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Comment by themitigating | Hacker News Reader

Businesses shouldn't be forced to serve customers

At some point when 50% of the world uses your service the rules must change.

Facebook and Twitter can sway elections with a press of a button.

Once your company can directly affects direct democray and lives of billions these kind of statements make no sense anymore.

Unless you like to be ruled by corporations.

Yes, anti-trust laws came about for a reason.

Yes, and we don't apply them to some companies for a reason.

We call these businesses natural monopolies and regulate them. Like forcing them to serve everyone or cap their profits.

Facebook and Twitter users sway elections.

Every company can affect democracy in some way. Foxnews had a massive effect on elections, Gas prices being high affects elections. Should these be regulated?

> Facebook and Twitter users sway elections.

That's not what gp is saying.

Facebook and Twitter control what users, in bulk, say in a way that can sway elections.

Facebook and Twitter moderate and suspend and users adjust what they say in order to not get suspended again, if they care to not get banned. (Those who don't care if they get banned are a red herring.)

There is also the algorithmic feed which gives a lot of control over what users say to other users.

I just quit Reddit and deleted all my accounts despite gilding > 10 comments over the past year because I got blacklisted from every community subreddit I wanted to participate in. I brought up the bias to the admins and was told mods can run their subreddit however they want despite Rule 1 of the mod guidelines saying to assume people are arguing in good faith.

I got banned because I say controversial things like Black people are not disproportionately targeted by police due to their race, but rather due to them disproportionately having guns and knives when the police show up.

The general public have a serious problem understanding nuance and statistics and I think it's disgusting that the media cry racism at every corner because it enrages people and gets clicks.

It's even more disgusting that people fall for it without realizing what the media is doing to them because they can't read past headlines.

I'll link to the actual TPS report that shows this but I'm on a slow connection right now and can't do it.

edit: nvm I'm dumb; it's not that but the report is named 9082-2018-TPS-Annual-Report.pdf if you can find it on its own. You can google "tps force report 2018 -2020 pdf". I'd find it myself but I'm downloading a 12mb pdf that's taking forever and I'm pretty sure this is the one.

Subreddits moderate themselves, it has nothing to do with Reddit. If a Reddit Admin bans you then you lose your entire account.

Rule 1 of the moderator guidelines from here: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-guidelines-for-...

Engage in Good Faith Healthy communities are those where participants engage in good faith, and with an assumption of good faith for their co-collaborators. It’s not appropriate to attack your own users. Communities are active, in relation to their size and purpose, and where they are not, they are open to ideas and leadership that may make them more active.

The actual post that was removed on me was in r/toronto a story I told about helping a homeless man wandering down the middle of the street in downtown Toronto. It was supposed to be a discussion of things you've done in the city that make you feel good. Moderators removed it because it wasn't relevant to Toronto just because it happened in Toronto.

Visit r/toronto and you will see feel good stories like this all the time in the subreddit. I pointed this out to the admins and still got nowhere.

I also wanted to post "We should try UBI but you have to vote to qualify. Thoughts?" in r/onguardforthee but that was also removed for trolling. That subreddit has posts similar to that one all the time.

I was definitely treated unfairly and double standards were used against me because of my reputation. I don't troll though, I just enjoy having difficult and philosophical conversations, which is why I can see it's perceived as trolling. I enjoy challenging people to think. I would never say something I didn't believe.

The admins doing nothing about the abuse was the last straw that proved to me Reddit doesn't care about finding the truth.

> I also wanted to post "We should try UBI but you have to vote to qualify. Thoughts?" in r/onguardforthee but that was also removed for trolling. That subreddit has posts similar to that one all the time.

Dude, cannot you see why if you start posting about how _Universal_ Basic Income, should not be universal and based on some sort of test, that people might think you are being a troll?

Like legitimately, what is the difference between your behavior and a troll who misinterprets things on purpose?

The difference is that this user is legitimate, asking legitimate questions for legitimate reasons to have a legitimate dialogue while following all the rules. The mere supposition of their malintent is an invalid litmus test. It's about as good as treating someone as innocent until suspected of acting similar to a person guilty of annoyance, then banning them from the community in perpetuity. "Because I we couldn't be sure" is never a legitimate reason to act so certainly in a manner which removes a member from a society.

