Hacker News Reader

Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

No, society does. Blaming technology is stupid.

A social network has a duty to take reasonable steps to ensure that bad people can’t easily conspire together to do their bad deeds. Society has a problem in that people engage in shitty behavior. One way societies combat this is by limiting the ability of like minded people from openly sharing the effects of their misdeeds.

Do you think it’s OK for a convention center to host a meeting where attendees are passing around photographs of CSAM to each other? Why treat the online world differently than the offline world in this regard?

Mastodon is both a social network, and a mere server software.

The social network side of Mastodon, connected around mastodon.social, has quite strong moderation, and they block other Mastodon instances for even lesser transgressions.

But anyone can run a Mastodon server disconnected from the trunk of the social network, and make their own fringe network. These instances are a problem, but it's Mastodon's fault as much as Apache and Nginx are responsible for serving CSAM.

It’s been a long time since I programmed and was up to date about these things. In my eyes Mastodon means “Twitter” without moderation. The lack of moderation would be a problem. I have an extreme view in the sense that I think humanity is not yet developed enough to have easy, cheap, anonymous community building at scale be a thing.

Thanks for the clarification. I’ll have think more about what I consider appropriate as far as it concerns Mastodon.

Saying "your car has a flat tire" isn't blaming your car, and saying "Mastodon has a CSAM problem" isn't blaming Mastodon.

This article seems to do a pretty fair job of pointing out that they investigate this issue on many platforms, but that they've seen higher rates of CSAM on Mastodon than others. They also specifically call out, accurately, that decentralized platforms have different challenges with addressing these problems when compared to a platform with a central arbiter.

A better analogy (not that I think car analogies map 1:1 to this) would be if the headline said "Ford has a nails-on-the-road problem". The headline implies way more ownership by the platform than is warranted and minimizes the actual problem, and it's tiring to see people try and pick things apart based on their worst possible uses.

Also the underlying report is mostly about servers in Japan where the laws are different and/or that are blocked by almost everyone else because they are toxic. As they should be, because the whole point is that servers can block badly run servers elsewhere.

You're right: if somebody did a study and found that, among cars on the road, Fords were statistically more likely to have their tires punctured by nails, despite operating on the same roads as other cars, I'd definitely consider it worth writing about and thinking critically about.

That's what's happening here.

Glad you were able to find such a bad interpretation, I hope it sustains you

Is a townsquare a technology?

When it uses computers, networking protocols, the internet, etc. then it is a technology. The scale by which these virtual town squares can grow is something that sets them apart from real town squares. In a real town square people have to contend with societal views of what is socially acceptable. This provides a needed moderating influence. In a real town square one can’t be too inflammatory without fear of being attacked.

So you're just defining the difference between who defines the tech. As placed like Twitter absolutely can act like a typical townsquare.

The only real difference is if the tech has the necessary tools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com