Hacker News Reader

Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

You're thinking of it like a legal process. Think of a private party instead - you're happy to invite lots of people, but everyone heard Adam was a real asshole to someone in public, so you don't want to have him at the party anymore (even though he was never bad at your previous parties specifically).

It's a reasonable thing to do and you have about the same level of responsibility for your party as twitch has for their platform. You probably also don't care what the justice system thinks about the invitations to your party.

View on HN

> Think of a private party instead

The extent to which corporations should be considered private entities does not seem like a settled question to me. Your corporation has no natural right to exist, and therefore does not have the natural right to do business solely as it pleases.

> and you have about the same level of responsibility for your party as twitch has for their platform.

What responsibility are they exercising? If the behavior on their platform is not disruptive to it, then what precisely are they defending their users _from_?

> You probably also don't care what the justice system thinks about the invitations to your party.

Invite someone on the most wanted list. I can't imagine it playing out that well for you.

> If the behavior on their platform is not disruptive to it, then what precisely are they defending their users _from_?

From being surrounded by Adams. Either you act in cases like that, or you become known as "that place that likes to invite Adam (and others)". And it's completely up to the host which side they want to be on. Twitch chose to end the invitation.

> Invite someone on the most wanted list.

That's not even close to the case discussed here.

The problem is who judges the Adams and decide that they are assholes. People are worried that the judge will not be fair and it will be biased in favor of some ideology.

Of course at some point it will not be fair. No system is and people make mistakes. The question is - is it going to be less fair / more biased than not applying the same policy.

Honest question: is there an exhaustive list of natural rights?

The only ones I know about are related to the Declaration of Independence and I don’t have any evidence they are comprehensive.

I don’t have any evidence to believe of a conscious higher power, so my list of natural rights is likely to differ from people who do.

No, because "natural rights", like all rights, are a human abstraction and thus open to interpretation, political and religious bias and difference of opinion. They don't actually exist in Nature and so can't actually be objectively quantified. The Declaration of Independence was written by men who believed they had a God-given right to own other men as property after all.

> then what precisely are they defending their users _from_?

You are replying to a poor argument from the parent poster, they don't have to be protecting anyone, it's fine for them to simply say "I don't want that jerk at my party"

> Your corporation has no natural right to exist

Natural right is a weird qualifier, some corps have a legal right or privilege to exist depending on "must grant" or "may grant" in the locality.

> and therefore does not have the natural right to do business solely as it pleases

Well sure, they aren't allowed to ban people for their membership in a protected class, e.g. their race or disability for the same reason that they aren't allowed to sell cocaine or kill people, because the law prohibits all of those things.

> The extent to which corporations should be considered private entities does not seem like a settled question to me. Your corporation has no natural right to exist, and therefore does not have the natural right to do business solely as it pleases.

This is a particularly interesting topic - a lot of the parallels around private vs. public places seem to have eroded over time. Facebook, Twitter and others are now serving the function of a public place. They are means of communication used by governments and elected leaders.

I suspect at some point soon there will be a shift in the balance here, to try and address the extent to which companies are "private entities" sitting outside of the legal frameworks, where they deal with the public. NJ views privately owned shopping malls to be public places from a 1st amendment perspective, even though it is not publicly owned - it isn't a huge leap to consider FB or similar as a public space on that basis.

I don't have the power to ban Adam from all parties. Twitch effectively does, in this case.

There are many services that let you livestream. Twitch is just one of the most popular.

You mean they can ban someone from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and all other services with live streaming option? That's not really the case.

There are posts elsewhere indicating that twitch is close to the only game in town for live game streaming. People were denied access to tournaments, not intending to stream or commentate themselves, because the tourney organizers wanted to stream on twitch.

Sure, it's just video games, but we have to reckon in general with the consequences of an oligopoly that's 'just exercising control over their private property' when it adds up to most digital communications.

If it’s important enough, the government should run it.

Game live-streaming isn’t important enough.

Sure, it sucks that twitch is the only game in town for professional gamers. For some reason other attempts never worked long term. But what options are there? Either it needs to be worth for someone to compete with the service, or streamers would have to gain some kind of law protection status which would be worse than now. Or even worse, twitch could go the way of pro physical sports where as long as you don't kill someone, nobody cares. (and you may even get positive pr to keep covered up)

They are deciding how they view each user and their actions. Shouldn't I also be expected to have the same privilege?

If I want to see it like a legal process there is nothing they can say, specially after this, to make me change my outlook in the same way they ban people for violating their way of thinking and give them no appeal not even the time of day.

You do have that privilege. Why do you think you don't?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com