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Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

This is a tired old argument and it isn't convincing or effective. There's a big difference between some kids screaming in your coffee shop and a community on a website supposedly dedicated to free discussion. A more apt comparison would be a group in a corner having a conversation at a rock concert. Suddenly this argument appears less apt.

And while some are screaming for these sites to get shut down over it, most of us aren't. What you see from most of us is recommendation to stop using services that silence you. This is a reasonable response, if someone doesn't like you, go somewhere where they do like you. That's what the comment you're responding to is advocating, embracing and even getting excited about. The internet needs a true public square, not a private entity masquerading as one that for some reason totally unbeknownst to them has to constantly remind everyone that they are not a public square.

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Where does discord say it's for free discussion?

In two clicks I found their community guidelines on their website:

https://discord.com/guidelines

Second rule:

"Do not organize, promote, or coordinate servers around hate speech. It’s unacceptable to attack a person or a community based on attributes such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or disabilities."

Calling someone a "retard" or "autist" is considered by Discord to be mocking people with disabilities.

Also IRC exists and is still in use by many people. Anyone can set up a server.

It's messed up when there are auto-banning bots that hit those with disabilities for speaking out on the issues they face in everyday life.

Have you read the content on WSB? Here's a link that I found on the top of the top thread of the subreddit [0]. Let's be completely clear here, this isn't someone speaking out about issues they face in everyday life.

> ive been folowing this saga since GME was 60 or so but sadly i was too afraid to become autistic, and have now gone full retard

And this isn't an isolated comment, there are hundreds of comments like it in the 90k+ commetns on that thread, and in that subreddit. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6er79/the_...

They probably meant that because the guidelines discord has setup are automated bots that occasionally hit innocent people while trying to enforce the rules. I think they were speaking in the broader context of Discord servers rather than the WSB Reddit or Discord specifically.

Yes, I was talking about hasanabi's discord server (a twitch channel) in particular, but I'm sure it's not alone and there are reasons. I don't blame them at all, it's the system that sets these incentives.

With all due respect, that's not what you said in your comment, and it read to me as an attempt to deliberately spread FUD about discord's moderation practices. If you're thinking of a specific incident, and introducing it as a discussion point, you need to actually mention it. Re-reading your original comment, I still can only read it as Discord banning WSB because people are speaking out about their real life issues

It's not discord themselves who enact the harsh moderation (which quite often includes bots banning some words, with punishments from alerting a mod to banning you for a bit), but rather server "owners" who risk platforming if discord deems them unable to police themselves. The problem is, that discord uses certain criteria to determine if a server is able to police itself, and those criteria happen to be fairly harsh on repeat (even if swallowed by the noise/message stream) disability mocking.

I'm criticizing the incentives Discord's polices create for moderation.

I'm sorry my wording was bad. I certainly did not intend any FUD spreading.

Then they should make that clear, as the thread and the GP's comments are specifically about the situation with WSB. Otherwise, someone who comes in not knowing anything about the situation, and sees the comment and assumes that the WSB discord was banned because its uers were describing their day to day issues living with disabilities.

I'm 100% with you. People that don't want their discussion controlled by a private entity with conflicting interests should absolutely not depend on that entity's services. Everyone upset about this should stop using discord.

I saw a comment on WSB that said they have bots that remove all swear words etc but some people use unicode etc to write the words anyway. I don't know if its true but where is the line for a ban if a genuine effort is being made to moderate?

The worst part about this observation is that this is the very reason being given for why twitter isn't getting kicked off of AWS. Because they're putting in a good faith effort to moderate, it's just "hard".

This is just about power and money, the chances that many of these HNers aren't losing money due to the actions of /wsb is low. I have no doubt many of the posters trying to defend the move are being a bit disingenuous. Not all for sure, but certainly some of them.

I have worked as a tutor at university. The best and most "free" discussions I experienced were all happening in a space where everybody was after finding some sort of insight.

This delicate balance was at times destoyed by a single person that started attacking people aggresively for who they were rather than attacking the argument they made in a way that makes them understand. Allowing that person to freely speak was reducing the classes freedom over all, because that person wanted to dominate the discussion so much, they fostered a climate were all other discussion was not possible anymore and free speech was prevented from happening.

In that case throwing someone out is a totally acceptable option. In fact this is the reason why discussion on this very site work out: because we are after insight and we punish behavior that is pure sophistry, aggressive, snarky, etc.

I am convinced that to speak freely as a collective, sometimes we must stop certain individuals from abusing their freedom of speech within our forums.

