Comment by betamist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by betamist | Hacker News Reader

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Discussions online have had this nature ever since they went mainstream I think. Especially Reddit I mean, some of those more popular subreddits are run mostly by kids is what I make out of it. Maybe not kids in terms of age but people who never grew up. Censorship seems to be the natural order of things in online communities where people don’t see or know each other, and when a lot of the context gets lost in the text only format. Here on HN too. Too many people with flagging abilities just flagging anything they disagree with, and good luck getting any mod’s attention after that. Unless you dance around the topic and never spell out certain types of takes, your posts will get fagged if the official narrative doesn’t match, and you will be accused of flaming.

Unfortunately people have convinced themselves that some opinions -those they disagree with- are dangerous for others to read. From cancelling your preorder for a game after a beta to “let’s think twice about pharmaceutical companies’ motives”, there will be someone who thinks your motives are unclean, you’re an agitator, or full on evil, and therefor deserve to be silenced.

> Unfortunately people have convinced themselves that some opinions -those they disagree with- are dangerous for others to read.

Or more likely than seeing them as "dangerous" they recognize that if you allow opinions to be expressed, others may gain a new perspective by reading it or even adopt that opinion themselves.

Or in the case of HN, certain topics of conversation are censored or discouraged because they tend to lead to boring/repetitive/annoying/aggressive comment threads.

Censorship is necessary for a civil forum. If you don't censor, you get 8chan, a place full of nothing but vileness. All the shitty people congregate there because no one will censor them or ban them, and all the decent people leave.

Of course, we usually call this "moderation" instead of "censorship", but it's mostly the same, except it isn't done by a government.

So the quality of any forum just comes down to the quality of the moderation. Good moderators keep out the off-topic crap and general nastiness, shitty moderators ban people for saying they don't like the company's new game.

One man's nastiness is another's joke, or opinion. What people don't understand is that if you are ok with the idea of a so called "moderation" that's more on the limiting side, some other group of moderators will come later and apply he same rules but from the different side, and your sides ideas won't see the light of day. It's a very simple concept that people have forgotten why freedom of expression is the first amendment. The problem imo is that it doesn't translate well to online communities that are open to anyone. I'm sure people have thought about this endlessly before, but I don't know if there's any progress.

Online communities are communities like any other: they're a product of the people in them, and the people that control them. You may find some are more to your liking than others. There's no perfect way of doing moderation. If you don't like any kind of moderation at all, you're free to hang out on 8chan with the neo-Nazis.

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