Asking the same type of questions with the same type of answer and only providing same debunked evidence is not asking legitimate questions, it is sea lioning[1] combined with a gish gallop[2]. He is using his polite tone to convince us that he is acting in good faith.

Do you think it’s plausible that a person has been so curious on this topic that they’ve done deep research, can pull up such hard to find data that it takes them multiple attempts to find some esoteric source that supports them, and they didn’t find the high school level answers to the questions they are asking and require us to debunk each and every point they throw out without ever engaging with your counterpoints?

You’d have to believe that this person is incredibly competent at research while being simultaneously incapable of grasping the basics. You’ll notice he never tackled any point or counterpoint there. Just kept posting new sources as they were discarded while complaining that no one would look.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Edit: sorry, missed that this was a sibling thread. If you missed it the same user elsewhere in this post is also trying to argue that he was kicked off a Reddit merely for bringing up the unassailable point that cops only arrest black people more because they are inherently more dangerous. I assume you can see why I’m pointing out that the poster is unbelievable. I am already confident that they are not posting in good faith and only doing counterpoints for random third parties who might read this thread and be persuaded by the poster due to the lack of any counterpoint

Double edit:tbh this actually had the hallmarks of a 4channer mocking us to their buddies. I was one of those assholes in my youth and recognize the tactics. His “I just wanted to post, ‘{controversial statement}, Thoughts?’” is an easy bait sentence that brings out all the free speech absolutists to defend you for just “asking questions” while talking past the group engaging with the {controversial statement} portion of the sentence.

If you have not been on 4chan/8chan/2chan/whateverPermutation boards and wish to engage in internet debate it would be illuminating to observe. In between the gore and the shock porn they have random threads where they openly discuss using these tactics as they believe “normies” won’t be able to stomach their shock content to read deeply into it

The moderator guidelines are guidelines not rules. A community of people has the right to ban people for any legal reason.

You have been banned from every single subreddit you participate in because of your behavior and you don’t see an issue with your actions at all?

If you constantly smell shit, check your own shoe homie.

It was all the left-leaning run subreddits I was banned from.

The report I spoke of is in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31915214

edit: I still screwed up and realized it after getting to stable internet. This information is found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31915960

Hi all, I had to use Yandex to find this. Google wasn't showing the result. I hope this also shows how dangerous Google's censorship of search results is as well. I challenge you to find this report in Google search results!

https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/9082-2018-...

I can't download the PDF but if I remember right the table in question is somewhere in the 50s or 60s. You can ctrl+f for it. It breaks down by suspect race and weapon type when police arrive on scene.

The third side nobody wants to talk about in this argument is that police disproportionately use force against suspects with weapons when they arrive on scene.

The report you just linked to only has 40 pages.

Was this what you meant?

https://www.ohrc.on.ca/sites/default/files/Use%20of%20force%...

In what way is facebooks moderation on or algorithm related to specifically to elections

You are either incredibly naive, or you are being intentionally obtuse. When you can pick and choose what ideas or people are acceptable to even discuss, you are controlling the extent to which people can explore ideas on your platform, and subsequently, how they might vote. The innate human needs to belong to a community are easily exploited by a social network that is not necessarily organic. Same way religious institutions can sway elections, or any institution that dictates culture. Tech just enables that process to scale.

The issue is that they sway elections. Why is it more important how they sway elections versus the amount of influence? It seems the latter would have a greater effect.

> At some point when 50% of the world uses your service the rules must change.

It's worse than that. They've effectively levied a tax on everything (without representation). Even if you pay cash, you pay (e.g.) Visa if the vendor accepts Visa. Businesses are contractually obligated hide the transaction cost from the consumer. This means all products and services have their prices jacked up to cover the cost of accepting Visa, MasterCard, etc. Even if you're paying cash, you're paying into it.

"Cash back rewards" are essentially a discount on the tax they've imposed.

So they tax you, they decide what you can buy, and you don't get a say. Kinda fucked up.

We don't have a direct democracy nor should we want one.

The stock market is a type of direct democracy and look how unstable it can be.

Hardly democratic when it's controlled like a puppet by wall street super funds and the fed.

I wouldn't call the stock market a direct democracy. In a direct democracy, every citizen/participant has the same vote as another and all it takes is simple majority can invalidate the rights of every individual. Obviously that's not the case in the US, and for the better.

Switzerland has direct democracy as an escape hatch.

