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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to think that comment sections on news sites are a really bad idea. At first I thought NPR and the like were cowards for removing theirs.

It's bad enough that NYT can be pretty biased on its own, but the comment sections are always full of low-tier thinking that just push whatever narrative is currently in the Overton window.

What I find distressing is how people remark that a telecom and advertising giant acting as a de facto government over the public square isn't a violation of free speech principles because they're a "private business", as if that's an original thought that's profound. Funny how people say "it's a private business" when it suits their own political interests.

We wouldn't blindly allow company-owned cities or states to pass laws, especially vague or undefined ones, that potentially violate our rights, so why do we allow "states" in cyberspace to be run in such a way?

Ban people promoting violence? Sure, why not. I'm as against hate and violence as the next person. But not only is censoring "hate speech" becoming a slippery slope at the company level, it's bad for the public in general because it sets a greater precedent for what the big corporations that run our everyday lives can tell us what we can or cannot do, and with no forgiveness. I don't find it hard to imagine a world where individuals can be instantly and permanently banned from doing everyday things, just like they are on YouTube, because they said or did something off the platform.

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I was shocked when news sites started publishing comments as a matter of course.

They worked so hard to research and create a 2000 word article that accurately reflects the world (in accordance to their editorial guidelines) using their good name - and then let fReEtHiNkErChAd and 2020BloodInTheStreets chime in at the end.

It would be OK if they strictly moderated the comments, but few sites seem to do that.

"They worked so hard to research and create a 2000 word article that accurately reflects the world"

I find this laughable. Many recent articles I've seen are designed to get clicks and have nothing to do with good journalism or research beyond what someone can get from behind a keyboard.

A lot that I've read in the past few years read like AI has written them. It wouldn't surprise me if major news publishers removed writing positions and replaced them with AI.

Okay: they worked so hard to contrive a 2000 word sequence to get clicks using machine learning and whatnot - and then let fReEtHiNkErChAd and 2020BloodInTheStreets chime in at the end.

Because fReEtHiNkErChAd and 2020BloodInTheStreets will each piss some readers off and please others, polarizing the topic and inviting others to participate, thus increasing pageviews and ad exposure. It worked well for a while, but with the growth of Twitter mobs it eventually backfired.

> They worked so hard to research and create a 2000 word article that accurately reflects the world (in accordance to their editorial guidelines) using their good name

I'm not sure which news sites you read but most of the ones I've seen count only as journalism in a very vague and abstract sense. The information is thin, the writing poor, and major important questions go unanswered and ignored. If there is indeed any point to following the news on a daily basis (and there is good evidence to suggest there is not), the quality of most new sources is atrocious enough that none of it is worth my time.

(The exception here is the occasional piece of very well done investigative journalism.)

But, in regard to comments, they do it for the same reason that Hacker News or any other site has a comments section: community engagement. This is not necessary a bad thing but it comes with the responsibility to _moderate_ the resulting community and almost every site drops the ball on this.

Most journalism is close enough to propaganda these days that the least they could do is open comments so that the public can correct the record.

Comments do add additional context, it's just a situation by situation basis of whether they are useful. HN comments tend to be useful, YT comments are occasionally useful but mostly garbage.

If you look at the comment sections of actual propaganda sites... well, you won't see Breitbart comments "correct the record". Quite the opposite, they are an important part of the local echo chamber. The only good they can do is giving others an unfiltered view into the minds of those communities.

That is interesting, I wonder if we could use the level of disagreement in the comment sections to detect propaganda vs news sites.

Certainly, but all other things equal without comments there's a reduced opportunity for alternative views to surface on the same page.

Is there any service that compiles relevant news(filtering out propaganda etc.). I would prefer an team of people doing the compile by manually going through various news sources and sending out the summary email to subscribers. That would be a huge time saver for me. I wouldn't milk paying money for that kind of service.

That's the mission of most news providers.

Here is a crazy wild-assed concept: letters to the editor, published in the next issue.

The Atlantic have taken that principle & modernised it: every article ends not with a comments section, but an invitation to email them your thoughts; then they publish the cream of the crop on https://www.theatlantic.com/letters/.

Doesn't work if the newspaper publishes total nonsense and smarter or better informed comments point that out, which is 50% of the value of comments.

I'm pretty sure a big part of the reason the Guardian stopped opening comments on most stories was the cost of 'moderation', except the reason their moderation costs were so high is that their moderators would routinely plough through comments by hand to remove people pointing out mistakes or absurd statements by the journalists, and as the Guardian changed over the years the articles became ever more extremist, so that started to be most comments. That is, they defined making their own staff look bad as abuse (regardless of whether it was written in vitriolic style).

Even now if you go read one of the few open threads they have, you can find commenters pointing out logical or factual problems with the column.

> accurately reflects the world

Sometimes, to some degree, and sometimes not. The level and consistency of accuracy varies per organization, per individual reporter, per story, and per person doing the judgement of "accuracy".

My experience is the exact opposite. I often skim the article and find that commenters are better informed than the author and provide more relevant information.

Unlike news companies, commentators do not gain monetary value from sensationalism.

Authors of articles are generally more informed than their pieces suggest, but their editors step in and make the story "pop" for readers in order to generate clicks. This often involves removing nuance. I believe that most major news organizations make an honest effort to be factual, but there's a lot of room within the facts to be misleading.

