Reddit won't interfere with users revolting against X with subreddit bans | Hacker News Reader

Reddit won't interfere with users revolting against X with subreddit bans

arstechnica.com

20 pointsjohnneville20 comments

Technically reddit and xdotcom are competitors, so this makes financial sense.

When will HackerNews ban X links?

They quit working for me in Firefox a while back, I just get a page with the stylized "X" logo these days.

I suspect a large number of the user base here has no issue with X or more to the point, the person that owns X.

Throwing out everything written, no matter who the author is, on a publishing platform, just because I don't like the owner? That seems a bit extreme.

You're letting the owner (or your hatred of the owner) define who you're willing to listen to. That seems rather unwise.

It's advocacy. People want to remove the influence the owner has on public discourse. Advocacy, like strike action does things which have short term pain because of a belief in a goal.

Also, we implicitly make these choices all the time, by not listening to Fox, or Pravda, or Al Jazeera or a host of channels, by chosing not to pay, not to bypass the pay wall.

I do not disagree that it seems extreme. It's dichotomous behaviour to me. But, it's human, and normal. I don't personally think everyone who remains on X is evil or against my world view. I just find I'm happier off it and ignoring it.

(I'm sure you know this. I'm not trying to school you, we're just making observations from different sides of the fence but the fence is there and we're in agreement about that if nothing else)

> "People want to remove the influence the owner has on public discourse."

Deplatforming completely failed in preventing the rise of the right wing over the past two administrations; if anything, it reinforced their delusions of persecution, strengthening them. And now that the leftists are on the back foot, deplatforming is going to be even less effective. It's just doubling down on a losing strategy.

That being said, I'm all in favor of blocking X links as HN submissions anyway. They almost always seem to be off topic or low value.

> Deplatforming completely failed in preventing the rise of the right wing over the past two administrations; if anything, it reinforced their delusions of persecution

Is it delusion anymore if you're systematically barred from everywhere? The Twitter Files also exist, showing active government-driven censorship efforts.

Free market, if I disagree with someone's life style I'm free to not give them my business.

When the owner of a previously public-ish, sometimes-useful platform makes it preferentially their own platform, and they've indicated they think acting like Hitler (or his sycophants) is okay, will you continue to use that software and social network?

Twitter seems an MMORPG, anyway; nonessential, possibly entertaining but with a lot of idling, and ultimately a waste of time. Privatizing public services for profit doesn't feel in line with what I understand to be a healthier path, that of public luxury, private sufficiency.

The owner of said publishing platform has already limited who I can listen to by breaking his site so badly that links there usually don't work.

I have no idea whether this occurred through engineering incompetence or as an attempt to strong-arm people into creating accounts, but it hardly matters; either way, links to x.com are nearly worthless.

probably never. HN is built around linking outside the platform and the guidelines encourage linking directly to sources, which are sometimes X posts. HN also isn't user moderated with a structure allowing users to make a decision like that.

reddit also has an incentive to keep people on the platform as much as possible so subreddits choosing to ban X links will likely only be a net positive for the site's engagement and ad views.

> HN also isn't user moderated with a structure allowing users to make a decision like that.

Sure, it is. Unless you are a fairly new user, the 'flag' link is right there under the title.

I have no idea what dang / YC feels about the choice to flag every link to twitter. Maybe they would offer new guidance to us all if everyone started doing it. It is their site, after all.

But barring that, yes, HN absolutely has user-driven moderation where we all can make that choice.

in my experience, flagging leaves the post up and just adds the flag indicator. i guess i assumed that dang reviewed these manually at some point. is there a threshold of number of flags where the post becomes dead automatically?

I definitely see posts go insta-dead when flagging, sometimes. But I have zero insights into the details of any algorithms behind it.

And I truly have mixed feelings about this all. Shutting down every link seems extreme when it is an individual person who has crossed the line. But when that person owns and controls the tone of the site... we need to ask ourselves whether we are trying to stifle their hate speech or just being vindictive to someone who is offensive?

I see you giving Elon "Osturf" Musk some grace. Yes, he is just an individual person. Yes, he has access to massive amounts of resources; he plays the game of Neoliberal (that's Hayek's term) Capitalism handily. If we were still in the Keynesian model (also based on colonial looting, but the discrepancy in rise of the proverbial boats is less) we might not yet be in as obvious an oligarchy, and more of us might be involved in representative democracy.

Now though, it might be too late to do much by whether or not any of us use his platform, as he can just lie about its popularity and vote in other ways with his many dollars. Depending on what enough of us actually want for our future and that of the next hundred generations of humans, there are other actions to consider.

Move fast and break things?

A lot of people have tried to game HN for various reasons (scams, overt marketing, job verts, political statements, even just trying to make it to the front page)

From what I can tell, there are a number of metrics at play from account age, IP address, account history, pattern recognition like up voting or flagging rings. I'm not sure to the extent it is largely rule based or data driven, I think dang probably keeps it opaque to prevent workarounds from knowing how the system works.

Given the fact that there are so many Musk apologists and "anti-woke" crusaders in the HN community, most notably Paul Graham, they probably won't do it.

HN has a pretty "IBM During Nazi Germany" vibe.

Pro tip:

x.com → xcancel.com

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