Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

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The danger here, it seems to me, is that once you make it clear that the people saying that there aren't enough female chess masters have a legal right to be on this forum and cannot have their posts thrown out as "political," the people saying that men are naturally more suited to the game of chess and women should get back in the kitchen will rub their hands in glee and realize that they now have a legal right to be on every other chess forum, because their posts, too, are merely "political" and not libelous. They know how to toe that line - doing so a core competency of internet trolls (see also "hide your power level"). That is, the tradeoff of saying that the powerful majority no longer gets to regulate forums and must give the marginalized a voice is saying that the marginalized no longer get to regulate forums either and must give the powerful majority a voice - and the powerful majority is, after all, powerful, and will take advantage of this too.

So the practical result is that only people with the resources to moderate their forums to the point that they're willing to accept liability will run moderated forums. That requires either significant resources to run the moderation program (and a chilling effect on what gets approved) or significant resources to deal with liability and American-style lawsuits. The breastfeeding mother who's setting up a blog for her three closest friends to comment on will technically be fine, but she can no longer grow her community beyond her three closest friends. The powerful (whether that's "big companies" or "socially powerful races" or whatever) are happy to keep restricting what happens on their platform and take on liability because that liability will affect them less.

I don't have a solution for this, and I find your argument mostly compelling, but I don't know that it gets us where we want to be either. I'm not really comfortable with "The price we pay for keeping MRAs from derailing forums is allowing people to say that feminists are derailing forums," but "The price we pay for making sure feminists can speak is making sure MRAs can speak" feels equally uncomfortable.

(BTW - I upvoted both of you because I think you both made good points.)

Do you have a clue what MRA's truly are?

No replies, just negs. I assume at the moment that you have a wrong conception of MRAs and are attributing the MRA label to certain other types of groups.

The solution is to anonymize and decentralize the internet, and we've been saying it for decades.

That didn't make the star-chans better; quite the opposite in fact.

It did from a certain point of view, which is kind of an unspoken point. Many of the people who argue that allowing anything but absolute and unfettered freedom of speech is a slippery slope towards fascism are not doing so from a neutral or academic point of view. Rather, they want to push the Overton window of societal acceptance for ideas currently considered intolerable by mainstream society by guaranteeing exposure to certain forms of political speech and propaganda.

The technical underpinnings of the internet are decentralized well enough. The reality is that these aren't technical problems, and any technical workaround will ultimately become circular. We have to come up with the necessary legal and social innovations that will allow people to cope.

It is already both (for the most part). The problem is that people will always prefer centralization. From shopping malls, capital cities, credit cards... to Internet platforms, the unavoidable fact is that centralization makes things easier, cheaper and more convenient.

Even federated-by-design technologies like email have slowly turned into mostly centralized services. Just having to pick an email provider is too much work for most people. Gmail is good and free, so everyone uses that. As long as servers cost money and big corps can offer free things to get user share, decentralised services are doomed to never become mainstream.

That's a slightly different solution from just decentralizing the internet, which 'saurik advocated above. (I'm in favor of decentralization on principle, to be clear, I'm just not sure it solves this problem.)

The problem with anonymizing the internet is that it prevents forming real-world communities. If you're forced to remain hidden so that you escape scrutiny, the breastfeeding mother has no way of finding others in her city beyond her three existing friends, because none of them want to be known as the dissident who supports breastfeeding. There's still value to the online communities, yes, but this seems like a significant abdication of the power of the internet to help society.

The problem with decentralizing the internet without anonymizing it is that any legal restrictions remain. If there's a law that says that Twitter can't kick breastfeeding mothers off their website without taking legal responsibility, that same law will say that my Mastodon instance must federate with every alt-right-but-toeing-the-line Mastodon instance if I don't want to take legal responsibility for everything that shows up on my Mastodon instance.

>...that same law will say that my Mastodon instance must federate with every alt-right-but-toeing-the-line Mastodon instance if I don't want to take legal responsibility for everything that shows up on my Mastodon instance.

This seems highly unlikely to me. What if you are running a different version of the codebase or something from those instances? v2.0.1special. Even leaving aside constraints like that, volume of inbound traffic, etc. are direct costs to federation with other instances that I doubt laws would be willing to force you to pay.

I wonder if there are examples of this having been done in the past. Microsoft's antitrust case is the closest that comes to mind, but they were operating from an absolutely dominant standpoint at the time. If Mastodon/ActivityPub ever reaches that level, I'd consider it...a win?

The law doesn't have to force you to pay it - it just has to say, either federate with everybody or nobody. All it needs to do is say, if you're accepting posts from other people, you need to do so in a non-discriminatory way.

(Providers like Twitter would love this law because it would kill decentralized systems. In fact this would allow Jack to "decentralize" Twitter https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106 while making sure no decentralized systems run by the powerless can compete. Everyone else can technically run a decentralized system, but Twitter is the only one worth using. It's the perfect regulatory capture.)

Sure, you can probably get by for a bit by just happening to fail to peer with Nazis, but you would immediately lose the ability to make a public shared block list with reasoning, a la https://github.com/dzuk-mutant/blockchain/blob/master/list/l... . You'd also have trouble successfully peering with non-Nazi instances - if you publish the protocol changes in v2.0.1special so other reasonable people can federate with you, the Nazis will just apply those patches too.

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