Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrexilius | Hacker News Reader

He's absolutely right and it is a very bad place to end up, despite the supposed convenience for consumers. There are a number of problems that create a bit of rock-and-hard place.

We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism, and various other centralized exercises of power that align with personal political whims. We want convenience and constant new features. We want things to work smoothly. We sorta care about security, as long as its not inconvenient. And we don't want to pay up front for any of it. Better still for it to be free with some ads.

Governments are legitimately concerned with terrorism, nation-state influence campaigns, industrial espionage, and law enforcement. They have to solve these problems, with constrained resources, in a technology environment that moves far faster than they can. They will push the regulation tools they have, as hard as they can, to solve these problems, if we let them.

There are almost zero short-term consumer/voter/elected-offical incentives for free, open, secure, interoperable systems. In fact consumer, political, and financial incentives are all aligned, currently, towards centralization of power and walled gardens. And the Silicon Valley model really is eating the world.

This is why open source has become so incredibly important. Open source hardware and networks doubly so.

View on HN

> We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism

There's still a large minority of us that sincerely don't.

Agreed. I don't want either (in general, there might be exception s). I obviously want to hold people (the people that actually have the kiddie porn, that are actually posting the hate speech) accountably for kiddie porn, inciting terrorism and even hate speech, but I don't generally want vendors to be accountable.

Why should they be held responsible for inciting terrorism? They're not injuring anybody.

One could argue that they are indeed injuring people, by stochastic terrorism [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_attack#Stochastic_te...

Because it still ends up with people killed.

Free speech absolutism is poison for actual freedom.

I agree. I think it needs a lot more thought than the OP was giving it, though of course that kind of sarcasm reads poorly on the Internet.

Throughout history vendors have generally not been responsible for the actions of their users. Nobody blames Sharpie if someone uses their markers to make a giant poster with hate speech. Nobody blames the USPS if someone mails a letter with a death threat. Nobody blames Verizon if somebody makes a phone call to bully their kid. Yet people blame Twitter when someone posts a tweet with hate speech. This is a dangerous direction for the world to be moving in.

It's not about who makes the tools, it's about what users want to see. Users don't want to see giant posters of hate speech on Twitter. If they do, they'll stop using Twitter. It just so happens that Twitter is the only tool that can make things users see on Twitter.

People still don't blame Sharpie or USPS or Verizon. People have tried to blame WhatsApp, it doesn't stick because WhatsApp is private. The culture hasn't magically changed. Companies like Twitter know that when advertisers and users complain about hate speech, they're not just asking for Twitter to be held "responsible" or whatever that means, they're telling Twitter that they will leave.

Users don't see that stuff unless they want to. Advertisers don't care unless their ads appear next to it. And these platforms have pretty much solved this. E.g. Google search results contain the full cesspit of the internet, yet everyone advertises with Google.

The issue came when the news media decided that it was newsworthy that undesirables we're saying undesirable things on social media and blamed the platform as a whole. Now it's a pr issue for advertisers to be on the platform at all whether or not they are adjacent to undesirable content.

I think the people who get harassed on Twitter, and have to spend a significant amount of their Twitter-using time dealing with that, would disagree with you.

Seems like this is solved by the block button.

If I have to block a lot of people I might as well block Twitter.

> Yet people blame Twitter when someone posts a tweet with hate speech. This is a dangerous direction for the world to be moving in.

Not to diminish the issue, but this is mostly an American problem as far as I see it. I realise these are also American companies, but conflating the entire world to be in danger is a bit disingenuous imo.

MANY European countries (speaking from a Scandinavian perspective) don’t suffer from this, and while there’s a danger of American policies trickling down, that has been severely diminished in the past decade as there’s a movement of all of us (that I’ve seen) sort of re-evaluating our admiration of the US that was built in the 90’s - 00’s.

From the outside this isn’t a direction the world seems to be moving in. Just more crazy US spiralling.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/twitter-claims-n...

Eh I mean, there's been a rise of extremism all across Europe. It's not quite accurate to say it's an exclusively American thing. Hate speech is rising and there's a case to be made that it's because extremists find each other on the internet (Doctorow calls it a "jihadi recruitment tool" in the article).

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2021-02-...

...what if the rise in so-called "extremism" is a direct result of government policy leading to poorer outcomes for the average person. If you study history people tend to become tribal not long after life gets hard. If I was a government think tank I'd surely blame the internet long before I blamed my rent seeking laws that inordinately effect the average worker.

