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Unfortunately there's a lot of truth in this. It is rather fashionable to be anti-GOP. As much as I loathe the current state of the party, they are not always wrong and on most traditional stances, especially those on the economic and foreign policy side, I tend to agree. That is to say you have company here in seeing that a countering point of view gets crapped on just for being a countering point of view.
But really it's bigger than that -- they need a new boogieman. Big tech is that because most of the winners from tech aren't the GOP-base, so it's easy to bash on. And banning Trump has got them all riled up even if there's no truth to the systematic bias beyond him specifically. In fact social media has largely propelled Trump and others into the spotlight in the first place.
> I think this is similar to much of the censorship we've seen.
That's... not a particularly convincing argument though, if you are really saying that the two situations are similar. Because the downvotes this comment got came from users, not big tech. The community decided for whatever reason, good or bad, fair or biased, that they didn't like the post.
So whats your alternative to that? If I tell my friends not to eat at a restaurant and their Yelp rating plummets and they're not the first result anymore, is that censorship?
Is the implication here that communities shouldn't be able to organize their own content? Because if that's really what you mean by big tech censorship, then I'm going to have a really hard time getting on board with that. The whole point of the marketplace of ideas is that some ideas in a community win, and that other ideas become unpopular.
I would think HN would be exactly what Conservatives want. Your post eventually gets hidden if enough people in the community dislike it, but people can still get to your ideas and upvote them or vouch for them if you genuinely have community support. And doing things like scraping the site or building a competitor is much easier than with larger tech sites, HN is big but it doesn't encompass the entire tech industry. It's a little difficult for me to imagine an alternative system. Is it censorship if somebody dislikes a Youtube video, or subscribes to a channel that isn't mine? Is it censorship if I search for a video and Youtube shows me the video with the most likes first?
I'm all on board for increasing market competition and making safe spaces for communities so they aren't drowned out, I can get behind a criticism that consolidation and having one all-encompassing space where a certain group is constantly blocked out is bad. But that's a very different proposal than "it's censorship that I got downvoted."
I agree that downvoting someone on HN is not censorship.
What I meant is the biases of the people writing and training the ranking / flagging algorithms bleeds through into the implementation. Similar to how there have been stories that facial recognition tools only recognize white people.
I don't know that it's a great argument or analogy. I mainly was trying to point out that when you escalate from individuals downranking items to individuals writing algorithms that have similar built in biases, then you end up with something very near censorship, even if it isn't intentional.
I believe that's really the whole argument behind "system discrimination", maybe individuals aren't overtly discrimination, but the system is built up in such a way that the result is discrimination.
You can agree or not, but it's worth considering, and I'd guess most people could be convinced of it in one context or another.
But the idea of "communities shouldn't moderate themselves", or what the GOP is proposing, which is that the government should decide how communities are allowed to moderate themselves -- that is in my opinion is just really contrary to the ideal of free speech. I think that there's a risk of confusing the dangers of disproportionate and centralized power (which is a real problem) with the idea of moderation or criticism or freedom of association in general, which are themselves fundamental parts of free speech.
So I just think that we need to be very careful and precise about exactly what is meant by a claim that companies like Facebook or Visa are threats to free speech. I do encourage people and communities to try and examine their unconscious bias and how that affects the systems that they build, I think that's important for everyone to do. But the proposals that are coming out of the GOP are doing a lot more than that, there's a difference between examining bias and direct intervention into how platforms are allowed to moderate.
In fact, it's better than the Discord channel situation, because HN rankings aren't only not determined by a single moderator (votes reflect the people who are on HN and voting at any given moment), you can also still get to the content and post, it's just not by-default visible or promoted.
It's censorship in the most technical sense of the word, we are technically repressing someone's voice in a community, but the 1st Amendment guarantees communities and individuals a right to censor through their freedom of association, and downvoting and hiding comments is probably one the least extreme examples of that I can think of.
This only becomes a problem with market domination.
It's not a problem that Google puts some search results on the 1st page and some on the 2nd, even though most people don't click through to the 2nd page or even think about the fact that it exists. There's literally no other way to do search. It's only a problem because Google controls 90% of the search market.
And the English Internet includes a large number of users from Europe/Canada in addition to the users from liberal US cities. Sites like HN with a long-form discussion format are also going to skew the demographics further along those lines. It's not a marketplace that's going to value right-wing ideas; a majority of users will have a cultural background that finds them distasteful.
I don't think there's anything about free speech that says that only Americans should be able to form communities with each other, or that communities should be restricted to a single continent.
