Hacker News Reader

Comment by feoren | Hacker News Reader

Every single time someone tries something like this, it becomes a bastion for hate speech and everyone else is driven away. It turns out most people actually like a moderated forum. If you joined a book club and every meeting had people just screaming the N-word at the top of their lungs the entire time, I suspect you wouldn't stay at that book club long. Yet time and time again we see people learning this same lesson. It makes me wonder whether everyone who is extremely anti-censorship really does just want to scream the N-word in everyone's face all day, deep down.

Good luck with your hate speech site.

View on HN

The clearnet is still a bit of a wild west (albeit now a heavily commercialized one). There's all sort of stuff that shouldn't be there, and if you go to report it to get it taken down, it's there a month later (hate speech, revenge porn, doxxing etc). Tor / Onionland is even more so a wild west, but that's the double-edged sword of anonymity & free speech. Anonymous voices & actions are sometimes the best voices & actions, but also horrific in equal measure.

That said, dubbing yourself 'unstoppable' & 'uncensorable' just paints a huge target on your back.

>Anonymous voices & actions are sometimes the best voices & actions, but also horrific in equal measure.

Is it really "equal measure"? Somehow I think this service will get a lot more "horrific" than "best" voices.

> Is it really "equal measure"?

I meant it's a double edged sword. For every ten anonymous 'uncensorable' darknet blogs exposing truth and exposing The Conspiracy, there's another ten sites hosting CSAM content.

I know, it sucks.

Uncensorable and anonymous just means it's going to end up having kiddie porn and rape sites.

I often wonder if people who create these sites are truly blind to what ends up on them?

Mostly sociopaths who don't care because their brains are wired not to do so. What's interesting is why evolution selects for sociopathic brains among us. They are the psychological cuckoos stealing from everyone else. Evolution is weird.

In threads like this, I'm always struck by the absence of discussion from a security-minded, denial-of-service attack perspective.

It seems like, if someone didn't want one of these platforms to succeed, all that would be necessary would be to hire a few people to spam certain taboo words and ideas from various sockpuppet accounts, and then the rest of the world points at it and says, "It seems like everyone on this platform really does just want to scream the N-word in everyone's face all day, deep down. Good luck with your hate speech site."

And, just like that, the new platform is forever known as a haven of hate, never to be used by "respectable" people. Now, back to Reddit and Facebook and Twitter with you, where we can build a profile of everything you've said, cross-reference it with any other accounts you may have, and hide content we don't want you to see. After all, you're not an -ist, are you?

It doesn't even have to be something universally understood to be offensive. I wonder what happens when pro-Taiwan posts start appearing? How will China react?

it's legitimately a weakness of the model that it can be targeted like this. being in a place where every other post is a racist screed just isn't fun and I will choose to go somewhere else, regardless of if it's real people or paid trolls

(fwiw, I doubt that the paid trolls are lurking in obscure forums. They're posting on Facebook and Twitter themselves)

> It makes me wonder whether everyone who is extremely anti-censorship really does just want to scream the N-word in everyone's face all day, deep down.

This is an absolutely ridiculous and tiresome caricature. Honestly, where have you actually seen this? I've seen some fairly "coarse" discussion forums in my time. They're not really to my taste, but I rarely (if ever) see people using the N-word, let alone screaming it in people's faces.

voat, the free speech version of Reddit went down this path very quickly. Most forums don't tolerate obvious hate speech, so the people who want to do that have to go to places that promise 'no moderation'

So you're saying all I have to do to take down free speech is to shout racialisms incessantly?

You don't have to, the chuds will do it naturally.

it works. being in a place where people are allowed to be nasty just isn't fun

Voat is a pretty famous and obvious example, sure. But how many people who like to bring up voat actually visited the site or tried to use it? Did you?

For the record, I've never visited voat, so I don't know how accurate the reports are. I can say that I have visited other forums with very lax moderation, and the caricature of "screaming the N-word in everyone's face" doesn't seem accurate.

Generally the reason I avoid unmoderated platforms has little to do with "hate speech" (whatever that is) but more to do with the lack of interesting or original content.

The risk with moderated platforms is this: in whose interest is the moderation being performed? Is the moderation being performed to serve the interests of the platform's users, or is it to serve other interests?

I visited voat on occasion to see how it was working out, mostly checking out the groups that were not inherently political, such as /v/science and /v/movies.

Here is a description of such a visit shortly before they shut down [1].

I generally saw a lot more anti-Jew stuff than anti-Black stuff, but when a Black person came up there was a good chance someone would use the N word.

They could usually even make their anti-Black stuff be about Jews too. For example in /v/movies there was a discussion of the 2020 "Call of the Wild" movie. People were upset that one of the sled dog team drivers was played by a Black actor. They believed this was part of some nefarious plot by the Jews that control Hollywood.

I remember also seeing quite a bit of outrage over Asian and Black actors in The Mandalorian. I think I only saw one post that specifically complained about how absurd it was to have "<N-word>s in space" but a whole lot of agreement with the idea that all the actors in space shows should be white.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25502118

I've now visited Voat, and I agree it's pretty terrible.

I still don't think the criticism of anti-censorship movement in general that I responded to is at all accurate, but that doesn't mean there won't be exceptions.

I used voat back when it was called whoaverse, and checked back on it occasionally for years. It was a little sketchy at the beginning but became full on antisemitic propaganda by the end when it closed.

I have some beef with Reddit and I legitimately wanted it to succeed, but I promise you as someone who cared a little about voat, it really was people screaming racial slurs.