Unemployment is at all time lows. What exactly is getting harder for people?

I agree that people have more and more sources triggering their fears and prejudices for a buck, which is making them angrier and angrier.

> What exactly is getting harder for people?

Having a job that doesn't pay enough to afford to pay rent & utilities, buy food, pay off college loans. I could go on. Just saying unemployment is low doesn't capture the nature of the working poor. Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed covers this well. People who work in software and make six figures tend not to be squeezed to afford the basics, except perhaps if they have to live in one of the highest COL cities in the US, but there are millions in the developed world that hold 2-3 jobs and still barely afford living.

Fuel prices are at an all-time high, and fuel companies are posting record profits. Rent is at an all-time high. Mortgages are getting insane because we have double-digit inflation and insanely high interest rates. Saving are worthless because of double-digit inflation and insanely high interest rates not actually being passed on except where it benefits banks. Food prices are at an all-time high and farms are going to the wall because they're being paid scrap prices for everything they sell.

Unemployment is at an all-time low? That's great, but people are working their backsides off and cannot afford to eat or heat their homes.

In the UK we have had twelve years of the right-wing extremist Conservative government and their "economic austerity" to "right the ship". What this has meant in practical terms is that wages have not risen in twelve years, taxes have gone up and up and up, and public spending has gone down and down and down. We had the woefully inept Kwasi Kwarteng who blew £60 billion off the UK's economy by raising taxes on the poorest and cutting them for the richest, collapsing most people's private pension pots. We went from roughly 40,000 people in the UK using food banks in 2010 when the Tories took power to 2.5 million people using food banks in 2022 - and these are not just "poor people" who the tabloid trash papers sneer at "well somehow they can afford mobile phones and TVs, why can't they afford food" - no, there are people on £30-£40k per year, who simply cannot afford to feed their families because they have to choose whether they keep the lights on, buy food, or pay their mortgage.

The political right have over the past 20 years done incalculable damage to the world.

I can't speak intelligently about UK centre-right, but here in Aus our Liberal party (as in classical liberal, centre-right) are almost indistinguishable for our Labor (centre-left). Big spending, big government and so we are seeing many of the same problems you mentioned.

I wonder why only the "populists" speak out about these problems, and then why most populists movements are led by extremists. It's not like fascists or communists ever had or have real economical solutions for healthcare or housing or environment, yet they constantly gain votes claiming exactly that (without detailing, of course). Why are all the big traditional parties only paying lip service to the real problems of the little man, even while pretending they represent them? And no I'm not sarcastic, this is a real question which bothers me extremely.

Parties don't really represent interest of their voters. They fish for votes to obtain political power, but they represent the interests of the people who run them (and their friends and patrons) - who are, generally speaking, not their voters.

Thus, traditional parties represent the interest of some subset of the established elites. Which means that the current socioeconomic arrangement is broadly in their advantage. They know that those problems are real, but they can be only solved by giving up some part of the pie. And organizations are much more selfish than individuals, so they never give up unless they believe that the alternative is to lose even more (hence why a messy revolution somewhere else can often do wonders).

>In the UK....

we've just pissed away 700 billion on measures that most of the population banged pans on Thursday for.

my sympathy is running out.

Unemployment is artificial! That's the mistake everyone makes here! Unemployment in the US over the last decade has been a function of ZIRP and nearly limitless fed money. It's not real. This is the same econometric snake oil they sell the country when they talk about the inflation rate. No one mentions it's a rate. For example, if we go through the next year with 8-10% real inflation they will report the inflation rate somewhere between 0 and 2%. Wow, stunning! Despite evaporating wealth they've somehow made everything look great. This doesn't even consider the unemployment number is doctored. It only includes people actively looking for work. If you got tired of looking and took 3 months off (as is custom among developers) you are no longer "unemployed" according to the fed definition.

So why doesn't that matter? Because the "employed" are not gainfully employed. They work longer hours for less wages. Longer hours because the competition pool is larger, and less wages for the same reason PLUS inflation.

The average joe may not understand this. But he certainly understands that he can't take vacations, he can't get sick, his electric, gas, and food bills have all doubled or even tripled (in some regions). Despite working, objectively, harder than ever he seems to only get further behind. This makes Joe angry. When Joe can no longer blame the government either due to perceived incompetence or manipulation by think tanks, he is soon to blame his neighbor.

This is the secret of the majority of "extremism" that makes the news. They will certainly sell it as racism, or sexism, or fascism though.

