Started reading, ok... not bad... then the Musk wank fest comes in. Anything beyond that is pointless to read and everything before is devalued heavily. In the market-forum of ideas and thought, worthless to me.
No point in listening to the tax plan from someone who wants my family wiped off the earth.
Of course you did—you proved to yourself that you have a closed, small mind that gets brainworms because you want to make everything a matter of politics. Every time I've posted a story that included any mention of Musk it guarantees it will get flagged on HN. It doesn't even matter if the story doesn't have anything directly to do with Musk or how tangential the connection is—the haters just instinctively flag it, like a Pavlovian response. How utterly surprising.
Yep. This is what is really needed for civil discussion. It is hard to work with otherwise as you get what my local small town FB feed normally is like. We are past the limit of peak assholery that only a system like that can even begin to filter things down.
For example:
Tiny local news source posted about an accident on the highway on a FB feed yesterday afternoon. Top 3 FB comments were about one of the people involved in the accident and blaming them because of the color of their skin, so he probably caused it. Over 50% of the posts were racist and semi racist rants spewing everything ranging from 'he was most likely going to a drug deal' to 'this is why we shouldn't let them out of the nearby city'. 10% were normal 'oh, that is why it was messed up.' 5% were 'wtf, calm down racists' and those posts got major responses about 'get out of my small town if you don't like it'.
Moderating heavily just means that the group in power will censor the other side’s opinions. We already have that, it is called Reddit. I’m not sure that is a solution. Maybe you can claim that there is less conflict, but in reality it just turns into a one sided echo chamber.
> Moderating heavily just means that the group in power will censor the other side’s opinions.
They key is not to moderate based on content, but on tone. "Tone" isn't really a good word, because tone is hard to get through a textual medium. I think what I mean is that you moderate things like ad hominem attacks and people being disrespectful or uncivil. Criticism is fine as long as it's constructive and delivered respectfully. But you don't moderate based on what someone's views are.
I know that's hard, and even people who actively try to watch their biases and avoid making decisions influenced by them will still screw up sometimes. But it's not impossible.
"Polite" racism is still racism. You can't really express the idea that certain people are inherently inferior to their faces without it being offensive, no matter what wording you choose.
No? Tell a bunch of men that men are more likely to end up in prison because they're more likely to break the law and you won't see much disagreement, let alone offence taking.
Well functioning societies define politeness very narrowly. It's about please and thankyou, not yelling, and other mechanical aspects unrelated to the content. The definition you're using here leads to forum outcomes like not being able to discuss workout techniques because that might imply there's such a thing as an ideal weight, or not being able to talk about last weekend's hike because enjoying the countryside is a dog-whistle for racism (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/07/british-countrys...). Once you decide that discussing group differences is impolite and therefore verboten, the only logical outcome is to conclude that there is no reason for any group differences to exist, but they do which means it must be due to oppression.
In other words, defining politeness that way ends in requiring everyone to be Marxist. That has outcomes that are objectively worse than societies that use a narrow definition (e.g. compare hunger levels in America vs North Korea).
It's perfectly reasonable to set up a forum where everyone is required to be committed to the tenets of Marxism under the guise of politeness, but you can't have such a forum and also have it be intellectually curious or truth seeking.
> left-leaning people often can't stand to be in the presence of right wing arguments. They fear "contamination" of some sort, so they either find ways to abuse the rules to kick the right wing people out or they leave.
Ehhhh... most times I've seen left-wing people avoid right-wing arguments it's been due to factors like racism -- or, often, 'not even wrong'-ness. This is in my experience the largest factor.
As for Europe and free speech, while you can't really speak about Europe as a whole even as much as you can the US, it seems to follow a policy that's closer to the forum this article is about. Germany has laws on hate speech and anti-Semitism, for example. That's not 'free speech' but it is moderation on a national scale.
> the group in power will censor the other side’s opinions
You mean on individual subreddits, or is this a snide jab at Reddit-the-company?
I think a big part of how online moderation goes bad comes when secret moderation is permitted, which prevents a community-at-large from noticing or organizing against abusive behavior.
>Does reddit thought-police subreddits, or do they thought police curate the site as a whole?
Yes.
2 million updoots say this is the rightthink, reddit user, you want to think right don't you?
Truth is clearly subjective. If you don’t believe that, you’ve not studied history or believe too strongly in your chosen tribal beliefs. I don’t have to rehash this - if you’re curious read about it. But briefly, most of the words you use like bigotry or racism or violence or fantasies are all totally subjective, frequently misused, and completely inappropriate as tools to suppress speech in any free society.
