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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder, if we never had 230 to begin with, if the internet would still be a decentralized collection of blogs and websites.

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No. 230 is why sites like geocities and tripod and blogger and livejournal and so on could exist in the first place.

Those sites are the beginnings of the centralization I’m talking about.

Previously the liability was held by the ISP that hosted the individual website with objectionable content. Section 230 was written in response to a pair of lawsuits against ISPs, not against bigger webhosting firms like Geocities or Tripod. Without it there would be a strong incentive not to host anything by arbitrary unvetted customers.

The incentive would be to act as a dumb pipe, which absolved telecom providers from liability pre-230. (And still does today for unmoderated communications services)

There is no "dumb pipe" liability shield. There was no absolving of liability pre-230. And 230 — not some fairly tale alternative statute that mysteriously doesn't appear anywhere in the U.S. Code — is what provides that liability shield today, for moderated and unmoderated hosts and sites alike.

There sorta was - pre-230, the legal precedent was that "distributors" of content were absolved from any liability for it, while "publishers" of content were not. This was established in Smith vs. California, 1959 [1].

The issue was that in 1996, it was not yet clear whether ISPs, hosting companies, and web services counted as "publishers" or "distributors". Compuserve vs. Cubby Inc found that Compuserve was not liable for users' content because it didn't moderate (i.e. was a distributor), while Stratton Oakmont Inc vs. Prodigy Services found that it was liable because it did (i.e. was a publisher). Legislators felt that this setup a perverse incentive and so enacted 230 to that companies would not be penalized for good-faith attempts at moderation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_pas...

> Compuserve vs. Cubby Inc found that Compuserve was not liable for users' content because it didn't moderate

That is incorrect. It was not liable because it didn't moderate (i.e., was a dumb-pipe distributor) and because it had no reason to know of the defamatory content.

That latter piece is fact-intensive and case-specific. Which means expensive litigation in every case. Which is not remotely the same as a liability shield.

This forum likely wouldn't exist if we never had section 230 to begin with. Remember the original reasoning behind it - a company that ran a completely unmoderated forum won a court case (because it wasn't moderated at all). A company that imperfectly moderated a forum lost.

Section 230 means you can have user generated content that isn't perfectly moderated. The result of section 230 being abolished isn't some panacea of decentralized blogs and websites, its usenet flamewars and 4chan.

No. Without 230 comments and forum posts would probably be on a decentralized network where only the author is liable.

As say a blogger, you would only promote 3rd party content you approved of.

If those decentralized comments ever appeared together on the same webpage, e.g. in the "comments section" of that page, lawmakers would absolutely consider that webpage liable _even if the content wasn't served from there_.

Lawmakers don't care about the technical details.

Indeed, only the comments the author wants to promote should be embedded or linked on the page. Otherwise they should come out of band, either as a feature of the browser (or plugin) or another site.

This forum is pretty heavily moderated, and its usefulness is largely because it is moderated. Back in the early days of HN the comparison was Reddit, which at the time was completely unmoderated (they didn't have subreddits or mods at the time), and Reddit was starting to become a cesspool of spam, low-effort posts, and offensive content. Many people moved over to HN simply because it avoided that. (And Reddit ended up introducing moderation a couple years later.)

Unmoderated forums work fine when they're a small group of people with a vested interest in preserving the norms of the community. They fail quickly if they can't establish barriers against the outside world that prevent people with no skin in the game from hijacking the community for their own agendas. The modern Internet is much more similar to the latter than the former.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be moderated, but that moderation would be opt-in and also decentralized. You could pick people/algorithms you trust most to filter your view of the conversation.

Neither a completely unmoderated nor a perfectly moderated platform would have ever gotten to the size of the giant centralized platforms we have today. It just wouldn’t have been possible.

And I think a good bit of the problems on the internet today are because moderation is inadequate on these huge platforms, but they are passed off as safe places for everyone. It has blurred the line between trustworthy and untrustworthy, everything is now just ambiguously okay-ish.

i'm reminded of the short story "unwirer" by charlie stross and cory doctorow, which imagines a counter factual universe in which the internet was captured by corporate intentions much earlier

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless:_The_Essential_Charle...

https://craphound.com/unwirer/archives/000009.html

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