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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

'Safe space' sounds like you're biased. 'Free speech' is aspirational, but ends up being 'where the shitheads go' in practice. How about those of us that just want to hang somewhere people don't insist on injecting random diatribes against kikes in unrelated discussions?

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You don’t need to read every post which is posted on instances, similarly to twitter. You don’t read every post on twitter, but instead follow people, read their tweets and retweets and build a graph which suits your likings.

You can do the same on the fediverse and create your own homogeneous feed.

It’s far easier and more appealing to simply join the community that doesn’t have shitheads in the first place.

I’ll take the “safe space” community any day. All the racist/sexist/whatever bullshit is pretty worn out anyway.

> but instead follow people, read their tweets and retweets and build a graph which suits your likings.

I’m not going to waste my time actively doing that. So while it happens naturally over time, I’d rather not see the shitheads before they get filtered out.

The safe space communities are just as bad if not worse than the shitheads you're referring to, except they isolate you with nobody but them and browbeat you into not having friends outside of their depraved circle. They're PCP being peddled in a coca cola commercial by an abusive boyfriend.

> except they isolate you with nobody but them and browbeat you into not having friends outside of their depraved circle.

I don’t see how that’s possible in online community.

I for one enjoy having federated and local timelines where the posts don't call me slurs, are mostly about things I'm interested in, and have properly labeled images (no uncwed nsfw, so I can scroll in public). Have fun blocking hentai bot #13874828374 from your federated timeline on pl dot shitheads dot st or whatever :)

Think of what you're saying. You're saying you want someone else to curate the feed from which you curate your feed.

The federated feed is noisy, just like the real world. You pick from it and decide what you interact with. Letting someone decide what you see there, it doesn't lessen the SNR, it just lessens what you see. For every hentai bot you don't see there is at least one real person with something interesting to say that you'll never see.

I prefer to decide what information is available to me, and that necessarily means wading through things I'm not interested in sometimes.

This is honestly an embarassingly bad argument/response

Embarrassingly bad? How so? Embarrass me.

I hang out on the free speech side, and I mostly avoid the JQ and edgelord types. It's not hard, you curate your own feed, and the block button is merely a click away. You run into them in threads and just ignore them, just like in real life (and up until like 6 years ago, on the internet in general).

Believe it or not “just ignore them“ doesn’t work for many people.

There’s a reason 4chan is only popular with a certain demographic.

Yah "just ignore them" really means "it doesnt effect me and I am uninterested in hearing how it actually effects you"

It doesn't affect anyone except people who want it to. It's literally some random person whispering into the wind on the internet. I'm uninterested in hearing how it actually affects you because it doesn't actually affect you, you just want to cry about something.

"You" in the proverbial sense of course, the way you used it above.

Good for you if you're not affected, I guess. For many people, Internet trolls can cause psychological harm. This is not some obscure thing. Teens have been committing suicide due to bullying on the Internet for decades.

Not going to 4chan is the same thing as just ignoring them. It works perfect.

It doesn't work, because they don't stay on the chans. They infest every space they can, doing everything they can to be unignorable. They're even on HN.

I have never used Twitter, just never saw the appeal. But I have a question, does it also have a method to block people and conversations/topics/keywords or are you just forced to have to have algorithmically chosen tweets pushed on you?

If you host your own instance, you can have arbitrary filtering policies. In particular Pleroma has a modular and flexible system here.

https://docs-develop.pleroma.social/backend/configuration/mr...

You can block users on Twitter, yes. In fact, in some circles, "block chains" (no relation to the crypto-related tech) are popular; the idea being that you use a script to not only block one person, but subsequently block everyone that follows or is followed by that person, then block those that follow or are followed by those people, and so on to a certain level of depth - kind of a "curse you and your offspring for ten generations" sort of vibe. I suppose in a way this is functionally similar to blocking an entire instance on the fediverse.

Not sure if you can block hashtags or something like that on Twitter.

Holy shit! That is interesting. So then would one still be bombarded with all the info that they don't want to see from those that they haven't been able to block yet but are topic-similar to those blocked, or can you more or less effectively make your own "silo". If the second point is true, what are people upset about if they can easily "chain block" entire sub-graphs of people that they don't want to hear from? That people other than them might be exposed to it?

Yes, I have found in previous discussions about Internet moderation that while many people talk about not wanting to see certain content themselves, the actual thing they want is to control what everyone else sees.

Yes, on Twitter, the fediverse ("Mastodon"), and other social networking services, it's typically quite trivial to build an echo chamber such that you rarely see opinions you don't want to see.

"But nazis exist on the fediverse!" Yes, they do, just as they do in real life. But if you don't intentionally attend their rallies or whatever it is nazis do nowadays and instead stick to whatever non-nazi-aligned places and activities you feel comfortable with, you're probably not going to encounter any of them.

Yes, the shitheads will go where they are tolerated. So do people who aren't necessarily bad people but still want to share opinions which may be outside what is currently the orthodox way of thinking. If that alone makes someone a shithead to you…

But if you really don't want to see arguments about Jews or whatever, just don't follow anyone who posts that. And if someone you follow does start with that stuff, just unfollow them, perhaps block them. In that manner it works the same way as on Twitter; once you have a solid base of sane people you're following, it's hard to just stumble across content that upsets you unless you're actively looking for it.

I don't think 'arguments' about Jews is a me-problem. Of course, that is exactly where we disagree. But your framing is dishonest.

My framing is honest because we're not only talking about people who hate Jews here. We're talking about people who do not accept the "correct" narrative on things like the results of major elections, medical science and the involvement of large corporations therein, etc. In recent years there have been a lot of statements which have gotten people in trouble on Twitter (and, in some cases, real life) which have nothing to do race or religion.

I don't believe most of these arguments, but I still think people ought to be able to say them.

points on PC culture aside, it really bothers me to have slurs thrown out in HN comments to prove said points. i'm not usually offended by stuff, but i want this community to be held to a higher standard re: discourse

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