If you believe these words are misused, that implies you recognize a context in which they can be used properly, eg that concepts like "violence" and "racism" have specific, commonly understood meanings and are not "all totally subjective."
I see what you’re saying but also don’t think I totally agree. I count purposeful ambiguity and purposeful false equivalence between situations that aren’t describable by the same words as misuse. But to answer more directly - those two terms have had historical definitions that were more clear, but have been manipulated recently for activist purposes. For example the word “racism” is now thought by many (on the progressive left) to mean any inequality of outcomes because of Kendi’s writings on “anti racism” and the DEI movement (the E being for equity).
Truth in the philosophical sense is subjective but this is simultaneously true and completely useless. We deal with the universe usefully only by putting a limit on the fuzziness we accept.
> Bigotry or racism or violence or ... are all totally subjective
These are all trivially objectively defined to the satisfaction of reasonable parties. What you do to people who try to deliberately play in the margins and rules lawyer is just save time by banning them right off.
> completely inappropriate as tools to suppress speech in any free society
You can't do any of them on this forum because a forum that allowed it would be trash and we wouldn't be having this reasonable discussion there.
It's completely reasonable for a society to limit dialogue around open bigotry and violence. You push said discussion out of the public eye where its both less apt to spread and less likely by dint of its secrecy to seem to others like a reasonable and acceptable thing. Note how hard it is to promote your shit via Gab vs Youtube.
> These are all trivially objectively defined to the satisfaction of reasonable parties.
I think "reasonable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. For instance, there's plenty of online debate about whether "transwomen shouldn't be allowed to compete in women's running" is bigotry or not, which side have you termed "unreasonable"?
I also think these words can have several quite reasonable but different definitions. For a trivial example, does "racist" apply only to "ought" statements or to "is" statements?
Your first example is the perfect example of defining reasonable parties. The issue is really simple. There is a championship where contestants are categorized or separated based on physical attributes. What the contestant feels about himself is completely irrelevant, that was not the point of the separation. Nor was the toy between the contestants leg.
Reasonable and trivial. And, perfectly matching OP's observation, the "issue" (there is none) is then completely muddered up with people's feelings and other things that are not related to the original 'issue': a championship has different categories based on physical attributes.
It's like a bunch of high school students having a lot of drama over nothing, and pretending they are discussing the most important issues in the world.
> A forum where you can't promote bigotry, fascism, violence, or outright fantasies is a healthier forum.
HN is that forum, yet HN isn't an echo chamber there are still plenty of healthy discussions including most sides. When reddit turned into an echo chamber that wasn't a good thing.
When you come from an echo chamber then a fair place will look like an echo chamber against your views.
I've seen posts from most views get upvoted to the top here. Compare to for example r/politics, I've never ever seen a conservative post get even close to the top there. That is what an echo chamber looks like, here on HN you will get exposed to good arguments from most sides.
I mean you actually can promote bigotry and even fascism on here as long as you’re civil about it. Fascists often have a hard time being civil, but bigots can be very adept at it.
No, you can be a bigot and fascist and talk about what you think, but I've never seen fascism or bigotry causes being promoted here. Stating your opinion isn't the same thing as promoting a cause.
Ha, well this is exactly the kind of fine semantic discussion that this topic usually generates. I’m not sure I understand exactly what distinction you’re making here or why it’s especially important.
I think the general policy of “if you want to say stuff like that go to a lava pit like Gab where they affirmatively want to hear it” is good and should just be the moderation policy in any mainstream situation. People who say outright racist stuff like that are generally a highly vocal minority who often end up pushing away the less vocal normies who make up most of the audience.
I agree with this. I think of the few websites where moderation truly is very light such as 4chan and how the discussion on those websites can get truly disturbing. Even the fairly innocuous boards dedicated to the discussion of hobbies are full of slurs and insults.
I greatly appreciate free speech in principle and don’t have any problem with websites like 4chan existing, but those spaces don’t feel conducive to the kind of thing the article talks about.
The free speech absolutists in these comments seem to disparage the heavy handed moderation tactics on this neighbor forum, but it sounds like that kind of management is working out extremely well for it.
I totally get your concerns with discourse online quickly going to unhelpful or seemingly dangerous areas, we've all seen it.
If the only solution is moderation though, aka censorship, I'd argue that the real problem is the medium itself and not how we're using it. It seems totally reasonable that having meaningful and useful dialog via a medium that allows anonymous participation may just not work.
Censorship is an extremely dangerous road. It often starts out well intentioned, as is the road to hell and all that. There were very important reasons the US founding fathers specifically carved out free speech as a fundamental right. Without it, censorship will inevitably used against the public. If censorship is the only way to have discussions online then we should just give up on that fantasy and have instead have meaningful conversations in public, say on your front porch with those that live in your community.
