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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

For a couple years around a decade ago I moderated a decent-sized but not massive subreddit and the frequency of child porn reports on there was chilling. It was every week at least. This was not at all a sexual sub, not even adjacent to porn or titillating images or anything.

Reddit was more permissive than they should have been for a lot longer than they should have been and may not be representative. But even accounting for that, it really opened my eyes to how common it can be.

This is also what turned me against free speech fundamentalism in the end. Every attempt at getting this addressed was shot down in the name of free speech and anti-censorship. Every time it was actually improved caused what felt like an internet-wide backlash against the changes.

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The older I get, the more I believe the issue is with centralization (which the DMCA had a huge part in establishing).

What if there were no redit servers, and each subredit was self hosted? What would the incentive be for people to post child porn on some small independently run server?

As the subredit owner, you could just censor whoever you wanted, with very little global internet drama. Tools for autoflagging posts could still exist. Over-censored forums would piss off users, and be easily replaced. Similarly, under censored ones would lose users / get busted.

This all worked fine pre-internet. Editors would decide who and what would be posted.

It still works for things like audio fiction podcasts, where "slush readers" filter submissions, and money / reputation are exchanged when stuff gets published. In addition to leading to much better moderation than the big Internet sites, it creates jobs for domain experts.

The main problem is that it doesn't scale to a $1B/mo business that investors can siphon money off of. Instead, it's best structured as an ecosystem of small botique businesses.

> What would the incentive be for people to post child porn on some small independently run server?

But... that's precisely what the article is about?

> The Korean agent showing Janczewski around eventually pointed the phone’s camera at a desktop computer on the floor of Son’s bedroom, a cheap-looking tower-style PC with its case open on one side. The computer’s guts revealed the hard drives that Son seemed to have added, one by one, as each drive had filled up with terabytes of child exploitation videos.

> This was the Welcome to Video server.

> "I was expecting some kind of glowing, ominous thing," Janczewski remembers, "and it was just this dumpy computer. It was just so strange. This dumpy computer, that had caused so much havoc around the world, was sitting on this kid’s floor."

The banality of evil, indeed.

> But... that's precisely what the article is about?

The incentive in this case was profit from/access to more CSAM. GP is referring to how most subreddits/forums do not have that incentive.

Usenet was rife with such content. Decentralization is not a solution to moderation.

yeah, I mean, I don't know what the solution is, like I am looking, but, I have no damn idea.

People don't need an incentive to upload disgusting or illegal content. They do it all the time just to annoy others. I built and ran a very small web app as a joke for a party, where friends could upload pictures of themselves drinking a beer. When I remembered it existed and went to take it down a year later, someone had registered an account and uploaded about a hundred megabytes of gore: images of dead or injured people.

Other friends have had the same problem with actual child pornography.

Does the centralization make the situation worse? I agree that there's probably a larger total number of illegal materials shared on large sites, because they get the most traffic. I'm less convinced that that the same amount of user activity fragmented across a hundred different companies would see more effective enforcement. Remember, stats about how over 90% of CSE material reports to law enforcement come from Facebook is testament to how effective the reporting infrastructure is. I've also read articles about how Bing and Duck Duck Go are not as effective at filtering abuse material than Google - which is not an dig against the former, but an byproduct of lower available resources. I don't think decentralization would improve that.

The centralization is a two-sided coin.

It provides a larger target where failure of the system to regulate content can impact more users.

But it also provides economies of scale in the regulation apparatus having outsized impact when it is improved.

The tricky question is whether the mute grows proportional to the megaphone.

> the more I believe the issue is with centralization

> This all worked fine pre-internet. Editors would decide who and what would be posted.

Obviously this argument is inconsistent.

It's also wrong. The worst problem isn't with Reddit, it's with sites like the one reported in the article. These are exactly like the "under censored ones [sites]" you advocate for above. They don't lose users - they gain the types of users who want that kind of material.

> shot down in the name of free speech and anti-censorship

Not to defend the material in question in any way - but the people who expressed concern... were right. As soon as Reddit gave mods the tools they needed to expunge the really terrible stuff from the site, those tools were almost immediately used to ban completely unrelated conspiracy subs.

I think lots of folks would consider that an entirely worthwhile tradeoff. Would you like to try to argue that it's not?

Why stop the tradeoff. Without the internet these things could not spread. Shut it down. People can take photos without permission from the government. Stop selling camera and charge camera resellers.

