but I'm certainly not going to be surprised if "my" rights are affected if I'm part of the group from which the mob manifested. That doesn't mean the decision to alter my rights is directed at me, personally.
Random speculation about why this was done or who did it, for what reasons, is also a type of mob thinking.
That's good and bad because communities can't be shut down when they shouldn't, and can't be shut down when they should.
Why not ban cars ? After all both paedos and terrorists use them to carry out their evil, nefarious deeds. They both also use toothpaste.
I think is perfectly fine being un-able to shutdown sites for "social justice". If it ever escalates to being a major criminal problem, a legal case can be filed and it can go through the courts before the ban-hammer falls.
Once a community that cannot be shut down is declared illegal, what happens? One of the major points of decentralized communities is that there is no effective "ban hammer" to shut them down.
Right now, a sneeze can ban you on the cloud. And the bans are just a click away - and in many cases not even that.
I will never cease to be amused by people who invoke CP to defend censorship when a discussion about control of online discourse is ongoing. We are talking about companies shutting down a group organizing against wall street hedge funds on the pretext that they're Nazi white supremacists, we aren't talking about pedos physically abusing children for profit. If you expect that this is a gotcha and that I have no choice but to declare that I think CP should be protected or else I have to support banning WSB from discord you really need to refine your conversational skills.
People who claim that should logically be wanting Rosa Parks to have started her own bus company.
Also Rosa Parks wasn’t anonymous, and I assume many on WSB are. I wonder if they would act the same if they weren’t? Or in real life?
And to extend your analogy, it's like a whole nightclub being permanently closed because one of the 250,000 people in the club (admittedly a big club) said a bad word. It's just a new form of Tone Policing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing)
The situation here is very different. There is no government monopoly favouring Reddit or Discord.
I read WSB daily for years and cannot recall a single usage of a racial slur. They definitely referred to themselves as autists/retards in a self-deprecating manner but that's hardly the same thing.
I could easily read through any of the front page posts on Reddit, and find what I consider to be hate speech, and if I were in a position of power, I could just use that as a justification to ban the entire domain.
Moreover, it easily allows adversaries the ability to plant hate speech in forums they dislike, and then pressure the authorities to ban it.
At the end of the day, I am an adult, and I reject the notion that sites need to protect me from speech.
Cardinal Richelieu (Alledgelly)
A lesson this generation will have to learn again.
At least they'll have a firm understanding of just how sexist light speed is.
That's the point. It serves to show the perils of judging people by what they say, particularly if single offence against some perceived norms becomes a standard for punishment.
And there's another quote from that same period: "like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children" (Jacques Mallet du Pan).
The man cement centralised power within France by through a multitude of authoritarian methods.
And so in my opinion it's the motives behind such a statement that are important.
1) Language is imprecise. We do not communicate with the idea that our words have a unique, specific meaning. This means that you can do things like quote my statements out of context in order to change their intent.
2) People are not perfect. You can almost always find some "fault" in even the best people. People should not be punished for a "fault" unless it does measurable harm to someone else.
Anon paraphrasing Cardinal Richelieu (Alledgelly)
This is different from what the parent poster is implying. It's about the dangers of authoritarianism. No plants or justification are necessary.
I fail to see how 'autist' is any less of a slur than e.g. 'trap' or 'gay', when used in the right (wrong) context.
It's not a racial slur, but it's quite certainly a slur.
Would you say it is okay for white people to use the n word if there are no Black people around?
I am not saying though that I think use of the term is okay, only that I don't think it should be prohibited either by law or by the pressure of big companies punishing people who say what is forbidden for them to say. I'm perfectly happy with people who make the judgement that they may never say certain words. I'm not happy with people telling others what they can or cannot say.
If listening to a word causes you so much trouble, thats your problem as the listener, and its up to you to deal with it.
I would, for example, encourage an actor to use overly offensive expletives, even repeating them ad nauseam in the presence of their fellow actors so they feel more comfortable using such words in a production dealing with racial strife, historical storytelling or what have you.
