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Comment by lusus_naturae | Hacker News Reader

Why though? Early internet nerds may feel like they have a hegemony over this domain, but it belongs to the public at large, made up of all types of people with varying levels of risk and criteria for what they deem is acceptable public discourse.

Not to mention the fact that one person's grimy is another's milquetoast, so what do you do about that? Moderation is the organic balance that resulted from years of trial and error.

I miss the old internet as well, but I know the internet is not just for the weirdos and nerds (anymore). Every road in the world does not need to be the Autobahn.

What would really be saying something is if people stopped using platforms they don't like. But that's like taking a drug user away from his dealer--they both need each other in a perverse, symbiotic relationship. It's not that hard to leave platforms anyways, teens have already mostly stopped using FB.

The most uncharitable bone in my body thinks that people who don't migrate off Twitter etc. like being the "cool" guy who doesn't like that stuff and having others around to read that. But I suppose that's just my opinion.

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> Moderation is the organic balance

To me, it seems very inorganic outside of specific platform niches that allow for self moderation of subsets of the network (Reddit somewhat, IRC, discord, Mastadon, etc.). A single globally shared moderation policy with local deviances to accommodate local customs and laws does not seem “organic” as much as forced.

Compare this to the real world.

If I go to my local business networking group, there is one set of moderation policies that is strictly enforced.

If I go to my local pub, there is a very different set of moderation policies that is loosely enforced.

If I went to my business networking group and behaved as if I was under the moderation policies of my local pub the contrast in behavior would be stark.

Church has one set, school another, the local swingers club another, the gentleman’s club another, etc.

Compare this to many social media platforms where it seems like the moderation policies attempt to moderate a baseline of behavior consistently across all communities regardless of whether they are pubs, business groups, or otherwise.

I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard.

You're absolutely right. I think the problem is that connecting everyone to everyone is a mistake. As John Oliver (I think, I can't find the source of the original quote now), puts it, "Facebook is the Walmart of social media." Yes, everyone and your mom is on there... but that means every post is going to be seen by your mother. That is frankly, terrifying.

Building on your analogy, it'd be like if in the real world your local pub mates and your business friends met. These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum.

>I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard.

I think this is exactly what you're seeing. Of all the different social media models, personally, it's reddit and discord that won out for me, along with a smattering of more niche like Hacker News and the discussions page on Github.

You can't and shouldn't build a community that satisfies everybody.

Google circles FTW

Everybody likes to laugh at google+, but circles were the most intuitive and useful abstract for sorting social groups that I have ever used.

>but that means every post is going to be seen by your mother

This is solved by people just make another profile to keep it separate. It is okay not to add your mother on your hobby account.

>These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum.

But sites like Facebook are not just a single forum. Each group can be it's own community. People can keep two discussions separate.

>You can't and shouldn't build a community that satisfies everybody.

I don't think this is impossible. It is hard to scale a community to billions of people, but large social media sites are an existence proof that it is possible. Though at that scale it is more of a meta community compared to smaller subcommunities that are made which are more comfortable for humans to interact with.

I don't think it's impossible to find a set of rules that a billion people would be willing to agree to.

> This is solved by people just make another profile to keep it separate. It is okay not to add your mother on your hobby account.

Note that Facebook and many other social media sites go out of their way to prevent the same person having two accounts. It is against their terms of service, and they do try to enforce it in various ways.

Okay? Facebook lets you create multiple profiles using the same account.

In your example the problem was that someone's mom was reading all of their posts and not that they wanted to use different login information for each profile.

For one thing, I wasn't aware of the Profiles feature (and couldn't figure out how pt create another one even after reading it exists, though I'm sure I just wasn't careful enough reading the settings in-app).

Still, the comment above used both profile and account to refer to the same thing ("create a new profile", "your hobby account") so I'm not even sure which they were suggesting.