Not everyone shares your ideas about what the "best" and most "free" discussions are. Apparently, the crowd at this Discord channel were ok with calling each other gays, autists, retards, or whatever. It may not be the highbrow enough for some, but that is no reason to shutdown their community.

Sure, but most people agree on what makes a discussion worse. E.g. if one person constantly interrupts others and leads agressively voiced monologous with no real substance, most people might agree that person might not improve the climate of the discussion to much

I have seen a few times now what happen when optimistic people goes with such rationale and attempt to apply it universally. To be more precise, people have tried to ban generalizations of group of people, banning the usage of gender where specifying gender is unnecessary, and of course banning the attacking people for who they were rather than attacking the argument. I have yet to see one community where it worked.

The outcome of such experiments always end up the same. People want to generalize about groups of people when its against the right group of people. We want to specifying gender when it is unnecessary, as long it not in the wrong situation. And we want to attacking people for who they were rather than attacking the argument, if its against people which is socially accepted to attack and dismiss.

People just love violence when its done for the right reasons and abhor it when it done for the wrong reasons. At the same time we try to apply principles like freedom of speech and find it completely incompatible with our split view on violence.

Unless we rise above it. Certain things are never okay. But being intolerant and demanding tolerance is a shitty move as well. And it is nowhere near as clever as the people who try this think it is.

The discourse about whether and how much we should tolerate the intolerant is old and has be well discussed by post WWII philosophy. If we want to defend the freedom of all, we need to restrict those freedoms for the people who try to get rid of them.

Or as a neo nazi once said to me: "we want to establish the old power again, so we can silence you. until that happens, we want free speech".

Being consistent and avoiding hypocrisy is not the same thing as tolerating the intolerant. Our most common tool to do so are laws that governments everyone equally, and which enforcement is designed for consistency.

The trouble comes back to the issue when a community and places such as universities tries to mimic laws without actually consider the problem of consistency, and at the same time wanting to believe in principles that they then don't apply to everyone. The result is inconsistency, hypocrisy, and often in order to escape the fact, removal of transparency.

>This delicate balance was at times destoyed by a single person that started attacking people aggresively for who they were rather than attacking the argument they made in a way that makes them understand.

I'm sorry I don't understand, are you arguing on behalf or against Discord who called the wsb crowd a bunch of white supremacist Nazis? I'm not being snarky, I genuinely can't tell if you're defending the open discussion about stock trading or the people that came in and called them names and got them shut down.

I am all for a discussion focused group having rules and expecting participants to adhere to them and booting them out if they don't. What I am opposed to is businesses that market themselves as places to freely discuss, wait til they have market control, then change their terms and kick people out based on tenuous accusations, in this case for the apparent reason of protecting hedge funds from the market. It is egregious what Discord did.

> The internet needs a true public square

Honest question: why?

Because when you can brand any idea as radical or dangerous, you get to dictate what radical or dangerous is, and when you do that, you control the narrative and people.

There are some things that are unambiguously dangerous. The insurrection at the capitol this month comes to mind.

Unequivocally. What is the alternative? Banning every single idea besides a pre-approved list of topics? That's Nineteen Eighty Four all over again.

If anything, public discourse enables people to observe and see potential clusters, covid could be traced to tweets talking about pneumonia in November and December of 2019.

If, instead of squashing them, we figured out the underlying problem, which almost always is lack of prospects, we can act accordingly.

Letting private companies enforce their terms of service may not be a perfect alternative, but it is a reasonable one and has been somewhat effective.

Yes this most recent operation was a smashing success, in terms of convincing shallow thinkers that it's wrong for subjects to bother their rulers. Just look at what Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant has to deal with right now. Amazon is sponsoring a recall election "justified" because she had the audacity to talk to protesters who were physically inside city hall. (In reality, because she wants Amazon to pay taxes.) Perfect timing!

Oh come off it. There was no "insurrection at the capital." There was a bunch of rowdy types running around with their shirts off and a bunch of old people taking selfies. A few bad things happen. I'd call it a mostly peaceful protest and you would too if you were using objective criteria that was equally applied.

So that those with the currently loudest voices can silence all others?

So that the "invisible hand of the market" may decide who is wisest (as demonstrated when we look at all the instances where this happened)?

I think all of these wishes of a true public space are usually colored by the (mis?)perception of certain opinions being opressed, when in fact they are often just socially unacceptable because of their destructive nature.

