5,521 karma · joined February 19, 2011
Software enegineering is not the kind of field that should require adoption of some universal coping mechanism. The fact that you're suddenly bing told to adapt to something harming you should raise all kind of qustions and red flags.
HTML is an extensible language. Markdown is not.
Here is some actual data, which (predictably) shows that conservatives are targeted significantly more for suspensions:
But that's besides the point, because it's much simpler than that. You don't need elaborate analysis to see that people tired of Twitter "moderation" filled 4 other platforms: Gab, Parler, Minds and Truth Social. Literally all of them are characterized as right-wing by the same left-wing media outlets that claim that Twitter is impartial in moderation.
I'm tired of gaslighting around this issue. Just within replies to my above comment I've gotten two contradictory statements. One, that there is no bias in Twitter moderation, because conservatives are actually targeted less. Two, that there is no bias because conservatives are more likely to break rules, so they should be banned more often. We have two diametrically opposite descriptions of reality that nevertheless converge on the same conclusion. This is ideology-driven reasoning at its worst.
At the same time, it's trivial to demonstrate that YouTube and Twitter (easy examples) primarily target conservatives with their "moderation". Just look at who primarily uses major alternative platforms.
>Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam.
The whole threads seems like it revolves around this line of reasoning, which strawmans what free speech advocates are actually arguing for. I've never heard of any of them, no matter how principled, fighting for the "right" of spammers to spam.
There is an obvious difference between spam moderation and content suppression. No recipient of spam wants to receive spam. On the other hand, labels like "harmful content" are most often used to stop communication between willing participants by a 3d party who doesn't like the conversation. They are fundamentally different scenarios, regardless of how much you agree or disagree with specific moderation decisions.
By ignoring the fact that communication always has two parties you construct a broken mental model of the whole problem space. The model will then lead you stray in analyzing a variety of scenarios.
In fact, this is a very old trick of pro-censorship activists. Focus on the speaker, ignore the listeners. This way when you ban, say, someone with millions of subscribers on YouTube you can disingenuously pretend that it's an action affecting only one person. You can then draw false equivalency between someone who actually has a million subscribers and a spammer who sent a message to million email addresses.
Why was the company blatantly denying obvious issues for so many years? What has changed? Why should I trust their judgment all of a sudden?
It's kind of like someone who is a pathologic liar having been caught in various lies for many years, swearing to tell you the truth, but not admitting to the past lies.
https://www.manufacturing.net/labor/news/13118134/union-paci...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/union-pacific-to-cut-nearly-3-0...
https://www.thepacker.com/news/transportation/union-pacific-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/sd9kqw/union_paci...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/s6c04a...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/14/los-angeles-...
https://www.cfindustries.com/newsroom/2022/union-pacific-shi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxp8lUXDz0
Meanwhile at the top:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF_5jng3RYM
TLDR version. UP switched to some fancy "efficient" system several years ago, laid off thousands of employees. At the time many people predicted collapse of the company in a couple of years. Three years later it is plagued by rampant theft and trash on the tracks. This year it refused to ship fertilizer during planting season. It also refused to ship additives to diesel fuel earlier this year (amidst general truck shipping issues and skyrocketing fuel costs). Meanwhile the CEO is smiling like a Cheshire Cat and giving out Bloomberg interviews about efficient management.
When a company puts Jon Lennon's Merry Xmas (War is Over) behind age restriction banner[1], the question stops being "Is there censorship?" and becomes about the logic of such censorship.
>The third one was temporary until Google stopped operating in Russia altogether.
They've censored other things on behest of the Russian government for years[2]. Again, I cannot fathom how people on a tech website like HN can be unaware of such things. This is common knowledge broadly covered on mainstream websites.
---
[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-john-lennon-war-is-over-wa...
[2] https://www.rferl.org/a/google-censors-search-results-after-...
https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-responds-to-cpac-censorshi...
https://reclaimthenet.org/google-expanded-its-censorship-of-...
https://reclaimthenet.org/russia-continues-to-order-google-t...
In US they pretend to "decide" to censor things "on their own" because 1st amendment prevents the government from officially demanding censorship.
Also, the notion that "raising awareness" is going to prevent deep fakes from being used in practice shows complete and utter disconnect from reality. Most people who are skeptical are already aware how imminently fakeable all the media really is. Most people who still are unaware will remain so, no matter how many GitHub repositories some dipshits will publish.
Another disappointing thing is the fact that Go type inference is not good enough to have syntactically compact lambda functions. So now, even though it's possible to write code that does filter-map-reduce kind of stuff, it's verbose, slow to write and hard to read.
What people want to know is not whether the current state of things is "normal". After all, death, sickness, war, hunger, disease and crime are all perfectly normal. Everyone gets that at some level. What most people want to know is what the fuck happened with the metanarrative that we were fed for the last several decades. Is it defunct and debunked? If it is, that has obvious implications in terms of who we should trust and who we should empower.
