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Comment by throwaway55421 | Hacker News Reader

Social media has basically turned the world into a sort of bizarre mob rule situation when it comes to unpopular opinion.

I think that we have a responsibility to speak out on matters we believe in and ignore negative pushback.

The alternative is that anyone can shut down a viewpoint by simply flooding the opposite side. You don't know whether a poster is a troll, a real person that's simply misguided, or a real person that posts in good faith.

You don't even end up with what's merely emotionally satisfying - that would be bad enough - but with the set of events or opinion that wins out purely based on competition.

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> I think that we have a responsibility to speak out on matters we believe in and ignore negative pushback.

You can try, but new "fact checking" norms will ensure unpopular (especially politically unpopular) opinions get censored on social media before anyone sees them

This is a complicated issue and requires a careful approach. I don't think any serious fact checkers simply declare non-mainstream views as false, rather they would highlight only issues where a clear scientific consensus exist. So you flag an article about masks being ineffective and quote a clear analysis, or you flag an article about the Chinese (or US) government purposefully spreading covid, but you don't flag an article discussing the evidence for and against origin theories. See e.g. also the EU imitative on Russian disinformation:

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/

Facebook and friends were screwed before they even got going.

I find it amusing that people use "getting news from Facebook" as a slur. It's stupid, but for entirely the opposite reason that they think it is.

Facebook and friends were screwed before they even got going.

I remember seeing a cool SEM micrograph of a violin at the ~10um scale at one meme site, but I'm having trouble finding it now...

>I think that we have a responsibility to speak out on matters we believe in and ignore negative pushback.

I would prefer to read you thoughts in areas you have experience in rather your random believes, as a non political example I don't care about your option on Linux init systems if you are not a system administrator, distro maintainer or somehow that is more then a random Linux distro user, same with programming languages opinion, I don't care about your anti-X pro-Y opinion if you have zero experience on X and Y but your opinion is just because your hero blogger/developer/youtuber hates X and likes Y.

For sure there are topics where you have experience with and you can share that and there are topics where everyone has same level of experience and we can all give our opinion.

Sure, your take is a bit overly harsh though. I don't think, with the exception of the odd mentally ill crackpot, most people do do this. Like, you don't see QAnon theories about systemd because well, it doesn't affect them at all, most people don't even know it exists.

By contrast, to give a recent and poignant example, the idea that e.g. _only_ a Harvard epidemiologist or equivalent should speak out on coronavirus restrictions is absurd.

They might have more precise data about specific models, but in the general case they don't know more about the impacts restrictions will have on anything else, they don't have a representative opinion on what an acceptable risk reward balance is, and it's also likely that they have personal bias due to their family and friends (as we all do).

The sad thing, even as you identify into this (true) dynamic, is that it’s happening in this community in favour of this supposedly heterodox viewpoint.

The slightest counterpoint to this supposedly suppressed lab leak theory is downvoted, flagged, and the community congratulates itself on its paradoxical unity-in-contrarianness. Before our very eyes!

Just asking questions — and saying what people really think — has long been a profitable grift. It’s sobering to see how different audiences succumb to it so acutely.

The problem is that what you have said is literally the exact same thing that people say to promote their not just crazy but nonsensical conspiracy theories. I mean, the QAnon folks literally go on and on about "what the media doesn't want you to see" as they wait for JFK's return in Dallas.

Sure, so just ignore them.

It's really not hard to identify stuff that makes no sense at all, and having to manually filter through that stuff is worth it if it means being able to form a model of the world that's actually correct as opposed to simply being what the most powerful entities want.

Brain damaged space lizard believers aren't doing scientific research, as an obvious example.

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