No word is so beyond the pale it must be Voldemorted.
How can you know what is a slur and what is not when judging the way others communicate in their relationships? What if it’s a nickname from childhood? What if...anything really?
How on earth would you take action on this point, besides teaching our children to be kind, thoughtful, and curious.
How can you know what is an insult and what is not when judging the way others communicate in their relationships? What if it’s a nickname from childhood?
How can you know what is a threat and what is not when judging the way others communicate in their relationships? What if it’s a nickname from childhood?
It's also quite common among comedians and other entertainers to make fun of their own ethnicity using slurs or use slurs in various performances.
You personally may not find it appropriate and that's a subjective point of view that you are entitled to have, but consider whether you have a good rational justification for it or whether you are exercising too much caution to the point that you are getting offended on behalf of others even when those others are not themselves offended.
The WSB folks are in a weird position where they're using slurs to describe themselves that don't actually apply to them (well, not as a whole; I imagine there are some autistic WSB members, just like there are in most populations). I'm bewildered as to why they think that's funny (or whatever justification they have for it), but it does strike me as potentially offensive.
As an example, I grew up in a very religious home. My family would find things like cursing, taking the Lord's name in vain, or advocating for atheism to be very offensive. And yet, I hope it is very easy for you to understand that it would be wrong to take what my religious family finds offensive and apply those ethical rules to other people. Jehovah's Witnesses think birthdays and holidays are offensive, Muslims think graven images are offensive, etc etc. All sorts of people believe all sorts of things. Every group of people is not obliged to not be offensive to every other group of people.
You may be inclined to say that people can choose not to be religious but have no say over things like mental type or race. I don't think that's true because the majority of religious people are in the same religion as their parents, implying there isn't much free choice involved. Even if that were true, why is something you believe less respected than something that you are?
The commenting guidelines state: Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...] Don't sneer. Regardless, I will indulge your curiosity.
1) There are certainly other terms in use on WSB that one could take offense to. I personally find this one to be particularly problematic. (The fact that I am myself autistic probably plays a big role in this ;)) 2) I have posted many comments here on HN, and as far as I know this one and the one you replied to are the only ones I've posted on the topic of slurs. I fail to see why I should be banned over this discussion.
Once we've reached that point it seems like a negotiation. Why would it be wrong to say sometimes and not wrong other times? My intuition here is that this is tied to whether the word is used with intent to offend or harass someone. In your case, you weren't using the word that way, and I would argue that the same applies largely to uses of the term on wallstreetbets.
If what you're saying would be true, then calling someone an idiot would be an insult to all the idiots out there. They are clearly not the target of the insult, the person you say it to is the insulted.
"oh, he hurt my feelings, stop him"
It's fucking moronic for us to have demonised speech like this, we should have held on to the old "sticks and stones" because frankly this Orwellian alternative is bonkers.
We're long past the point where feelings need to actually be hurt to take action.
Half the time it's "oh, he might hurt someone else's feelings, stop him"
Or in short, of course it's an insult to the idiots out there. That's literally what makes idiot an insult.
"Idiot" used to be a medical condition, someone suffering from idiocy.
"Retard"; someone whose mental development had been retarded and remained in a childhood state into adulthood.
These words are not supposed to be taken literally (when used colloquially) but to suggest that the person in question displays signs of the medical condition.
I guess we could try to label this as misuse of the terms and try to end the practice, but where would that lead us? "Bob is double plus ungood at thinking"?
[0] http://englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/06/euphemism-treadmi...
I could easily imagine a policy like this in, say, a linguistics forum, where it's totally allowed to discuss the usage of slurs, as long as they're not directed at someone.
A self-deprecating slur can still be a slur.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
Every time you read an article saying “X community is filled with Y horrible thing,” remember this.
> That is why I'm throwing my support behind the Twitter handle in general.
This won’t end well
I keep waiting for one of these high-profile, fucked-with groups to jump to a dentralized network. Still waiting...
