Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Google and other large, centralized providers will always invariably end up having to censor profusely, if for no other reason than they want to retain their customers (spam is distracting and annoying), but also because any high profile hosting/message relaying/republishing platform that makes URLs available to the whole world is going to have a PR problem when a journo links to something unpopular/objectionable hosted on the domain with the standard "Why is Google supporting/promoting this trash?"

YouTube recently banned accounts and censored videos that contradicted the WHO - the same WHO that said you shouldn't wear masks during the pandemic.

Centralized systems are censorship accidents waiting to happen. It's super bad already, and we're still in peacetime. Imagine how shitty things are going to be if that changes and the nations that can exercise ultimate control these vast centralized systems feel that free communication via them poses an existential threat due to crisis.

Then there's the whole Instagram "no nudity" thing. Even outside of times of crisis, the de facto photo sharing default has excluded an entire category of human art and creativity. No single organization should have this much dictatorial control over our society's ability to express its own culture, nevermind its ability to permanently read (and share, and mine) your private conversations.

Build around centralized systems by running things yourself. Run your own mailing lists so your groups can communicate outside of algorithmically reorganized timelines designed to benefit advertisers. Self-host Discourse (forum) or Mattermost (web chat) or Gitea (git web). Make local backups of your servers and vpses data partitions so that you can fire them back up somewhere else when the time comes.

Your community will thank you in the long run, and you will be contributing to making all of society more resilient and more expressive/free.

The sentiment in your comment is frequently expressed on HN - censorship isn't good, we need to decentralise to escape censorship.

Ironic that this sentiment is expressed on HN, a centrally controlled site with strict rules around what can and cannot be said. "But all those rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) are good". Well, I agree. These rules are good. They are enforced well. It does foster a decent community with interesting discussion. But let's not mistake a well run, controlled system for a laissez-faire one. HN without moderation would not be the same site, and I'd bet most of us wouldn't want to be a part of it.

This particular comment is strange though - you rail against Instagram's no nudity policy, something that almost all people agree that the site is better off without. And yet, have you tried posting nudity on HN? Let us know if it stays up. HN's control over topics that can be discussed is so firm that even potentially interesting threads like the first one around the European Super League (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26854970) were shut down.

>Ironic that this sentiment is expressed on HN, a centrally controlled site with strict rules around what can and cannot be said.

There's a big difference between a general photo-sharing platform like IG and a small, somewhat topic-focused forum like this.

It's like saying a recipe submission site is "censoring" nudity posts. I guess that's technically true in a sense, but it's also not really what the site's for.

Who gets to decide what the site is really for? And if it's not the entity who makes the site, what sort of say does that entity have?

HN itself is an independent site, as opposed to something like a Facebook group. The strict rules are ones we all agree to by joining. So HN by nature falls in the category of "running stuff yourself" since it's not part of a giant centralized conglomerate like Google or FB.

> The strict rules are ones we all agree to by joining.

Did you manage to create an FB account that isn't bound by the Community Standards (https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/)?

> Ironic that this sentiment is expressed on HN, a centrally controlled site with strict rules around what can and cannot be said.

I say this on my own website, on other sites, and here too - it's not an exclusive thing. This isn't the gotcha you seem to think it is.

> you rail against Instagram's no nudity policy, something that almost all people agree that the site is better off without.

Citation needed. This is your opinion, not fact. There are many thousands of fine art photographers who can't share the majority of their work on IG, and hobbyists who have lost their entire accounts and audience simply because Facebook's censors can't tell a male nipple from a female one. Many people into fetish clothing and jewelry design can't even post non-nude images showcasing their products. There isn't the wide consensus you imagine.

> And yet, have you tried posting nudity on HN? Let us know if it stays up. HN's control over topics that can be discussed is so firm that even potentially interesting threads like...

I actually wrote and operate a little hobby site that exists solely to detect and highlight stories upvoted by HN's readership and marked as off topic (and hidden) by HN's administrators: https://orangesite.sneak.cloud

People should be able to decide for themselves what they see and read, including delegating that authority. HN, for example, has the "showdead" preference option for opting in to seeing comments marked dead by the mods.

HN strikes a good balance, and lets people opt in or out of comment moderation. Facebook and Google do not.

> People should be able to decide for themselves what they see and read, including delegating that authority. HN, for example, has the "showdead" preference option for opting in to seeing comments marked dead by the mods.

> HN strikes a good balance, and lets people opt in or out of comment moderation.

While this is a good idea (and I use the showdead option myself), it is incomplete. To complete it might include such thing as:

- Add another preference option to force everything to be displayed in chronological order.

- If you have enough disk space to allow it, allow replies to dead and old messages, which are automatically also dead.

Hacker News isn't big enough to be a problem. It's not big enough to steer the global conversation. Censoring something from HN doesn't mean that huge populations never hear about it.

Not being able to cope with nudity seems to be a USA specific phenomenon. I female friend of mine was almost arrested in the US for dancing too suggestively, and she was far from being nude. Seems to be a puritanism thing.

I am willing to bet there is ALOT more to the story than simply "dancing too suggestively"

Instagram is a US company, staffed primarily by people from the US culture, so the problems with this USA-specific phenomenon are being exported to billions of others who aren't part of that culture.

I know. Its sad. And it happens with other things too. That is the price we (the rest of the west) pay for never having emanicpated ourselves. This "the US defines what west is" thing pretty much goes on my nerves since I realized how it works. It is also likely a reason for anti-US-attitudes. The loud and extroverted bully is never really a darling of everyone.

> so the problems with this USA-specific phenomenon are being exported to billions of others who aren't part of that culture

This is the case on the vast majority of technology developments -- things to solve mainly US centric problems are pushed out with massive amount of money to try to "solve" problems that don't exist.

A byproduct of this push is often to create those problems in other cultures. It's like the British empire of the 17th century.

It's not US culture that's the issue - ever heard about the utterly ridiculous regulations Germany has on pornography (tl;dr: a simple "are you 18" prompt isn't sufficient, you need a certified online identity provider verifying your age against a government issued ID)?

Reddit, in contrast to Instagram, hosts porn of all varieties - from softcore nude art to hardcore fetish stuff.

The issue with the US is "family friendly" brand/advertising culture - no big brand advertisers want their ads to go next to a blowjob - and credit card regulations.

It's already on a decentralised system. This is a Usenet group.

The complaint is about Google Groups, which AFAIK is the only usenet interface anyone uses who isn't trying to be a pirate.

The exact same issue applies to Gmail, which fronts another decentralized/federated system.

What's the issue with using Thunderbird for this (mail or usenet)?

But I am old and I never understood why one would prefer a browser over native clients.

There are several usenet providers that exclude binary groups, no reason for a pirate to use them.

Indeed. I just got back into Usenet using Eternal September as a provider, and they don't carry binary groups.

You're just objectively wrong. To the extent that _anyone_ cares about Usenet for actual discussion purposes, there are lots of other providers you can choose from.

Same, obviously, goes for e-mail.

Indeed, that’s why we need to build decentralized services. Like Usenet /s

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