> there's been a rise of extremism all across Europe

There's certainly a rise in talking about stuff being "extremist", but how much of this is genuine?

The incentives (more outrage, more views, more clicks, more ads) don't exactly encourage honest reporting or even discussion on this.

Definitely. Might have been unclear but I was trying to speak specifically about the “blame the platform not the people” mentality I was responding to.

Fully in agreement extremism is on the rise and the internet aids this.

be interesting to graph that against immigration numbers......

A counterpoint is that if the companies running these platforms are run by American companies, then their efforts to combat hate speech will be disproportionately focused on English language and American hate speech. This can allow it to flourish elsewhere.

IIRC wasn't social media used to destabilize several countries in Southeast Asia and Africa?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/25/business/ethiopia-violence-fa...

That was Facebook, not Twitter, but this is not just a problem for America.

In Germany you can get your house searched for a tweet. Not for terrorism or any egregious crime, a viral example was because a politician has been called a penis. I believe the UK has similar issues. This is far worse than the situatuation in the US.

Not the smartest choice to make yourself identifiable, but such legislative blunders still need to be corrected.

I don't believe a house search is some trivial policing. I think the state failed again to protect reasonable rights. And yes, the hate speech legislation of Germany should be adapted to the 21st century. This won't happen politically, because society currently loves pointing fingers at small missteps. A wrong joke and you get a shit storm.

It is the usual suspects, you hate women or are a racist are the most common accusation. People really start forgetting what these qualifiers really mean. And I believe they get far too much political support and that this isn't a healthy development.

People blame magazines if they print adverts with hate speech. This isn’t new to twitter.

This is the reason there is a fight right now.

You are correct if we treat social media companies as content curators. If we treat them as speech platforms you are wrong.

Regardless of your belief a "speech platform" (email, etc) can and honestly should allow these things in the spirit of actual free speech. If it is a content curator, then yes, one can infer that by curating so-called hate speech they are indirectly promoting it.

This difference is lost on people. Personally, with the amount of censorship and ads I am fine treating social media companies as curators and treating them appropriately. There are billions currently flowing into congress to stop this. Primarily from those social media companies that want to censor but still be called a "speech platform".

People often conflate their feelings with law. There is no law stopping you from going into a park with a megaphone and spewing what some people may consider hate speech. Consider even how vague the term "hate speech" even is. If I "believe" in two biological genders this, according to some, is the same as denying the holocaust. To some, criticizing the effect asylum seekers from certain countries has had on my country is consider not only racism but "hate speech". We have to be extremely careful what we consider "hate speech". Because the current definition of "hate speech", "disinformation", "misinformation", etc all center around one idea: "things I don't like should be banned, and things I do like should be promoted". This is party-neutral. Both sides of the coin want the other side to be considered hate speech mongers.

Magazines have full editorial control, though. Think of it like a fully-moderated platform. Nothing gets through without positive approval of the magazine editors. With a platform like Twitter, it's default-allow, and people have to see (and block/report) much of the bad content to get rid of it.

Yeah, but as soon as there is a take down mechanism, anything on the site is implicitly endorsed, even if only weakly.

“You’ll take down CSAM but not spam/incitement to violence/revenge porn!?”

Further, user reporting as your only form of detection doesn’t scale well or protect your reputation.

No, it's not. csam is illegal and so is revenge porn, the platform could even be in favor of csam and revenge porn and they'd still need to follow the law.

Ok, I suppose if the takedown was only ever used to enforce the law, then there’s no editorial oversight. But that isn’t any major platform, past or present. Even 4chan is moderated.

>Yet people blame Twitter when someone posts a tweet with hate speech. This is a dangerous direction for the world to be moving in.

I don't think Twitter gives a shit on what people think, but if advertisers complain then Twitter/YouTube will make sure to be very careful with what is allowed. I am not convinced by the arguments this advertisers have about not appearing on some "legal but bad" content" but is their money so they have the right to ask on what kind of content the stuff should appear.

The precedent was set when gun manufacturers started getting sued for the actions of their customers. It was all well and good then. Few bothered to express any concerns about where that kind of thinking would inevitably lead. Anyone who did was accused of being antisocial or worse.

> Anyone who did was accused of being antisocial or worse.

To be clear they were not accused to of being anti-social. People who don't want gun manufacturers sued for what is done with their guns were called child killers, "sandy hook hoaxers", etc. The Bloomberg (yes, it was Bloomberg) money machine paired with the noise machine that is Mom's Demand Action has absolutely dominated the narrative around this.