Yeah you do, just not in someone else's space.
Like if you want to bellow out some Klingon opera, you can, but they're gonna throw you out of Tesco.
Is "my house, my rules" really so hard to understand?
People are waking up to the bait&switch the on-line platforms are. They do everything they say to pretend they're the public square, short of saying it, but when push comes to shove, they reveal themselves as private owners with an agenda.
What's doubly annoying is that governments worldwide decided to participate. When politicians' primary channel of communicating with their constituents/subjects is through Twitter, you could morally argue that it should be treated as public square. That one is on the politicians though.
If Parler wanted, they could have gone a different route and survived without any issues.
But the infrastructure we have is privately-owned, so yeah, the owners can do what they like.
We'll never get rid of greedy quasi-monopolies unless we let them do a crap job so that people demand alternatives.
This is how market capitalism is supposed to work. (And similarly, we get rid of market capitalism by letting it demonstrate that it just doesn't work very well.)
If they don't use this moment to formalize self-managed comms, they're not going to be a community for much longer, given they're putting the squeeze on people to the order of billions of dollars.
Reddit is catching flack. It's only a matter of time before they pull the pin for some ambiguous reason.
It's the perfect time to start funneling the audience to a dedicated forum (or literally a chan).
Interesting that they made software to moderate but reddit either doesn't want to or can't handle the throughput required to run it. These threads are some of the biggest ever seen on reddit. What happens if they get shut down again? Should they begin migrating to telegram groups?
...and if they can't find one, the SEC will probably just order them to shut it.
Reddit's one lawyer will sit with the CEO, and they will have a 4 second conversation "Yeah, we're not sticking our neck out for those self-proclaimed retards.".
...and that's it. Reddit has banned subs for far far less.
Do you think they'd try to gamble 2-4 milions users?
They're all bad faith arguments which have ranged from collusive behaviour being insider trading (even though messages were public) to foreign interference destabilising US markets.
There are multiple attack points in which pressure can be applied: the trading platforms ( Robinhood et al), the communication platform (Reddit, Discord), the regulatory framework or through back channels at the board level.
If several funds do end up going bankrupt, which is unlikely to happen now, regulation or some legal framework would likely follow.
Most often mods are complicit in the bullshit that the sub participates in (trump related subs, /r/fatpeoplehate, etc). In this case I can see the mods wanting to keep the community afloat but reddit banning them for reasons which effectively become out of their control or unable to moderate.
Even the “official” Automoderator bot I think is just a underpowered cluster running some python.
If effective moderation can occur at smaller levels, like discord channels or subreddits, then those communities won’t been to be removed by the larger platform. This would also be helpful for startup social media platforms that have yet to bring enough revenue to afford a facebook sized moderation team.
Technically speaking it can do things like:
* Flag posts that contain a blacklist of words, including non-obvious spellings of said word (using non-standard Unicode characters in place of letters)
* Cross reference IP addresses or user names with banned users in other communities
* Notify moderators of trending slogans, phrases, or hashtags that have non-obvious extremist roots.
* Identify images containing extremist/hateful content
* Flag content that contains any political discussion for communities that want to be completely apolitical.
* Flag pornography
EDIT: To be clear, the target audience for this would be community moderators/admins or startup social networks that haven’t built their own moderation infrastructure.
Your suggestion sounds like a step to toward the Black Mirror Season 2 "White Christmas" episode where the main character gets ban from all social interaction (not just online) forever until death
Nothing says dictatorship better than having a ill-defined concept such as hate-speech combines with the power of the ban hammer.
Please not that if you downvote this comment you will be producing hate speech against me and you WilL bE rePoRteD tO tHE LoCOaL AUtHoRItHIEs!!1
Open source implementations exist, e.g.:
https://github.com/t-davidson/hate-speech-and-offensive-lang...
I suspect more message board will want to start applying these sooner rather than later. Most have already figured out that they need anti-spam tools, rather than it coming as a surprise when they roll things out and it fills up with bots. The technology is similar.