Would you like to argue where your line is?

Somewhere short of enabling revictimization so that r/thedonald doesn't have to pay for hosting.

Um do you want to try again at not defending it?

My information is very out of date but I'm curious how you know how unrelated they were.

My more-than-lay understanding is that the trading didn't happen in the open. Users used questionable comments, line-toeing images, and "jailbait jokes" to find each other and then swapped in DMs or off-site entirely.

Reddits mods have always had a rich grapevine. In my time I never once heard of a sub getting banned that didn't have a months or years long reputation for turning a blind eye to that. Possibly that completely changed after I left, sure.

You can ban all speech and it would end the spread of these images altogether, at least to the extent the law can be policed. The ends don't justify the means.

Okay, but we didn’t ban all speech, right? The collateral damage was mostly weird conspiracy theory subreddits and hate-based communities like r/fatpeoplehate. Given how it actually shook out, I think the ends absolutely justified the means.

Criticisms of pragmatism don’t typically depend on failure to achieve the ends.

Until 'weird' and different becomes systemically shutting out minorities. People justify a lot of things they shouldn't

If that happens, I’ll change my tune. I’m much more concerned with actual harm that’s currently happening than theoretical harm that may not even come to pass.

To be honest, I’m still quite bitter and resentful about losing the r/RightWingLGBT community.

Vast majorities on a site like that are already self-censoring.

The damage in terms of isolation and radicalization is already very real.

You won't be around but the system you endorsed will cause pain for future victims you haven't considered.

What assurances do you have that the system you endorse won't cause pain for future victims you haven't considered?

If you're advocating a return to older internet status quo, I think we have solid evidence that it would cause pain.

His system causes pain for the present and future. It is a system we know and have rejected. Another system may be worse but accepting his system assures pain for all now and in the future.

> It is a system we know and have rejected.

I think I need to know what definition you're writing from to have an opinion on that.

Moderated public discourse is the rule, not the exception, in vast spaces of human communication. It's not perfect but usually good.

In contrast, unfiltered bidirectional public communication can cause significant issues. It gave us 4chan and Reddit before the admins decided ad revenue was important to them.

Can't you see the problem with holding as evidence your position of ignorance that anything is wrong with the situation as it stands, whilst the situation which you argue in support of is explicitly designed to impose that position of ignorance? It would be much the same as if you were blindfolded walking through a morgue and claiming that no death surrounds you because of your treasured blindfold.

You can't even know there's a problem until you can properly see the situation you're in, and if you advocate for measures that allow the apparent imposition of a false reality, you can't use that apparent false reality as evidence that "everything is OK and no theoretical harm has come to pass".

I fear nearly the entire world is awash in this nonsense and it gains purchase with every passing week. Everybody craves the illusion of normalcy and sees no sin in the truth being betrayed in pursuit of it, and then when that illusion falls away they scream blue murder that they were deceived, seemingly with complete ignorance of the fact that they begged for that deception, demanded its imposition, and vilified those who opposed it.

The truth always outs eventually, you can only hide from it for so long. And all you buy in the hiding is license for those who need your ignorance to operate, with all the harm that implies.

Could you give me an actual example of harm that happened to an undeserving community as a result of these policies, then? I am entirely open to being wrong, if you can provide a counter example.

To ask the question misses the point entirely and demonstrates the malfunction; In the presence of what I claim to be this optimal regime of information restriction which has concealed instances of what I am seeking to be informed of, inform me of these instances.

To cite just a few obvious examples from the past few years of social media censorship to cover up things the special interest groups in control of social media would rather have concealed; COVID Lab leak evidence, Hunter Biden laptop, Metabiota links, Ukraine Gas company positions, bribery being passed back up the chain, Daszak and EcoHealth alliance activities, etc. I know that all of these were vigorously attacked and suppressed over the past few years, and most people either knew nothing about them or believed them to be entirely false due to that active suppression, and they made critical life-changing decisions which altered the trajectory of the political and economic realities of the entire world based on those outright lies.

And here we sit, raising them as examples for somebody who started from a position of claiming they were unaware such things even existed because of their vaunted and optimal information control regimes. Whether you react with an admission that you were clearly wrong or doubling-down on it because you dislike the implications of the above is once again beside the point; Censorship of this kind is absolutely unacceptable and intolerable. It is a wholesale license for the censoring parties to sculpt the views of everybody to that which best serves the censoring parties interests. Nothing more, nothing less.

