I’m calling it now. Elon will push Twitter to allow users to determine their algorithmic feeds. A market for algos to compete with what content to serve you will be unstoppable. Everyone gets what they want.
Any platform that embraces free speech will gradually become /b/. If you treat signal and noise as equivalent value, the noise will overwhelm the signal.
A small minority can easily be inundated by another small minority, especially when the barriers are close to 0 (creating a free account).
Anyone who’s ever tried to run a subreddit quickly understands why some level of active moderation is necessary if you care about quality.
I don't like this absolutism, because from my POV, this assumes that the audience has zero culture. /b/ is what happens when the participants are embracing the wild-west nature of our cyberpunk-era, which is exactly the design concept of 4chan itself.
Good system design carefully examines the interfacing feedback-loops and focuses on the positive ones, not the negative ones. Free speech on its own is a positive loop, censorship is a negative loop. A system that embraces its nodes flourishes when the nodes also embrace the system, which includes the _design and intent of that system_. The sentiment of the design and intent behind 4chan is "do whatever you please". That's not free speech, that's laissez-faire-social-boogaloo. Those are not the same.
It should be entirely possible to design a platform with culture to it.
Negative feedback-loops are not a symptom of bad culture, but of the _absence_ of culture.
A cultivated audience can both express and consume any actual thought. Look no further than HN, I don't feel censored here at all (although I haven't given this example too much thought, maybe I'm overlooking something right now). And an audience can be cultivated through the design/intent of the platform itself, as perception and dataflow of humans is always relative to their context, their local space.
On twitter I'm an unrepentant trash-talker and still have full privileges, and have never had a moderation mark against me.
Here on HN I've been told off by dang twice for heated political arguments, and as such if I post too much I get rate-limited by HN.
HN's culture exists because they use moderation to enforce it, as is their right.
I disagree with their decisions (protecting civility over truth is wrong, imho), but not with their right to create the platform they desire.
Maybe the fact that you call yourself an unrepentant trash-talker coincides with what I referred to as absence of culture (not claiming it does or judging, just relating your response to the point I tried to get across).
On the HN-thing: HN doesn't like flamewars or behaviour that is conductive to them - that doesn't mean we're not free to make our point. That's a different thing than behaving with a more or less absolute disregard for the space you're in though, which is probably the part that dang focusses on.
This seems to be "Working As Designed" given the rules here. I wouldn't call it censorship or even heavy moderation. It's something else--self moderation? groupthink? I don't know. But it's likely the reason the place hasn't devolved into a sewer.
I totally believe great-grandparent post's take: "Any platform that embraces free speech will gradually become /b/." I think this is pretty hard to refute. Look at what happens every time someone gets banned from Platform X and tries to create "The Free Speech Version Of Platform X." The new platform gets populated by the latest batch of Platform X's cast-offs, and eventually and inevitably turns into a toxic stew of antisemitism, conspiracies, and bigotry.
Ask yourself wether the audience drawn to the new platform has culture. I don’t think it has, they are usually the subset of platform Xs original users who are simply not able to get their point across without having the rest of Xs audience reacting emotionally negative (because the rest of the audience also has no culture). It’s a social problem, not a technical one. 80% of people seek identity and peer confirmation, _because they have no culture_.
In the case of US-audience, this effect gets accelerated because part of US-culture IS the “Wild West/I ignore anything that’s not my gut”-madness. If you view that as the default, sure, we wont get anywhere. I do not view this as the default. The self censorship that you describe on HN in a way is, you probably guess what I’m about to write, culture. Culture includes to restrict yourself in order to fit your content and your expressions to the space you’re in. Whole heartedly: please don’t censor yourself. Please don’t care about downvotes. Cultivate your thought and formulate it adequately, and there should be no moderation-incentive. Just don’t shove strong opinions (which are categorically dull) down an audience that’s not interested in them. Instead be curious and get the point across as questions, etc. it’s all a matter of form. You can explain the problem of cancel culture even to the most stubborn filter bubble-stuck dim person, you just have to use wording that lets them see through your eyes. That’s hard, but culture HAS to be hard. The alternative will always converge on /b/, because the alternative always converges in the absence of culture.
I think at least part of the rationale is that civility is more likely to lead to the truth.
Emotionally heated debates on the other hand induce multiple negative effects which can obscure truth:
1. Causes people to “dig in” in defense of their position, and become less open-minded and able to change their mind
2. Increases emotional investment in a position (pride, ego, etc), which induces bias and misjudgement (see Munger on the Psychology of Human Misjudgement)
3. Degrades into flamewars, kills the spirit of collaborative and mutually respectful search for truth
4. “Tramples curiosity”. (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
You don't need to be an absolutist to be pretty disgusted with Twitter censorship.
> Haha fine, I probably don’t disagree with you, but even if I did then still!!
Not a great example.
Musk is clearly pro-Ukraine, but apparently refused to block Russian news sources on Starlink when asked to.
Starlink doesn't run their own DNS, so they're not going to block them there. And I would guess that such a simple site is hard to block by IP address - it's probably on shared hosting.
> Musk is clearly pro-Ukraine,
He is? He supported Ukraine giving a high profile plug to his project. If Kim Kardashian wanted to plug my product on her social media I'd do a ton to make it happen, but it doesn't make me a fan.
What does that mean? Every country and every person I know advocates for at least some restriction on speech.
Spam, fraud, violence, NDAs, national security, libel all come to mind.
I don’t know of any country or platform that has been successful with “absolute free speech”.