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Comment by CoryG89 | Hacker News Reader

I don't necessarily hold this view, but I can see the merit in it. I tend to lean toward purist as far as free speech goes. Slippery slope arguments and what not.

Personally, I like the concept of outsourcing the policing/moderation of a community to the community itself. I think what online forums do by promoting moderators from the long time, trusted user base is a step in the right direction. The upvote/downvote system on HN, where the downvoted stuff gets increasingly more difficult read, is even better.

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Great freedoms come with great responsibilities. I tend to think that free speech works only when the consequences of using that free speech...y'know...exist. In a universe of pseudonymity and anonymity, those consequences don't exist. Even when you are literally committing the crime of assault (friendly reminder: assault is the threat of violence, battery is the violence) against somebody because they have the temerity to be a woman who makes video games or a black man who criticizes the police on the Internet.

To that end, showing people the door seems eminently reasonable. You aren't going to actually be able to visit upon them the prosecution (again, for literal and extant crimes) that they have earned for themselves, but you can, and IMO should, cut them out of the social universe that you undertake to create and protect.

If by "assaulted" you mean assaulted by words alone, then I am not sure that the right to not be assaulted should trump free speech.

I believe dealing with newly generated accounts can be dealt with as a separate problem, distinct from the community at large. Reputation and filtering messages/content, and or restrictions based on account age are some examples.

If you don't think there can be any consequences for free speech on the internet, then I don't see how you can give any credibility to threats of violence, which you can simply block out yourself instead of having to have big brother do it for you.

The problem with that is pragmatically the cost of real estate in a Potemkin village is apparently zero.

You can write a sellable poem that people like about wine, all its good and (mostly) bad. But good luck selling a poem about sucralose or aspartame.

But there WOULD be consequences. The consequences is that you would end up on a lot of people's ban lists.

That way you don't have to interact with people you don't want to.

The consequence for these crimes when they do not occur on the Internet is jail time. What, exactly, does a ban list mean by comparison?

Not true. I can mail anyone a letter, anonymously to their house. I can even drop it in a public mailbox w/ no return address and it will be delivered to you. Unless I mess this up some how there will be no jail time. This doesn't mean everyone wants the government to go through all of the letters and filter out the bad ones. Same goes on the internet.

Except Twitter is not mailing a letter - it's like renting up a billboard in front of Christie's house, that says that you're going to kill her and rape her.

Doing that will absolutely land you in a criminal court. 'She doesn't have to look at it' won't be a great defense, either.

Words have consequences, and centuries of precedent and legislature have established them.

Raw community policing doesn't work either. That's what Reddit does and looking at /r/politics, that hasn't worked very well because it's being kept 99.99999% pro-Hillary and/or anti-Trump by whoever is willing to put in the time to keep it astro-turfed, most likely CTR.

I would think this just suggests the community is made up of more people who lean toward those politics.

You would be wrong, you get banned for mentioning or posting anything pro-trump.

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