A commentator that is an expert in the field is not constrained by an editor, and can in a few paragraphs give a more realistic and accurate assessment of the phenomenon.

When I read articles about things in which I'm not knowledgeable, I don't trust the conclusions until I see high quality comments(or tweets) that confirm the thesis of the article.

How do you know the commenters are better informed?

One website where the comments are usually more interesting than the article is the register, which is mostly IT/high-tech-related news. But when I say more interesting, it's usually because they provide more context, another angle, more information or some humor.

Comments would be better if there was a enforced delay in the conversation, and you would have to sign off on what you wrote. 24h laters, the rage of the past would be seen indignified by many.

Is a privately owned museum a "public square"? Or a sports stadium owned by a private company? Or a Cinema? Or a threatre? No, neither is youtube.

It's a place the public visit not a piece of public infrastructure. Repeating "public square" over and over again does not make it so.

Then why does it get the legal benefits of being a "neutral platform"?

Because "neutral platform" in the case of content hosting hasn't ever meant no rules. Youtube has always had rules.

The main legal benefit is §230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has never required platforms to refrain from exercising editorial control in order to receive immunity (in fact, one motivation for this law was to encourage platforms to engage in exercising editorial control without incurring liability for doing this).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

(I can see political pressure now and in the future to say that some platforms should have some kind of neutrality and/or transparency obligation in order to get this immunity -- but under current U.S. law, they don't.)

Do any of those places host a substantial portion of the public political debate? If any of those places banned people, would that significantly reduce the ability of those people to meaningfully participated in the public political debate?

Probably not, but then I don't think it's a like to like comparison, youtube is more of a broadcast system than anything, it's closer to TV or Newspapers were pre youtube and nobody has the automatic right to TV airtime or to be printed in a newspaper.

It's not close to TV, in any way shape or form other than the fact that it's a video on a screen. Regular people don't put things on TV. That has always been a privilege for the very rich, or for local governments in the case of public access TV. Either way, not something regular people have access to.

It's closer to pamphlets than newspapers, in that regular people can make and distribute pamphlets, whereas regular people have never been able to put whatever they want in newspapers. We would be rightly upset if either the government or common carriers refused service to political groups distributing pamphlets.

Then using your analagy I could see a compromise here, youtube could host whatever content as you desire but it wouldn't necessarily surface it in seach or anywhere else on the site. It would only be accessible by direct link. That would satisfy the common carrier aspect as you could simply email the links out to your existing audience.

Because to use your analagy, to send out your pamphlets you must know your audience already.

>That would satisfy the common carrier aspect as you could simply email the links out to your existing audience.

Yes, but the analogy with traditional delivery services breaks down because people don't ask the delivery service to find new content for them. Preferring certain people's videos in search and recommendations based upon their political content is a deliberate reduction in the ability of the penalized people to meaningfully participate in the political conversation, which is what we should be trying to prevent. It's dangerous. Less dangerous than banning them altogether, perhaps, but still dangerous.

Google and Facebook et al built very successful products that a lot of people enjoy using. But I don't think very many people think that should entitle them to shape the political conversation. The people being shut out to varying degrees will certainly not see it that way.

Then I think there's a core distinction between hosting content and as you put it "finding new content for them". Hosting may fall under some common carrier scenario, but recommendations/search fall under curation and curation is very much back in the realm of TV/newspapers where the proprieter exercises control. I think that does entitle them to shape the political conversation, although I could see some argument for a great deal of transparency in exactly what they're doing in that regard.

>Then I think there's a core distinction between hosting content and as you put it "finding new content for them".

Yes of course those two things are different, but YouTube does both of them and both of them are necessary for meaningful participation in the public political debate.

>but recommendations/search fall under curation and curation is very much back in the realm of TV/newspapers where the proprieter exercises control.

When users search somewhere like YouTube or Google, or look at their recommendations, they are typically not expecting to get content ranked by how well it falls in line with the proprietor's political outlook. They're trying to get content that matches what they searched for, or in the case of recommendations looking for content the service thinks they might be interested in, not content that the proprietor thinks they should be seeing to further their own political goals. Search, and to an extent recommendations, fall under discovery. People don't go to YouTube or Google or Facebook or Twitter to see content curated by those companies. If they want curated content, they go to a specific channel or page or account, or to a website like the NYT.

>I think that does entitle them to shape the political conversation, although I could see some argument for a great deal of transparency in exactly what they're doing in that regard.

I'm curious if you would you say that if they were hiding content you agree with and promoting content you disagree with, or what you would say if there was an election coming up and they were hiding content in favor of your preferred candidate and pushing content in favor of the opponent.

I think google will largely remove content at the edges that it deems to be offensive or dangerous both to its audience and to its reputation, much the same way reddit went through a recent cleanup of similar "communities". So long as they are transparent with what they're removing, I really don't have a problem. I distinctly believe that a right to free speech is not a right to have an audience provided to you. If you want to build such a community on your own site then by all means, that's your prerogative and that's the freedom the web gives you.

>I think google will largely remove content at the edges that it deems to be offensive or dangerous

And do you think they remove that content without any regard for their own political leanings? That their opinion of what is "offensive" or "dangerous" is not influenced by their own political ideology?

>I distinctly believe that a right to free speech is not a right to have an audience provided to you.

What is the point in free speech, in your opinion? Why is it something we should care to guarantee?

>If you want to build such a community on your own site then by all means, that's your prerogative and that's the freedom the web gives you.