You mention being able to share that information across boards, and I don't know of any widespread implementation of that. You can, at least, let somebody else handle your authentication, which slightly slows their ability to create new accounts when you blacklist one. I'd like to see those sites distinguish "aged" accounts, so that it at least takes some effort or cost to use a new account.
Surely they're not taking too kindly to them making such an mockery of capital markets.
I say this as the founder of Retalk.com, which we built exactly for this type of situation. I sincerely hope WSB decide to move platform and join us. We can give them the exact mod tools they need.
https://lemmy.ml/docs/en/index.html
"Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Raddle, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.
For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere."
Can anyone tell me? :)
If others find that the reasons given by the short sellers is legit more people short and driving down the price but instead with GME the opposite happened.
Rather than one big community, why not a whole tree of sub-communities. With some clever discovery mechanisms to share content and discussions between sub-communities, this would enable both the larger sense of community while allowing individual circles of tighter knit communities to also form. I think this is the basic idea behind federated social media too where the "clever discovery mechanisms" are human curated lists. It's a good pattern that could work in a more centralized model too.
Isn't this essentially Reddit?
I guess they’ll just have to make their own Twitter or Reddit, right?
So the buying pressure at some point subsides, and momentum to the short side builds as people exit.
Participants in these forums like yahoo finance before it are constantly trying to exhort the group to move into names in which the touts already have positions setup.
[0]: https://gizmodo.com/discord-bans-r-wallstreetbets-for-hate-s...
They are perpetrating a financial bubble that will harm its participants, the economy (possibly to a significant degree), and that is specifically designed to hurt certain people. They are encouraging a mechanism that could do far more damage in the future. It's an angry, violent mob, and what I see looks very much like other violent, angry mobs I've seen recently, including the portrayal of victimhood in the post, used as a justification for the behavior.
Mobs don't end well for the community and especially for the mob. Those who think 'well, I don't like the target so I'll overlook some things' soon find the mob doesn't stop when and where they hoped it would. Inviting and encouraging riots in your city is not a way to solve problems. Sometimes mobs do end well for people behind the scenes that use and manipulate the mob.
What good are the participants doing society? I think if you step back and take a deep breath, there's no way that this activity is a good idea.
The so called revolution is just a halo that they attached to themselves so they can all look like heros. From an economic perspective, what they did is irresponsible and dangerous.
I agree with most of what OP said. It's just that some facts are harder to swallow in the current political climate of poor = good and rich = evil.
That's the point here. The only difference is that regular people made money this time.
You are essentially proving my point..
Violent? Violent? do you know what that word means?
WSB is playing the game fair and square. It's the billionaires that's been short selling and manipulating the markets that got caught with their pants down.
WSB is squeezing the greed out of billionaire vulture short sellers, which has gotten so brazen that they have painted themselves into a corner. Usually, they get away with these kind of shenanigans. But this time, someone who knew the game saw the positions and realized that other player had the edge using a winning strategy. All they have to do is drive the price higher and short sellers have to buy at whatever price to cover their positions.
Think of it like this, someone has to buy an item that you have, at any price. What price would you charge?
Now when it's some self deprecating band of screaming mad lads beat hedge fund managers at their own game, suddenly it's foul play and the free market must be regulated. Doubly so if they are loud and make stupidly idiotic trades that go against the grain of any financial wisdom passed out in the past century and win out big time - how dare they?!
PS: They haven't sold their positions, and I'm sure by the time they expire some of them will definitely have won big time.
PPS: I also like to think of the man or woman who had some shares sitting in the account that they got from working for Gamestop a couple of decades ago, thinking it was worthless now. Until some dumbasses on the internet went and skyrocketed their net worth for no apparent reason other than for shits and giggles.
Unfortunately even if I don’t participate in these games, my tax money is used to bail them out when they lose.
I squirted coffee through my nostrils with laughter when I read this. True dat.
