timdev2

Just how expansive a concept are your advocating? If you're only saying that aside from not throwing you in jail, government shouldn't coerce (or even incentivize) private parties to censor in ways the government would be prohibited from censoring, then I think you're right. But it's still not clear to me what concept of "free speech" you're actually advocating for.

What is this concept/principle you're advocating? That all expression should be allowed everywhere always and nobody should ever censor anyone else?

Sure. My point is that when you consider the range of such possible mechanisms, no matter where you draw the line between permissible and impermissible, we're still talking about what it's okay for the state (not private entities) to do.

It's probably my fault, but I find myself unable to read between your lines and tease out your point.

I read "cathedral" as being exclusive of the state. Reading it as inclusive confuses me even more, I think.

If the state outsourcing censorship, then the state alone is culpable. I think we can have some legitimate and interesting arguments about where the line ought to be drawn. For instance, if a private entity asks the state for guidance about content moderation, is it (or ought it be) legal for the state to provide it?

But that entire discussion falls well within the contours of the established legal framework. So I'm not sure what concept you were referring to originally.

I'm curious when that happened. I hear people say it all the time. But I'm old enough to have grown up before the commercial internet, and I don't remember there being any widespread conception of "free speech" apart from limitations on state censorship.

For instance, I suspect if some antisemitic nuts in say, the 1960s, had wanted to buy a full page ad in the NYT with some elders-of-zion type conspiracy ad, complete with hook-nosed caricature of a jewish banker, and the NYT refused to run the ad, nobody would have raised any objection on "free speech" grounds.

Can you think of any examples of extra-legal "free speech as a popular concept", pre-Internet?

There are a number of utilities to improve window management on MacOS. I find rectangle[0] works reliably, without trying to do too much. Easy keyboard shortcuts to maximize, snap to 50% left/right, or quadrants.

[0]: https://rectangleapp.com/

I sold GME for a tidy profit on RH while buying was disallowed. Not hypothetically; I really did. Are you saying RH should have forced me to hodl? How would that have been a better customer experience?

Careful with the shopping mall analogy. Someone will inevitably bring up Pruneyard[0] and derail things. I think "a bar" is probably the best analogy out there. There might only be one in town. It's open to the (adult) public. People discuss issues. The barkeep can 86 you if he doesn't like your behavior, or shoes, or politics, and your rights will not have been violated.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

Weird. On a computer, `"kitchenboss" "g320" "disassembly"` returns exactly six results, all of which appear to include the quoted terms. Plus the "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" message at the top. Which sounds like exactly what you want. I wonder why it's different on mobile.

Unless it's changed in the past 56 minutes, the SERP is pretty up-front that it can't find any pages with all three of those.

It literally says `No results found for "kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly".` right at the top, and then shows you the (properly explained) results for the non-quoted version of the query.

Absent any current requirements for computational throughput, I think "future-proofing" with Go is likely premature optimization. You know Python well, it's a capable and widely-used language and platform. You can almost certainly scale it well enough by throwing inexpensive resources at it as needed for the foreseeable future.

Somewhat tangentially: if you're also already comfortable with javascript, you might consider using it (or typescript) on the back-end as well. I've recently been looking at remix (https://remix.run) which seems like a pretty smart approach to doing that. The idea is roughly that you build a thing that looks like a traditional server-side app, but with server-rendered react components, and the framework supports you in layering on client-side progressive enhancement. I haven't done anything serious with it, but it's piqued my interest enough that I might overcome my aversion to running javascript on the server (mostly due to healthy paranoia about the state of the npm ecosystem).

What strict-liability statute are you referring to?

Perhaps so they can report you the credit rating agencies if you go into arrears.

If that's the case, it would be an incremental improvement if the credit agencies implemented some tokenization scheme, sort of like credit card gateways do.

Not that anyone should trust the credit agencies either, but you'd still be removing unnecessary points of potential compromise.

I'm not sure I understand your taxonomy. In my mind, an image board is a type of forum (generally anonymous and ephemeral). Reddit is more like a forum than a typical forum than popular imageboards, since users have long-lived identities and posts are permanent by default.

As far as "most cat pictures and memes", maybe it is, by volume. But that doesn't diminish the substantial corpus of more substantive, forum-like, discussion hosted on the site.

I feel like you didn't really address anything past the second sentence of the comment you were responding to.

> Economics works itself out if you let it.

Sure. But exclusive single-family zoning, for example, isn't exactly "letting it".