I personally don't think gun manufacturers should be held responsible for gun deaths, unless they are specifically marketing their guns to people who will use them to commit crimes. (And for the record, I am also super pro-gun-control, and would not be sad in the least if the second amendment were repealed, and states were allowed to make whatever gun regulation they wanted.)

But I think the real reason gun manufacturers are getting targeted is because the people who have been victims of gun violence see no other recourse. Gun control in the US is mostly laughable, and it's politically difficult (if not impossible) to fix these sorts of problems. So the next natural step is to probe the system to see if there are any creative ways to change things. Targeting gun manufacturers with lawsuits is one of those possibilities.

so is your point that suing gun manufacturers was a slippery slope to people being mad at twitter, because if so that's the lamest slippery slope i've ever heard of.

Regulating Twitter is little different than regulating say billboards: https://www.cga.ct.gov/2006/rpt/2006-R-0553.htm

Public airwaves (TV, radio) have have fines for breaking various rules even when it’s a member of the public speaking live. Thus the classic tape delay and bleeps on all life content.

Further back Newspapers, advertising, and letters to the editor etc where limited for so long that it was a constitutional issue in 1776.

So having platforms is hardly a new thing. We have been debating such freedoms for so long it’s part of various countries cultural identity.

Just plain wrong. Twitter is a broadcast distribution platform, like newspapers, radio, and tv before them. You sure as hell blame the companies who broadcast content on their pulpits.

You're welcome to hold that opinion for closed 1-1 messaging platforms that don't have amplification features, but it's just plain wrong to assume that any platform that can amplify ones voice into the unwilling or ignorant and somehow be immune to this level of scrutiny. It's a farce and will certainly never end well for those that try.

It's interesting that we usually look at the amplification problem with a very different eye than the "censorship" problem. They are really two sides of the same coin. Maybe we'd need less moderation if the platform wouldn't boost controversy? Not thought through at all. Just a thought I had while reading the discussion.

Edit: I also think no discussion of censorship/moderation is meaningful without addressing the cannon of falsehood and stochastic terrorism. Those are massive, very real problems that must be addressed.

> Yet people blame Twitter when someone posts a tweet with hate speech.

Probably because Twitter has already demonstrated an ability and desire to curate what people see in their feeds (all in the name of increasing engagement and pleasing their advertisers). So, naturally, people see this, and tell Twitter that if they're going to interfere to the degree they already are, then they must also help ensure the safety of their users, and deal with bad actors directly. In a way, this is Twitter's own fault.

No one expects that Sharpie even has the ability to police the use of their markers, let alone the desire or resources to do so. Most people don't want the USPS reading their mail (and it's a federal crime to do so!). I think the Verizon example is where we're starting to get in a grey area, with telcos getting pushed to implement tools and protocols so people can verify calls are legitimate. That's more about the spam/scam problems with the phone system, not about stopping bullies, but it's a bit closer to that. A further issue is that most people hate phone calls, but love posting stuff online, so naturally they're going to focus on the thing they actually willingly spend their time doing.

I think a further issue is that most people can't really opt out of USPS or the phone system, realistically. But if Twitter passes some threshold of toxicity for them, they'll just stop using it. Twitter (the company) doesn't want that, obviously, so it's in their interest police their platform.

One of the key differences, though, is that there is no biased amplification algorithm sitting on top of the Sharpie-generated hate speech posters. If vendors don’t want to be in the business of policing content then they should stop differentially amplifying content. You can’t manipulate the visibility of content and then claim no responsibility over what end-users see.

Yes, this is key.

Also if you run a platform that ends up being used to say live-stream mass murders, it seems pretty reasonable that you would want to ban that. Ultimately companies are run by people. No one wants to work for a company that becomes a platform for that kind of horror.

Yes, but - you know - someone works for Live Leak.

Depending on the location of the poster the host of that poster would be amplifying the hate speech. For instance, let's say it was on a billboard on a busy highway. Are they now responsible for it if they don't take it down quickly?

What if every time you used a sharpie and poster board to write hate speech, it was automatically uploaded to the internet and shared with anyone who followed the Sanford company?

That isn't how social media works.

Ranking should incur the same consequences as authoring. Don't want liability? Let it stack chronologically.

twitter is a broadcaster, and it isn't new that broadcasters are responsible for what they broadcast.