A) The actual fact of the matter is that the majority of the public political debate which normal people engage in on the internet occurs on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and perhaps a couple of other giant corporate-owned web properties that all have essentially identical policies. Telling people to go elsewhere is essentially telling them to go piss up a rope. It's not a real alternative.

B) The daily stormer would like a word with you.

On the other hand, a privately owned shopping mall is legally a "public square" in a number of states in the US, with the justification that it is explicitly a place for people to gather and interact, just like the main street of a town in the 19th century.

Which of these cases is Youtube more like? It's already hard to tell, and it's continuing to change. I expect the legal status of online forums to evolve over the next several decades, just like the legal status of brick-and-mortar spaces has evolved over time.

>On the other hand, a privately owned shopping mall is legally a "public square" in a number of states

Even then, it does not mean that those malls should allow anyone to sell wares. What it means it allows people to visit without discrimination on basis of legally protected classes like gender and race. YouTube banning a channel does not ban individual from watching videos, it prevents them from uploading videos which is akin to setting up stores.

The original poster was referring to the Pruneyard rule, which is not about characteristics of shoppers (public accommodation), but about using the shopping mall's premises specifically to engage in speech directed to other shoppers.

> What it means it allows people to visit without discrimination on basis of legally protected classes like gender and race

No, the "public square" designation specifically allows people to do things like come to the mall and set up political protests and whatnot. It's not about _access_ to the mall; it's about speech protections.

Is uploading videos more akin to setting up a store at the mall, or more akin to standing on a soapbox at the mall and giving a political speech? It probably really depends on the video, on whether the video is being monetized, etc.

In particular, I feel there is an important distinction between demonetization and removal here, from an ethical/moral perspective. I can't speak to the legal perspective; I am not a lawyer.

One flaw in the analogy is that physical space is limited and difficult for a person to move around in. The digital space is effectively infinite, and switching is as easy as typing in a new url (compared to the physical challenge of moving to another state/region).

There are all sorts of flaws in the analogies here; that's why they're analogies, not identities.

That said, I'm not quite sure I understand your point. A speaker in physical space can pretty easily take their speech elsewhere; most obviously to the nearest public street corner. So moving away from a private venue typically does not require anything nearly as drastic as "moving to another state/region".

I'd really like to understand your point and how it applies to both the mall and youtube situations, though, and would appreciate you explaining it if you have the time.

The crux is that digital space is infinite -- anyone can create a space for their own speech. In the physical world, people own very little space, and free speech almost always needs to impose on someone else's property. I think because of that, any comparisons between online speech and IRL speech are inherently flawed and not very useful.

Thank you, that explanation helps.

I think there's a difference between "you can speak" and "you can speak in such a way that interested people can hear". The former is not very useful in terms of the right people usually think of as "freedom of speech"; the limiting case of it in the physical world is "you can speak, but only in your own home". So what, if anything, makes for an online version of the public square, where one can go to present speech for consideration by others?

Also, I think online speech is more similar to physical-world speech than you make it out to be. You can't speak online without "imposing" on your hosting provider, their ISP, etc. If you self-host, you "impose" on your own ISP (and probably violate their ToS, if you have a residential connection). You "impose" on your domain registrar. These are all private entities, so you have the same sorts of issues as you allude to for the physical world. And these private entities have been known to restrict the speech of people relying on their services, so this is not a hypothetical risk.

Telling a silenced victim that they can easily move to somewhere else in digital space is of little comfort when their complaint is that they are being denied access to a public audience who are habitually congregating in an existing location.

The extent to which someone is entitled to an audience is of course more difficult to judge.

I disagree with your last sentence; I don't think anyone is entitled to an audience, so it's not a very difficult situation to judge. Free speech means you can shout in the wind all day long.

"Free speech means you can shout in the wind all day long."

That's the idea those absurd behind "free speech zones" off in a remote corner.

Free speech means free speech in every public space.

I respect that you take that stance, but I don't share that opinion.

Well, I'll remind you that Republicans used "free speech zones" to silence critics of the Iraq War.

Personally I fear the future where the government (or monopoly/oligopoly) in power isolates all opposition in a remote corner where no one can hear.

Not just between demonetization (totally fine with me) and removal (don't really like it). Promotion is also a tricky one, since those algorithms are fully under Google's control and thus responsibility for its results. But do you still participate in this "public square" if only your followers will find your message? But Google will have to decide what videos are shown anyhow...

For a mall comparison, that would be like them only allowing the demonstration to exist in the basement behind the door that says "beware of the leopard".

If a mall did that they likely be accused of discrimination. The demonstrators don't demand to be promoted, but simply be treated as anyone else.

The main case related to this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R... (which other states have a Pruneyard rule? I think it's not very many).

It's not many, true. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/03/why-can-shopping... lists New Jersey, Colorado, Oregon, Massachusetts, Washington, and Pennsylvania, in addition to California.

I assure you that if you were to set up a booth in a shopping mall and start screaming slurs and lecturing about how gays and blacks and Jews are undermining the foundations of the superior white civilization, you would very quickly be removed from the mall.

That seems probable, yes.

What if you set up a booth in a shopping mall in the spring of 2016 in California or Massachusetts and gave away pro-Trump stickers? I assure you there are plenty of people out there in both states, many of them likely working on YouTube, who view that as equivalent to your hypothetical. I know a number of them personally.

