But you could... not do that."
Hacker news and Facebook:
1. Have advertisers (and just standards)
2. Check it for horrible stuff that's "not illegal"
3. Using "some other people'll" that are paid with money.
Now, here's the thing. Facebook and Hacker news are not equivalent in quality or quantity when it comes to how much illegal or horrible content is uploaded to them. But they both have advertisers, a risk of bad content, and use at least one paid moderator to prevent bad content from existing. Brimble is saying that Facebook and other hypothetical services could "not do that", which either means that:
1. The website / service will not exist or
2. Paid moderation on that service will not exist or
3. Moderation on that service will not exist or
4. User created content on that service will not exist.
That would affect Facebook and hacker news. No, I do not believe that hacker news is exposed to as much illegal and horrible content as Facebook. However, it is exposed to some, and it seems like the remedy in both cases is for the website to not exist. I'm pretty sure that if someone asked dang whether they had ever, in their years of moderating this site, seen something that disturbed them, he'd answer yes. I'm certain of it.
If you want to know my opinion though, I don't personally get enough value out of facebook, instagram, etc to use them at all. So if you were to ask me if the price of psychological damage to content moderation/review workers is worth it, I'd say no.
Let me spell it out for you. * The peasant doesn't get to choose whether he participates in society. * The peasant wants to improve society.
Here's you: * You get to choose whether you use hacker news, and you have decided to use hacker news. * You think that websites like hacker news should not exist.
Do you see why your argument isn't convincing? Your riposte of "yet you participate in society" could be used for literally anything. You're saying that hacker news shouldn't exist, but you don't actually believe that. If you argue things you don't believe, it's not really a good faith discussion.
If we're gonna cite the comic, three out of the four panels of the comic do not rely on this, and are precisely about using something by choice even while saying they should be different. The last panel is even more extreme because it's funnier that way, presumably, but the core point does not rely on lack of choice.
The other two examples are: posting from an iPhone that Apple ought to treat its workers better, and buying a car without seatbelts while saying cars ought to have seatbelts.
> but you don't actually believe that.
Nice mind reading. Shall I baselessly speculate about your posts while accusing you of being a bad actor, too? No, no I shall not.
This is more akin to posting from an iPhone and saying phones shouldn't exist.
You may also be surprised to find out I'd prefer much more bike- and walking-friendly city planning, even to the point of making it harder to drive places, while in fact I drive almost everywhere.
Dealing with the current reality does not prevent one from advocating something else. Am I the one taking crazy pills, thinking that's super-obvious?
The fact that you supposedly hold such a strong position as saying 'this platform shouldn't exist' when the cost to you for not using this platform is minimal makes very little sense to me. For the example of a phone, it's not entirely incongruent for someone who's already bought an iPhone to be upset with Apple, and if they generally wish to use a phone, other companies might not be much better. But if somehow they get the notion that phones or smartphones shouldn't exist at all and continued using them, that doesn't make sense. I know people who get around fine without smartphones. If somebody really thought smartphones shouldn't exist yet continued using them, I question the strength of their convictions, and am more inclined to believe they hold their position more for the value of controversy than genuine belief.
I object to the idea that we have to psychologically wreck some workers. No, Facebook (and Twitter, et c.) do, to stay in business, evidently. We don't have to. We could say they aren't allowed to do that anymore, as we have with other worker safety issues in the past. We could even do that while exempting very small low-harm operations and cases in which that kind of work really is something resembling necessary (police work, say). There's no "gotcha" in "but what about police investigators?" or "but what about HN?" (the two I've seen in this thread) unless one ignores the reality that similar worker protection regulations deal with those sorts of edge cases, routinely. Even if the regulations couldn't have any nuance (why not? It's not been a problem any other time), I'd personally be OK losing HN over that, sure.
You seem to be advocating a position that content moderation, and services that rely upon it, should not exist. I'm not sure why Hacker News would somehow be an exception to this, so you seem to be advocating this site should not exist. If you're not advocating this, perhaps you should explain how this site, which consists entirely and exclusively of user-generated content, would get around without content moderation, or why that content moderation would be acceptable.
> I'm not advocating that position because I don't like using HN.
I'm not sure what that has to do with it. If I heard someone advocating that, for instance, meat should be abolished because it's murder (or something along those lines), I would be perplexed if the person advocating that continued to eat meat. It wouldn't do anything to lessen my confusion if they told me they're not advocating that because they don't enjoy eating meat; that part makes sense to me. What doesn't make sense is both having that point of view, and continuing to to engage in that behaviour.
Now, if this individual instead had the position that meat should be taxed, or that people should cut back on their meat consumption because of its impact on the environment, I don't see an incongruence there. But if they hold the position that it should be banned entirely, that doesn't strike me as a deeply-held conviction if they continue to eat meat.
Likewise, for our NYT op-ed writer, if they, e.g., once read newspapers and then decided they were garbage that needed to be abolished, then perhaps there's no incongruence there. If I see him next week with the Sunday Times in hand, I would then gather that perhaps the position he advocated he wasn't serious about.
This is covered in the post you're responding to, directly. And others in this thread. I don't think it's particularly important or helpful that HN be outlawed, but I might be willing to accept that for fixing worker abuse in social media companies generally. I doubt, however, that'd be necessary, for reasons that are, again, covered plenty well in other posts of mine here. The TL;DR is that it's totally normal to have regulations, including for worker protection, that kick in only at a certain scale (say, employee head count) and that could probably work here.
