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Comment by semitones | Hacker News Reader

"Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation." - it is impossible to measure the qualifiers "quality", "nuanced", "tolerant", "original", "non-ideological" while still being objective. Thus, whatever implementation for enforcing these qualifiers you choose, it will inevitably lean towards some ideology. Hence, contradiction.

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What you wrote sounds to me a bit like claiming that it's impossible to qualify paintings as beautiful or not, so therefore there cannot be any art museums

Well, objectively, you can't have an art museum that has only beautiful art in it, since beauty in art is subjective and non quantifiable, so yes there can not be an art museum that has only beautiful paintings, and the beautiful paintings that supposedly are there might only beautiful to the eye of the curator.

Either way, the point is not wether or not you can have a place with discourse with the all good qualities described, it is more so that because those qualities are not quantifiable, it is impossible to know for sure.

It’s not about the content it’s about the incentives and reward structures we put in place to govern our society. E.g. we want(ed) a strong economy of businesses in the US so we subsidize(d) their operation. We know very well now that social media platforms (sometimes even deliberately) promote content that irks people because they get rewarded by our ad industry for eyeball time. What better way to consume and waste human capital than to present a bunch of people with outrageous bullshit? There must be a structure or limit we can impose on the attention industry that would deter what we have come to consider abusive treatment of humans. A really dumb but raw implementation would be a use tax where social media companies are literally taxed for engagement beyond some threshold. Point is it’s not a contradiction to demand and invent better systems in the face of poor outcomes. What you can’t do, and what is the contradiction you’re referring to, is to force the desired outcomes without addressing the underlying incentives because then you are oppressing people or companies exhibiting valid behavior within the existing system.

I disagree.

It is not impossible to measure quality, once you accept that quality has many definitions and therefore requires many contexts incentivizing different versions of it for different purposes and audiances.

And that diversity would be a very good thing.

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