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Comment by mark242 | Hacker News Reader

That is fundamentally wrong. Pushing content moderation onto every person who posts a message on social media is a chilling effect on people posting. Pushing content moderation onto every person who reads a message on social media is a chilling effect on people reading.

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People are fine reading stuff they disagree with, it’s fun that way. They just downvote if they disagree. It’s not fun sitting around in a moderated hugbox where everyone is saying the same thing

"Stuff I disagree with" is fine. Outright hate is not. There are limits.

You're talking about a system of good actors that just disagree on what's being said, if you spend 10 minutes running your own site you'll quickly learn there is a metric shitton of bad actors.

Run something unmoderated long enough and, depending where you are, you'll have law enforcement knocking on your door.

Downvotes are a perfect way to ensure you end up with a hugbox where people are afraid to disagree.

>Downvotes are a perfect way to ensure you end up with a hugbox where people are afraid to disagree.

Hacker News has downvotes and people here disagree all the time. It's subjective but it even feels like downvoting and disagreement have increased over time, so the presence of downvotes at best doesn't seem to have an effect and at worse seems to encourage disagreement.

In fact, I actually can't think of a platform for which your claim is actually true.

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