Trust me, I'm not a fan of the sort of rhetoric you describe. But I also don't like slippery slopes with no guardrails. I expect we'll end up with guardrails here in the end, after a few decades and a bunch of court cases, but it's going to take a while.

Is YouTube calling simply supporting Trump an extreme view?

A literal reading of their new restrictions as quoted in the article would in fact make a bunch of Trump's campaign speeches fall under the restrictions. And while I'd much rather he had not made those speeches or that people had not listened, or both, it's not clear to me that refusing to broadcast them would have been the right call either.

Now very likely Youtube plans to do extremely selective enforcement. I'm not sure that over-broad rules with ensuing very selective enforcement, applied only against the powerless and unpopular, is the right direction to head in, but that's what I see going on here.

I don't have a problem with people pushing bigoted fear mongering narratives for attention being powerless and unpopular.

I think the truth is that big platforms that are conceivably open to anyone eventually become abused, unevenly enforced, and end up being a gamble when it comes to business. YouTube, Google play, Apple's app store and many more are all examples of this.

I think you have the causality backwards. What I said is that in practice only the powerless and unpopular will get silenced, not that silencing will make people powerless and unpopular. That is, in practice this will likely get applied against all sorts of minority viewpoints that fall under the rules, but not applied to sufficiently powerful/popular/near-majority-viewpoint rules violators.

Also, I couldn't care less whether things are a gamble when it comes to business. I do care about public discourse and control thereof.

Youtube runs on the back of publicly-funded infrastructure and, as a natural monopoly in the space, it has a position of privilege that needs to be regulated.

We need an Internet Bill of Rights to ensure free speech on any platform of this scale. Yes, that means speech you don't like; may I suggest not watching it?

I see, would that include allowing pornography on youtube, or would that not be allowed, if not why not?

Interesting question. Of course, being of sound mind, I don't consider pornography to be the same thing as political speech, and don't really seem to have any issue drawing a line between the two. It should certainly be just as easy to NOT see either thing, if you don't want to; but presently it's much harder to get a platform for the speech than it is for the porn. Funny, that.

I find porn to be considerably less objectionable than holocaust denial.

Yes, that would include pornography. Age verification is not that challenging.

Interesting question. US culture has a rather long history of censoring sexual content, but other nations has other areas which they prefer to censor. Historically in Sweden, we had about as restrictive ban on violence as the US had on sex. As an example, we had sexual education for teens on national broadcast and allowed movies which got banned in the states. On the other hand we banned Darkwing Duck as it "taught children how to use physical violence against each other".

Following more modern censoring in Sweden, should Youtube allow videos that include tobacco, alcohol and gambling? if not why not?

Anyone can put video on the internet. How is YouTube a monopoly? It isn't a human right to have a certain number of people stumble on to your video through algorithm recommendations.

In what possible respect is YouTube a natural monopoly, under any classic economic definition of the term?

> Is a privately owned museum a "public square"?

I think a key insight in discussions like this is realising that “public square” is as more of a function rather than a state of ownership.

IMO if your company becomes big enough to obtain the function as a public square, you should be prepared to be required to act as one.

Legislation isn’t there yet, but just like privacy and data-ownership is getting more legislative attention these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if things like this are subject to regulation within 5-10 years.

As this infinitely repeated discussion shows, it’s clearly a problem which needs to be solved.

There's already a SCOTUS ruling on the books where the government cannot deny convicted sex offenders their access to Facebook because it is the public square. It's literally in the ruling.

The public square argument at this point isn't deniable, it's more about what the company that maintains that public square gets to define as trash.

Youtube, Facebook, have to decide whether they're communication infrastructure, like telephone companies, or publishers. In the first case, they have to publish everything that doesn't violate a state law; in the second case, they get to choose, but they accept liability for everything that is published on their platform.

This is wrong. The law very explicitly states that companies are not liable for content uploaded by users and are also legally able to moderate their platform as they see fit. Google section 230.

Well, social media is heavily based on network effects, so it's not like consumers can just leave one platform for another and reach the same people.

If your cell company prevented you from calling your crazy uncle on Christmas eve because he believed aliens built the pyramids, that would be considered a violation of your right to free speech AND free association, and it would be very creepy.

The advantage of removing (or at least, humans actively moderating) comments is that it pushes discussion back to face-to-face (or at least, more direct and personal) channels and restricts the anonymity of commentary. This has a few benefits, namely:

* Self-moderating: Such conversations require a certain level of decorum, since these are presumably people you interact with every day. The likelihood of calling your desk mate a Nazi, racist, race traitor, etc. to their face are astronomically smaller than when it's cloaked in anonymity, since there may be consequences to your commentary.

* Self-authenticating: It reduces the efficacy of message amplification, since the real world serves as an out-of-band identity authentication mechanism.

* Self-regulating: It's easier, cheaper, and less risky for the hosting site, since they no longer have any enforcement role to play in the discussion itself (beyond the original slant when presenting the information, e.g. by news organizations).

Of course, this doesn't address the problems of sites which are inherently designed to do one-to-many broadcasting and discussion, such as Youtube or Reddit. How would these sites look without comments at all, or with a very strict attestation/vouching system?

Although HN follows a similar model vis-à-vis discussion and broadcasting, the active HN moderation is pretty good, at least good enough to maintain a relatively high-quality discourse and removing very low-quality discussion. However, this is difficult to scale and relatively expensive.

I was a huge proponent of this in the early days of the web and was leading the crusade for reader engagement, championing the idea of anonymous commentary and a pure marketplace of ideas.