I doubt you could even get English and American communities to agree let alone Chinese and Swedes. A lot of what we see is steered by extremely Americanised morality and laws. As a Dane it feels off and I'm sure for people from China, India, and other places very different than here it must feel even more so.

A "baseline" where, as mentioned above, misogynistic, racist behaviour isn't allowed sounds easy. But is it though? You take what Nazis and racists have said for ages and put "Russian" instead of their victim of choice and suddenly most Americans will agree that's fine behaviour "because Ukraine".

How about age limits, alcohol, sex? Hell, even Americans couldn't agree on a baseline in those.

I don't know if you're American but as I said I'm not and the internet has teached me how to behave as one online to not be caught in strange Americanised moderation rules. That's not agreement but enforcement that's caused this and if asked I would vote No to those rules.

> I doubt you could even get English and American communities to agree

I doubt you could get just American communities to agree.

> I don't think this is impossible. It is hard to scale a community to billions of people, but large social media sites are an existence proof that it is possible.

Large social media sites are a pale shadow of an actual community. These sites love to throw that word around to get you to sign up, then act like properly moderating their sites to actually feel like a community is impossible.

I’m not sure those places are as different as you say, at least in terms of a baseline for acceptable behaviour that is common to all. Overtly, individualised racist or mysogybist abuse isn’t really acceptable in any of those places, and social media companies have t even managed to enforce that as a standard across much of their networks.

> I miss the old internet as well, but I know the internet is not just for the weirdos and nerds (anymore).

This is what I found bizarre about Jack Dorsey pining for the old days of the internet (usenet, irc) and the lack of discovery, and blaming centralization for it. There are still decentralized places that exist, and anyone is free to set up their own host, and they would get mountains more traffic than was even possible in the 90s or early 2000s. The problem is that that isn't good enough anymore. It has to make a mark on the internet or something. Not satisfied with 10,000 people viewing your page or your post, gotta be 10M+.

The other thing is that "old internet" was largely about the type of people on it. Mostly university students, most of those engineers, most of those male and from the same socioeconomic background. Fast forward to now when everybody is online, and the callout culture and seeming animosity towards viewpoints favored by early internet people is because opposing viewpoints exist.

Because what a lot of people think of as the deep, dark, grimy internet is how people talk in real life. The phenomena of the internet being a clean place where you don't say slurs only happened as a result of advertising on social media platforms. The argument about what way should we let the internet "be" is completely orthogonal to the matter, no one is suggesting people to go out of their way to be dirty, just let people have conversations the way they do outside the internet.

this is interesting to me. more than ever people are socializing on the internet, and not just in sequestered areas like discord servers. there still are ostensibly "public" places like twitter. to me this is similar to in real life as you describe it. and in real life i don't use slurs. none of my friends do either. in fact, i'd wager if you ever used a slur against against the wrong person in real life you'd quickly regret it. it's just very, very interesting to me to see a comment like this which supposes everyone is just as eager as you are to use slurs in any context.

> Early internet nerds may feel like they have a hegemony over this domain, but it belongs to the public at large, made up of all types of people with varying levels of risk and criteria for what they deem is acceptable public discourse.

Today will feel early too in 100 years.

It might not be what you meant but this comment comes across on its own as a bit of sour grapes.

It’s less about a hegemony, and more about what was a shared experience for an actually small group of people. They weren’t pioneers or visionaries, just curious explorers. The web having that small of a user base probably won’t happen again. It’s moot a bad thing either because look at how we can ask connect now.

Still, the first time trying cable/adsl, or wifi when there was none, or mobile data that was so slow it left lots of time to dream was a seminal moment that this group didn’t see coming or pick, but it is theirs.

Maybe they were 10-20 years early and today you are in a better position.

There’s a lot of firsts still to be experienced together on this journey.

Similar to how we’re all soaking in LLMs together.

When something like the web was underground, counter cukture and mainstream it’s a different formation period. Tech wasn’t cool and certainly didn’t impress many. Still it was chosen. The promises to be around a keyboard were limited and it took going to great lengths for many. It’s really good it’s not as hard anymore.