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't complaining that VAERS was a bad source of data. I was pointing out that your post is hard to distinguish from the large body of bad posts that misinterpret those data because their authors fundamentally misconstrue what the data actually represent.

Discrimination is largely legal. You absolutely can discriminate on any characteristic you like, with several well defined exceptions (such as race or sex).

If you're going to use VAERS data to support your argument, you really must take extra care to demonstrate that you understand what those data actually are, and explain why your conclusions should be taken seriously.

Otherwise, you risk being lumped in with the multitude of bad takes made by people who misunderstand what VAERS is, and don't understand statistics.

> US Covid deaths peaked in early January, three months before US daily vaccines peaked in mid-April, and VAERS deaths peaked in March-April.

I find an April peak in VAERS deaths entirely unsurprising, since that's exactly when the rate of vaccination was highest.

I think option 2 is a non-starter. If you're going have newspaper-like liability, I don't think anyone can afford to do that.

That leaves option 1. I suppose such a thing could exist, but it would be very different from social media as it exists. It sounds like a mash-up of twitter (accounts, follows, retweets) and 4chan (minimal moderation). Which would be interesting.

But you're still talking about basically making anything resembling current social media sites illegal.

You're also probably making any niche forum illegal too, unless it's niche enough that the operator can reasonably subject every post to prepublication review to try to avoid liability.

Doesn't that basically round to "outlaw social media"?

Sure. That's problematic. But that's no excuse to not place blame where it should rightfully be laid, and instead place it elsewhere just because doing so is easier. There are rights at stake here.

As other have pointed out, you're describing protected classes. If you're advocating that political viewpoint should be a protected class, that's fine.

It's worth noting, though, that while I'm not allowed to ban Muslims from my bible study forum site, I'd be well within my rights to prohibit them (and anyone else) from evangelizing islam there.

> No, it's actually unconstitutional when you have Senators like Hirono requesting and goading them into removing people they don't like.

I agree that elected officials shouldn't try to make an end-run around the 1st Amendment by threatening to regulate companies if they don't censor on behalf of those officials.

When they do, shouldn't we should place the blame at the feet of those elected officials, not the companies they're attempting to extort?

> Why should a social media provider, who is ultimately a dumb conduit for the public town square like any other telecom service, be able to do so?

I think you're begging the question here. It's not clear they're conduits - they're arguably at one end of the conduit. They arguably abut the town square (the internet at large), but that's not the same as being the town square.

> Why not just treat political opinion as a protected trait as well?

Lots of reasons. If you think about it for a minute or two, you can probably think of several.

> They are effectively governments when it comes to their ability to shut down speech

You mean "their ability to shut down speech on their own property, and nowhere else", which is different. So, yes, they're effectively governments on their own turf, much like the owner of a popular bar. Even if the bar is the the de-facto "town square" of some isolated hamlet where the townsfolk routinely gather to discuss the issues of the day.

The first amendment constrains the government. A social media site censoring your post does not infringe on your first amendment rights. It limits your speech, but the 1A protects your right to be free of government interference with your speech.

Are you familiar with the rule of goats?

This has worked very well for me, too. I suppose it might start to break down if you're using some of the more complex AWS-specific offerings.

But if your function more or less resembles a little web app that maybe talks to S3 and DynamoDB, this works really well.

Right. And you can use something like terraform-inventory[0] as a dynamic inventory source in Ansible. So TF manages all the bits and bobs floating around in AWS, and then ansible takes over to manage configuration on whatever EC2 instances are involved.

[0]: https://github.com/adammck/terraform-inventory

The practical reason it wasn't overturned is that it wasn't appealed (IIRC, they reached a settlement). Had there been an appeal, it's possible the court would have recognized that exercising some editorial control over third-party content doesn't make you into a newspaper-like publisher. They might have set the bar some place like "actual knowledge of the content, pre-publication". That might have created a precedent where there was something resembling distributor liability - where a platform wouldn't be liable unless they were put on notice and failed to take down defamatory speech.

That would still be a problem (because it would allow companies to censor critics, even if the criticism wasn't actually defamatory), but at least we wouldn't have incoherent arguments about a non-existent publisher/platform dichotomy.

That city-journal piece is pretty awful. For instance, regarding the bit you quoted, they absolutely can claim that 230 protects free speech. Private censorship on private property is free speech.

Congress almost certainly can't pass a law that outlaws viewpoint discrimination for web sites that would survive 1A scrutiny. Fiddling with defamation liability to get around the constitution might work, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Okay. But when Twitter or whoever takes your post down, how does treating them "as a publisher" help you? It doesn't. They have a 1st Amendment right to do that.