Secondly, Go creates a silly dichotomy by introducing two completely different mechanisms for error processing: error values and panics. (Soon to be three, because people will start using generics.)
Thirdly, "errors are values" approach is extremely counterproductive when you have to create generic error handling (with logging, default behaviors on failur,e etc). Something as simple as printing why a web page panicked becomes an exercise in cleverness.
Go enthusiasts will probably say none of this matters if you follow some set of "good practices". However, even core language libraries often fail to handle errors consistently. (E.g. text/template.)
For example, Go error handling is shit. People will attempt to fix it with generics now and that will create a lot of inconsistency between different APIs. Because of those inconsistencies the entire language will loose any possibility of elegant, high-level, pre-packaged solutions for certain things (like automated logging, recovery, etc.) This loss will be permanent and the vast majority of users won't even understand why some things are so hard.
So why are you panicking just because Musk bought the company?
This is laughable gaslighting. That whole thread is misdirection. Yishan is a liar and should be called out on it.
Moderation is not "easy" because it requires careful design and effort, but it is not "hard" in the way he describes it.
None of the major social media companies made any real effort to make moderation transparent.
None of the major social media companies made a real effort to come up with a solid set of content rules that most people can agree with upfront (at least in principle) and that doesn't change after every major news story.
How can they claim this stuff is "hard" when they never even tried to take the most obvious measures to re-establish some level of trust in their companies? Trust that they've had initially and squandered though their actions, BTW.
Edit:
Also, I am sick and tired of social media CEOs, VPs and founders pointing a finger at their users and saying "you, users, are the real problem here". This is bullshit. An average interaction on (moderated!) social media is significantly worse than an average interaction in (unmoderated) real life. It's about medium structure, not people. The vast majority of people are fine.
Maybe you're brainwashed to the point where everything Twitter bans falls into categories of "hate speech" or "extreme disinformation". That doesn't mean the majority of people out there share your views. Of course, you don't have to deal with those people, because you probably hang out only on websites that reinforce your biases via censorship.
>I'd love an example of how yourself or other you follow are censored.
Unity 2020 campaign account got permanently banned and links to its website were restricted even in private messages. They broke no rules, posted nothing edgy and no one ever coherently explained why this happened.
New York Post got suspended after Tweeting Hunter Biden laptop article link. The suspension was based on clearly fabricated rationale.
These are just two egregious cases that I'm well familiar with. I can post about a dozen more. There are thousands less notable, but no less clear-cut examples out there. There are even more examples that are debatable, but which in totality indicate a pattern or political manipulation.
Funny thing is, I don't even use Twitter. The question is, why does a person like me is more aware of its censorship that someone who claims to be well familiar with the platform?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/04/08/musk-twitt...
"Musk’s appointment to Twitter’s board shows that we need regulation of social-media platforms to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication."
...said a multi-millionaire in a newspaper owned by a multibillionaire.
There were also hundreds of notable comments and dozens of articles to that end across the usual websites. People should stop doubling down on their lies and just admit that their past positions weren't based on any real principles.
People endlessly reference the Dunning-Kruger effect as a meme, without ever having read the paper, let alone having checked its methods. You don't seem to have a problem with that.
On the other hand, after seeing an article that uses essentially statistical arguments to debate a scientific study you conclude that there is some "anti-intellectual, anti-scientific streak" in our society and that it should be of grave concern.
This doesn't make any sense except as an extreme case of virtue-signaling.
The only "explanation" this article offers is a link to a meandering video that doesn't answer any of these questions.
After "establishing" the premise, the article immediately launches into demands for more resources:
"We need to be able to have that agility"
"We need to be able to change"
"The U.S. needs to think a lot more innovatively"
"This includes incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning into next-generation systems to be able to respond faster"
Over time articles like this one make people accumulate an extensive set of assumptions that basically aren't supported by anything except endless repetition.
For example, a brief excursion to the nearest Geocities archive will immediately demonstrate that access to the Internet was by no means something exclusive to tech nerds and academics even around year 2000.
Plus, the notion that "access" is even the right thing to measure is nonsensical. It's pretty obvious that big tech employees want to get a pat on the back for the fact that every homeless drug addict in US probably has a smartphone now. The real question is whether this "access" is actually beneficial to the poor or just creates a larger pool of individuals for big tech to parasitize and profiteer from.
Moreover, you likely supported this when it manifested a bit differently. Most of HN seems to firmly believe in guilt-by-association as a way to control behavior, speech and thought. You get all preachy and act horrified when it goes "too far" (i.e. when it looks like something that might happen to you personally), but in general it's a concept endorsed or at least tolerated by the majority here. Well, you know what they say about Karma.