Well, it turns out I had an over-optimistic view of people.

What no one really wants to admit here on YC is that the userbase here is something like the top .01% of (intelligence / literacy / analytical skills). Hell, even reddit, as low-brow as that has gotten, is still top 1% easily. But there are still plenty of staggeringly oblivious views in both places.

It's hard to admit that dichotomy, because when we realize that the top 1% or .01% can still be so ignorant, we also gradually realize that we are all probably in for a lot of trouble moving forward, particularly if and when resource wars become a bit more widespread than they are now.

This. It has to be said. Thank you.

The major consequence of this for me is that it has caused me to reevaluate my views on representative democracy.

Edit: As a clarification, while I still tend toward a preference for representative democracy, I now acknowledge that it is possible for a fruitful and productive society to flourish in systems that some may label as an "oppressive dictatorship".

I abandoned that idea a while ago. I think we could move toward a wikiocracy, which would have problems of its own but for which we have a working prototype that is reasonably transparent, responsive, and accessible and delivered a significant public good in a relatively short time frame.

How would the rules look for establishing the long-term governance of a wikiocracy? Specifically, my impression is that it works because it has good people. If the good people left and lesser people replaced them, could it still be made to work?

One of the things I'll give the US is as crappy as the leaders get, the system still remains cohesive rather than suffering a bloody coup every four years.

Well lots of other countries get on OK with parliamentary democracies, I don't think the US system is uniquely reliable in this regard. You'd have to look at the ups and downs of Wiki edit wars, figure out what standards would apply for citations of empirical data as valid policymaking inputs and so forth. I don't think Wikipedia has especially 'good people', just experienced ones and a general agreement to operate within the wiki framework.

>I don't think the US system is uniquely reliable in this regard

Completely agree. I'm just speaking from an American perspective. There are plenty of other countries that are similarly stable (perhaps even moreso thanks to having more than two diametrically opposed parties).

The "general agreement to operate within the framework" bit was what I was getting at with "good people". I'm not sure how stable it would be against a concerted effort to disrupt/distort it. But I haven't looked into its governance in much depth, either, thus my original question.

Politicians have been talking up what they call evidence-based policymaking for years. That'd be the equivalent of citing empirical data for policymaking inputs. Unfortunately it's not that easy, as the endless edit wars and fights over what constitutes a reliable citation shows.

> One of the things I'll give the US is as crappy as the leaders get, the system still remains cohesive rather than suffering a bloody coup every four years.

Pretty much every system in the world has that feature. Heck, that's a standard of quality so low North Korea’s government passes with honors.

Major consequence of what? If we accept for a moment the extremely questionable proposition that HN and Reddit posters are some sort of intellectual elite, yet "there are still plenty of staggeringly oblivious views in both places", all that means is that you wouldn't be able to find an enlightened dictator, would you?

And indeed what we see is that oppressive dictatorships never have high quality people running them. They're always overrun with corruption, absurd ideas, forged statistics, pseudo-intellectual waffle (see: the books and political thinking created by the leaders of the USSR) and to the extent they may seem more intelligent or erudite than the working classes it's only because they craft their image so carefully.

You say you now acknowledge it's possible for a "fruitful and productive society to flourish" in an oppressive dictatorship, but what on earth are you thinking of here? Surely not China, which has thrown millions of its own citizens into concentration camps, trashed its environment, routinely seems to report false GDP numbers, relies on capital controls to keep the rich Chinese from leaving, is famous throughout the world for IP theft, has practically disconnected itself from the global internet and has radically misallocated resources in many well documented ways? That fruitful and productive society?

Well, whichever measure of IQ you want to use as a proxy for intelligence, it's plausible that the self-selected group of people who comment on HN is higher compared to the world population (oh, this includes me, too -- how embarassing). How much higher is an empirical question which is unlikely to be settled, although I would guess that your .01% is a bit of an overestimate.

The important point, though, is that "dichotomy" not the same as "contradiction". The contradiction between your estimate of the high intelligence of HN commenters and the, let's say, less-than-intelligent ideas sometimes expressed here can be explained by noticing that being somewhat smart doesn't make someone immune to having stupid ideas.

What, after all, is the minimal IQ beyond which one will never make a mistake?

> What, after all, is the minimal IQ beyond which one will never make a mistake?

I'd argue 0, in that a being completely incapable of even attempting thought would be unable to have an incorrect thought. But that's a bit of a reductio ad absurdum

> userbase here is something like the top .01% of (intelligence / literacy / analytical skills).

If this were true, I would have lost whatever little faith in humanity I had left. But I very much doubt it, being good at some "hackery" thing is completely orthogonal to being intelligent/smart in any normal meaning of the word.

I think you're mistaken, people here (including you) seem very eager to jerk themselves off over how intelligent they are.

In reality I doubt the average HN user is above the 75th percentile

Is this lake wobegon?

Nice reference ;)

Maybe so, but I still think this can work. I think the problem is that we've moved away from communities focused around a particular topic to just throwing everyone into a pool and crossing our fingers.

If a community has a topic and the majority of users are interested in discussing that topic, then when someone veers off-topic to rant about their favorite conspiracy theory, you don't have to be a judge of the validity of his viewpoint. You just gently point out that's not what people are there to talk about and that they're welcome to discuss said conspiracy theory over on yonder conspiracy theory aficionado forum (and ban them if they continue trying to detract from the conversation).