Businesses are forced to serve customers everyday - from anti-discrimination laws to universal service for phone companies. There is also argument that oligopoly should not de-facto control payments and work as moral police.

This is how people want it. It's been two years of "Twitter is a private platform" over and over again. If you aren't going to stand for free speech when someone wants to talk about the Wuhan lab, why the hell would you expect anyone to defend your right to furry porn?

Because it’s not automatically the same thing just because both are private (e.g., non-governmental) organizations. A newspaper can exercise editorial control over what it publishes, but AT&T can’t exercise editorial control over your phone calls. Hacker News can moderate user content, but an ISP can’t moderate what you send over its network.

The question of whether Twitter and Facebook should be treated like a phone company than they are like Hacker News isn’t a stupid one, and I don’t think it’s as clearcut as people on both sides of this debate would like it to be. But the question of whether a payment processor should be able to exercise this kind of editorial control over transactions using them as an intermediary is not really the same question.

Also, keep your paws off my furry porn.

Payment processors similarly prevented right wing sites from accepting donations and payments. Gab as one example had to create their own server farm and payment system in order to operate since they were shut out of every other provider.

Did you have a problem then?

If we want to subject payment processors—or social media—to the common carrier standard, then obviously, they can’t deny services to anyone who isn’t violating the law. Having politics Visa, Mastercard, or Stripe doesn’t like isn’t illegal.

The point I’m making is that I don’t think it’s hypocritical to suggest that such a standard applies to some companies, not all companies, which is what your original post seemed to suggest. I’d personally want to set the bar pretty high when it comes to taking away any business’s right to choose their own customers.

I thought it was funny but yes I definitely had a problem with payment processors' ability to do so.

There are alternative payment methods.

> This is how people want it.

Some people sure. Maybe even the "twitter consensus" or "HN consensus", but I think you should be very careful about taking apparent consensus on these sort of social media platforms as indicative of a broader consensus in society.

> talk about the Wuhan lab

When this is just coded language meaning "racist conspiracy theories", sites don't want to carry those posts. Social media sites are catching on to the coded language game.

If you want to make noticing that a few miles up the road from the epicenter of the COVID outbreak was a lab, doing experiments with that very virus, a racist act. I'd then make that claim that those who consume furry porn are pedophiles with greater accuracy.

Show me where someone who made the accusation about the lab was banned from a site for making that accusation and nothing else.

https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-suspends-dr-li-meng-yan-wuh...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...

Ah yes, great examples. The people were clearly only pointing out that COVID originated from the same city where a virology lab exists...wait a second, they're both promulgating the "China made COVID" line.

There's a big difference between saying COVID originated from Wuhan and conspiracy theories saying COVID was manmade.

Personally I think they should, with objective, explicit exceptions common to all merchants, something like:

  1) rudeness or disrupting

  2) age and health

  3) intoxication and indecency

  4) whatever else society can agree on (good luck!)

Both service providers and customers keep ending up in court because the "right to refuse service to anyone" too often becomes "discriminating against a protected class", and the lines get blurrier every day. Much easier to just say "serve everyone or don't go into the business of serving people" and be done with it.

In fact, the obligation to serve customers by law would serve as both a consumer and merchant protection for cases exactly like this -- the fact that, until sodomy laws were ruled unconstitutional in the US just a couple decades ago, many banks refused to lend to otherwise-credit worthy gay couples or unwed heterosexual couples for mortgages (afraid of being accused of supporting illegal activities), which would be more of a moot point in this sense because the onus is no longer on the bank to scrutinize how someone lives their personal life so long as they meet objective measures of credit worthiness.

Civil Rights Act and the ADA disagree. As does Sherman Anti Trust and dozens of others.

Break up the oligopolies and I agree completely.

If Mastercard and Visa refuse to do business with you, you will soon find yourself out of business.

Monopolies/oligopolies should. Imagine if your power company decided they don't want to serve you.

Businesses should be free to pick and choose only when there is also a public funded alternative or the product is targeted at a minority. Otherwise society starts falling apart.

Imagine there’s only 3 car dealers in your region and they all blacklist customers who have at least once followed Elon Musk on twitter.

That sounds like a libertarian perspective that may apply to a radically different system of economy and government (one that does not exist in practice), but the system we actually have is not even remotely close to libertarian. In the mixed economic system adopted by nearly every nation on the planet, business face all manner of regulation and the more fundamental they are to everyday life, the more they tend to be regulated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com