Hacker News Reader

Well, building a massive internet forum to sell ads on is not really a recipe to be anodyne, right?

Some users are bound to replay real-world conflicts there. Israelis and Palestinians will scream at each other, Europeans will draw Muhammad cartoons, Rs and Ds will love each other unconditionally as usual... and all this attention sells ads, but also creates uncomfortable side effects.

Political outrage drives engagement much more than cute cats.

View on HN

Yeah, agreed. It's hard to draw the line between a normal political discourse and a dangerous one, and harder at scale, and even worse if your engagement metrics are at stake. So mostly they do nothing until it's too late.

AWS pulled the plug on Parler a few days after the Capitol riot, and then justified it with evidence of posts from before the riot. If the riot had not happened, then surely Parler would still be hosted on AWS today.

So the big players are not proactively censoring anything; it's all engagement metrics, then CYA when shit hits the fan. But take heart: that means that small platforms really can live under the radar.

But wasn't the Capitol riot planned on Facebook? (https://www.mic.com/p/facebook-played-a-major-role-in-capito...)

Nobody is going to pull that particular plug.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com