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Comment by gruturo | Hacker News Reader

Would you agree to go to jail if a user posts something illegal on a forum you run?

No? Fair and reasonable. Neither do I. Now let's ask ourselves - would ANYONE reply yes? A bit unlikely? Therefore the result is absolutely no more forums/hosting of any kind.

I'm not talking pornhub here - even a cake recipe sharing site, a scientific forum, a community of model train enthusiasts, Stack Overflow, your MMO guild's site, even HN itself... nothing. No Discord, no Slack, obviously no social media (which I happen to dislike, but I'm quite firmly in the minority, I'm told), nothing at all.

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> Would you agree to go to jail if a user posts something illegal on a forum you run? > No? Fair and reasonable. Neither do I. Now let's ask ourselves - would ANYONE reply yes? A bit unlikely?

You seem to be asking rhetorical questions and then answering them on your own instead of letting the OP answer? So, I am not sure what the point is?

I don't feel my question was rhetorical at all.

And if OP wishes to answer, and contradicts me, declaring themselves willing to go to jail for material not posted by them, but by a user of their forum, I will have to accept their perspective. I just stated mine.

Small communities would be favored in an environment where all user submissioned are reviewed before going public.

We might see some innovation, like how HN allows you to opt in to seeing dead comments, just have all comments dead-by-default.

there's more friction there, but IMO anything is better than hiring overseas workers to view flagged content 8 hours a day.

I can think of a couple of niche forums that are so dead, that would be feasible. Keywords: so dead

>Small communities would be favored in an environment where all user submissions are reviewed before going public.

HN would have to go offline anytime dang decided to sleep.

dang sleeps? That doesn't sound right.

There might be a middle ground between what you suggested and letting harmful content run hog wild on your platform.

You should always have a right to sue if you are harmed.

> You should always have a right to sue if you are harmed.

Yes, but not to sue the hoster. If I offend you during a phone call, you should be able to sue ME, not the telco. Harmful content must be taken down once identified, and any technology reasonably helping its early identification should be put to use - but the hoster should be immune from lawsuits except if they do not act timely on legitimate takedown requests.

Please, stop suggesting you should have a right to sue the hoster - this can only end up in countless avenues of free speech disappearing, and dictatorial governments (and aspiring ones) abusing it to silence their victims or dissenters.

The bottom line for me is that people are being harmed and they have no legal means of recourse. Victims can probably sue the original uploader but what about other people who do not know it is harmful? And there is nothing to prevent users from uploading the same video forever. Is re-uploading this harmful content a crime?

I think the host should be held accountable if they keep allowing the same harmful content to be uploaded again and again. The first occurrence is their notice. Future occurrences is negligence.

> I think the host should be held accountable if they keep allowing the same harmful content to be uploaded again and again. The first occurrence is their notice. Future occurrences is negligence.

On this, I fully support your view. Something as trivial as a keeping list of hashes, to prevent repeat uploads of the exact same binary content, is incredibly easy to implement and I would fault any major hoster for not doing it. But people quickly learn to re-encode or subtly alter the content, so hashes, size, number of frames, etc don't match.

Perceptual hashes are a lot more expensive computationally, should be much harder to dodge, but even youtube, which supposedly has the best minds behind it, copes very poorly with the many popular evasion techniques (slight distortion, horizontal mirroring, superimposing a couple thin lines, showing the content in the left pane, while showing nonsense in the right pane, etc etc) so I'm not sure they're a viable option.

Can you really hold the hoster at fault when the technology doesn't exist, or is impractically slow and expensive? Would you rather have no hosters?

> Would you agree to go to jail if a user posts something illegal on a forum you run?

I just wouldn't run a forum unless I had the proper staff and a legal team. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.

Facebook, Google, and other megacorps would be very happy when they're the only ones who can afford this - yet another barrier to entry to solidify their oligopoly.

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