Todays web is much better and more accessible. It’s mushy what we access that we will learn to pay attention to and become more discerning about as our digital palette evolves.

As an observation, Facebook was the first thing the broadest group of people did on a computer or the web. It really lived off mainstream technology adoption. This might be Fb’s greatest contribution to society. Still, if we don't like where a platform is going, the next curve of connecting awaits for you to make something you and others want.

Stopping people from using a platform they don’t like might be harder than just building the next thing.

The internet will get more personal. And that’s good.

I think what you're hearing is people mourning a loss of something they had and valued.

I think feeling that loss, and expressing it, is valid.

> Todays web is much better and more accessible.

Whether or not it's better depends on what you found valuable about it. It is worse for some, and better for others. Disclaimer: it's much, much worse for me. But I acknowledge that it's better for others. Such is life.

> The internet will get more personal. And that’s good.

Whether that's good or not depends on what you mean by "get more personal". If what you mean is "more personalized", then I think that's the opposite of good.

But, again, that's just me and I'm mourning that the web is most of the way toward becoming a thing that no longer meets my needs or desires. That it meets the needs and desires of others is fine, and I don't want to deny others from being able to derive value from it. But, nonetheless, the loss to me, personally, is real and I don't see why I shouldn't be able to talk about that.

> Every road in the world does not need to be the Autobahn.

Great quote

> Every road in the world does not need to be the Autobahn.

the point is, currently NO ROAD is the Autobahn. thats not a balance, thats censorship.

Reddit has tons of NSFW stuff. There are plenty of less-moderated platforms available if you choose to engage with them.

Reddit has porn, but that’s not a convincing argument —- porn isn’t inimical to their ideological strictures.

Meanwhile, they absolutely forbid expressing common, mainstream political viewpoints that are inimical to their ideology.

Can you give an example of a mainstream view that is banned? I’m genuinely curious. I wonder if we will have different definitions of mainstream? It seems like a global audience of 5,000 might be mainstream and warrant a home according to some of the accounts here, whereas I would argue that this is still incredibly niche and these people might not expect to find anywhere in real life that would tolerate their speech either.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/america...

For example, “Six-in-ten U.S. adults say that whether a person is a man or a woman is determined by their sex assigned at birth.”

Reddit is heavily moderated. The likes of Gab get banned from app stores and hosting providers; KiwiFarms shows that even if you self-host (at a level beyond most regular people's ability and resources), if you offend the wrong people then you'll be cut off the internet.

The KiwiFarms issue is less what was said online in a club like forum context and more what was done in the real world by members and coordinated from KiwiFarms.

As far as I can see that was a smear campaign if not an outright false flag. The specific post that was mentioned as grounds for cutting it off was removed by moderators in less than 15 minutes, and was posted by an account that hadn't posted anything else.

You're talking about a final straw after being moved on from one "we'll host anyone" provider to another.

If I can paraphrase Ian Fleming;

* Once is happenstance,

* Twice is circumstance,

* Nth time is a sign of deeply nested anti social malcontents that seek to inflict life theatening scenarios upon others for the Lulz.

There's no need to paraphrase; "enemy action" is a very plausible and adequate explanation.

But once you reach 109 times it rolls back to being coincidental right?

Those qui know, know.

In any case, lets not be deemed offensive for harboring thoughts of rebellion against the overlords lest we be yeested from the platform for attempting to pique the curiosity of those not entirely lobotomized by the oppression machine yet. Such fallacious behaviours shall be left without scrutiny while we all dance together under a rainbow of landmines, minimum wage and proxy wars funded by alphabet companies ever-seeking to exercise greater and greater control of the human mind at scale.

Yes, let's strive not to offend others, for that way we will surely make the most progress, ignoring all prior knowledge and our very evolutionary mechanisms so we don't make lines on a page that induce rage in the untrained mind.