I'm not set on or advocating outlawing HN. My entire original point was that harmful social media moderation jobs do not have to be done. Facebook (among others) choose to operate in a way that makes them necessary for their bottom line. Further, we implicitly choose to allow these jobs to exist by not making jobs that are psychologically abusive illegal without an excellent justification, as we do with jobs that are physically abusive or dangerous without a great reason to be so. This is close enough to regulations we already have for worker safety, that I don't think it's wildly outside the bounds of behavior we (at least in the US) already regulate.
I doubt HN in particular is harming moderators very much, for a bunch of reasons including its size and the form it takes. Probably not a ton worse than your average customer service job. And maybe better, since no-one's yelling abuse at them on the phone.
There is no "gotcha" here, for multiple reasons.
OK, then that's at least a substantial comment on why you feel that HN is different, rather than the evasive ones you've been giving throughout the thread; you could have just led with that instead.
Couple posts up. Cut the passive aggression and read.
You're also really avoiding the fact that you're not describing an improvement, you're describing abolishment. Hacker news only has one single feature, and that's user input. The comments are submitted by users. The articles are submitted by users. If you get rid of user input, then this website is an opening and closing HTML tag. The comics describe a scenario where something is improved. What would improvement of hacker news be to you?
Let's ask this:
1. Do you think that hacker news should exist in its current form?
2. If not, what would you change?
3. Do you use it?
4. Do you think that it should exist?
5. In what ways does Hacker news differ from facebook, such that a positive answer to 4. would have a negative answer to 5?
It's not, though? Else we are all constantly hypocrites in this regard. We may think the electoral system is broken and should be reformed, yet rarely vote for a candidate who supports that (because the current system provides few such candidates), et c. So calling it out seems pointless. We all deal with imperfect information and with the choices that the current system presents, but not others that might exist (or, rather, represent more-practical alternatives than they do now) instead, if the system were different. Prefacing criticism with public confessions when it's not very relevant is just a waste of space, and is stating the obvious.
> You're also really avoiding the fact that you're not describing an improvement, you're describing abolishment. Hacker news only has one single feature, and that's user input. The comments are submitted by users. The articles are submitted by users. If you get rid of user input, then this website is an opening and closing HTML tag. The comics describe a scenario where something is improved. What would improvement of hacker news be to you?
The "something" being improved would be worker protections, essentially. Publishing other people's stuff would probably require human review of it all. Given that AFAIK publishing houses aren't inundated with tsunamis of abusive content, I don't think that level of review is a problem in practice, as far as being abusive to the people doing the work—rather, it's the fact that abuse gets through with some regularity, that draws it in the first place. What's done now with review of user-posted online content clearly is hurting people, and it's the way certain businesses operate that are causing the problem.
If you asked me to draft legislation for this, I'd at least consider a carve-out for very small (low head count) operations. That's already super common in all kinds of business and, specifically, worker protection, regulations.
> 1. Do you think that hacker news should exist in its current form?
It doesn't seem to be a significant part of the problem, no, but I'd happily lose it in the name of reforming social media (=publishers with terribly lax submission and go-to-print standards) generally.
> 2. If not, what would you change?
Oh man. Nothing related to this, actually. Probably put in better poster-identity-tracking capabilities so it's easier to remember when you've already been down an unproductive garbage-thread with someone, or watched someone else do it (I do not have present company in mind here, to be clear) and over time people prone to creating those stop drawing replies at all and hopefully go away. There's a lot of inside-the-rules shitty posting that can't easily be user-policed right now, as it is on some other sites. I get the motivation behind weakening poster identity across threads, but I think it's beyond clear that it does more harm than good, now. Posters I read elsewhere today on HN, who were wondering how some subreddits can see HN as a cesspit: this is a big part of why.
The main downside is that meta-discussion about who's what kind of poster is low-value noise, but norms around here do an OK job of policing worse than that (provided the content being policed follows a clear pattern), so I think it'd work out OK. Just allowing personal tags for users, maybe with color-coding (visible only to the tagger) for posts, would go a long way. Some kind of hide-user functionality might help too, though it'd take some thought to make it work OK with HN's threading. Probably have to hide entire sub-trees they're at the root of, but I've definitely seen users for whom doing that would strictly improve my reading experience and I wouldn't miss a thing worth reading.
> 3. Do you use it?
LOL.
> 4. Do you think that it should exist?
Again, I'm not sure the entire category of thing is, fundamentally, not a crazy thing to bring into the world. It's like having an open email relay then trying to police messages passing through. Clearly insane. But, also again, most of the harm seems to kick in at scale. So, I dunno, maybe.
> 5. In what ways does Hacker news differ from facebook, such that a positive answer to 4. would have a negative answer to 5?
Chiefly in size. Fewer users, fewer employees, way less visual or auditory media to evaluate as a percentage of posts (I'm counting links, or it'd be zero). Arguments in favor of one and not the other are purely the practical sort—what's doing harm in practice, and how do you narrow in on that as specifically as possible—not the iron-clad-pure-reason sort; but, again, that's a pretty common approach with this kind of thing, for good reason.