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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> content that isn’t advertising friendly and could be taken down.

That is a dangerous road. Today they might be taking down otherwise legal content with which advertisers do not want to be associated. Tomorrow they are being asked to remove content with which advertisers disagree. Suddenly my 1000-word rant on the evils of Microsoft's latest OS is being taken down. Rather than being a free space for discussion, reddit will have become just another moderated online forum where nothing of note ever happens.

Reddit's power comes from negative posts. Facebook and twitter makes headlines when people 'like' things a billion times. They lack the capacity for users to express anger objectively. Reddit makes headlines when it empowers 50,000 gamers to dump on EA. Advertisers like EA should be be paying for such feedback. They evidently already listen to it.

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Isn’t this a slippery slope argument?

Is the slippery slope argument a fallacy when companies have shown that pushing their agenda piece by piece is their M.O.?

Reddit has already shown that they had the capability and the will to edit users posts, not just removing them. Reddit and other social sites already uses all sorts of algorithms to move content they want to the top and to bury content they don't want. Companies don't want negative PR about themselves or their products. Companies advertising on Reddit are Reddit's actual customers.

You put those facts together and being afraid of Reddit eventually censoring posts critical of customers doesn't seem like fallacious thinking.

You don't throw a chicken into a cage with a starving tiger and call it a slippery slope to say that the chicken is going to get eaten

It's the only argument that reliably gets trotted out whenever someone mentions curbing hate speech.

This isn't about hate speech. Hate speech is illegal and should be removed. This is about material that advertisers don't like. Advertisers aren't cops. They don't necessarily care about illegality. Rather, they might tolerate some degree of hate so long as it gets eyeballs. This is about marketing.

> Hate speech is illegal and should be removed.

This is a lie. Hate speech is not illegal, and the SCOTUS has explicitly made this clear.

To not have an understanding of the critical importance for private individuals to speak freely shows an extraordinary lack of knowledge of history, for one. And you declare you are an attorney in your HN "about" page?

Depends on where it is. In parts of Europe, it is.

Because it's true.

Then why are you here? HN is extremely heavily moderated.

Counterexample: HN.

'Slippery slope' arguments are not inherently invalid.

Please explain. I was under the impression the reason why slippery slope arguments are unacceptable is because events do not necessarily cause more extreme events to occur.

Yeah, I've always found it "curious" (as in, bullshit) that Slippery Slope arguments are invalid, but arguments that invoke the Overton Window are perfectly fine.

They're the same concept. And that concept is also in physics. "Things in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by an external force".

Not really. "Slippery Slope"-type arguments are fallacious when there is no evidence provided to support the slope. The fallacy is arguing that the closeness of each "step" in the slope necessarily means that these steps will likely happen, but not providing evidence to support that these steps will occur. If one provides evidence which support that certain steps will likely occur, then it's not a fallacy.

As an aside, there is something called the "fallacy fallacy" wherein pointing out a fallacy in someone else's argument doesn't necessarily mean that the argument's conclusion is false.

With that said, I'm not making an assessment of the above poster's reasoning.

> Rather than being a free space for discussion, reddit will have become just another moderated online forum where nothing of note ever happens.

It already is. Even if you removed the mods, the hive-mind would moderate unpopular ideas to oblivion anyway.

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