> How would my being mildly politically active on HN contradict my belief that it is rational for me to encourage the distribution of legal speech, without regard for agreement with the content? [...] I just don’t see what that has to do with the thrust of my objection.
Yeah I'm not really making my point clear here, sorry.
My point is that a "values-neutral" platform doesn't exist, and every attempt to build such a thing is usually only "values-neutral" from the perspective of it's creator. For example, I'd argue there's a contradiction even in the way you phrased it here: "Legal speech" implies you are indeed giving "regard for agreement with the content", since this would imply suppressing content that is not in agreement with some legal framework you have in mind.
> I think it’s only censorship because of how HN fades the comment towards illegibility.
It's not just that. Upvotes promotes one position over the other, so when one considers statistical properties of how far people scroll down, or how likely people are to expand low-voted comments or go to another page (for platforms like Reddit, HN, etc), the effect can be the same.
It's interesting to see that as online platforms gradually replace "traditional" journalism for how people get information, we're rehashing a some of the same old arguments about what is "objective" journalism. Publishing ANYTHING, whether physical documents (eg newspapers) or HTML documents (eg HN, Facebook), will always promote some worldview and censor another based on what is included in the publication, and the ordering of the topics.
Sometimes this censorship is explicit (eg nixing a story, Google taking down a search result), other times it's done statistically (eg putting stuff "below the fold", a search result being on page 10), but our informational world is perpetually being shaped like this. Pretending that's it's even logically possible have unbiased platforms "without regard for agreement with the content" --- as an example, not you, but elsewhere here it was claimed 2010-2016 was mostly censorship-free --- is starting off on a wrong premise. If we start on a wrong premise, any further discussion is meaningless at best, and actively manipulative at worse (Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan comes to mind)
> (FWIW, I did not downvote you, and I do so rarely.)
Yeah I'm not really making my point clear here, sorry.
My point is that a "values-neutral" platform doesn't exist, and every attempt to build such a thing is usually only "values-neutral" from the perspective of it's creator. For example, I'd argue there's a contradiction even in the way you phrased it here: "Legal speech" implies you are indeed giving "regard for agreement with the content", since this would imply suppressing content that is not in agreement with some legal framework you have in mind.
> I think it’s only censorship because of how HN fades the comment towards illegibility.
It's not just that. Upvotes promotes one position over the other, so when one considers statistical properties of how far people scroll down, or how likely people are to expand low-voted comments or go to another page (for platforms like Reddit, HN, etc), the effect can be the same.
It's interesting to see that as online platforms gradually replace "traditional" journalism for how people get information, we're rehashing a some of the same old arguments about what is "objective" journalism. Publishing ANYTHING, whether physical documents (eg newspapers) or HTML documents (eg HN, Facebook), will always promote some worldview and censor another based on what is included in the publication, and the ordering of the topics.
Sometimes this censorship is explicit (eg nixing a story, Google taking down a search result), other times it's done statistically (eg putting stuff "below the fold", a search result being on page 10), but our informational world is perpetually being shaped like this. Pretending that's it's even logically possible have unbiased platforms "without regard for agreement with the content" --- as an example, not you, but elsewhere here it was claimed 2010-2016 was mostly censorship-free --- is starting off on a wrong premise. If we start on a wrong premise, any further discussion is meaningless at best, and actively manipulative at worse (Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan comes to mind)
> (FWIW, I did not downvote you, and I do so rarely.)
Thanks, I avoid this also!