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Comment by glenvdb | Hacker News Reader

I think the long history of events like these, particularly the more recent publicised ones, are going to push lots of communities, and by extension the Internet, to decentralisation.

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.

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I think it's becoming obvious that not being able to shut down bad communities is the lesser evil.

That's a bold statement, you think it's so obvious? Do you think not being able to shut down child pornographic trading communities is a lesser evil than shutting down WSB discord?

CP trading chat rooms should be shut down by arresting people creating and selling content in there, not by giving someone the right to shut down any chat room they want by the click of a button. Because if you can shut down CP trading chat rooms by the click of a button, we all know this button will be used mainly to target good causes as CP represents a tiny proportion of people or even criminal activities.

This tired justification of "child pornography", "terrorism" and "hate speech" has been beat to death to ban just about everything these days.

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.

> 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.

Then it is declared illegal and simply continues to exist. If this is truly a major crime (loss of life, major financial loss), then governments have many means outside of technology to shut stuff down: old-fashioned detective work, cross-national police work, enforcement of treaty obligations or even para-military action in severe cases.

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.

Child pornography is illegal, IMO rightly so, and people trading in it should be arrested.

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.

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