People blame airports for letting people board with bombs, we blame pharmaceutical companies when someone switches the bottles with poison, we blame gun manufacturers for public shootings

A lot of these analogies are...bad. Does Sharpie know everything you write with one of their pens and store detailed metrics on the popularity of all your previous scribbles? Is Verizon operating a 1-1 calling service, or a global audio broadcasting platform? People absolutely do blame telcos for their failure to filter spam calls effectively.

I feel that the massive scale of social media created a monster of social impact that human don't fully understand yet. The tremendous broadcasting effect that human had not experienced before needs further scrutiny for its impact positive and negative. We have been practicing and advocating freedom of expression in the paradigm of news papers and TV, where the publishers are held accountable for editorial accountability. Or in the form of self-expression on the streets, or town square, where the impact of info/rumor/attach is much smaller than the current social media. One entity (a person or a bot) with millions of followers can spread info/rumor/attack. It seems absurd that such huge scale of spreading information can be without accountability. It's like that a society has to regulate automobile for its traffic accountability due to its much greater dangers to the society, but few or none for the horse-drawn carriage and the pedestrians.

I think that Twitter or other social media may have tiered censorship based the number of followers to limit it to be the appropriate human-scale of influence

We need to exam these issues in the context of social impact.

It's not about blame. The reason why Twitter cares about hate speech is because they are a commercial service and they want people to enjoy their product. You can get infinite amounts of hate speech on 8chan, yet those services aren't that popular.

> Nobody blames Verizon if somebody makes a phone call to bully their kid.

The mid-20th century USA ended up developing extensive case law about the phone system. Once upon a time, quite a few people did think it was the phone company's responsibility to prevent such calls, within reason. And they litigated the question.

Does the phone company have the right to disconnect abusive and profane callers? Does the phone company have an obligation to disconnect such users? If the phone company fails to do so, are they civilly liable? Given the government-regulated quasi-monopoly status of the Bell system, was there a First Amendment or due process angle, if the phone company disconnects users for placing obscene or offensive calls?

The answers to such questions were not particularly obvious and it just sort of evolved organically to the status quo today. New laws were passed to deal with the situation, such as one that makes it a federal offence to knowingly place an obscene and unwanted phone call. And there are a number of regulations that impose an obligation on the carriers to try to reduce spam, unwanted solicitation, maintain calling logs, etc.

I certainly blame AT&T for connecting robocalls with spoofed caller ID (most frequently masquerading as a local number, but sometimes spoofing well-known numbers like Apple's.)

I can imagine that "problems with your Apple ID/Apple Card" scams are more convincing if they appear to come from an Apple number. I figured it was a scam but I called Apple up anyway to confirm.

It's in Twitters best financial interest to moderate their service. If they let it be a free for all with zero moderation beyond illegal content then they will lose all their advertisers and the userbase would leave. It doesn't even matter if they are responsible or not. They made it is a necessity in order for the company to no go bankrupt.

Someone has to hold those people accountable though. Either platforms, or a centralized government entity.

That’s without getting into the issue of allowing that type of stuff to continue to exist on platforms if the ideal scenario is for Meta/Twitter/etc. To just not police their platforms at all.

> Someone has to hold those people accountable though. Either platforms, or a centralized government entity.

Or we could just say people on the internet are assholes and you need thicker skin. Would you be okay with government ID required to sign up to any website? If so, I can see why you have a vengeance complex.

> you need thicker skin

We're talking about holding people accountable for child porn, and inciting terrorism. What the actual fuck are you talking about "need a thicker skin"?

Why is this all-or-nothing for you? Surely, if someone posts CSAM on YouTube, or even Google Photos, they should remain accountable unto themselves to remove content that is both illegal and morally reprehensible? Or should someone's Google Photos be allowed to hold any amount of CSAM to the point where it's a de-facto private hard drive?

Yes, a not-so-vocal minority. People outside our echo chamber don't even know we care about this stuff.

I the the way forward on this is to pass a national hate speech law and have it work kinda like the DMCA where platforms and people can submit complaints, and the people taken down can dispute in a public government process that has some accountability to the citizenry.

Build up some case law about what is and isn’t so it’s applied uniformly and take stronger measures against repeat offenders.

How does one achieve that without KYC-type laws or mechanisms for platforms? In that sense I agree with GP that it's a rock and a hard place situation.

Expanding the DMCA model to speech in general! Ten years ago I would have been very surprised to see this take on HN.

