29 karma · joined September 10, 2017
Why care how egregious your actions are when the government listens to you and your bags of money, and not the people you're fucking over?
TV is monopolized to hell and back and full of advertising people can't stand. The internet provides everything you could want, without the cancer that has infected television. People wouldn't cut TV out of their lives if TV actually provided what they want at a fair price.
So it's not a case of "It only came into law 3 years ago!" but rather "We put it back into law after being considered law for 30 years because of a court case that demanded clarification".
The way I see it, and probably why Google et al don't seem to be throwing up a recent fuss anymore, is that the big tech companies and industry giants can cut deals with the major ISP's to avoid throttling or provide services/expertise to the ISP's. So the end result is turning Google et al into their OWN monopolies. (e.g. Comcast partners with Youtube to deliver streaming video!)
Now you get telecom monopolies AND service/content monopolies.
Truly the best of both worlds.
No we don't. We have a stronger belief in the rule of law, but not an actual practice of rule of law. It's been getting worse and worse over the past two decades and at this point I see little difference between any particular western government and Russia's.
If you haven't noticed it, you've been willfully ignorant.
By living on a basic income provided to you by the government, you become dependent. That dependency is a weakness that gives the government greater power over you. What recourse do you have if the government removes your basic income? If we eliminate all other forms of income, say via automation, so there are no jobs you could turn to - what choice do you have? Go on to a rural agrarian existence, or die?
What delightful power and leverage a basic income gives the government over its population.
Without comments, people go elsewhere to discuss the issue - elsewhere that you don't control. With comments, they discus it on your site, where you can completely control who can say what and how visible those comments are.
Done correctly it's a form of soft censorship by controlling of the discussion and manufacturing consensus among the "commentators".
Hard censorship has more immediate backlash than this does.
Something I find a lot of people carelessly shrug off - moderation isn't always a good thing. The act of moderation is, at its essence, censorship. That's a lot of power to be misused by the wrong sort of people.
(and who is the wrong sort...?)
It's not the sort of place I'd go to for serious conversations about anything.
Modern media do this every day already with their yellow-journalist hit pieces, biased comments to drive a narrative aren't even a skip away from that.
That's pretty much it. Once the population gets too big and the level of discourse too low, the intelligent people will move to greener pastures with better signal:noise ratios. Slashdot's moderation system didn't save them, and HN's moderation system won't either.
I've yet to see a comment system that promotes signal:noise ratio over groupthink.
Let's take the fat people hate subreddit. Okay, you ban every user and the subreddit itself. Some people make new accounts, and a new subreddit about hating fat people, so you ban all those too.
Did that convince anyone that their opinions were wrong? Absolutely not. If anything, convinced them, in their eyes, that they were onto something and had to be silenced.
All it's done is driven people with those bigoted opinions away from Reddit. These people still exist (until we start exterminating them I guess) and will continue to speak their bigotry wherever it is they do end up. All that's really accomplished is just cleaning the website of speech you don't want anyone to see. Kind of like sweeping dust under a rug - still there, can't see it though. Out of sight, out of mind.
Someone else's pest-problem.
Though with rampant censorship these days, few people have to build up any kind of argument to counter these bigots. It's a lot easier to hit a downvote button, or a ban button, than to present a reasoned argument at all.
What a fantastic place the internet is evolving into. A haven for, well, some kind of speech. Not free of course. Restricted and safe speech. Perhaps speech licenses and internet ID's soon? If you say something bigoted we can throw you in jail and fire you. Harass your friends and family too. It's the only way to protect a free and open society.
The only thing censorship achieves is sweeping problems under the rug and pretending they've been solved.
Are gene-modded babies going to have genetic compulsions that make them predisposed to propaganda and suggestion? Biological kill-switches?
There's a lot of good and a lot of bad that is going to come out of these technologies.