Some of this probably has to do with voat getting most of their users when reddit banned fatpeoplehate. I can totally imagine other unmoderated places still being nice. But what happens when one outspoken racist makes their home there? Everyone has to either put up with it or leave.

imo, you have the million dollar question right there. Moderating is hard & thankless work. I hope that someone makes a good federated social media soon

If you didn't want something like this to exist, maybe a good way to get it to be un-enjoyable by the people who want to use it would be to show up and yell intolerable things at the top of your lungs. You can already see many instances in this thread of people assuming that sites like this exist solely for the pleasure of racists, which makes "normal" people think it's not for them. Mission accomplished, all the normies will stick to their "mainstream" sites where content is moderated and they don't have to worry about parsing what is "right" or "wrong" because someone in Mountain View wrote an algorithm that surfaces wrong-think to a minimum wage disposable worker who decides that yes it is wrong-think, and removes it.

Think about this. Last year, if you said that covid might have come from a lab, you were saying something that was obviously wrong, your post should be removed, you should be suspended, and you might be a racist as well. Fast-forward to now, well actually it's pretty possible that it might have come from a lab, maybe we should have talked about that...

The problem to solve with anonymous message boards is getting rid of the bad-faith actors. I think we need a system that allows individuals to subscribe to independent moderators. The central company provides the infrastructure and makes a marketplace where individuals can upload their own ban lists and moderation algorithms that people can subscribe to, allowing you to curate your feed based on many options of moderation. Maybe kinda similar to ad-blockers, some of which get rid of everything and some of which allow some stuff through, that follows standards. This way the central company is insulated from having to worry about moderation, except to remove obviously illegal content, and individuals get a variety of choices and can't blame some central authority for making decisions on the content they see.

Regardless of your feelings and views, that is still free speech whether you like it or not. What you want is a "platform that only allows what I deem acceptable allowed to be posted". That already exists, it's called reddit. Edit: And the best part is this is still true regardless of how much you downvote it

Read the ToS. They also have a list of what has been deemed acceptable and unacceptable.

At some point you really do have to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt and accept that, yes, people keep making these services because they want to be racist.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Have you considered this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29165559

Conspiratorial garbage. Zero evidence in favour of this and tons against.

What would be some examples of the 'against'?

The fact that a lot of people posting racist garbage on these platforms are real people with a known history of being actual, real racists?

Back in April I fired up LBRY when I heard about it. Sounded kinda neat on a technical front.

95% of the page was conspiracy-tards and racists. Noped right off, and haven't been on since.

Just launched it again and the front page shows a video from some asshole talking about how she's discovered that Measles is a sham and SHE has uncovered the fact that NOBODY has proved the existence of virus particles! Also, turns out that PCR is fake, who knew? eyeroll

LBRY is now dominated by "pseudopandemic" vloggers, antivaxxers, 9/11 conspiratards, "population control" conspiratards, "Australia is FALLING!!!"...the list goes on.

There are people who legitimately could use censorship-free platforms, but they're drowned out by all the assholes and morons who think they're being "censored" by (insert boogeyman here) trying to hide THE TRUTH...when really it's that nobody can stand their bigotry/stupidity.

It's really that the people who can't stand them get them kicked off Youtube. That's the definition of legitimate use.

They say it's "undeplatformable", but it's really just a way of screaming into the void because no one is going to want to dig through a pile of trash to find out what they're saying.

I'd say it's a great win-win. They get to spout whatever they want, and no one has to hear it.

As compared to big tech which gets to "spout whatever they want" via censorship and controlling the discourse. And everyone has to hear it.

I mean that's the beauty of it. I get to choose whether I want to hear Twitter's version of discourse or NoFILTER's version, or neither. So when people I'm unlikely to want to listen to decide to go to NoFILTER, that's a win for me.

I dont think they are mutually exclusive. Its perfectly possible to create self-regulated forums that function well without big tech being involved. I think we've have been conditioned to believe that people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey are the best people to provide this kind of environment. I dont think this is remotely true.

How can there be "self-regulation" on a platform that is "unstoppable, uncensorable, undeplatformable"?

I certainly agree that there are plenty of valuable forums that are not run by tech giants, but they function because they have dedicated moderation and censorship. The trouble is that the set of things I think people should be allowed to say is extremely large, but set of things I want to see in a forum or any sort of social media is much smaller. It doesn't have to be Jack Dorsey at the helm, but someone has to be sweeping up the filth to make a forum a place I want to interact with.

> no one is going to want to dig through a pile of trash to find out what they're saying

People still use clearnet websites that do this every day. For some sites, read: news outlets, it is their business model.

Right now, you are using this thing called the internet. There's a lot of "hate speech" on it, but it doesn't seem to drive everyone else, including you, away.

Oh please. Usenet was a free speech platform. IRC was a free speech platform. The 90s internet was a free speech ecosystem and the prevailing ethos was anti censorship. And guess what? It wasn't an endless hellscape. It was great, mostly.

We're just caught up in the middle of a moral panic and the church ladies from SNL have come out of the woodwork, flapping their arms about how everything is s/satanic/racist.

I remember both of those platforms having problems with disgusting illegal content.

It certainly wasn't a big enough deal to prevent everyone else from enjoying the platform. Things worked out. There were problems here and there but by and large people discussed most topics with each other civilly and the system worked without any central authority approving each post.

If saying "good luck with your idea I don't like" is the expression of "moral panic" and church lady from SNL, then that seems like a rather mild panic. Compare that to legislative action to dictate the content of science and history classrooms on matters of race and sex.

Probably because they weren't platforms with the sole purpose of being a space for free speech. The problem with these new platforms and sites is that they are generally copies, worse than the originals, of larger platforms that have the only attraction of being free from moderation.

They only see this problem and try to solve it in the worst way. Accepting everything and everyone, offering a confusing experience, financially unattractive and often need to charge dearly for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com