I think the calculus has changed a bit since then because we either have unaccountable megacorporations doing it or government.

Why would you think government would be any less accountable? If anything, government has everything to gain from this.

Governments all over (including our own) have already gotten caught removing things that are directly relevant to transparency for modern systems. Crazy to think they can be relied upon to exercise these types of powers wisely.

If your argument is that nobody can be trusted then that’s fine, but I’m throwing my hat in with government over Facebook or Twitter if I have to choose. Because “everyone just drop it” doesn’t seem like it’s gonna happen.

"Less unaccountable" is what I meant to write, but my point still stands.

"I think the calculus has changed a bit since then because we either have unaccountable megacorporations doing it or government. So let's give them even MORE power."

On other, less-enlightened forums, this would earn you a .jpg of a dog cocking its head to the side quizzically.

I was thinking the opposite, if they’re gonna ban you for hate speech there has to be a formal complaint, with a reason and citing exactly the content, there is a formal dispute process and the final decision is made by someone not part of the corporation.

No thanks.

This is an extremly bad idea, there is nothing even closely redeeming about it.

This will end up with masses flagging the current not popular thing. This is precisely why you need laws that ensure freedom of expression, self-determination and other human rights.

This is exactly what happens right now except the content moderators are employees of the platform. The world hasn’t ended. I want the process that every platform already implements but it works the same across the internet with public complaints, a formal dispute and restoration process, and the decision not depend on the temperature of the particular platform’s moderators.

HN’s flagging system is more aggressive than what I want with less oversight. If you feel like you have freedom of expression here then surely HN but with a looser grip ought to be even more, ya?

It was a pretty bad situations since some moderators have been instrumentalized for political purposes. And there is nobody that really called them out for it. This should have been the press and their silence is pretty loudly screaming about how you can depend on them. I don't care which political party was worse here.

We had content manipulation for political purposes. There is no guarantee that this will stop now, but changes were certainly needed. It isn't too great that it is now in the hands of Musk perhaps, but he at leaset has a different goal. Even if that is just a pretense it would still be an improvement. And no, some alleged bots are no excuse to just editorialize topics.

This inhibits people forming their own opinion if they will be fed with preapproved messages. So yes, it was a severe problem. Even European leaders called out Twitter when they banned Trump. And it was certainly not because they liked him.

I do believe that flagging is abused on HN from time to time. It just doesn't happen too often and HN isn't too relevant for public discourse. Twitter sadly is since a large part of journalism is about the latest Tweets people can be enraged about. Overall HN is tolerant of diverging opinions as far as I have seen.

That's ludicrous grouping the first (free speech) with the other two violent things. Quite a bit of effort goes into blurring these lines. It's not good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY

Note that assault (which could be words, threats to life for example) is already against the law, it's psychological warfare to make up a new term "speech I don't like" and parade it around (write long wiki articles, mfg consent etc) like it has meaning. It's a term in the same class as "conspiracy theory" and designed by the same class of social engineering experts.

I wonder how large that minority is, versus how loud it is. I've been to forums that had no moderation. Normal people do not talk that way and do not want to be around people that talk that way. Kiddie porn? FFS, get out of here, we do not want to see that.

Apparently we do have some kiddie porn fans on HN, who knew?

I did. Because I've been running discussion forums on and off for 40 years. If you let them, a tiny tiny number of foul people will take over your site by driving away all the normal people who don't want to be exposed to that garbage. Free speech absolutists have trouble understanding that such bad faith actors exist, and in sufficient quantity to crush what could otherwise by a robust, diverse discussion.

I wish the minority were larger, or large enough to have some market impact. Although it is perhaps growing in recent years to due fairly blatant abuses of power to push agendas.

If the site is ad supported, then the majority they care about are the majority of ad buyers and ad buyers definitely want moderation.

There is hope to grow that market impact! Imagine a service where the user could explicitly modify the algorithm to encourage different emotions in themselves, including hate if they want it.

Such a service would make plain a simple truth we don't want to acknowledge: screens hold powerful sway over people, and algorithms hold sway over screens. That power (mood manipulation) can be used for good or evil. Maybe if people are given control over their own tools in this way, they can better appreciate the control that is exerted on them by others, and so better resist it.

Count me in

Yes, but that minority is increasingly irrelevant.

The people are now online and the people want this.

Don't worry, there's no technically sound way that it can be done.

There'll be bluster, but it won't lead anywhere.

No policing for kids porn? Seriously?

