But at least you agree that is because big companies have enough money to buy enough moderation correct? So in the best case scenario is jut another part of society that small companies are not allowed to participate if they are not rich enough.
Yet Omegle made more money and had more users than HN ever would, but consistently failed at moderation.
> small companies are not allowed to participate if they are not rich enough
It's been open knowledge to anyone who's been in middle and high school since 2010 (like yours truly) that Omegle is filled with creepy old guys.
There are plenty of small social media startups from that era that never had as much of a pedo presence as Omegle.
HN doesn't even allow text formatting changes beyond monospace and italics, much less posting pictures or video.
Even without moderation, you'd only be at risk of ASCII art schlongs.
Hah, rewind. There's literally a porn site on the front page right now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38213707
Hacker News is not and never has been a "business" in its own right. It's part of the business model of a VC fund -- Y Combinator -- and Forbes indicates they were worth $5 billion as of 2021.
Also, I don't think we know how many people moderate HN and never have.
I don't work here. I just hang here sometimes and have for years. I don't have reliable info.
But I am pretty sure you have no idea what you are talking about.
It's part of YC but I can confidently say only around 4-5 people are working on it including moderation. I can also say confidently that more resources are spent by YC on Bookface and their own internal BI tools than HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1837288
It's source page gives a 404 "not found" error.
The current official mod in charge pretty consistently says "no moderators did x."
This handle of mine only dates to 2017, but I originally joined in 2009, so I have no idea how long you have been hanging here, but I would be really shocked if they needed 30 moderators in 2010 and now have literally one guy doing all the moderation work by himself entirely.
I also doubt that people really in the know are posting here with "insider" info that wasn't cleared by staff.
It's not my business. I don't feel they need to tell me such info. But I have no reason to believe your uncited assertion that you can say X "with confidence" is reliable info of any sort.
The communities are very different and attract different crowds. The most dangerous sites are sites that connect groups who wouldn't connect in real life.
if you remember from some months ago, the HN filter has like 66 thousand sites that get auto-filtered. I wouldn't even be surprised if your comment is delayed if you have a link and it isn't from a whitelisted site, or a greylisted site (an imgur image can have a variety of things that you want to check first). When something amiss does get through, enough commenters can flag the content and have it temporarily unviewable until a mod can get to it.
That's hard to do with Omeagle's more intimate setting, and of course live streaming yourself.
>It's been open knowledge to anyone who's been in middle and high school since 2010 (like yours truly) that Omegle is filled with creepy old guys.
may as well expand that to the rest of the internet. Most social media don't work off of live chats, so that's a huge pain point in Omeagle's favor.
And to be frank, they do. They just have more moderation to control that. Wasn't uncommon to have ANY link comment delayed for such reason, if it wasn't outright banned. Words can only do so much damage.
Small companies can participate, as long as their moderation resources are proportionate to their scale.
Yes, if they aren't, you are going to have more liability problems, just like if you operate a theme park with inadequate maintenance staff to prevent the rides from flying apart and killing guests.
A better analogy involves things that are generally intended for adult purposes, as the Internet is. You certainly can operate a business selling construction tools, and generally not be sued when someone lets their kid use one and the kid gets injured. Even if you have knowledge that some customers will buy tools for use by their under age kids, or that they will leave tools accessible to kids, while you're merely assuming that they're supplying appropriate supervision and control.
The fundamental problem with this liability argument that has been put forth is it's based on responsibility laundering. Kids can't judge or consent, yet the argument quietly asserts it's reasonable for their caretakers to be absent in supplying appropriate judgement and supervision as they're interacting with the larger world. The resulting conclusion is that it is everyone else's responsibility to only ever act in ways that will protect those unrestrained kids. The direct implication is that everything accessible on the Internet must be made safe for kids, which is directly opposed to having free and open communications for adults.