Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

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It's good that it keeps getting exposed that a single organization without accountability decides what people are or are not allowed to publish on a platform to the people who explicitly subscribed to their publications.

The fact that moderation is a hard problem is orthogonal. The fact remains that there are different rules for different people, both for flagging and for content. The fact that there is more nuance than "two sets of rules" doesn't really change the fundamental problem that private companies now get to arbitrarily police publication by normal people.

I have the distinct impression that in 100 years the default mode is going to be "if it's legal you can post it, if it's not you can't, and if you have a problem with the boundary, take it up with the lawmaking authority and not us". We will look back at this time at the emergence of any-to-any publishing like the dawn of radio or TV or newspaper where a few rich guys got to decide what could or could not be published.

https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/109FW5 (NSFW) is a beautiful picture, taken by a major 20th century photographer. It's also depicting a sex act that most people would never even consider.

Do you really want pictures like this everywhere on Instagram? So now we have a no sex acts rule. But then an art museum is hosting an exhibition of art, and that art is depicting sex. Maybe even pedophilic sex, like a vase in the Met that has an old man stroking a young teenagers hairless genitals on it. That's very likely child pornography, except that the law can't ban images of artistic value, and the image of the vase has a lot of value, and I doubt anyone would find it erotic. Should the Met not be allowed to use a picture of a bunch of vases to promote its exhibitions?

There's lots of reasons why reasonable seeming results are not possible from simple rules, and why it's legal, let's have it is not a great rule. Having a moderation system that addresses e.g. art studios and museums differently from other people is quite sensible.

The solution to that is a rule set that users can select what they want and automated tagging. It is essentially opt-in moderation vs. chosen for you moderation. And it could become fairly sophisticated too! We are starting to see it in the form of subscribing to block lists on twitter.

Also in practice I think this is covered for %99 of cases people via an NSFW & NSFL tag system. That would be an NSFW art and thats that.

The children issue will boil down to parents are the real root user of their children's accounts and parents will have control over the tagging set for moderation until they are of age.

IMO I think most people are fine with mandatory labeling of goods, and actually welcome it because it gives more control and informed consent. It's the mandatory censorship that become the issue.

Abusive false labelling might become the next hot topic, but that is far smaller of a surface area.

Isn't that basically what happens now? Say I join a local city group. All posts to that group could be tagged with said #city in your world. Well right now anyone who is in one of these groups knows that many people come in and post lots of extremely charged national politics. They inevitably have their content removed as it's off-topic, not from Facebook but just from the city-specific group. The poster cries that their right to freedom of speech is being violated and that the mods are censoring them.

So in your world, say the same person posts biased national political opinions and tags it with #city. Unless someone is moderating that tag, the tag becomes absolutely useless. It seems like how things work today, just with extra steps?

You have a choice to filter out #city tagged items or not. And you can debate that a tag is incorrect as a matter of fact, much as you can debate if a food good does have sodium in it or not. And also tags are not singular, you can tag something #city #redteamblueteampolitics #highlyemotional #inflammatory and YOU get to choose if you want to see #highlyemotional content or not, not the platform. You get to choose if you want to follow the #rude #crazy person on Server Y, not your mastodon instance admin.

Also a big part of this is matter of scale and choice. I don't think people care that much about a small subreddit and their bullshit most of the time, or petty facebook group politics. It's when the platform itself does the censoring, and when the platform is where %95 of content exists due to network effects and has user counts that are in the billions that it starts having a duty of neutrality. It's much like city roads or housing or similar, the people you filter out from housing and city roads have to be filtered out for dangerous damage to the infrastructure or people itself and that is it, otherwise you get into really bad political and discriminatory territory when you say black people or people of opinion Y can't buy housing here or drive on the roads.

In this future system, you can also have alternative tagging systems, credit ratings for moderators, published AI models that tag client side, etc. I think it would be a very interesting marketplace of services!

Sounds extremely subjective and time-intensive.

That photo needs a stronger warning than NSFW.

It’s a disturbing, self-destructive act and I’d rather I’d never had seen it.

Short of writing a novel, what would be more clear than the clear indication that it is Not Safe For Weaklings? If you don't think you're strong enough to handle it, don't venture in. Seems pretty straightforward.

NSFL. Or, perhaps we need a “4chan and similarly tasteless degenerates” tag.

> NSFL

Not Safe For the Limp is just variant of Not Safe for the Weak. They both communicate that if you aren't strong, stay away.

> Or, perhaps we need a “4chan and similarly tasteless degenerates” tag.

It's just an arbitrary grid of pixels. Either you are strong enough to handle viewing arrangements of pixels or you aren't. The weak have been warned, the strong have no concerns. No need to overcomplicating things.

That probably sounded a lot better in your head.

No it’s not. It’s unusual by most (>75% feels like a safe bet) people’s but it’s not self destructive… it could be considered and probably was a little on the unhygienic side of things considering the potential for urinary tract infections, but a person doing that is not a person that’s doing it for the first time. From physical deformation (not that different to someone using gauged ear piercings) and a different urinary pathogen exposure profile, their body has changed a bit. No different from skeletal and muscle related changes in people pushing the boundaries of performance in countless sports.

It’s just very different, but posed in a way that is simultaneously provocative due to the sexual nature yet mundane given how different the sexual act is.

Self-mutilation for sexual gratification is a disturbing, self-destructive act and it’s not something I’m better for having seen.

I also don’t see any artistic merit in the work whatsoever, but you’re welcome to your own views and predilections. I just wish there’d been a more accurate warning so I could avoid it.

I take your point about accurate tagging … but my point was more in response to calling it self mutilation and I was mainly trying to argue that it’s not self-mutilation… but like a lot of Mapplethorpe’s work, it kinda makes you want to talk about it, it’s “confronting” but I’ll stop myself before I go down a tangent again.

Specifically addressing my argument it’s not self mutilation is that this is the sort of thing that if they stoped doing it today would “heal”. Elasticity would change and the body would slowly return to normal. Which is why i specifically called out the gauged ear piercings. When you turn a 1mm hole in your ear to say, a 25mm hole (large but not extreme) that’s not really “self mutilation” when compared to people that deliberately undergo processes for artistic scar patterns or to use another ear example, have shapes cut out of the ear cartilage. The gauge piercing will heal, so would this and there are vastly more shocking things people do in the body modification world… many of which id say it was entirely fair to judge as self mutilation… like sclera eye “tattooing”… having something done to you that has a high potential to impart your vision or even blind you for the sake of achieving a specific artistic look on your face feels like a much more clear cut case of self mutilation than this particular photographed act.

"Do you really want pictures like this everywhere on Instagram?"

As all things, this should be determined by subscription to content. I mean if i subscribe to CNN news and CNN stars posting dick picks or gore. I unsubscribe and thats the end of dick picks for me.

I should not see things that i don't subscribe to same way as i should not be presented with web pages that i do not explicitly go to by clicking on a link or entering url address.

It's on me if i go to 4chan. And same thing goes i opposite direction. If i like dick pics i should be able to subscribe to all of them and not be judged for that.

I don’t think pictures like this would be “everywhere on instagram” if instagram allowed all legal content.

Correspondingly, I think your argument is a strawman.

> vase in the Met

Source for the curious?

The particular vase I was thinking of seems to be on the Museuminsel, not the met. I blame my poor memory, and you can see a picture at (again NSWF) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece#/m...

What makes you think something as unique and hard-fought as the First Amendment will be applied to the Internet when all trends point in the other direction, both on and offline?

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