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Comment by hytdstd | Hacker News Reader

I don't think people really understand what happens to a website when it stops censorship/moderation. I suggest visiting 4chan.org, and thinking really hard about the experience. I personally tolerate its nastiness and am a fan of the website, but I don't have any pretension that it's the right sort of moderation policy for a profitable business.

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This is not a good comparison. Youtube without censorship wouldn't look any different to you, unless you are interested in the kind of stuff that now gets censored. Remember that youtube had barely any censorship for a long time. Did your recommendations look like 4chan then? The reason 4chan looks the way it does is the bumping algorithm, which promotes controversial posts, not just the lack of censorship. A platform where the frontpage is based on a recommendation algorithm wouldn't look like that, and in fact didn't look like that before it started censoring at this scale.

You should always watch youtube in private mode so you don't get pigeonholed.

YouTube without censorship would turn into PornHub in about as long as it takes to upload a new video.

Right. I think part of the problem is the recommendation algo. Reputable brands do not want their videos to be linked to more questionable content . The problem is, extreme political stuff does not generate much $, so YouTube does not stand to lose much much by purging it.

I understand what that argument is asserting and I'm sure that brands believe it, but as a consumer of YouTube content I just don't think it's true. I have absolutely no association between the YouTube ad that plays and the content of the video. Maybe children and older people used to traditional tv make that association? I just find the whole argument frustrating personally.

The companies that buy ads are vain and obsessed with cultivating a brand image, and Google is more than happy to indulge them. It doesn't matter that nobody is actually going to get outraged and stop shopping at (e.g.) TJ Maxx just because a game streamer said the word "die", it only matters that TJ Maxx bought the ad and the managers can be reassured that they've mitigated their risk.

A majority of respondents disagree with you. Advertising placed next to offensive content has a negative effect on brand perception.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/698821/influence-offensi...

Without moderation youtube is unusable. It would be a defunct site within months.

How would it be unusable? I would still be able to click on links and watch videos.

If you could find the links and videos you want. An unmoderated IOU to the work kid be overrun with porn in seconds because 1. It’s YouTube and to upload porn at what was once a forbidden place is very appeal 2. Where porn can fit , porn will go.

Youtube has actually always had censorship. I found this from 2006:

> What kind of videos can I upload?

>> We accept any type of video content as long as it does not contain:

>>> Pornography or obscene material

>>> Copyrighted content (unless you own all the necessary rights)

>>> Hate or graphically violent acts

4chan is moderated to death. worse than twitter. probably also full of feds. good luck posting from tor, VPNs, datacenter proxies, open proxies, etc. good luck posting more than a few times, creating new topics, etc. /biz/ will not display your posts if they don't like your isp or IP even if not using a proxy. Not that I have much desire to anyway. Tried it a few times. nOt impressed.

4chan sucks because it is too moderated in everything but the speech.

I would prefer just having rules about what speech is allowed or not and then give users full capability to use the site. Twitter does this pretty well.

>4chan sucks because it is too moderated in everything but the speech.

>I would prefer just having rules about what speech is allowed or not

I'm not sure if you're serious. 4chan has an incredibly tiny amount of rules, one of them being no racism outside of /b/. Half of the forums are constantly bombarded by anti-black, anti-asian and anti-jewish racism. These posts do not get removed.

I wonder whether 4chan is the way it is purely as a consequence of there being minimal moderation, or whether the lack of moderation combined with extreme moderation of such content on other platforms is driving it all towards 4chan. Would all platforms wind up the same way if all moderation were removed? Or would it end up being far less obviously concentrated?

This experiment was real in the earlier era of the Internet. And the answer is: When censorship isn't universal, and there are lots of more or less free spaces to speak in, extreme views don't get concentrated and exist everywhere but at a much lower level of intensity. The mainstreamers are less ignorant too because they actually have some exposure to arguments and counterarguments against these views as opposed to just vilifying and banning the others.

Lots of other benefits to this model - names that people don't get trapped in extremist bubbles as much when they're not literally banned from everywhere else.

What? Without censorship a single line of thought, the most vocal, comes to dominate while a majority of people who disagree decide to leave for a new place. This happened all the time in the early internet, it happened to 4chan after Obama became president and it happens in subreddits everyday.

Moderation is also why you won’t see comments which are impolite or heretical but may be obviously true. 4chan is moderated, but the goals are just very different from sites that want to avoid the hassle of vigilante activists by enforcing orthodoxy in content. 4chan also goes to some effort to ensure easy identification of its pseudo-anonymous users. It’s also useful fodder to trick people into rage-donating to the right party. Always ask what the business model is for popular web properties. If you can’t figure it out or nobody else can make money in the same domain, then there is probably a side channel being monetized.

