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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

Censoring and moderating and content, as it relates to this lawsuit, is very expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it ranks pretty high in their cost chart. The only reason that social media platforms do content moderation is to manage the financial (advertisers), and the political risk. Well, if the politicians and the courts tell them they can't moderate political stuff, then the political risk has been removed. All that remains is the financial risk.

Advertisers aversion to controversy is based on, I assume, their adherence to cultural norms. These norms are fluid. So I actually think these laws will give them the cover they need to stop doing something that they would prefer not to do. I also believe that we'll be litigating this for eons.

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It's not the only reason. Without any moderation, sites would degenerate into cesspools that only cesspool dwellers would want to visit. Few site owners want their properties to be cesspools.

Why not give users the power of moderation? Currently the website owner makes the decision for me about what content I should not be seeing. I want instead all or at least almost all content preserved and the ability to create and subscribe to blocklists. The website can have a default blocklist active to make it palatable for the majority.

This is an interesting model, and there's nothing stopping someone from starting a social media site that works like this. But that doesn't mean that existing ones should be forced to use this model. Let's try them both (and others) and see which ones work best for their users.

This is the model that social media had. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... they all started of just showing you content from people your followed.

Or course they now all demand to show you "recommended" content and with that take on the responsibly of how "pleasant" that recommended content is.

Where did they do this? I bet few people truly know. My personal guess it's because injected ads and promoted content logged to out of place between your friends posts whereas there is little difference between ads and most popular posts.

Actually this model does exist and is pretty successful. Facebook Groups. The admins of these groups are not employees and have the power to limit whatever, whenever.

Why not just go to a different website that runst he way you want? Or revive NNTP and host community servers or something.

How Twitter used to be I think? If I remember correctly, I only got tweets from people I followed, in chronological order. I could unfollow someone and never hear from them again. Now the algorithm decides what I see.

Isn’t that email before decent spam filters? I much prefer my inbox with spam filters.

The current model of social media is analogous to an email host DELETING all emails that are sent to you but it considers to be spam.

What I propose is that the email host preserves all emails sent to you, but puts them in your spam folder if it considers so. Moreover, I should be able to disable that and let my email client to do spam filtering on the rules I make.

Or, its analogous to a newspaper receiving a bunch of write-in opinions and only deciding to print a select few of them in the paper.

Even if it proved successful, this definitely won't appease the ruling to not censor speech.

There's a weird bias towards "we need a daddy to tell us how to talk". Maybe it's because moderation is too hard for mere crowdsource+algorithms and maybe it isn't. I dunno.

And maybe the owners just want to keep that sweet fascist option open.

IMHO, the deeper aversion is because user-driven moderation goes hand in hand with user-driven ranking.

Which is turn makes it harder to non-obviously put your hand on the scales and insert paid content into high visibility feeds.

If TikTok inserts a well-matched piece of paid content into a feed, who would even recognize?

If HN inserts a piece of paid content onto the front page, people tend to notice.

Perhaps that's how it should be, though? Paid content -- even if I'm required to see it in my feed and can't filter it out -- should be marked as such.

HN has something similar to "paid" content: YC alum companies are allowed to post hiring notices that end up on the front page, and decay down the page according to a pre-determined algorithm. They're obvious in that you can't comment or vote on them, but HN does allow them to be hidden. I think that's the right way to do things; if HN allowed YC companies to post on the front page, and made it look like they were regular posts that got organically upvoted, it would reduce my trust in HN.

Any social media platform that puts paid content in a feed, while trying to make it look like regular content, would also lose my trust.

I'm not seeing the hand-in-hand here.

We're looking at 2 different moderation processes.

Daddy

Voting

There is no necessary connection that I can see.

A possible solution to this is to allow any user to be a moderator, and to allow other users who want moderation to subscribe to one or moderation "feeds" from other users.

If one wants to wade through the degenerate cesspool of content, they'd have that option. If one wants to only see fluffy non-hateful things, they could subscribe to moderation feeds that achieve that.

The notion that we can impose a single perspective of "good content" and "bad content" onto millions of people, with different perspectives, is simply asinine.

This solution would run into the same problem. X moderator doesn't give preferential enough treatment to conservatives, and therefore must be stopped

On the contrary, moderation feeds would almost certainly be completely protected by free speech laws, as they would essentially be the expressed opinions of individual people.

What free speech laws? Conservatives keep screeching free speech in the realm of a private entity and it simply doesn't apply.

This discussion is specifically scoped to the legal system in the United States.

If you, as a US individual, express the opinion that "I do not like post with unique ID X on platform Y because of reasons a,b,c", that would be protected speech. A moderation feed would be equivalent to a series of such statements.

If other users decide to subscribe to your moderation feed, and have matching posts automatically hidden, that would specifically be the choice of that individual user, and not a private company.

One of the greatest scams governments around the world have managed to pull is making "free speech" a politically partisan issue. There are two sides to it though, but it's not conservative vs. liberal, it's the common people vs. governments and corporations.

This is a solution looking for a problem.

People say this, but not long ago Twitter/Reddit/Youtube were basically a free for all for anything except porn. And their user numbers were skyrocketing at the time.