Moderation is censorship though, it doesn't matter who is doing it. I raised the founding father's only to make the point that people have already learned the hard way that censorship carries very real risks, not to directly equate government censorship and censorship in private groups or on private platforms. The former is legally protected, the latter generally isn't.
My GP comment isn't arguing that censorship online is dangerous because of governments, its that censorship of speech in general is dangerous. People need to be able to freely speak their mind.
Online that can easily get out of control. You could argue that we just need benevolent censors to deal with it. I'm arguing that anonymous online discussions just don't created an environment where quality conversations will happen.
> I raised the founding father's only to make the point that people have already learned the hard way that censorship carries very real risks
I don't think that really makes the point, though. The founding fathers recognized that government censorship is dangerous because the government has the power to take away your freedom and possessions, even your life. Putting censorship and police power together is a recipe for autocracy, oppression, and human rights violations.
Censorship by private individuals and organizations just doesn't have the same punch. Consider that the first amendment is only concerned with government censorship; the founding fathers could have banned all forms of censorship if they thought it was a reasonable and necessary thing to do.
> I'm arguing that anonymous online discussions just don't created an environment where quality conversations will happen.
That's trivially disprovable: we're having one right now, on an online forum that has moderation (or "censorship", if you must).
The appeal to authority via the "founding fathers" probably isn't the best argument one could make. The centuries have propped up a legendary version of them that is a bit different from the reality. In reality they weren't all Christians; Jefferson in particular. Jefferson also said the constitution should be rewritten every 19 years. History has lost the voices of those who dissented.
The point is that the values we have ascribed to them may not be accurate. I don't think they meant "free speech" to be a freedom orgy, but a tool to prevent abuse by those in power. Remember, moderation itself is a form of speech. The most democratic approach is public, transparent moderation. While it isn't perfect, I feel like HN does the best job of this I've seen.
> In reality they weren't all Christians; Jefferson in particular.
That's an interesting inclusion if you're wanting to avoid appeals to authority. Why does it matter whether they were Christian?
It is a fine line between appealing to authority and pulling historical examples of lessons learned the hard way. I don't know what else to refer to those who wrote the constitution as, if "founding fathers" has some subtle whiff of appealing to authority I'm haply to refer to them as something else. The point remains, though, that freedom of speech was protected so early on based on what people of that time saw happen without free speech.
My point was that the the first amendment says very little, so intuiting what they would think about situations other than Congress restricting free speech takes quite a big leap of inference, which often comes from a place of false information about what they truly believed. I was getting to the idea that much of what we believe about them is wrong or incomplete, so why would their values here hold any more to our preconceptions?
There's actually a still a surprisingly long collection of the founders' writings. Jefferson alone has a 1,000 page book full of his writings from notes and letters related to the Virginia state house to a letter he wrote to the king enumerating a list of grievances.
Knowing their values is extremely important. As you note, many of the amendments are short and when legally challenged the court is generally left interpreting what was meant and intended by the amendment. How could we interpret what was meant or intended by the law without knowing everything we can about those who wrote and passed the legislation?
While I don’t disagree at all high level that power can (and does) corrupt the censors (-ers?), moderation can certainly feel like censorship when you want to say something in or act a certain way within a social group where others don’t want and shouldn’t have to hear or know about it. If your speech can be “moderated” within some social group (ex: they don’t interact with you), then why shouldn’t that group be permitted to revoke your permission to speak in their digital version of that group? Maybe this just doesn’t scale, or we haven’t figured out how to scale it yet.
Moderation ain’t censorship if you’re being a dick.
Freedom from censorship does not allow you to shout “Fire!”, in a crowded theatre, and all that.
A forum dedicated to a neighbourhood trying to be neighbourly does not need the fake panic of racism and xenophobia strewn through it. It’s fine to prohibit that behaviour.
The 'Fire' example is overused. The speech alone can directly cause physical harm. Racist, xenophobic and other distasteful speech does not. Free speech, in the USA means you have a right to distasteful speech, actively harming someone with speech is just as bad as harming them with a stick, therefore it can be prohibited.
The fire example does not directly cause physical harm - unless they're Dragonborn, I suppose. What does, as with racism and other hate speech, is how people react to it. Do they panic and rush out the door? Do they act on the racist rhetoric?
One of the more damaging aspects of the cancel culture, woke culture, etc (pick your overused generalization term) is that they normalized the idea of retroactively blaming someone for how others respond to them.
