Comment by goodbyesf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goodbyesf | Hacker News Reader

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> except no one actually wants to be on such a forum.

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?

I think you’re wrong. Most people want a “family friendly” experience because they’re not interested in internet troll culture and aren’t interested in being surrounded by angry people doing and saying hurtful things for giggles. That’s not a knock on the angry people giggling at hurtful things - it’s just a statement that they’re a violently loud minority in the world. Most people are folks that work 60 hours a week raising kids, hang out with their friends, and generally just want to post Beyoncé videos and talk about the cookout next weekend at a friends place. They last thing they want is a racist screed and dick pics posted in their family and friends discussions, or in the Beyoncé fan forum they’re in. NGOs didn’t make that a reality, that’s just the reality of most peoples lives. I am not sure, but I suspect you’re experiencing that most people you associate with want such a forum - but I suspect people on HN don’t associate with very representative people of the populace.

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.

Have you ever browsed, say, the Nigerian or Arabic-language internet? Those people, too, are indeed largely family types who don’t want dick pics or users trolling for giggles. However, those populations hold different views on things like LGBT people or different ethnicities, and they want to air those views, it is a fairly popular subject of conversation. The particular moderation approach chosen by many Western-owned tech services or Mastodon censors those discussions that those populations feel are normal. Certainly one might hope that those parts of the world will come around to one’s own views on certain social issues, but the short-term effect is essentially making whole regions of the world feel like second-class citizens.

They are producing a product that is tailored to their customer base. They’re not producing a product for people that don’t shift their revenues materially.

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.

I, personally, want a moderated forum. Having been on 4chan and seeing gore randomly I don’t really have a problem with people setting rules to moderate that out. There’s nothing conspiratorial involving NGOs (what??) about it.

I don't think anyone is preventing you from not going to those uncensored places.

Of course, but "most people do" seems pretty wrongheaded. Most people would not like to see random gore interspersed in e.g. their tech forum, or their friends posting family photos. There's no big conspiracy here.

99.99% of forums setup by private parties are also moderated and censored by the owners because the assertion that people just want to be in a place where gore or scat can show up with the same likelyhood as cat pics is unserious.

Marketing dollars. Bad content == no companies paying for ads.

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