Comment by abrahamsen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abrahamsen | Hacker News Reader

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> Also, why shouldn't services be responsible for users using their service to abuse others?

Because I like Hacker News. If Hacker News was responsible for the posts of its users, it would not exist. The value it provides for Y Combinator would not match the risk.

Also, email as we know it would not exist. The price of stamps would skyrocket as the postal service would need to hire people to read all letters in case they contained death threats. If any of the web services deserves common carrier protection, it would be twitter.

Whenever something bad happens (like here), there will always be demands for more surveillance. More central control. These demands are just, the victims are real. And the solution exist. We could have a world with only a few highly curated and monitored for pay communication channels, where death threads plus anything else our governments want to keep out would be kept out.

Anyone fighting that future are insensitive jerks unable to emphasize with the victims. Or can easily be portrayed that way.

Righteous indignation comes with a price.

let's get something clear here, just because this kind of argument pops up all the time. Firstly compounding several different disparate services which differ vastly is completely silly.

1, hacker news IS responsible for the content that appears on it. If someone posts something that hacker news is legally obliged to remove, they will (not to mention we know that hacker news engages in hellbans etc).

2, email is a commonly used set of protocols, not a company product. You could think of the postal service in a similar way. They act more like dumb pipes, but email hosts differ from real world post in that they have an added responsibility to make sure they aren't used as spam relays. Twitter/hacker news etc are not dumb pipes.

3, in this paranoid tech world, women asking to be safe on social networks and the internet, and asking to be able to report abuse is equated to state spying and invasive surveillance, what the fuck. What the actual fuck. People just want to be able safely use the internet without having themselves threatened.

> Anyone fighting that future are insensitive jerks

If people are easily portrayed as having their foot in their mouth, there might be a reason for this. When you start conflating women's safety with state surveillance your foot is safely planted deep in your mouth.

Perhaps, and I'm going out on a limb here, just perhaps, part of protecting against the tyranny of surveillance and invasive state practices might be making the internet a strong safe place for anyone, so governments don't step in and do it for us in a way we really dislike.

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