Sure, every company has the right to do what they want with their "platform", but don't be surprised if in the future these people persist into new platforms to share their ideas. New platforms that will be controlled by them with no possibility of censorship, or worse, the opposite type in an attempt to reverse the damage.
"keep your friends close, but your enemies closer"
And this is granting the justification for censorship, which of course most of the time is just about power and control, with innocent people paying the price.
Downside is growth, but I don't think you can get much better than a tweet from Elon and attention from every major news network.
In a way, it's amazing how fast we revert to pointless nonsense news. Hopefully the news cycle sweeps this away quickly.
The world will see whatever the media, in aggregate, report. They got lucky that the first reports were “Elon Musk tweets about this quirky thing happening”, but the media will soon find another angle to the story. The only thing selling right now is outrage, and since people can’t be quite as outraged about Trump anymore, anything to fill the void is welcomed. You don’t have to do anything outrageous for the outrage maching to get you; they’ll get you anyway for whatever you were alleged to have been associated with, somebody who agreed with something somebody else claimed was from you. Add to this that there’s huge financial pressure for this kind of thing to be put out of business, and they’re probably completely doomed.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Wallstreetbetsnew/
- https://ruqqus.com/+wallstreetbets
- /join ##wallstreetbets on freenode
You cut off the head, a dozen more emerge.
And they become the seed around which the new community crystallizes.
As the social media and tech oligarchies get emboldened to attack less extreme groups, the people who find themselves deplatformed end up taking refuge in the only sites that are prepared to stand against the ratcheting up of restrictions on speech.
Don't be surprised if, as a result of pressure on WSB, a lot of casual traders find themselves mixing and sympathizing with violent extremists on Gab and other platforms.
Only if they have time to, is my concern.
For WSB I don't know what that means long term, what is an extreme trader?
To what end? Wouldn’t it hurt the bottom line too much? I don’t buy the “they’re out to get us” idea.
To see this dynamic played out in different circumstances, look at the Euphemism Treadmill[0] (as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion) and Purity Spirals[1]. It may be bad for business to encourage this nonsense, but as echo-chambers become less diverse, they can exert more pressure on platforms to enforce their rules for them.
[0] https://englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/06/euphemism-treadm...
[1] https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
I think they realised the media is broken, academia is broken so why not apply that to the financial market.
But they/we still need to work to how to exist within this world which militantly wants to keep the status quo.
Same, I've been a subscriber of WSB since at least 4 years ago. I also check TheDonald.win (now Patriots.win) on a regular basis. Both are constantly accused of racism and/or white supremacy and yet I see none of either.
People use terms like 'racist', 'nazi', 'fascist' and many others as synonyms for "any person or thing I don't like or disagree with". It's also the media's favorite new strategy for discrediting sources that contradict their chosen narrative.
The 8th post on the homepage is this: https://patriots.win/p/11SK7JKMbx/guess-what-my-favorite-thi..., and the top comment is a list of racial slurs for Asian/Chinese people. There's a few other threads that include similar lists, as well as comments making fun of Asian/Chinese people in general.
I saw a few slurs for gay people as well.
I found all this in 5 minutes, so I'm surprised you haven't seen anything even though you browse it "on a regular basis".
I am not saying the group is good. There are indeed many lightly veiled hints towards violent armed insurrection, as the members fear imminent communist takeover of the USA. But it is best to carefully characterize the forum as the whiplash of overreaction can push people to be more sympathetic to their claims, and feeds their oppression narrative. I have certainly felt this effect.
> It is part for the course of what I see on the site.
Well yes, if a site is full of racism, a comment with racism in it is "par for the course".
Edit: To reply to your second paragraph that you added after I posted my comment:
Yes, I understand where they're coming from, and that they feel like US is under attack. However, it should obvious to anyone that China isn't governed by the average Chinese person; it's governed by the CCP. By choosing to insult and make fun of the average Chinese person, they're clearly engaging in mean-spirited racism (which has lead to increased racial violence against Asians), and that has to be condemned as the racism it is.
You must be fun at comedy shows...