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Comment by logic_beats_pro | Hacker News Reader

>We need to realize our problem is not with censoring people, it's with who does the censoring.

No, the problem is with censoring people.

You make it seem like censorship is a given. I disagree and feel no need to have a third party prune unwanted ideas for me. This will seem like a strange idea for some but I don't need a priest in between myself and God. I don't need a doctor in between myself and good health. Why would I need a censor in between myself and information?

No need for governments, no need for corporations, just me and my silly brain will decide what to digest. What a concept!

We need to realize our problem is not with censoring people, it's not with who does the censoring, it's people that try and normalize censorship.

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Censorship is certainly necessary on some level. Child sexual abuse material, for example. Animal brutality material, rape/snuff material, and so on. I do NOT want this stuff shown to me, ever, and I don't want anyone else in society to have access to this material ever. Even just a short exposure to these things can be life traumatizing to people, as it has been to me.

Racism/sexism is a lot murkier of a topic. There's a lot of nuance there that I think we culturally haven't fully figured out. The whole "cracker" situation on twitch, for example.

> Even just a short exposure to these things can be life traumatizing to people, as it has been to me

+1. When I was younger I used to browse 4chan somewhat regularly. I saw snuff videos and other awful content that I still think about to this day. My life would have been better had I not seen it.

My life would have been way better if I had 1 million dollars at birth. Let's restructure society and sacrifice everybody's fundamental liberties to ensure a better life for me.

Funny enough, the rich actually already do this for themselves.

You're your own censor in this situation and that's probably what the sentence was getting at.

I censor myself all the time. There's numerous things I simply don't want to read or see, but I've made and own that decision for myself.

Here's a devil's advocate point of view:

Free speech/free press is an asset within a group when the following are true: A) members are acting in good faith which typically requires value systems to be not too divergent, B) members agree on how to arrive at the truth, and C) members are not confusing science (designed to be true), opinion (designed to be neither true nor false), and entertainment (designed to be false).

When one of these is not true, it creates liabilities that need to be managed. Social breakdown is the result of not managing these liabilities.

Probably an initial response will be: "well who decides X" ... if we've figured this out for engineering problems where lives are phyisically on the line we can figure it out for this. Any authoritative action whether it be laws or standards make some portion of people unhappy.

Censorship is a given for large online platforms. You can and should try to allow free propagation of ideas, but you also have to protect the forum from people who are determined to fill it with hateful commentary and pornography. 4chan isn’t a crazy special case, it’s the default destination of a forum where everyone knows there are no rules.

In particular, it used to be called "forum moderation" until that was deliberately conflated with censorship by far-right groups, angry at their loss of audience, starting I guess somewhere around 2010.

That's because forums generally have topics and rules. If we're in a forum about sports cars and you're constantly starting adversarial threads about city planning and parking, then mods would probably censor you to keep the forum on topic. Places like Facebook advertise themselves as the "town square of the web". Traditionally nobody was censored in the town square. There's a difference between purpose built communities and the general network of communication.

The term moderation itself often came from debate and discussion venues where moderators would police speeches.

> Traditionally nobody was censored in the town square.

This isn't true, it's just that the spatial constraints IRL mean there's never been a need to scale moderation of town squares beyond intuitive methods. Go to your physical town square and start screaming slurs and threats of violence at passers-by, and see how long it takes before the community "censors" you.

> screaming slurs and threats of violence at passers-by, and see how long it takes before the community "censors" you.

In developing and developed countries I've had (ostensibly) mentally ill people shouting epithets at passerbys and they're just ignored. So I think this is more about cultural norms.

Moreover, the case you mention is simple. If a spammer joins a forum and starts spamming, there's usually broad support to kick them out. Once the argument becomes ideological, that's when sentiment is a lot more mixed

The equivalent of "forum moderation" is removal of content by Facebook group owners, or subreddit moderators. Censorship at the scale Big Tech does today would be equivalent to the vBulletin developers baking admin backdoors into the software so that they could censor other people's instances of it.