I have come to the conclusion that this can only be achieved by separate platforms. I don't believe this is a dangerous split in society, it is just about the people you want to interact with directly. I do no believe there is a common solution to satisfy both types of users.

I guess we will shortly see AI empowered moderation, where AI analyses text and gives it a hate score. I would prefer platforms that make no content suggestion at all.

One minor correction - no one 'wants' ads. People are reluctant / unable to pay for the hundreds of daily services they use, given the death by a thousand cuts nature of subscriptions, and the failure of microtransactions to ever become a reality. So we tolerate ads (to a point). But no one actively wants ads. This isn't a social contract that was agreed to. In fact, enormous numbers of people go out of their way to avoid them, online and off - using ad blockers, arriving late to the cinema, 'pirating' media they already have 'legal' add riddled access to. Completely agree with you in relation to the bad incentives at work, but adverts are not a desires outcome either.

I agree with you almost entirely with one tiny caveat. The only time I am receptive to advertisements is when I am actively and intentionally looking for a product, service, or solution. But I share your assessment that the vast majority of the time advertisements and the tracking infrastructure around them are unwelcome.

That's a terrible time to be receptive to advertisements! The ads are trying to get you to pick their particular product over their competitors, for reasons that have nothing to do with quality or suitability for your needs.

I want ads to a certain extent. Particularly when they are informing me of something that I likely want but wasn't aware of and which I wouldn't have stumbled upon without the ad.

I agree, but also ads which are repetitive and which I can clearly communicate why I am not a potential customer, can be quite annoying.

It would be nice, I think, if people who are shown ads could add tags to the adds for the type of product/service the ad is for, or other aspects of the ad (e.g. “this ad is horny”), and indicate classes of ads which they claim they would not be interested in, which, hopefully, advertisers would prefer to show ads for their products to people who would be potentially receptive.

For example, I do not watch horror movies, and I don’t think this will ever change. I find video ads for horror movies a little stressful (not like, in a way that is an actual problem for me, just unpleasant), and I think it would be to the advertiser’s benefit and my own for their ads to be shown to someone else instead of me.

Similarly with ads for fashion, or at the very least for women’s fashion. I can imagine the possibility that there could be some kind of clothing item where I’d be interested in buying due to an ad, though probably not anything advertised using the word “fashion”.

If ads are supposed to have the benefit of introducing potential consumers to goods/services that they might be interested in buying, why don’t they allow users to provide more information about what they aren’t interested in? It seems like it would be beneficial to all parties.

> if people who are shown ads could add tags to the adds for the type of product/service the ad is for, or other aspects of the ad (e.g. “this ad is horny”), and indicate classes of ads which they claim they would not be interested in, which, hopefully, advertisers would prefer to show ads for their products to people who would be potentially receptive.

This exists already (at least to some extent): https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...

I’ve seen this, or at least parts of it, yes, but it doesn’t resolve my issue. The thing it lets you tell it “don’t show me these” is limited to a list of 5 things, none of which are “this is for a horror movie” or “this is horny”.

The other section about interests and brands, uh, well they seem to just not work for me? Like it keeps saying “we will populate this section once you’ve been shown more brands/ads”. I don’t have an ad blocker installed. This is both on my phone and on my laptop, and is the case for all my google accounts?

I know it at least used to have an “interests” section that I could update, but that didn’t really solve my problem either.

The reason I specified a viewer-tagged system is because it would, I would think, avoid the problem of [the categories that one can mark oneself as dis/interested in] being largely useless?

By definition you can't want something you're unaware of.

> One minor correction - no one 'wants' ads.

Yes, in 2022. I have ad fatigue. PTSD, even, from the onslaught and effort to avoid them.

But I recall a time when I enjoyed ads and actually looked forward to them and paid good money for magazines, and to a lesser degree TV, full of ads that somehow seemed informative and civilized and entertaining. Byte Magazine, The Computer Shopper (all ads! yet I paid for it!), Car & Driver, Popular Mechanics, Bicycling, you name it. I don't think this is nostalgia; I was informed and entertained. Never again, I suppose...

When ads are hyper-targeted to niche products offered by small businesses that I am a fan of, they are actually not bad. I like the ads on Facebook, but not as much on other platforms like TV since TV ads are just random pray and spray ads, usually by megacorps for things I'd never buy.

