That's not true; 4chan's always had a pretty decent number of users for an internet forum. GAB's one of the largest Mastodon instances. The only sense in which "No one" wants to use an unmoderated forum is the sense where you don't consider people with different views from yourself to be people.
The low-rules boards are often seen as cesspools by other users.
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-pr...
The even broader point is that nobody wants to participate in a truly unmoderated discussion, which may not be technically true, but if you allow "nobody" to mean "nearly nobody" (the author's intent), it's accurate.
Besides, one of the key aspects of 4chan is anonymity which could itself be considered a level of moderation; the default and indeed strong preference of commenters is to not be identifiable, which is a form of (self) moderation.
You can try to weasel around with what "moderation" means here, but the effect is largely the same no matter how you slice it; some stuff on 4chan isn't posted by tradition, not by technical capability.
Even on /b/, doxxing, calls to raid other boards, complaining about the moderators/admins, submitting false post reports, impersonating admins, etc. is banned. On all other boards, even seemingly innocuous things like anthropomorphic (furry) imagery or even posting images of characters from the show My Little Pony (other than in the /mlp/ and /b/ boards) is disallowed.
Porn is disallowed on the majority of boards, and even risque images are sometimes removed; the rules are enforced to the degree where a SFW board (e.g. /jp/) can have threads about Japanese porn actresses, but you're not even allowed to post a nude.
4chan is quite heavily moderated and there is a whole team of janitors and moderators for all boards that respond to reports behind the scenes; you only rarely see them chime in like dang does on HN. For a while, even "share a screenshot of your desktop" threads were routinely being removed from the /g/ (Technology) board by janitors.
As for Gab, I recall they even ban softcore/suggestive pornography or imagery. It's certainly not the wild west just because its users are more sympathetic to the first amendment.
An AI model is talking with myself, about subjects I want to discuss in private with a second brain. If I want to talk to myself about erotica, why can’t I? If I want to yell obscenities at myself, why can’t I?
I can understand why Microsoft or Google don’t want to give a chat bot that does these things, or offer dangerous medical advice, or whatever, but if it’s my own device and a model I’m running myself, why on earth would I want a censored model? I.e., I see why the service provider wants to give me a censored model, but do I want a censored model? Why would I?
I still don't understand how a personalized filtering system hasn't become the default technological model of social media. I suppose it's because of power dynamics; no one is really incentivized to build such a thing and recommendation systems don't seem to work very well.
Moderation is for forums where readers have little control over who is posting the content that you are seeing, so the forum tries to shape the content for the readers in one way or another. Examples: Reddit, HN, trending or boosted social media posts.
Censorship is when the reader elects to get information from a known source, and someone or something intervenes to prevent the information from arriving. Examples: twitter blocking content from a source whose readers elected to follow them, filtering emails from known contacts, filtering private messages.
For AI, it might depend on the specificity of the question whether it's more like moderation or more like censorship.
censoring/moderating that is akin to censoring/moderating what you enter in Notepad, and I feel we are approaching the point where we will soon be having unironic arguments against general purpose computers. Unsafe/dangerous/unethical, what if someone writes a no-no word in Notepad, what if someone draws a swastika in Paint, etc, etc, etc.
this is all so tiresome.
On the other hand, I think I agree with the subtext behind the semantics, an unlombotomized model would let you discuss whatever topics the mainstream culture deems hurtful or embarrassing that a service provider would not allow, and that in itself is a good thing. You’re entitled to be you, even if most people strongly feel your opinions are hurtful.
Nonsense. These are totally unrelated things, and people use them for different purposes.
Wrong. Most people do. There's a reason why forums had to be censored. If no one wanted it, we wouldn't need censorship because such forums wouldn't exist in the first place. The elites and people with agenda want a censored forum. But that's life.
Censorship online didn't come from 'the people'. It came from the elites via journalists, politicians, NGOs, etc.
> The question isn't whether models shouldn't be censored or not, but who should be the ones doing the censoring.
I agree with you here. Anything important will be controlled. Just like the internet, google, facebook, etc. If it becomes important then control and censorship is inevitable. The question is who? With china it's obvious the party is. Everyone can agree on that. Who is behind the censorship in the US. It isn't 'the people'. So it can't be the spineless politicians. So who or what cabal forced everyone from reddit to twitter to censor uniformly?
That said, I’m really happy there’s places on the internet where you can go to get your fill of angry screeds, dick pics, and trolls trolling. It’s an undervalued subculture of the internet subculture.
A part of it is also they realize that LGBT and those other ethnicities are customers of theirs as well, are also employees and management at those companies, and are their shareholders, and have chosen that the services they provide are friendly to anyone who isn’t being hurtful to anyone else for any reason, but with an emphasis on the areas that matter to them from a brand, revenue, and governance point of view.
It is hard to say this is a wrong approach - “be nice to everyone” isn’t exactly controversial, but somehow it’s become so.