I can't control how people respond to what I say. I can attempt to predict and account for what I think responses will be, but I can be wildly wrong.
The whole way through it has felt to me like a lazy shortcut around the fact that proving intent is extremely hard. Ignoring intent completely is much easier, and that's exactly what a person is doing when they judge someone based on how others respond as a replacement for understanding what that person originally meant.
I've encountered this idea before from people with anti-woke tendencies; that they think woke people are holding them responsible for causing offense as though causing offense is the harm that the woke crowd believes needs to be stopped. Anyway, I just thought that view on things was funny. If anyone claiming to be woke does think this than they are more of a prude/puritanist/pedant than woke. I understand the thought that anti-woke people have but it's just a misunderstanding. The concern around hateful speech is around actual harm such as systematic ostracization of a group.
There are already censors, just try and post a copy of the latest Disney movie or CSAM. The sooner we acknowledge that there are censors, the sooner we can figure out how to have constructive discussion online.
Of course there are already censors, and I'd say that's a problem. Sharing CSAM or a copyright protected media file isn't speech though, and isn't protected by free speech laws.
Creating CSAM and posting it online is certainly speech, though, just as much as posting a legal form of original artwork is. But I'm 100% fine with the person responsible for that CSAM being censored and prosecuted, by the government, and that's exactly what will happen.
If you extend speech protections to cover creating and distributing CSAM you open the flood gates to a mountain of other actions that are crimes today.
What is the difference in creating CSAM and creating heroine that would make the former free speech and the later a crime?
You say "censorship" instead of "moderation" because the former has negative connotations, but I don't agree that all forms of censorship are bad. Removing spam is censorship, but I would hope we can agree that we'd both prefer spam gets removed. (If you don't agree, then honestly let's just stop discussing this now, because our fundamentals are different enough that we're not going to agree on anything on this topic.)
> the real problem is the medium itself and not how we're using it. It seems totally reasonable that having meaningful and useful dialog via a medium that allows anonymous participation may just not work.
There are plenty of people on HN who are anonymous/pseudonymous, and yet we have lots of meaningful and useful dialog here. Not 100%, but still lots. This subthread is a fine example. I only see your username, and you haven't filled out anything in your profile, so you are for all intents and purposes anonymous to me. And yet... here we are.
And on the other side of that coin, read some of the other comment threads under this post and you'll see that there are anecdotes describing plenty of very-not-anonymous people who post shitty things on Facebook in places where people who know them in real life will see it. People who even lived near each other and could easily run into each other in town. I haven't been on Facebook for a good 5 years or so now, but in the 15 years or so I was an active user, I too saw plenty of truly nasty arguments, involving people with their real names and photos right there. And there is moderation there. I cringe to think how much worse it would be without.
People suck. We hold our beliefs too closely, and feel threatened when anyone challenges them. Sometimes we get scared of things and lash out in unfortunate ways. And that's before we even get to the tons of people who are racist, sexist, and whatever other -ist you can think of, and feel no hesitation or shame in displaying their disrespectful, hurtful, inhuman(e) attitudes in public.
> Censorship is an extremely dangerous road.
In general I am very skeptical of slippery-slope arguments. They're often used to shut down discussion without presenting any actual evidence of a trend, but only hand-wavy, hypothetical fears that something bad might happen.
But sure, censorship can get out of hand; that's why rules and guidelines are important. The HN guidelines, as an example, read as somewhat informal, but I think they're pretty great. I think they're why HN is fairly successful at fostering community and thoughtful discussion. Sure, sometimes the bad kind of censorship does happen; no set of guidelines is perfect, and no humans enforcing those guidelines are perfect. But that's life. You try to have a mechanism to call out and review bad decisions, and learn from the mistakes.
> There were very important reasons the US founding fathers specifically carved out free speech as a fundamental right
And yet the US government can and does censor people from time to time, with the support of SCOTUS rulings. 1A's grant of freedom of speech would appear to be absolute just from reading the text, but in practice it very much is not.
> If censorship is the only way to have discussions online then we should just give up on that fantasy and have instead have meaningful conversations in public
Sure, you can go and do that if you want. But I'm fine "talking" in public online spaces knowing that some moderation actions might censor what I have to say, for reasons that I might agree or disagree with. I don't think I should have the right to say whatever I want, wherever I want, to whomever I want, without consequences. That's not how any society works.
And think about that: moderation ("censorship") happens out in the real world too. I've experienced social circles where someone has been ostracized for behaving badly, to the point of being excluded from the group. That's the most extreme form of moderation/censorship: being banned!
I am a fan. But not in the way it is mostly being used.