Look at Dollar Shave Club. A tiny little company that was able to get to an insane valuation chipping away at the consumer mega corps because of targeted advertising and some good ads. I've heard that small consumer packaged goods vendors are having a tough time now that Facebook got their tracking shut down. The only people who can effectively market mass market stuff like that now are the megacorps like Unilever and Proctor and Gamble who can do multi-million dollar poorly targeted campaigns.

Disagree - even if 'dollar shave club' happen to be the ideal razor company for you, once you purchase their product you are still subjected to their advertisements ad nauseam. Frankly I have zero sympathy for companies who can no longer track my data without my explicit consent.

I have a personal holy war against internet ads and its industry, as a reprisal the destruction of the better internet of the bygone era. I use everything in my power to remove internet ads from my attention - ublock origin, sponsorblock for youtube. Adaway for Android phones. Now I rarely ever see ads on my computer/phone. Real life ads, while also occasionally annoying, is not nearly as harmful as it does not track you or gatekeep information.

> We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism, and various other centralized exercises of power that align with personal political whims.

Autres temps, autres moeurs. We live in a culture today where if you are not active in the fight against X, then you condone X, ipso facto. Back in the day, companies could legitimately claim that they were in the business of delivering a product, and others had the responsibility of policing against social ills. In today's era of corporate responsibility and ESG, that is no longer the case. Open source will be affected too, as open source cannot be sustained in a vacuum; it needs institutions, foundations, and corporate backers, all of which will be pressured to comply with "ethical source" guidelines.

This is why open source has become so incredibly important. Open source hardware and networks doubly so.

Open source is nowhere near as important as the right and ability to read and modify. The most popular browser is (mostly) open-source, and so is the most widely-used operating system. The megacorps are really happy to advertise the fact that they're contributing to and using OSS. Yet the situation is such that while you can see the source, it doesn't necessarily mean you have any power to do anything other than read it. What good is having the source if you're prevented from actually using it, due to various "security" features?

Contrast that with the rise of the PC in the 80s and 90s through the early 2000s and the slowly-dying culture that came with it. The majority of software was closed source, but it didn't stop people with a disassembler and a hex editor from analysing and modifying it.

Thus I think focusing on OSS is merely a distraction.

It's not the source that's the problem; we're drowning in open source.

It's that power has shifted to centralized clouds and nobody has stepped up to make self-hosting as turnkey as open source is.

We need an open source movement and ethos for DIY cloud hosting, if not shared resource fabrics.

Sadly the only thing that I can think that would make self hosting easy is if operated like a botnet/virus.

I think you're putting the cart before the horse with the consumer-vendor relationship.

Consumers don't want vendors to police content, vendors want to be a hub of content and policing content is the only way they can appease the diverse group of people they want to continue to grow. Consumers are perfectly happy to self-police content, the problem is that the models that allow for that make it a lot harder to discover content.

With your comment of incentives I think youre placing the blame wrong again. The reason there's no incentives to create free, open, secure, interoperable systems is becausese capitalism places importance on prior ownership. There's a lot more money in being the standard that everyone has to pay a royalty to in the future than there is in giving out the standard for free and just being a user of it(see: meta and the metaverse).

> They will push the regulation tools they have, as hard as they can, to solve these problems, if we let them.

And after the party you don't like is elected, they will use that same power you gave them for going after say... women who underwent abortions. Be careful what you wish for.

The end goal should be open-source everything. Imagine a world where, for example, the schematics for farming tools are open-source and anyone can improve them and download them. Everything becomes a global collaborative effort.

He’s absolutely right engineers should censor their outputs and work under the demands of allegiance to social norms?

Religiosity.

The past is not shackles on the future.

This is fundamentally a political issue and any organized effort to counter the establishment's chosen path can and likely will meet with a political/legal response. The issue is central enough.

I was musing to a friend the other day (in context of AI actually, not general access to computing) that Marx apparently missed a fork in the road in his linear idea of 'historic necessity' regarding the deterministic nature of social system transitions. Since technology, now cognitive technology, is such a huge amplifier of wealth, it now seems the Capitalist class can chart a way in the future that decouples from labor and assumes control over advanced technology. This path of the fork in the road will not end in a workers paradise ..

Here's a fun website that follows that train of thought to its natural conclusion:

https://exterminism.com/

What seems naturally conclusive can be held to be reflective of one's own predispositions unless it is accompanied by a compelling train of thought.

So all we need now are the missing tracks of this train (and all the charming must-see stops along the way).

did you watch the video? Its about DRM, not really anything your comment is covering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com