This would be a problem if HN dominated the entire industry and it was the only place to talk about tech, but... it's not. It's just not the same concern as talking about something like Youtube, where not only is Youtube extremely dominant, it's also hard to integrate with and hard to replicate because of high hosting costs. Heck, HN is one of the best places to build organic direct contacts with people. It's one of the few places online where if you have a popular site, you will get asked about direct RSS feeds, you will occasionally get direct emails from people. So I just don't get the analogy people draw between HN and, say, Facebook. I can't even read most business listings on FB without an account, it's entirely different beast to compete with.
I don't see any problem with a community of tech people worldwide having a site where they talk about tech, and part of that is always going to be that the people who use HN end up skewing in certain directions. There's no such thing as a neutral community, there are always predominant ideas, and there are always ideas that the community will find distasteful.
You can argue whether HN's specific biases are good, I think some of them are quite harmful, and I'm sometimes upset at the way this community skews on multiple issues. But I don't think it's a risk to free speech that those biases exist.
There are spaces I'm a part of that consider HN to be basically Right-wing, and there are a few spaces I encounter that consider it to be Left-wing. It just comes down to what those communities consider to be normal, it's expected that different communities have different standards of what is and isn't objectionable to say.
Users on a website meant specifically for tech workers?
Isn't that a bit like saying tech censorship doesn't come from big tech, just from the individual feelings of its employees?
Is the implication here that communities shouldn't be able to organize their own content?
Deleting and hiding any non-left wing view is not "organizing".
I'm not entirely sure. Seen from a distance, it looks like happened to Republicans in 2021 exactly what happened to Muslims in ~2016: social media companies finally decided to take action against the violent factions that used the rest of users to hide in plain sight.
According to a paper I read a while ago, it worked against Da'ech, Al-Qaeda, etc. without harming regular Muslim users. I hope that it can work as well against alt-right violent movements without harming regular Conservatives.
Now, do I believe that social networks should have that much power? Not at all. But I believe that focusing on actions that Conservatives are aimed against all of them is counterproductive. We should rather aim at breaking these ~monopolies.
> Add to that the fact that Republicans are in fact also consumers, and I don't think it's fair to say they are ignoring consumers.
Well, they seem to be ignoring most consumers to focus on a single group. Is that a better formulation?
Great. I'd like to see them do the same with Antifa and co.
https://nypost.com/2021/01/22/twitter-suspends-antifa-accoun...
I don't think it is that obvious because, at least me personally, I haven't seen any evidence of this. Now there are websites that are built around reducing visibility of unpopular opinions (like this one and Reddit), and elevating popular opinions (like Twitter), but I don't think it's fair to call this censorship. You can't join websites where opinions are judged and then complain when they're not judged your way. By that logic, every time a candidate loses office, they've been "censored", which isn't an honest application of that term.
The only times I've seen posts stricken is when they're damaging in some way, like vaccine misinformation or voter misinformation. It just so happens that one side seems to indulge in a couple of those categories.
> I don't think it is that obvious because, at least me personally, I haven't seen any evidence of this.
Not going to argue one way or another on this, but I do want to point out that you can change some words around and end up with:
"I think the downvotes are due to your claim that it's obvious there is systemic racism. I don't think it's obvious because I haven't seen evidence of it. Black people just happen to commit more crimes"
Where your analogy falls apart is that I can observe systemic racism using impartial statistics. When controlling for variables, there is imbalance that cannot be explained by anything else.
When we look at statistics for right-wing censorship on platforms, they find that this isn't happening[1][2][3][4][5]
I can sympathize with an emotional argument that it feels like it's happening, but when I look at the facts, I can't see any evidence. I can't say that about systemic racism.
I am willing to be convinced though.
[1] https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/bias-report-release-page
[2] https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/new-study-finds-facebo...
[3] https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/despite-bias-claims-fa...
[4] https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/study-facebook-still-n...
[5] https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/study-right-wing-sourc...
We have been in this far from equilibrium state of individual liberty and we are drifting back towards equilibrium.
Because of the WW2 generation our education system has probably focused a bit too much on the dangers of Hitler and not enough on the dangers of Maximilien Robespierre.
So you get people out to crush and down vote Republican "Nazis" while chanting Vive la Liberte!
Not to mention up and down voting is just a terrible system and especially in a place like this with people smart enough to use their brain.
Clearly there was a time in the past that the smartest people in the world would have upvoted phlogiston theory at the expense of reality.