4chan moderators absolutely care about enforcing an orthodoxy. If your content is not received positively they won't bother, but the moderators do act against content that isn't politically useful to their goals.

And what would you say that those goals are?

4chan isn’t minimally moderated. The rhetoric you see is curated I have been banned from 4chan a number of times for reasons I’m not sure of other than the fact that I don’t share the same, let’s call them political, beliefs as most of the posters there. It’s a white supremacists echo chamber by design, not coincidence.

Indeed. It's a nice branding trick they pulled off by making people think it's free speech, it's not, it's moderated so that the political viewpoints of the moderators are replicated.

4chan is moderated specifically to encourage the views it harbors. The state it is right now is the result of censorship by white nationalist moderators and coordinated action.

EDIT: This happened to me thrice. I got 3 temp-bans from /pol/ for having politics the mods didnt like.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu...

4chan has better moderation that YouTube.

I’ve seen 4chan. I honestly mean no offense to you, but I can’t imagine there is anyone who contributes here who could tolerate that.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3A4chan.org%20new...

Why can you not imagine it? As much as I don't care for 4chan I can see why it attracts some people. It's almost entirely uncensored and everyone is completely anonymous. The only driving factor to contribute is for the sake of enjoyment. I would like to be part of such a board, albeit slightly cleaner...

I've been banned from /pol/ three times for political content the moderators disagreed with.

It's far from entirely uncensored.

I suspect there are many users here that visit 4chan regularly. It's got a lot of hate, but some of the content there is entertaining enough.

There are very smart people on 4chan. A well known example:

> Fans were arguing online about the best order to watch the episodes, and the 4chan poster wondered: If viewers wanted to see the series in every possible order, what is the shortest list of episodes they’d have to watch? [...] In less than an hour, an anonymous person offered an answer — not a complete solution, but a lower bound on the number of episodes required. [...] The proof slipped under the radar of the mathematics community for seven years — apparently only one professional mathematician spotted it at the time, and he didn’t check it carefully. [...] Then Robin Houston, a mathematician at the data visualization firm Kiln, and Jay Pantone of Marquette University in Milwaukee independently verified the work of the anonymous 4chan poster [1].

This example tells us a few things. One is that 4chan has users who can come up with new complicated mathematical proofs in a matter of hours. Two - that there are professional mathematicians who read 4chan and can spot those proofs.

Also anecdotally, but on two separate occasions I accidentally discovered that a "smart and well-adjusted" person I know lurks on 4chan. In one such instance the response was similar to "reddit is where dumb people try to act smart, while 4chan is where smart people try to act dumb". I think there is at least some truth in that.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-help...

There is no reason censorship/moderation has to be done server-side. It can be done at the client level with subscribable mute/block lists.

Of course, this requires big tech to relinquish their power to shape worldwide discourse, which is unlikely to happen voluntarily.

it's an interesting approach, since you can personalize the moderation, that I see used in some communities but is not perfect. The implementation that I see requires good tagging (where you mark what tag are you not interested in) or has poor discoverability and high manageability cost (where you have to find the correct blocklist, and this blocklist has to be constantly updated).

More importantly, it doesn't solve the other problem: I don't want to use a website that supports a certain ideology or promotes dangerous content. So the website operator needs to have some sort of serverside moderation otherwise part of the community will not comfortable using it.

Some imageboards use both system, a client-side taglist that hide undesirable comment, and some "server-side" rules about what is generally allowed. I don't think client-side only moderation is sufficent

I like the idea in theory, but I fail to see how subscribable lists don’t cause a larger echo chamber than what we have now.

Instead of Reddit’s “news” subs banning the pulse night club shooting, you have “popular tastemakers” driving the list doing the same.

Except probably with less transparency or accountability. When /r/news bans a topic, I know roughly which couple of clowns did it, when I never see something because my list-makers pre-decided I shouldn’t, we’ll, who ever are those people?

It only seems like a good idea until somebody abuses it to do despicable things. You don’t even need to go that far imagining such things when the story about Near/kiwifarms happened just yesterday. If shit like that happened with something I made, I’d just fucking take down the site and never make open platforms again.

There are very real business reasons they don't do that though. One, is that algorithms that decide what you as a viewer want to look at are very successful at keeping you on their platform. Two, once any company chooses to filter content to make it more palatable to users, they start taking on the legal and PR risks for it.

4chan and other imageboards already allow client-side moderation.

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