> Censorship at the scale Big Tech does today would be equivalent to the vBulletin developers baking admin backdoors into the software so that they could censor other people's instances of it.

No it wouldn't. As big as Facebook is, they still only moderate their own platform, and there is only one instance of Facebook. Separate vBulletin instances do not constitute a single, collective "vBulletin platform." The narrative of "Big Tech" as an organized leftist conspiracy orchestrating censorship over all social media is simply right-wing propaganda.

> there is only one instance of Facebook.

That's my point. The reason vBulletin forum moderators aren't equivalent to Big Tech censorship is that you can run your own vBulletin, independent of theirs. Censorship of Facebook is bad because that isn't an option.

It absolutely is an option! There are open source social media projects out there that you can fork and start hosting today, if you want. Or you can use one of the existing alternatives. It's just that not many people use them right now, because Big Tech "censorship" has done a pretty good (definitely not perfect) job of just targeting bad actors. If a large non-toxic chunk of the population starts getting banned, non-toxic alternative platforms will become viable for the network effects that power social media centralization. Until then, the alternatives will look like Voat and Gab, and it seems like the online public doesn't love platforms that are dominated by the toxic castoffs from more mainstream platforms.

>If a large non-toxic chunk of the population starts getting banned, non-toxic alternative platforms will become viable for the network effects that power social media centralization.

Case in point: a number of Youtubers fed up with the platform demonetizing and delisting their content are advertising their content on other video platforms, or just hosting their own like Corridor Digital.

The web is one of the few examples of the free market actually working, but people have fallen for the defeatist and nihilistic narrative about the "centralization" of the web and "control" by sinister forces, insisting that competition with any big platform is simply impossible.

They said that about MySpace too and look what happened.

So you don't want doctors (or presumably any form of expertise,) or governments, or corporations. Just you and your brain thinkin' thinks.

I'm wondering where exactly you think all of this "information" you would be digesting would be coming from, absent the "censorship" of structures and systems needed to collect, validate and disseminate it?

Good luck reconstructing the last 8000 years of human progress and knowledge from first principles, naked and alone in nature with some crystals and potions before you fucking die of parasites and tetanus I guess.

You're attempting to steer the conversation away from censorship and now towards a scenario where the internet, medical journals, books were no longer available? In that situation, I would have a much harder time getting access to the information to make a decision.

Back to the original point - You're assuming that a doctor, government or corporation will make a decision for me that's in my best interests. In reality they're much more likely to make a decision for me that's in _their_ best interests. Lots of examples in the past few year+ with the pandemic.

> No, the problem is with censoring people.

No, it’s who/when/where the censorship occurs.

If you want to come into my living room and shout Nazi propaganda, your ass is getting censored and banned from my house.

If you think that level of censorship is a problem, then we have a fundamental disagreement, and the bad news for you is 95% of people will disagree with you.

If you agree on that level of censorship, then we’re just arguing where the who/when/where line should be.

I think there is a need for "censorship" (if you want to call it that), but not for the reason the other people replying to this comment say.

Do you really want to censor racist comments, for instance? Wouldn't you rather know how many racists there are out there?

The real problem is possible use of a channel like this to support bad actions, not bad viewpoints. For example, someone could advertise to hire a hit-man to kill someone. Or a group might use the channel to organize a mob to go around burning down jewish businesses.

In the scheme described, owners of individual servers could block such messages, if they recognize they're there (a possibly hard problem). Perhaps this would be sufficient, while still leaving viewpoints uncensored, since there are, we hope, very few people in favour of serious criminal activity, while many favour free speech even for those they detest.

If I'm running a relay, and there's a possibility that somebody who dislikes me can upload something questionable and use it to make the cops show up at my house and make off with my computers... Well that's content that I'd like to censor.

I'm not taking a stand against the content itself, but as long as there are bullies that can be moved to action by bits on a disk, our protocols will need to either support censorship, of be zero-knowledge to the point where nobody knows which bits are on which disks.

This is a really sophomoric take.

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