Hacker News Reader

Comment by nsood | Hacker News Reader

Unmoderated social media (which I'm guessing is your goal with decentralization) tends to accumulate people who have been kicked off all moderated social media - see stuff like Parler, Ruqqus, etc.

I don't think removing all ability for moderation is a good idea, more of a balance is necessary.

View on HN

What's the problem with that? You don't have to read these people's posts if you don't like them, just like I don't have to watch conspiracy bullshit on youtube. Maybe I want to read these folks' posts! The platform shouldn't make that decision for me.

With well designed communication tools, you don't need moderators to decide what kind of content you see. You and your immediate network will be your own moderators by implicit action and inaction (and if everything is designed right, you can also take explicit action to e.g. drop that flat earth shit from your feed that shows up because your best friend keeps reading and upvoting it).

This is exactly how the real world works too. I choose who to chat and hang out with, I don't need to call cops to remove marketers and idiots from the world for me.

I think this kind of rebuttal is a bit narrowly-scoped. It's not like we made social media centralized and controlled by a few people BECAUSE other systems were unmanageable/impossible to moderate. We never even got to see a world were users own their social media. In such a world I imagine moderation to be in the hands of the users, evolving into a crowdsourced effort in which anyone can implement off-the-shelf blacklists/whitelists. This way no single node can get mass silenced by decree of a CEO or government entity (thus requiring to "run off" somewhere else). You could see it as free market for information exchange.

I think the free speech of posting coronavirus facts is far more important than the danger of dealing with the parler crowd. For people in authoritarian countries like India or Myanmar or anywhere else, it's the government that is the main obstacle to having free speech—not groups of hat-wearing nitwits.

Anyone posting something outright illegal on a social platform is making themselves a target for law enforcement anyway — why subject the entire platform to censorship on their behalf?

As an Indian, I can assure you we have plenty of hat-wearing nitwits as well, and there's more in common in the ways Trump and Modi got elected than you think.

In case of unmoderated social media, just because law enforcement goes after them doesn't mean the content doesn't need to be taken down sometimes. Think non-consensual nudes, calls to extremism, etc. These things are filtered out because at some point even Parler and Ruqqus and all will delete them. But completely unmoderated social media will not allow for that.

I also never said that free speech was less important than dealing with the Parler crowd. I'm just saying it's a harder problem than it's made out to be.

If you have an upvote/downvote system that requires authentication, thresholds of useful upvoted activity to unlock (like HN), and perhaps some kind of spending or at least account balance, you could have a reasonable front page and subforums, and the discouraging noise you describe would only come up if you manually paginated or manually searched/filtered for it. Assuming wide enough usage by the public.

And the first uses of bitcoin where shady, or outright illegal, given those users had the greatest incentives to use alt currencies - this was the main attack by detractors.

Outside of speculation and hype; is there currently much demand for bitcoin as a currency outside of industries that operate in a legal grey area?

Yes, uncensored social media will tend to accumulate people who have been censored, that's the point.

Twitter is moderated, but is also full of political extremism. People leave Twitter all the time.

Moderation is solved problem. There are email spam filters, network of trusted people, proof of work...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com