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Comment by eykanal | Hacker News Reader

Saying "I don't want censorship" is equivalent to saying "I'm fine with people using my tool for coffee meetups, genocide planning, bridge club, and drug deals." It's an attempted handwashing of moral responsibility under the cover of software purity.

At this point, it's pretty well documented that social media _as a tool_ has increased young female mental illness; the question is only "how much" [1]. To try to wave away responsibility for this by saying "but I'm just making a tool!" is beyond irresponsible at this point; it's morally reprehensible.

[1]: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

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> media _as a tool_ has increased young female mental illness

Why should this be solved by discouraging censorship-resistant tools?

Arguably, the erosion of mental health could be laid at the feet of greedy corporations using algos to push hate, and division for eyeballs to advertisers.

Isn't Nostr algo free? Isn't it just a messaging service?

Yes, nostr is just a protocol. There is no inherent algorithm. A client could choose to implement one and users could then choose to just migrate to a different client without one. All I want is a reverse chronological feed of posts from people I follow. That’s it. And right now the nostr clients deliver that.

> "I'm fine with people using my tool for coffee meetups, genocide planning, bridge club, and drug deals." It's an attempted handwashing of moral responsibility under the cover of software purity.

None of these activities are efficiently stopped by censorship on the largest social media platforms... so what are you suggesting? That we continue to employ inefficient censorship (which gets also abused all the time by governments around the world), or do you have any actual solution? If not, this sounds a lot like virtue signalling to me.

The elephant in the room here is that quite likely a large part of content that may contribute to female mental illness is not hateful.

I'm of course talking about female influencers on Instagram flexing their wealth, highly customized looks, hot boyfriends, fancy holidays, etc. The phenomenon where a young girl at her most vulnerable/insecure age is ranking against this distorted image of filter-laden "expectations" is brand new.

My point being, there's a huge amount of content that is bad for our mental health, yet cannot be censored because the harm is indirect.

Bad take. Good software has to be used by anti-abortion activists and abortion clinics.

Social media as a tool strikes me as the same kind of argument as “REAL socialism hasn’t been tried yet”

It doesn’t feel at all to me that there are any social media platforms that function at all like tools but rather data vampires attempting to addict at any cost” and so Haidt’s mention of increased suicide rate is unfortunately not at all a surprise.

Sorry if this sounds harsh but calling platforms in the zeitgeist at this moment in time as tools is simply naive.

nostr isn't a platform though, it's a protocol. Something closer to SMTP than to Facebook. Go build a little something on it (there are decent libraries for popular languages at this point which makes it easy) and see for yourself. It doesn't feel like a platform, it feels like a tool.

Yep

It is a tool for communication. We can build a twitter clone on it, a chess match server, IoT messaging, etc. Nostr-the-protocol is a proper tool. Agreed that the social aspects built on top of it should be built with human wellbeing in mind - not ad revenue.

Hopefully having the nostr protocol in place lets people iterate faster to build good social technology, and accelerates moving past the ad/engagement focused platforms we live with today.

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