A lot of the songs that Suno generates are "good enough". I've been using it recently to do two things. First is to make a set of instrumental songs I call "Canoe Camping in Canada". Basically: Instrumental Americana Folk Accoustic. It is doing really good and generating ambient soundscape songs. I've spent about a week of free credits working and reworking parts of songs it generates.
The second is to make some 15 second showcard jingle music. I create short ads (15-30 seconds) for local companies and events that show at our independent one screen theater in-town before the movie starts. I just needs some audio to slap in while I show an image and some text about something. It works great for that too.
I was kind of curious about if what I was generating would be flagged as copyrighted, like if bits of the songs or melodies were directly out of something else. So, I upload them to Youtube to let their AI see if it can figure that out and haven't been flagged yet. I know that isn't a definitive answer, but to me it is "good enough".
We have the same fight going on where I moved to. Plop a huge subdivision or a Meglomart with a 50 acre parking lot down and no one bats an eye. If you want to put up some solar panels and the Redhat FREEDOM Screamers come flying out of the woodwork to tell you how this is stealing food because all the farmland will be gone, how cleanup from solar panels will be problems with using the farm for planting for years, and how the solar is destroying animal habitats.
What? Doesn't farmland already destroy animal habitats? And doesn't the subdivision or stripmall cause the same problems and worse for returning the land to farmland.
I'm not making these up. There are hundreds of those plastic signs all over here with a link to a website that has those as their top arguements against solar.
Kentucky Cons are currently blitzing local channels with anti solar ads and how it is killing the livelihood of the 23 remaining coal miners in the state.
This is due to contracts. When we get a movie booked for our 1 screen theater, we are stuck with that movie and only that movie for the time we run it. 1 screen = 1 movie. We aren't allowed to show anything else during that usual 2 to 3 week timeframe. With one sort of gotcha being the inbetween week going from a release to a release, since we aren't technically showing any movies from the Monday to Thursday. Advertising for special events in those times are even more trickier as we aren't allowed to post some of them on our website or facebook because of these terms.
The movie producers and distributors are very much at fault for this set up.
It would be super great to be able to run a kids/family movie on Fri + Sat Morning then do a more adult movie on Sat night/ Sunday, but it just isn't allowed.
The people killing movies in a theater is the movie companies, not the theaters.
I work at keeping our small town single screen theater going. So, my experience is from a viewpoint of that, not from some mega 24 screen behemoth that some of his rules could apply to better.
01 - We enforce. Mostly. During kids movies, having a kids being noisy is going to happen.
02 - Lol. We have 0 leverage on this. Though, we charge $7 adult, $5 kid/senior, $5 matinee.
03 - We run about 20 minutes of ads. Which end at the time the movie starts. If the marquee says we start the movie at 7 pm, we start the movie at 7 pm. We get a lot of people showing up at 10 after and being like "when does the movie start" and when you say "10 minutes ago" get frumpled.
04 - We do this as much as we can. But he is talking to producers once again, not theaters, for most of his suggestions.
05/06 - Our booker contract says since we have 1 screen, we may only have 1 movie each week. Most big movies, we have to keep in screen for 2 to 3 weeks. He does talk about this in 02 a little. This destroys us. It would be great to do a kids movie matinee on Sat morning/afternoon and an adult one in the evening. But this is totally out of our control.
For this specifically, Disney is the absolute draconian worst at enforcing all of this. We have had to drop getting some big blockbusters because of stupid ass crap like "You need to show this movie no less than 12 times opening week and 8 times a week for the next 3 weeks after that." What movie was that.. crud, it was a big one from this summer. That would basically be 2 showings for about 120 people and then 10 showings for like 10 people at most or 0 at expected.
07 - Not a theater problem, talk to distribution.
08 - WE FREAKING WISH WE COULD DO THIS. Not theater problem, talk to the NFL.
09 - I thought theaters did this. There are automatic curtain adjust systems.
This is giving me CompUSA flashbacks of going in to get a new Processor/GPU/MB and having the one salesman with the key stuck in a never-ending conversation with a customer who ends the whole thing with "Thanks for the info, I will think about it for a few weeks before buying."
And since the salesman with the key was thinking they were going to score a big bounty would usually just ask me to wait my turn.
I've read this one a few times and each time I see it I keep getting more and more pissed at Stripe.
Customer: Hey, someone is using your product to steal money as I am seeing a ton of fraudulent donation transactions. Can you undo these?
Stripe: lol, no, u fix it
Why did the customer have to even think of writing a script to begin to unfuck the situation here? Why did the customer have to do a ton of legwork to fix the situation?
No point in listening to the tax plan from someone who wants my family wiped off the earth.
X - Closed