This then removes moderators as judges of what is Right and True (the problem facing moderators on Facebook/YouTube/other anything-goes platforms) and positions them in the much more manageable role of, well, moderating a conversation.

The problem isn't an ideological or semantic one but the fact that most news operations don't have the resources or motivation to moderate online commentary effectively, and the cost of poisoning conversation is trivially low.

Most new organizations are also general-purpose, meaning the organization will cover everything from politics to sports to tech to finance to gossip. My assertion is that trying to be all things to all people leads us into impossible-to-moderate scenarios even before you look at the motivation/resources available with which to perform said moderation.

I'm proposing approaching the US code and other bodies of law (and associated jurisprudence) as a Wiki and seeing what happens. I propose that this could be an improvement over the whole representative democracy approach.

Oops, I posted this to the wrong subthread.

> We wouldn't blindly allow company-owned cities or states to pass laws, especially vague or undefined ones, that potentially violate our rights, so why do we allow "states" in cyberspace to be run in such a way?

Actual states have a monopoly on violence, and can deprive me of life, liberty, and property. So I want them to have as few excuses to do that as possible. These "states" in cyberspace can do none of that, so it's significantly less of a problem if they don't embrace freedom of speech as an ideal.

(I guess it depends somewhat on whether you see free speech as an inherent virtue or as a safety valve against government oppression. I've been leaning towards the latter personally.)

> I'm starting to think that comment sections on news sites are a really bad idea

I have no idea how it is in other countries but in Germany the comment sections in every single newspaper is _horrible_, especially when it is articles about refugees, climate change and similar topics.

That is sadly the way anywhere mainstream without heavy moderation. The scary thing about Youtube comments isn't that they are extra stupid because they aren't - they are the norm and essentially what happens when a representative sample of the population is available.

Just because the majority of the population has the ability to comment doesn't mean the majority participates. Voluntary participation like that tends to attract people with strong opinions on the position under debate - especially people who disagree with the position upheld by the article and especially people who feel like theirs is the minority opinion.

I suspect you're defining horrible comments as, "comments expressing views I don't like and wish didn't exist". Germany has particularly extreme and unusual policies regarding migrants/asylum seekers/refugees, climate change and a few other such things. Is it any surprise that extreme views in one direction trigger extreme views in the other?

Although any hateful speech is terrible of course, I think censoring like this is a bad idea. Like other conversations about freedom of speech on HN it will eventually lead to talking about banning non hateful but extreme ideas like flat earth and anti vax. While ridiculous as they are, I think it would be equally ridiculous to ban them. What's the line you draw when you decide what gets to be promoted. Maybe certain religious ideas or ideas criticising religions?

I do disagree with your private business comment though. It is a private business and they can do what they want to an extent. You don't tell a news paper who they have to let write articles. But I think the problem is that youtube is so large and the service so imporant that it might as well be a government deciding rights. It's not just youtube there are a lot of tech giants that powerful. I think when it's obvious they are that powerful and important it's time to break them up. I mean hell the bread company my step dad works at even had to go through a process to see if they would be too big with a recent purchase. But yet tech companies have been getting away with this sort of unchecked growth. They are global powers with dwindling competition. Break them up. Reintroduce competition.

Agreed. The only comment I would add is that, unlike newspapers, these companies receive a broad immunity through the laws so that they can operate without fear of legal retribution. Even though they operate as private companies, I would argue that they still have a mandate to the public good as part of their operations.

I'm also okay banning anti-vax ideas, in defense of the community in general, and in defense in specific of those vulnerable few who can't be immunized and rely on herd immunity.

Foregoing vaccination imposes an as-yet-unaccounted externality on the community; you put everyone at risk by not vaccinating yourself or your kids, and there's no way for the vulnerable (those relying on herd immunity) to know who around them will put them at risk.

It goes way beyond an individual choice, to vaccinate or not. That decision has impacts far beyond the individual's life.

Obligatory vaccination is oppression, however you twist it.

How far are you willing to go when it comes to oppressing individuals in the name of the common good? Force women to have children to repopulate aging countries (or, alternatively, force sterilize them in overpopulated countries)?

I don't buy this argument any more than I buy the argument that taxation is theft (it isn't) or that traffic lights are oppression (they aren't).

Vaccination, for those who can be vaccinated (not everyone can), is a trade-off for participating in a society free from disease. Taxation is the price you pay for buying a society and traffic controls are a price you pay for access to a ubiquitous and generally safe road network.

All of coexisting with others is a balance of trade-offs; labeling all of those trade-offs as oppression renders the word meaningless, as much as referring to any kind of coercion as violence.

As for how far am I willing to go? Mandatory vaccines are a good trade-off, and I am willing to stand by the position (one which is growing increasingly popular, as preventable diseases are returning in force).

Forcing women to have children? I have never heard, outside fiction, of a society that forces women to give birth; certainly it's been encouraged, lionized even, but you're proposing something from the realm of fiction as a what-if. Not helpful.

which vaccines? meningitis? anthrax? syphilis? tuberculosis? HPV? hepatitis? flu?

We will never have absolute safety in life. I prefer to have freedom to make the choice because the government will always end up abusing any power we give it.

You're conflating three concepts: forcing people to be vaccinated, banning speech opposing compulsory vaccination, and banning speech arguing that vaccines are a bad idea. In a free society, only the first has any possible justification (based on harm to others if you aren't vaccinated). The second is core political speech. The third is core scientific speech.

