Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fatnino | Hacker News Reader

So everyone needs to explicitly block cheese pizza for themselves just so a few perverts can share that stuff in the name of "free speech"?

View on HN

No, everyone needs to explicitly "choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists"

That still implies either: A) Cheese pizza is permitted B) There are a "floor" of rules

"Permitted" is a strong word for activity enabled by a protocol. It implies some moral acceptance from the ones who designed the tool. I think a better word would be "possible". Similar to how e-mail makes it possible to send all kinds of content.

This is why free speech is so hard to maintain. There are so many cases where you want to ban or censor something obviously repugnant, but once the power is created to do so, it will be abused, probably as soon as someone you don't like is now in charge.

It really isn't - the cheese pizza lover can make their own instance

“Cheese pizza” is banned by law in most countries, so it won't be “permitted” either way.

That content is prohibited by law anyway so it's not really relevant to internet moderation standards anyway.

isn't that what matrix is doing with their decentralized moderation?

I would nuance that system a bit.

Replace "moderator" with "any peer".

Replace "block" with "vote". (And that vote could be as simple as "up down" or maybe something more sophisticated)

Now everybody you meet (every "peer") has a "rating". Based on the cumulative voting of yourself and your peers.

A peer that you upvote, his votes are weighted-up in that cumulative rating calculation.

A peer that you downvote, his votes are weighted down.

So we have peers, votes and a cumulative rating calculation.

And then we filter out view by rating.

Voila! Personalized decentralized moderation.

This doesn't really work because it doesn't allow a moderator to set the tenor of a community. People can filter out individual messages, but a dedicated set of bad actors can turn a community into swiss cheese or undermine discussion just by spamming, baiting and trolling and taking advantage of the variance in the level of tolerance for the bad behavior.

Communities function when there is a standard to which the community members adhere and when bad behavior is uniformly moderated away. Making each individual have their own moderation bubble is a recipe for incoherence, even with the improvements you suggest. Its also a lot of work.

That is to say, every community is for meme pictures

You're describing the exact thing people do when logging onto a Mastodon instance. They're choosing to accept the moderation/federation policies of that instance.

I suppose "cheese pizza" refers to CSAM?

FWIW I think it's a sign of intellectual dishonesty to complain vaguely about censorship of "widely held beliefs" without stating what those beliefs are. All social networks have "ground rules", they're just not always the same. For any social network that somehow can be pinned to someone's physical identity, those rules will at least include the laws of that person's jurisdiction.

"Free speech" is widely mocked as a supposed principle because it's a rallying call, not a specific thing. Even people who'll proudly tell you "I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend your right to say it" will have limits if you keep pushing them on it. "Free speech" just means "I want to be able to say things I'm not allowed to say" and the first response should always be "what and for what purpose".

>"Free speech" is widely mocked as a supposed principle because it's a rallying call, not a specific thing.

To many of us the mockery of people who think that way is a badge of honor.

I can provide two specific examples of "widely held beliefs" that have been mass-banned on Reddit. I also want to note I don't endorse or subscribe to either of these beliefs but I felt neither were deserving of a ban and I was open-minded to hear arguments in their direction.

1) Reddit banned /r/NoNewNormal and "Covid misinformation" after activist moderators started shutting off subreddits. I personally got a Covid vaccine and complied with mask regulations, but I was interested in hearing coherent arguments related to lockdown / mask / vaccine skepticism. Obviously these skeptic views were very widely held beliefs, and some of them like the "lab leak theory" went from "misinformation" to "possibly true"

2) Reddit banned /r/GenderCritical which was a subreddit representing feminists who expressed skepticism over modern transgender ideology in the spirit of JK Rowling. Again, JK Rowling has millions of followers so this qualifies as a widely held belief. While I want to be inclusive and supportive of transgender people, I'm interested in hearing skeptical arguments related to things like whether it's really a good idea to give puberty blocker to teenagers .

I believe both of these bans happened not for good reasons but because of ideological crusades from Reddit power-moderators who skew heavily on certain political and ideological topics.

I'm not trying to start a flamewar or debate on either of these topics, I'm not endorsing either of those subreddits, I'm addressing your critique that specific examples were not provided of "widely held beliefs" that have been unfairly censored.

I'm not familiar with the reasons behind those particular subs being banned, but in my experience "toxic communities" are a more common reason for a ban than the subject matter. If a sub wants to discuss gender identity and politics that's one thing. If that same sub then becomes a rallying place for those who brigade and harass other users or subs and the mods don't respond to admin requests to stop it then the sub gets banned. It's not true of all cases, of course, but it is common and something that most users of those subs will probably never be made aware of as the content is controlled by the mods who may or may not support the behavior that got the sub banned.

In the case of both of the topics you listed, there are still plenty of places online you can go to entertain your curiosity about those views. What I don't understand is the assumption that a corporate product should be compelled to host discussions it deems inappropriate in either topic, tone or corresponding action by users.

Through what mechanism do you believe website owners should be forced to allow users to operate by their own terms? Should anyone who hosts a comment section on a personal website be forced to keep all posted comments in perpetuity?

> FWIW I think it's a sign of intellectual dishonesty to complain vaguely about censorship of "widely held beliefs" without stating what those beliefs are.

I would hazard a guess that don't think those beliefs need to be stated because most people know that widely held beliefs are censored, and because it would make the discussion about something else. The Twitterfiles are available, as are all the discussions about censorship including by those running the social networks. They don't deny censorship, they attempt to justify it.

> "Free speech" is widely mocked as a supposed principle because it's a rallying call, not a specific thing.

Free speech is not a rallying call, and it most definitely is a principle, just as "democracy" is not a rallying call.

> Even people who'll proudly tell you "I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend your right to say it" will have limits if you keep pushing them on it.

And like democracy, different people will define it and (if they get the chance) implement it differently. However, they're all talking about democracy (maybe with the exception of North Korea's government).

> "Free speech" just means "I want to be able to say things I'm not allowed to say"

It most definitely does not mean that which means your following questions are moot. I would suggest that you find out what those supporting freedom of speech actually think.

Or the police can do their job and catch pedos?

How about you initially "trust" all of your friends. If one friend blacklists a bad actor, all their friends automatically blacklist them as well. If it turns out the friend blacklisted an innocent person out of spite or something, word should eventually get around and people can manually revoke trust from that friend.

I myself block a ton of stuff, which isn't illegal not offensive, not ... but just boring for me. That list shouldn't spread to others. Also I don't want to have to think about personal vs. global block.

would be an easy option, to autoblock with your friends or not. or even with individual friends - I value the opinions of lots of people who filter out people I'd want to hear from.

I'm talking about a big red button "spam/harmful" rather than a personal preference list.

To be a little clearer: you have your own private filters and a separate, distributed block list shared amongst your friends, which is for bad content. You use the big red button when you encounter spam or harmful content, and this bad content/user/node/etc is added to the shared block list.

You initially trust all of your friends to use this block list properly, but if you find one of your friends is misusing it you can revoke trust from them and ignore their contributions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com