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Comment by anotha1 | Hacker News Reader

I'll give it a try, but I'm already turned off by the "free speech" mention which has become synonymous with "give people a place to be a racist" and "all things Q."

Edit: for clarity, I believe everyone, including the racists, should have freedom of speech. Though, forcing companies to host that speech is not freedom of speech. And the speech that is supposed to be protected, dissenting views, seems as protected as it's ever been. Freedom of speech is not there to protect objectively harmful hate and conspiracies that intend to manipulate the vulnerable.

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Yeah, that was an immediate red flag for me too. It's the same kind of rhetoric used by sites like Voat and Gab which are immediately taken over by the far right (and I definitely don't want a single cent of my money going to them).

I've honestly never understood the appeal of a completely unmoderated space. I'd prefer a site that was moderated fairly and competently so I didn't have to wade through extremist dross looking for content.

> I've honestly never understood the appeal of a completely unmoderated space.

Unmoderated sounds good on the surface only. If dang and the other mods weren't present, I'm sure none of us would be here either.

when you hear the word democracy do you think "give undesirables a say in our government"?

Democracy doesn't work when the citizens are manipulated due to their lack of intellect.

So your idea of democracy is "only these people should rule you, whether you vote or not."?

It's disingenuous that you're using quotes to represent something I never said.

Education is lacking, democracy is suffering because of it.

Anything else you interpreted is based on your own biases.

> Education is lacking, democracy is suffering because of it.

We can only re-balance the power of manipulation through developing technology that values identity and transparency over fraud and misconduct (or social acceptance aka likes).

Currently, the economics behind misinformation are only feasible for a handful of institutions; and that unbalanced the power of acquiring knowledge online.

The Web has failed us as a technology, in the sense that its intention liberated knowledge to the people at first but then gradually pushed control over its discoverability and "trustworthyness" away from the people.

Democracy is doing just fine. Anyone can vote, fool or laureate. That's democracy, and nothing more.

How much longer can that keep up until we see some sort of strange Balkanization and increased secretarian violence.

I don’t see how we can keep up the facade of a united nation where more or less two factions bubble up that are clearly opposed along irredeemable lines (personally I believe there are more than two factions but they tend to bubble up and ally into just two in a way that makes differentiation basically meaningless)

I think the USA's current opponent are lobbying corporations, not terrorists or domestic insurgence.

True, you are correct, democracy specifies no specific outcome.

However, my comment should have read "bad for the outcomes of a democracy."

Yep, I sure do.

And I'd always thought that undesirables were a relatively smallish percentage of the population. As long as they are, we don't actually have to decide who's undesirable. They get outvoted. It's pretty clever.

Until the point where mean, angry, stupid people become a majority -- or worse, a near-majority with ancient thumbs on the scale favoring them. Then we've got a lot of very uncomfortable decisions to make.

Yeah as a Mastodon user whenever I see someone touting "free speech" as a feature of their social media platform it's a huge red flag that usually just means "alt-right, racists and transphobes welcome"

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