We are talking about Reddit. I’m saying we haven’t seen any real collateral damage from moderation policies aimed at preventing CSAM and hate-based communities.

I'm talking about the entirety of the new wave of "narrative sculpting", of which reddit is most definitely a significant part, by censorious mechanisms as an adjunct to what was previously a prevalent and well accepted viewpoint on the primacy of absolute free speech. The same tools that enable that censorship enable any kind of it, no matter what loaded description is used to justify the censorship.

If it honestly could be kept to purely policing cp and super intrusive gore spam, that would probably not be something worth getting up in arms about. The fact of the matter though is that it is near globally applied by this point in time to force the perspective that the owners of the centralised media services want and shut out every opposing view for as long as possible truth be damned. And that is utterly unacceptable. It is turning the world into a complete hellscape.

First they came for the nazis and…I said “good”.

Then you realized they redefined nazis to mean you?

If it happens I’ll tell you first.

There's a cost/benefit analysis to be done.

Some ends don't justify their means. Others do. Depends on the magnitude of the ends and the means.

Again the conflation of freedom of speech versus the freedom to be heard.

Freedom of speech means that the government can’t put you in jail for saying something stupid.

Censorship of privately owned online forums is entirely up to the forum. There is no high principle at stake there. In fact, censorship of this kind of forum is itself a kind of speech - so forcing someone to publish what you want them to publish, is also a form of suppression.

That doesn't make any sense. Mods (not Reddit employees) can't ban subreddits, because they only have control over their own subreddits. The admins (Reddit employees) did ban subreddits, but it had nothing to do with the new tools the admins gave to subreddit mods.

> This is also what turned me against free speech fundamentalism in the end. Every attempt at getting this addressed was shot down in the name of free speech and anti-censorship.

The solution is to put these vile pieces of sludge in prison forever, or execute them - not turn against liberty. This is a red herring for at least morally questionable people.

If executing people fits with your conception of liberty I think we have very different understandings of liberty, and what "morally questionable" means.

I have no objection whatsoever with executing people that torture our most vulnerable for sexual gratification.

Liberty means the freedom to do what is right. Child exploitation isn’t even in an adjacent universe to that.

> I have no objection whatsoever with executing people that torture our most vulnerable for sexual gratification.

I have a problem with you executing people.

There are plenty of hypothetical people whom we could agree deserve execution.

The problem is: Who has the power? What else will they do with it?

If the subjects of that power are kept alive then there is a chance to "put right" injustices, if not then not.

That is the problem with execution as a "tool of justice"

>I have no objection whatsoever with executing people that...

>Liberty means the freedom to do what is right.

I understand the sentiment, but you do see how those two statements together are problematic?

No. For the same reason that using deadly force to defend yourself from an attacker is justified and also “right”.

Of course you would cut off the second part of the sentence where I specifically reference people committing one of the most heinous crimes in order to make your “gotcha”. Perhaps trying to imply that I am not opposed to any and all uses of capital punishment when I am talking about a very specific crime. Frankly a pretty lazy attempt at building a straw man.

Capital punishment should be reserved for the absolute worst among us. Exploiting children for sexual gratification is one of them.

Child rapists get full due process at least.

> The solution is to put these vile pieces of sludge in prison forever, or execute them - not turn against liberty

So, concretely, are you arguing that Reddit mods shouldn't have the power to shut down r/fatpeoplehate, but should have the power to permanently imprison or execute people?

Man this thread is taking me back to my digg.com days.

If you're not willing to take the Internet flamebait from time to time, are you even alive...

No what a ridiculous statement

> This is also what turned me against free speech fundamentalism in the end. Every attempt at getting this addressed was shot down in the name of free speech and anti-censorship. Every time it was actually improved caused what felt like an internet-wide backlash against the changes.

Child porn never add anything to do with "free-speech". I'm sorry but trying to link the 2 as they are somehow related issue is completely absurd. Reddit still has plenty of child porn, revenge porn and child grooming subs, so much that Reddit now keeps modlists hidden cause the depraved people Reddit hires as "supermods" apparently need that kind of protection to continue their misdeeds.

I hope one day that depraved website and its depraved admins and "supermods" get its day of reckoning, in a court of law.

> Child porn never add anything to do with "free-speech".

Well, they are related in that the tools needed to combat one can also be used to combat the other. If I can delete a post because [I believe] it contains child porn, I can also delete a post because it's saying something I don't like.

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