Hacker News Reader

Comment by FreeSpeech | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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?

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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com