Comment by brimble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brimble | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think it's anywhere near being a stretch that having an entire job that consists of psychologically harmful activity would fall under current or non-radical future workplace safety laws. At which point doing it just because your business model doesn't work without causing that harm, would be illegal.

No one is forcing Facebook to harm people like this. They choose to, in order to make money. We choose to allow the creation of jobs that are guaranteed to cause that kind of harm. My objection is to framing this as work that "has" to be done, as if there's no choice.

> Human beings enjoy many <-> many communications and will invent something to fill that void.

Right. We have Email and messaging apps. Websites would still exist and are dirt-cheap to start up, if someone wants to write for the public. Possibly social media could survive somehow, IDK, but they're (and their supporters) the ones saying they "have to" work this way. If so, maybe they should "have to" stop being in business.

You can say the exact same thing about law enforcement, and I presume you don't want to disband homicide and sex crimes enforcement.

There's a lot of variety in human brains. What will traumatize one person is comedy for another. There are (or at least used to be) websites you can seek out to look at pictures of grizzly death. It's simply not the case that everyone is damaged by looking at terrible things, and - to cut off that line of thought - the people who aren't are not monsters or sociopaths. They're just made of different stuff. I can't comment on whether Facebook et al are careful enough in their hiring practices, but I'm certain that there are plenty of people in the world that can do this job.

Email lists were popular before Facebook took over that niche. Nobody more than I would rather see the comeback of mailing lists, but that doesn't solve the problem. You can assume that if mailing lists got the kind of uptake that Facebook has, gmail/hotmail/etc would have the same content curation issues.

I'm still not sure exactly what you are proposing. Facebook gives me a way to communicate with my friends. It sounds like you want to take that away.

> I'm still not sure exactly what you are proposing. Facebook gives me a way to communicate with my friends. It sounds like you want to take that away.

I want us to stop allowing that business models that rely on harming workers must exist. We may choose to allow it, but it's a choice. They do not "have to" do it, and we do not "have to" let them do it.

I hate discussion of harm to these workers that frames it as "well, it sucks, but we have to". We. Do. Not. Have. To. We may choose to, but we don't have to. We don't even have to if we want efficient mass communication. We have to if we want a few publishers to be able to corner and monetize the attention economy.

I don't get what you mean. If there was a large enough mailing list, people would send this stuff on it and then the list would become moderated and we would be back at square one.

I'm sure the Linux kernel mailing list gets tons of vile things sent to it all the time which are filtered out.

I don't see why we have to involve business models at all. Any large all to all communication medium is going to have this issue and the only way to prevent it is to devolve back to the cable tv/newspaper era where people only consume content.

Huh? FB could very well stop this and settle for less ‘efficient mass communication’ via many possible methods. Such as limiting the user base, restricting communication to friends of friends only, etc.

Obviously though a competitor with even less scruples will rise up and gobble up their marketshare if they did something that drastic. So the net result makes no difference.

To actually prevent child pornography from getting shared would require a dictatorship censoring the entire internet. Sure it would be the government instead of multiple big private companies, but that seems even worse than the current situation?

And if you go the other way and have millions of little networks, how do you plan on stopping all the bad stuff from being shared without an even more powerful and centralized dictatorship deciding who can form networks or not?

If you mean to get rid of all censorship and let free sharing of child pornography, etc., that will not pass any democratic legislature, at least in the West, since the vast majority of people want to limit that.

So in the end all alternatives would lead to even less freedom. Have you actually thought through any of this?

If I wanted to start a media hosting service for me and my community (_local, only within an N-block radius of my hosting device_), who would you expect to be held liable if the hard drives associated with that device held something illegal in those N-blocks?

If you were also publishing those files to the entire world, changing the formatting to suit your site's needs & branding, algorithmically selecting the pieces of media that draw "engagement" and preferentially putting those in front of people, burying others, and also publishing ads alongside all that, I'd not hesitate a bit to say that you should be, at least in large part.

Facebook's a magazine publisher at massive scale, that relies on worst-in-class submission and acceptance processes to make money. They're not in the file storage business.

Are you saying that if _any one of those_ things isn't true that it's _not my responsibility_ for the bits on that machine? I am losing the thread here a bit and am not clear on what you are trying to say or how you're answering my question. Apologies.

I'm saying that I don't think "file storage service for locals" is even in the same product category as what Facebook does, even putting scale aside. They're an ad-supported publisher with extremely lax standards. A file storage, or even file sharing, service, isn't necessarily that, and it would take several steps to bridge that gap and travel from "not at all comparable to Facebook", through "grey area", and into "OK, now we're talking about something pretty similar to Facebook (and to Twitter, et c.)".

For sure agree these are totally different and the space between them vast! I was asking directly about a specific use-case so that I can better understand your perspective on who is responsible for the bits stored on a hard drive.

Ah, cool. I think of a file storage service more like a bank safe deposit box: you have rules, and there are laws, someone breaks them and you find out (or the cops do) that's on them. No-one expects you to carefully search every box (indeed, they'd likely be upset if you did) and you're not responsible if something illegal is put in there that you couldn't reasonably have known about (like, if someone tells you they're gonna put illegal shit in there, then you would have a responsibility to, at least, deny them service, but you're not expected to crack open the box after they leave and poke around for rule and law violations).

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