Hacker News Reader

Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

No, this is how it’s supposed to work. People say things that are unpopular, then other people complain and withdraw their support. Each of those people are exercising free speech.

This is what the “marketplace of ideas” looks like. The evolving tension between different factions and ideas is a feature, not a bug.

View on HN

A handful of multinational corps are supposed to host and facilitate the grand majority of human culture and communication.

Weird. I must have missed the historical text about rights and freedoms that compensated for this.

I think in a marketplace of ideas, many ideas are available, and the better ideas are embraced. The bad ideas stay on the shelves. But they do not get thrown out, at least the bar for that should be high.

Agreed. I would add that in a marketplace of ideas, people try to persuade others, rather than pressuring authorities to intervene in the expression of ideas they disagree with.

I agree with that too.

And to take the metaphor one step further, which may be to go too far, if someone does not want to have their ideas on the same shelves as some other ideas, the best is if the marketplace is big enough that there are other shelves to move to. For example, there are more record companies than there are streaming services. The consolidation that seems inevitable in the Internet era works against a truly diversive market. Traditional bookshops worked much better for this. The convenience that many values, to have everything in one place, has disadvantages too.

“Marketplace” like a market economy, where people are free to introduce new things, organize themselves, and try to attract support.

Not marketplace like a grocery store where you go shopping.

Hmmm. No. In a "marketplace of ideas," each idea has a price. Some are held dear and others are viewed as worthless. Regardless, each idea is available to you, and to future generations, for consideration. What we see here is not a functioning "marketplace of ideas." Rather, it is the illiberalism of puritan times and other dark ages where certain thoughts and attitudes could not be considered because a faction explicitly removed them from the marketplace.

When reading books like "The Scarlet Letter" way back in my younger days, I always thought of them as being so irrelevant. Unfortunately, I didn't understand they were actually sci-fi novels. My only consolation now is that perhaps a new crop of Americans eventually emerges that views the moral panics of today with as much exasperation and disdain as I viewed the moral panics of the 1600s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com