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Comment by tr1ll10nb1ll | Hacker News Reader

There's no right answer to:

- what you should censor

- whether you should censor

when running a social media (more like an ad-platform but irrelevant to the point I'm making) service to this scale serving people from every demographic.

Anything you do is wrong.

If you don't censor, there's misinformation on a platform you control and you will be responsible for further conspiracies and actions/campaigns stemming from it in the worst case scenario. The cost outweighs the benefit. On the other hand, if you do censor, you piss people off anyway.

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My opinion is that a “social media platform” should stop trying to serve people from every demographic. I believe that:

* Facebook was much better when it was an exclusive community of college students

* Reddit was much better when it was a small, self-manageable community of nerds

* Hacker News is much better than either of those two because it’s still a small community with a specific scope and good moderation

I wasn't old enough for a small Reddit/college exclusive Facebook so I don't feel too strongly about it.

However, I do agree that we don't have a true social platform (not a corp with other objectives).

We can bemoan this all we want but if they weren't doing it, someone else would've been.

Alternatives can be created over and over but as long as those are consumption-driven corporations, they will try extract every single second of our attention possible. That IS their business after-all.

It's a responsibility that no one wants

This. Forums live and die on moderation. I've seen a forum self destruct and it isn't pretty. We can't allow black boxes to tell us what is false when you can look out your window to know the thing is lying. And if something gets that big and ugly without enough human moderation or self censorship it will collapse into a firey whirlwind.

> and you will be responsible for further

They didn't suborn the behavior, they just acted as a carrier for it. And if they didn't, it would find other outlets.

> in the worst case scenario

The worst case scenario would be someone using your platform to organize a genocide, not conspiracy theorists communicating ideas to each other; and since Facebook apparently didn't feel too embarrassed about allowing the former the latter barely seems worthy of consideration.

> On the other hand, if you do censor, you piss people off anyway.

And you drive them further down the rabbit hole, where true monsters like to gather and feed off their isolation and bitterness.

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