>I'm also okay banning anti-vax ideas

You are OK with banning the idea? It's one thing to make it criminal to endanger your children's health. It's another to put a blanket ban on the speech because you don't like the idea or you think it's "dangerous". The point of free speech is that you don't get individuals deciding who gets to be in charge of what is morally right to say. Society as a whole decides through civil discourse and rigorous debate. But you can't have that if you go around suppressing the other side.

Start banning free speech and you start banning democracy. There is really no two ways about it. This is not a debate about the physical choices people make. Those are either made illegal or not. This is a debate about whether or not people have the right to talk about their ideas. But you are here trying to use a ridiculously nearly undefendable action to spin the argument of some actions are bad or dangerous. Yes they are, but the speech and discussion can only enlighten the public so long as reasonable minds have a chance to speak up against unreasonable ideas. Humanity's resilience comes from the fact that we get to try so many ideas at once out. But if you let a single entity decide what ideas will be allowed you introduce a dangerous weak point into society. The inability to speak your mind only ever brings suffering violence and death. Yes free speech has its problems but it's the best we got.

There is also the problem that someday a company might produce a vaccine that was dangerous to the public, and people that find this out might want to tell others. A strict ban on "anti-vax ideas" would stifle that speech.

Yet you say that "they can do what they want to an extent." I'm not sure that we disagree at all. I support private businesses right to do what they want, until they become large enough that they've reached "escape velocity", if you will, where they have become so large that it's unlikely that any meaningful competition can come close to matching them in budget or influence. Companies of Google's size should see even fewer freedoms when they get massive kickbacks from the government; Google receives millions in public money but has nebulous "rules" they arbitrarily enforce over the public.

I don't know if breaking up these massive "tech" companies is a good approach, but something has to be done at some point, and there needs to be rules over how YouTube can regulate its platform. At the very least, YouTube needs to be forced to make all of its rules explicit and to not insta-ban entire channels while deleting all their data.

I think it's going to be weird and messy whichever way it goes. If it is under government oversight, politics is just going to ruin the whole purpose maybe make it worse. Me and you can have a debate about whether or not neo nazis should have the right to speak their hateful messages without calling eachother nazis. But voters aren't so calm when their elected official slings mud suggestion someone is one because they don't want to ban their speech.

I'll admit though. I'm not so sure what the effect of breaking them up will be. How many services would be lost, how many sites would go down because of lost services, how much money would be lost due to search ranking being ineffective or businesses needing to buy ads from multiple companies. It would hurt a lot of people at least temporarily. But I think long term the Internet and business would thrive after a short term pain. It would definitely have to happen in stages though. Each part of the business broken up into a few.

But yeah I agree, the escape velocity companies you mentioned need to be put in check somehow.

Comments are the worst part of the web

TY for reading my comment

They can choose to not be a platform for anything that they want. You don't have a right to that platform. Forcing YouTube to leave everything up infringes on their rights to run their site as they want.

To play devil's advocate to the "private platform" argument: we force tv networks and radio stations to give equal air time to all presidential candidates.[1] NBC is a private a company but if they permit one candidate to host SNL they must give the other candidate(s) an equivalent opportunity so as not to unfairly sway public opinion. I don't necessarily think that "infringes" on NBC's right to run their platform as they want. They're still given the option of whether or not they want to wade into politics on their airways but once they do they're obligated to open their platform to both sides.

Now you could argue that Donald Trump expertly exploited exceptions to the "equal-time rule" in order to get much more coverage than his competition, but that's more to do with the structure of the law than the spirit of what it's trying to accomplish.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule

Broadcasters have purchased a license from the government to use those airwaves, and have to abide by rules. In contrast, anyone can put up a website. That is why broadcasters are more constrained in their behavior.

The issue with TV is that it's not "their airways". The "airways" are public property so to speak, and the TV license grants TV networks use of that public property on certain conditions, one being political messages.

Youtube, or any other site uses no public property in that way so they are not, and should not be beholden to the same rules.

YouTube has become a mass communication platform, more akin to the telephone company than say a magazine. A magazine has editorial control over what it publishes, and can decide what to put into its content. A telephone company has no say over what is said over its phone lines.

YouTube is just asking to be regulated in such a way as the phone companies. And it should be regulated to follow the First Amendment as a mass communication platform, even though it is a private company.

I'm wondering why YouTube doesn't have something like Reddit's "quarantine" where certain videos and/or channels are blocked from the recommendation algorithms without being outright banned, but still available for those who specifically search for them.

They do. Now they're taking the additional step of just deleting them.

FWIIW this censorious crap cost them $70b in market cap last quarter. Looking forward to next quarter.

Here, try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8beSkkKJ_0

No comments, likes, dislikes, and no recommendations on the sidebar. It can still be viewed if you accept the risk, and can be found using the search bar or by scrolling through the channel.

Funny enough, it's available in the US, but not in many EU countries (I tried Italy, Spain and Belgium).

Its gone now.

Generally, true statements are not profound or original, but sometimes still need to be repeated when people assert the opposite. “The world is round” is neither an original or profound statement and yet people still need to say it periodically.

1. Comments sections on prominent, generalized websites (non-niche sites) are oftentimes not even worth reading. Buried beneath idiotic nonsense, spam/scams, edgelords, trolls, bots, and narcissists are the actual few insightful comments that are refreshing bits of value. It's like panning for gold in a river.