> anything except porn

That's moderation. Both because they are actively excluding certain content, but also because 'porn' can be subjective and so decisions have to be made about what does and does not qualify.

Porn is and has always been very political

And after they attempted to clean up, they were able to attract more advertisers and mainstream users the advertisers wanted to reach. Doesn’t the story of those sites back the person above you’s point?

That’s just saying “until it became a problem, it wasn’t a problem”. Those sites were a free for all, up until it became a problem. And then they were no longer free for alls.

Yeah, this is exactly right. Stronger moderation started happening because more and more toxic/abusive BS became prevalent. I only really experienced true "hostile attacks from a complete stranger" on Twitter in the last year or two, and I've been a heavy user of it since 2007. (tbh my usage has dwindled and I'm wayyy more focused on Mastodon now, which thus far fosters a stronger sense of community than Twitter will ever be able to)

Reddit is still a free for all - including porn

It's not even close, admins ban subs all the time, mods are under strict grip of admins on how they need to mod thing otherwise they get replaced, there are cases where admins straight up say that mod teams need to get more people in the team or they'll lose the sub, i've seen subs with automods straight up saying that they need to be careful with what is written otherwise they'll be banned.

The huge Aimee Challenor thing, that lead to people being banned anywhere the name was uttered is just the super high profile example I know, i'm sure reddit users would be able to show more smaller cases.

Just want to make it clear, I'm not claiming this control is good or bad, there are good reasons for and against moderation, but reddit is not even close to a free for all.

[0]: https://www.newsweek.com/reddit-aimee-knight-challenor-fired...

Exactly. The court isn't saying you can't moderate out the cesspool posts. They are saying that you can't choose political sides.

Where did they say you can't choose a side? It's also possible that I moderate content, the majority is conservative, and I'm not choosing a side.

Every decision is inherently "political"

Exactly, grey zones can happen really quickly. For example if someone says "I think Candidate X from Party Y is a total a-hole." Is that a political statement or a cesspool comment? I see legitimate arguments for either.

And this is why the us supreme court will throw out this appellate ruling. They really don't like grey zones.

> For example if someone says "I think Candidate X from Party Y is a total a-hole." Is that a political statement or a cesspool comment?

That's not even remotely gray, it's both a political statement and a "cesspool comment"; you're suggesting a false dichotomy.

Whether or not pineapple on pizza is acceptable can technically be brought to a political argument but anyone not turned into a rage monster by current social media can tell that it isn't a political debate in the current environment.

Perhaps in the technical definition of political, but not in the layman's definition of political.

The definition of political used by the populace is almost always the narrow subset of societal/cultural fights that are actively being argued. Generally speaking these arguments are headed by politicians.

There is also a space in the definition for arguments directly impact the structure/scope of the government. Although this may be separate enough that it may warrant being considered a second definition instead of an additional category within the first definition.

I often see this sentiment associated with those who wish to regulate political speech they find offensive. It's convenient if everything is political so that everything said can be regulated.

Regulating political speech for whatever reason (including offense), should be considered a legitimate exercise of moderation. It happens on Hacker News all the time - political speech is only considered on topic if and when it contains evidence of a "new or interesting phenomenon," and even then, users will mod down anything they don't like. And given the quality of most political threads here, I don't think many people here would prefer it if that were allowed to run amok.

If I'm running a car forum, I should be able to ban pro-Nazi rhetoric if I want, regardless of whether I find it offensive or merely technically off topic. Not every space on the internet needs to be /pol/.

Yeah, internet content laws are becoming increasingly conflicting. On one hand, you have places that are making it more difficult to legally moderate websites. On the other, you have legislation like SESTA and FOSTA where websites are being held legally responsible for content that others may post on the website.

Section 230 was an unusually great piece of internet legislation, and it's not great to see it start to crumble with these new changes. Just let every site be its own site.

I think quite literally lots of things are political. This discussion is political. Anything to talk about h1b visa is political. Immigration is political. The most offensive speech is arguably political speech, such as advocating for genocide.

There's a bit of a gap between "everything" and "lots of things" though. I agree with you that lots of things are political, but everything?

Using the widest definition, "affairs of the citizens", it's literally about everything outside of your private home. The twist though, is that since pretty much everything has consequences (including inaction), you are not safe from eventually having an outside impact even there. As the meme goes, "we live in a society". (Also why you should want to keep good relations with the other citizens...)

If you want to sell X to group Y which coincides mostly with party Z and has little overlap with the opposite party, it is worth your while to make buying X a political activity, however you can go about doing that.

I think the only thing that is clearly not political is people sharing pictures of pets. Everything else including Insta Thotts and what have you have been co-opted.

Just don’t follow anyone on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram with those views, how is that a ceespool?

Websites routinely disperse unconnected users' messages to encourage discussion. Hence the youtube alt-right indoctrination spiral.

Even if you don't follow people you still see user content

Hugely expensive. Zuck mentioned in the rogan episode they spend roughly $5b annual on "Defense" aka moderation and safety. To put it in perspective, that's roughly in line with what the defense budgets of Switzerland and Mexico.

> The only reason that social media platforms do content moderation is to manage the financial (advertisers), and the political risk.

What about the legal risk of hosting illegal content?

Yes certainly. But I was referring to moderation that is the topic of this lawsuit.

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