Not to be that guy, but I grew up in Austria inbetween old Nazis and young Neo-Nazis. When they said: "you are trying to silence us" what they meant is "we want to establish the old power again, so we can silence you. until that happens, we want free speech". This is literally (translated from a very thick accent in Austrian German) what one of the neo nazis said to me after the 8th beer and a heated discussion. To assume these people want free speech for anybody other than themselves is naive. For them tolerating others is a vehicle to convince them of their cause: Once they have what they want they will get rid of it.

The question how much tolerance we have to show those who themselves are intolerant is a old one and still not easy to answer. However to me it is quite clear that we should sacrifice the free society we have without a fight.

It appears to me that our society is currently threatened by a group using the exact strategy that those Nazis were using in your home country, except they're at the next stage, past the using free speech and actively now attempting to destroy it.

I'm of the belief that to protect your free society you protect it's virtue, even when people take advantage of it. If you hold steadfast to "free speech", no group ever gets past that first stage, so they can never take power. It means sometimes tolerating hearing reprehensible views of the world, but it is either that or giving someone all the guns and the power to control what you say, and if history teaches us anything, that always ends badly for the regular people no matter the initial intention of the person doing the censoring, a power like that is irresistible to those who want to use it to benefit themselves.

Why do we have them in the physical world? So people can gather and speak and protest without approval of corporate overlords.

Never thought its gonna get to a point where i have to explain individual liberty in the west

It's a primary source of information for over a billion people at this point. It's probably not a good idea to have that monopolized by corporate or government interest

For one thing, conversations are a lot easier to have when there is an implicit rule that context is always considered when evaluating word usage. For example, the word 'autist' in the context of 'stonks' and 'wsb' is not understood to mean an attempt to mock people with disabilities and therefore unlikely to get anyone offended as a result.

South Park tried to make this argument over a decade ago and they were dead wrong.

People get offended because they want to get offended. They then rationalize it after the fact, usually by resorting to “certain words are always wrong”. But if a friend occasionally does something annoying, you could either elect to ignore it, or you could take a stand and make it a make-or-break issue. But the choice to make it an issue is yours.

Because when the people are allowed to freely share their ideas with one another and talk about them without interference the cream rises to the top.

There is historical evidence of this, the monarchs of the centuries past, the Catholic church, they all stifled the ability for people to freely discuss ideas, and even killed people for sharing the wrong ones. As soon as the printing press was invented that allowed people to share ideas freely you had revolts against them all over the next few centuries leading to representative democracies and republics, the enlightenment and development of ideas such as human dignity and individual rights, diversity of religion in the west took hold, the end of theocratic rule over Europe, and it all culminated in the creation of the US and an end to global colonialism mid 20th century. We owe our great way of life and our emergence from theocratic and monarchical shackles in large part to the ability to express and share ideas freely, this is a big reason why western societies hold that right in high esteem, it was a resounding success, it worked for us up until now and it will continue to do so if we let it.

> A more apt comparison would be a group in a corner having a conversation at a rock concert. Suddenly this argument appears less apt.

This is a tired old argument and it isn't convincing or effective. There's a big difference between having a conversation in a corner at a rock concert, and having a conversation in an online service hosted by someone else outside of that conversation, in a territory owned by a state where the host has to comply with laws which place the accountability of user-generated content on the host. A more apt comparison would be... I don't know, I actually don't have any idea. How about simply not being deliberately offensive or hateful or using whatever rhetoric that could ultimately translate into real-world violence?

At least you're original.

Do you want a change in this society? I'd guess you do, most people want to change something. Espousing a desire for any change will always be offensive to someone, and so wanting any improvement necessarily includes being deliberately offensive. The right to speak is the right to offend.

Real world violence, sure. Let's ban that. And asking people to be nice, that's not a bad thing. And banning name calling in your private forum to promote substantiative discussion, that's probably a good idea. But deciding what unappetizing ideas are allowed and are not allowed to be discussed is a bad idea, I thought we learned that lesson in the last century. Free speech isn't what leads to fascist dictatorship, control of ideas does.

All this and I just want to remind you that we are discussing a web site using "white supremacist Nazis" as a pretext to prevent people from organizing against wall street hedge funds.

> Espousing a desire for any change will always be offensive to someone, and so wanting any improvement necessarily includes being deliberately offensive.

This is not true. Whatever you’re disagreeing with another person, you don’t have to call that person any politically incorrect slur, which is really the kind of “offensive” that we are talking about here.

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