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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

The most important part of this post doesn't even have anything to do with cryptocurrency:

> If the broad masses of people disagree with the platform landlord, their opinion will be altered to conform with the rules, or else they will no longer have a voice.

We really need to fix that problem.

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Something about means of production and who owns it. This is most obvious on social media. The people participating on the platform do not get to decide the rules for how it operates. Which is a little ironic given that most people on social media are ostensibly in favor of democracy.

It’s already fixed to some extent. On Reddit, you make a new subreddit of your own. On GitHub, you fork. The problem is that some projects are too big to effectively fork (or forking would over leverage the community) or people are lazy and don’t want to do the forking themselves despite accurately identifying the presence of a problem.

What about when it's the Reddit or GitHub admins who judge you to be guilty of thoughtcrime?

...or the Reddit CEO who goes into the backend to invisibly edit your posts.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170720143148/https://www.reddi...

Or more realistically, you get banned from Reddit and Github.

Have we already forgotten what happened to youtube-dl at the hands of GitHub?

I know GitHub were only following the DMCA but it shows they have the capability to not only remove the project but also all of its forks.

I genuinely don't understand the fear generated by the youtube-dl storm in a teacup. It's a great example of the system working: someone thought they had a DMCA case so they filed a takedown, the takedown temporarily removed the content, then after a review the content was put back up.

This is just evidence that this particular slope isn't as slippery as some thought.

> the content was put back up.

The repo is back up, but the project is dead. I suspect the developers got nasty letters from lawyers behind the scenes. I believe yt-dlp is the future of this project, but it's presently lesser known than youtube-dl so the lawyers got what they wanted in the end.

That's a problem with our laws.

Copyright should just be a contract between seller and buyer. You promise not to redistribute this. If you didn't buy something, you have no contract with the seller and you can be free to download whatever you want or build whatever software or service you want.

The onus of finding who is the buyer breaking the contract and dragging them to court is on the seller.

We shouldn't have things like DMCA which allow you to censor anything tangentially related or being able to scare people off, but that's what you get when you have a corrupted government that does the bidding of Big Business.

Similarly, patents shouldn't be a thing.

You came up with something, you already have first mover advantage. If someone comes along and does the same thing better, too bad, they were better than you. If you have a manufacturing secret, protect it with contracts and sue for damage if they get broken.

This is effectively saying we just shouldn't have copyright.

Person A buys a movie and agrees to not distribute it, but goes ahead and does it anyway to Person B. Person B hosts it for everyone, and Persons C through Z get it and also host it. You're suggesting Person A is liable, but the cat's out of the bag and Persons B through Z can continue redistributing it forever because they never agreed to anything.

If this is the desired goal, you don't need copyright at all, you can already get Person A on violating Terms of Service or whatever.

So you can sit around in your new subreddit with enough subscribers that you can count them on your fingers, posting freely, while /r/politics (or wherever) has a subscriber base measured in millions.

Reminds me a bit of the "free speech zones". It's a poor facsimile of true freedom of speech.

Seeing as the new public squares are, by and large, digital spaces controlled by megacorps, we need to expand the first amendment to apply to private enterprise.

Freedom of speech is not the same thing as requirement that others listen. If someone has no audience, with all the platforms that are available, it's not because they're being censored. It's because nobody cares what they have to say.

It's not that nobody wants to listen. There are plenty of people who want to listen, but the megacorps refuse to let the talkers and listeners connect.

This is not what is happening on these platforms. r/thedonald had millions of subscribers and not a single one was forced to listen. Then it was banned by reddit for thoughtcrime.

You could have brought up hard left subreddits getting banned too. Like Chapo. So it doesn’t seem like only the right is persecuted/appearing to continue the trope of how the right are such victims.

Same thing

How is it the same thing? Hard left doesn’t victimize themselves while calling others snowflakes all the time like /r/Donald people or sympathizers.

> So you can sit around in your new subreddit with enough subscribers that you can count them on your fingers, posting freely, while /r/politics (or wherever) has a subscriber base measured in millions.

And if by some chance your subreddit manages to become popular, the admins and power mods will conspire to take it from you. Reddit sucks.

There's something akin to a law of nature at work on Reddit that goes something like this: Any sub-reddit (or it's topic-at-hand) that garners any national attention in the political sphere will become an echo chamber full of corporate shills unless there is constant and public vigilance to guard against it, and even then the sub's chances for surviving to fulfill its original mission is grim. I f'ing hate what Reddit has become.

Freedom of speech is exactly how you get r/politics, private propaganda syndicates, and qanonsense screaming loud enough that it drowns out everything else.

"More" of it isn't going to make any of those things go away.

"Freedom of speech" isn't a guarantee that your prefered brand of rational discourse is going to have an audience of millions. If anything, it's a guarantee that it won't, because someone with a self-serving profit motive is far more incentivized to shout over you.

Freedom of speech does not entitle you to broadcast to anyone else's audience.

The first amendment of the US constitution does apply to private enterprise. This is why Congress cannot make a law that limits private enterprises' editing of third party content on the platforms they own.

What you are arguing for requires either an amendment to the constitution or nationalization of those private enterprises.

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