Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

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Did you or the responders read the article? This reads like an assumption that the article is about tech companies in the United States and their effects to combat election misinformation. It's not.

The part about the United States says this:

> While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship.

And you say:

> Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information in hope that bad actors will not influence the public.

The first major heading in the article is this:

> Poland blocked human rights sites; India same-sex dating sites

Not exactly the same thing as individual companies trying to combat misinformation. Even if those things could be twisted as good faith efforts, how would this help make politics more honest?

Having a conversation about the United States is fine, I suppose, but I'd much rather understand how actual governments are censoring things around the world. It's at least what the article is mostly about. If nothing else, it'd be nice for discussions here to actually have some relation to the article rather than being something people quickly upvote and jump in to espouse whatever preconceived opinion they had.

>This reads like an assumption that the article is about tech companies in the United States and their effects to combat election misinformation.

I completely disagree with this. The parent didn't mention companies once. This must be some kind of 'blue-black or white-gold' thing because the rest of your post reads like nonsense to me. I'm sorry that I haven't got anything substantial to add to this, but I'm just very confused by the fact that your comment is the highest response right now.

The source article is about countries forcing ISP-level bans on accessing certain sites, while the parent comment is about misinformation. Nobody's blocking gambling content, pornography, or Match.com because they're worried about misinformation.

varispeed talks about control and manipulation. That's far broader than misinformation.

Yet also not "gambling content, pornography, or Match.com."

Sorry for being curt in the last reply. To expand on this, I think a key line might be

>bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage.

which I interpret broadly as enticing people to do things not sanctioned by the status quo morality. Some governments aren't happy about sexual liberty, others about certain religious or political belief. The internet with the liberation of information also liberated a certain relativism that is corrosive to the epistemic fundament of established power.

Why would you let the actual content of what you are supposedly responding to get in the way of whatever you are soapboxing about?

Yet it also goes on to say this:

> “When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic,” she said. “The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.”

What this alludes to is that somehow 2010 Open Internet Order 1. equals the concept of "Net Neutrality" as a whole and 2. was the backbone of internet freedom in the United States and both are untrue. In fact, none of the fear astroturfing that took place during that campaign ever came true. I'm interested in knowing who started that campaign and why.

I'm always in favor of iterating on broad ideas like Net Neutrality but it is constantly being used to misrepresent the state of freedom on the internet.

The behavior of tech companies in the US was certainly a template for governments around the world to block their own content as corporate censorship wasn't criticized and instead hailed because it censored the right people. Heck, they have validated Chinas censoring attempts or that of any dictatorship really.

Tech companies were stupid, but so were the users. And not only those that believed in more esoteric conspiracies.

HN really needs a way to force people to have at least clicked on the article before posting. Maybe something where the article has to be clicked on, and then a X minute timer is started so that people will be strongly incentivized to read the article before commenting.

We tried that on reddit a long time ago. It didn't work. We realized that a lot of people just want to see the discussion.

I always click on the comments first myself to see if the article is even worth reading.

I thought that was the WHOLE point of Reddit when I joined years ago. It was like Digg but ONLY for people that had "Read-It".

I think that was the idea and it quickly devolved into horse shit.

I would love a site that was like Read-It but forced people to "read-it" first.

My take on “read it” - is that I read the title, look at the score and then the qty of comments

If it’s an interesting title and the score and qty of comments is high, i go to the comments.

I’m pretty much in /all and I hide tons of subs using RES...

So my feed on /all is pretty clean and tailored to things I’m open to.

First and foremost thanks for reddit, Ive had an account for 14years, and pretty much hit the site every single day for 14 years

With that said; I do the same thing... but I rarely upvote a story - I do check out stories but far far less than the comments.

I do the same here on HN. Especially here because there are a ton of smart people here and HN is pretty strict on being anti-troll - but i dont count ant-trolling as censorship, it’s forum-housekeeping.

Before reddit I mostly was on slashdot, and some other forums that don’t exit any longer.

The OP is talking about posting comments, not viewing them.

So was I.

I just was talking to someone about this.

I'm the worst on HN at commenting on a topic before/instead of reading the article.

But I see HN not as a place to share random articles around the web, but as a place to discuss interesting topics with a (relative to other alternatives) civil and educated userbase.

I'm usually not super interested in what a single person has to say on a given subject (i.e. the linked article) as much as I am in the collective thoughts/responses from the HN community.

Again, admitting that I'm likely part of the problem, but just being honest, and -- in my own mind, at least -- feels like a mostly justified reason for making the most of the time that I have/feel like spending on these topics.

If a similar community existed that was (again, relative to other alternatives) civil & educated, but just allowed discussion on topics vs. links to articles, I'd be hanging out/engaging there instead.

Honestly clicking on the article just leads to paywalls or ad laden disasters that just consume my CPU (or complain if I have an ad blocker).

HN just works, so it's a lot less work just to read the discussion here.

HN self-policed fine back when caustic takedowns of incorrect comments were normal/expected/rewarded. But in the dang era of "comments must be nice" you get more upvotes by regurgitating HN-friendly views quickly based on the headline than by reading the article, so of course people respond to that incentive.

Then I'll just click the link, read some memes on reddit, then come back once the timer runs out.

Why are you so opposed to reading something before commenting on it?

A lot of people aren't interested in discussing linked material and therefore reading it, they just want to have a discussion on the topic of the title.

And in the process turning this site in to a predictable talking-point forum that just gets triggered by random title keywords.

A few weeks back I saw a front page article written in terrible english, being factually wrong on almost all points (it was talking about tech history so you can be objectively wrong), and was like 2 pages of rambling - blogspam 101.

But the title was something complaining about Electron and it was clear that nobody read it and everyone was just bandwagoning on Electron.

Then there was that outrage about a guy who was maintaining faker.js and people spinning same old BS about licenses and how everyone should use GPL - meanwhile it was obvious nobody even looked at what the library did because none of the discussion applied.

So people interested in discussing points should maybe find a different site for this - it's really dragging down the quality of content.

Of course you will, but the point is that many people like you will find such a process more of a hassle than it's worth. My solution would reduce the amount of this happening significantly, even if it won't stop every do-badder...

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