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Comment by dalke | Hacker News Reader

Short version: Automatic spam filtering is censorship and the spirit of the US First Amendment requires that everyone host all comments.

I believe this is a false understanding, which places free speech on a pedestal over other human rights.

Freedom of assembly also means the right for private persons to exclude others from participation. A club can hire a bouncer from a local security firm to prevent certain classes of people from entering (eg, drunk, inappropriately dressed, or known troublemakers; so long as its not legally prohibited discrimination), without specifically telling the bouncer all of the conditions for exclusion.

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Where is spam in the post that shows this picture? Nowhere.

What does this tell us about spam detection algorithms?

How does your startup handle user rights?

Why are you writing about freedom of assembly here? No relation to censorship.

1) This (poorly written) comment concerns spam. I didn't say that the comment itself was spam.

(Edit: I see now the tag "Detected as spam." I rarely use Disqus and didn't catch it the first few times I looked at it.)

2) Spam detection algorithms are hard. There are false negatives. https://disqus.com/home/channel/discussdisqus/discussion/cha... suggests that Disqus has many problems, but without knowing the baseline rate, it's hard to judge if it's really bad. (If it stops 1 billion spam comments per day, and falsely categorizes 10 real ones, but all 10 complain, then it will appear that there is a high failure rate.)

3) Huh?! I don't have a startup. I sell software under a free license.

4) You must have missed the part which says "against the spirit of the constitution of the USA". Free speech and freedom to assemble are equally part of the first amendment. If you want to protect user rights, you have to protect all of them, and realize they are sometimes in tension with each other.

Otherwise, chance your account name to "FreeSpeechRights".

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