2. There's not going to be a fair judge of what counts as "censorable content" when two opposite sites of the debate are each arguing in favor of their side. It's like why referees exist in sports. Of course Team A will say "No way! That wasn't a foul, I didn't touch them!", while Team B says "It was definitely a foul, I got hit!". To anyone who's heard "boos or cheers" from the crowd at a sports game, it's not a shocker the response centers around which calls benefits their team.

3. With regards to the "freedom of speech" rights and personal liberties - how much of a shit does a monopoly-level, multi-national corporation give about strictly adhering to government-defined "rights"? What is the business cost of vehemently adhering to potentially-gray-area covenants vs. saying "Yeahh.. fuck that shit it's too much effort". Finagling laws to suit business needs is what huge companies pay teams of people to do already.

4. YouTube is like a factory farm. The more users are bunched into YouTube, the more money Google makes from advertising. It's all a numbers game. Google has no incentive to change the setup of the farm, so to speak, when what they have has been paying off to keep the service free and hold market share. Unless someone has a particularly large audience, the main solution to complaints from random, non-paying users is: "Deal with it".

5. Ban specific items that are violent, devious, or dangerous? Sure. Banning "DIY drinking bleach cures autism" is not the same as banning something more nuanced like "trailer trash ride dirt bikes on the interstate" on the grounds a specific subgroup has a problem. As customer service will show you, people will always find something to complain about. If Google came out with, "We will ban whatever we feel like based on what disagrees with our superior, self-selected ideology", that would be a very different story. That's not much better than a dictatorship banning anything that disagrees with the State.

What strange irony that you post about it on HN, effectively a detached comment section for a news site. Was that intended? Regardless, I think you're making the tacit assertion that comments for the news belong somewhere. How? How should its censorship work? Would that take care of the problem?

There definitely is an effect to white-labeling and brand confidence. When comments are hosted by an organization - regardless of the specific legal implications and understandings - people assume the brand has some ownership of the contents of those comments... No matter how big of a font is used to say "The opinions expressed below belong solely to their owners and do not reflect the views of <BRAND>."

Am I the only one who really enjoys shitty YouTube comments?

>The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time.

“So they should deal with it! That’s the bargain they made when deciding to host the national conversation!”

No, you don’t understand. It’s not just the predictable and natural reputational consequences of having some embarrassing material in a branded space. It’s enemy action.

Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal.

[...]

>Fourth, I want anybody else trying to host “the national conversation” to have a clear idea of the risks. If you plan to be anything less than maximally censorious, consider keeping your identity anonymous, and think about potential weak links in your chain (ie hosts, advertisers, payment processors, etc). I’m not saying you necessarily need to go full darknet arms merchant. Just keep in mind that lots of people will try to stop you, and they’ve had a really high success rate so far.

That Slate Star Codex article is soooo good, and I suspect severely underrated.

Funny how last XKCD refers to NPR and comment sections: https://xkcd.com/2159/

I agree with your comment but find it rambling, so I’ll concur with this: If free speech is a right worth protecting from the government, it’s worth protecting against equally powerful corporations.

> If free speech is a right worth protecting from the government, it’s worth protecting against equally powerful corporations.

The right of free speech is that you can say what you want without violent repercussions, such as fines, prison time, or capital punishment. Corporations and individuals already aren't allowed to do any of that, so no additional protection is needed. Governments are singled out specifically because they do not follow the same rules as everyone else—asserting that violence is a "legitimate" means of achieving arbitrary goals.

> The right of free speech is that you can say what you want without violent repercussions, such as fines, prison time, or capital punishment.

This is merely one view of free speech; many people actively disagree with this view.

You can't take a contested human-defined concept like freedom of speech and say "this only means X, case closed." I mean, you can, but nobody has to agree with you.

The view that free speech should protect you even from the most trivial consequences like being banned from a private platform is completely unreasonable and ridiculous. Doesn't matter that there are people that hold that opinion, that's a weak argument for it.

A lot of people combine free speech with anti-discrimination. Speech get attached to identity and from there a ban becomes discrimination.

Three people walk into a Hotel. A priest, a advocate for the left, and a advocate for the right. Each three talks about the groups they define as "us", and how bad those "others" are. Can the hotel owner deny hosting and ban one of them based on the identity and vies of the person?

> the most trivial consequences like being banned from a private platform

You say these consequences are trivial, but they may not be trivial for every individual. A number of individuals have been banned from multiple platforms, including their revenue streams and parts of the financial system, seriously damaging them financially. Even when I disagree with the individuals being banned, something about this strikes me as wrong. It should not be possible to mount a coordinated attack on an individual's financial stability like this. The boogeyman of the moment is the right, but this will surely be turned against individuals on the left the next time we go to war, or perhaps the next time left-populism seems to be gaining serious ground.

> If free speech is a right worth protecting from the government, it’s worth protecting against equally powerful corporations.

But corporations' ability to decide what to host is guaranteed by freedom of speech. Remember, freedom of speech is not just freedom to say what you want it's also freedom from compelled speech. It's the freedom from the government telling you to make or host speech. Mandating that corporations host speech they don't want is not protecting freedom of speech, it is violating freedom of speech.

That's under the principle that a corporation holds the same rights as a person, which is not a principle that everyone agrees with.

I wish all internet comment sections be removed. If you have something to say, promote your own website. Yelp is the worst.

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