Those that can't hold a thought without judgment, can't think critically, yet they are the ones we decide to put in charge of our social narrative?

I wonder WHO decided that was a good idea.

>if you offend the wrong people then you'll be cut off the internet.

Disingenuous hot take. People tolerate the offensive. I’m tolerating you right now.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/kiwi-farms

Kiwi farms was a haven for degenerate anti social wanna be mass murderer. No sane business wants that association. No one is silencing these people, they are being lawfully discriminated against (refused service) for their reprehensible behavior. That’s freedom of association in action. The laws prohibiting the government from acting against someone for their words do not apply to the individual. In other words, tolerance only extends insofar as the infringers intolerance can be tolerated without relinquishing inalienable rights.

Off topic, but kiwi farms is a weird hill to plant a flag in on this topic.

> No one is silencing these people, they are being lawfully discriminated against (refused service) for their reprehensible behavior.

They're not just being refused service by hosting companies or the like, ISPs are not routing to them. That's new, and that's what I think is worth "planting a flag" about; it's not a newspaper refusing to print your articles, it's the post office refusing to ship your newspaper. If that's not being silenced then I don't know what is.

Additionally, for a time the SSL Certificate Authority in Greece was threatening to remove their https:// certificate for “unspecified violations of some clause.”

Said clause being, “specifically”, clause 3.1 of HARICA Subscriber Agreement. Which can be read here: https://repo.harica.gr/documents/SA-ToU_EN.pdf

Agree with you.

They are still on TOR, and currently they are back up on sneed.today (not sure why the old domain didn't come back yet?). The site seems to be hosted (I guess?) by TerraHost, a Norwegian company which is owned by the american company Epik, and which refuses censorship. I assume the people wanting to take kiwifarms down will have to go to the upstream providers of Terrahost, since they won't bend the knee.

https://bgp.tools/dns/sneed.today

The fact that they're using Terrahost as a provider isn't new, but the difference here, I guess, is that now they are using an IP owned by TerraHost rather their Null IP/ASN connecting to TerraHost and then to upstream providers such as GTT, and so on...

https://bgp.tools/dns/kiwifarms.net

Not sure what difference this makes, and I'm too much of a noob to understand what is going on exactly, so I might be talking bullshit here. But it seems to be working. Be that as it may, NGOs and institutions who defend the free internet should be opposing the censorship of kiwifarms, but they aren't because everybody knows that most of these institutions have an ideological bias...

>institutions who defend the free internet should be opposing the censorship of kiwifarms

This argument is unsupported by your comment. What value does kf create? Far as I can tell it only destroys value with their trail of suicides and bigoted behavior.

> What value does kf create? Far as I can tell it only destroys value with their trail of suicides and bigoted behavior.

Even if that were true (and I don't think it is), freedom only for those who "create value" is no freedom at all.

You obviously didn’t read the article I cited substantiating this fact.

>ISPs are not routing to them

Distinction without a material difference. This is only slightly to mail delivery services refusing delivery to homes with aggressive animals. In this case it’s telecom operators not enabling violent criminals that could create liability if left unaddressed.

> Kiwi farms was a haven for degenerate anti social wanna be mass murderer.

No it wasn’t. Both in life and in death William Atchison was made fun of by the members of multiple communities, gaining the posthumous nickname “Couch Cuck”. A “haven” for murderers would not obsessively archive information relating to murderers, such as social medias (which consistently delete the information to avoid being associated), prior convictions, etc with the intent to study and publicly shame them. One can argue of the efficacy of this, but it is no different than what MSM does. In fact, KiwiFarms can be attributed to the destruction of a CP/animal torture ring and multiple arrests, due to their archival efforts and Internet sleuthing.

Additionally, on the topic of “reprehensible behavior”, companies like CloudFlare happily accept money from animal abuse websites. And under every metric KiwiFarms is legal under US law. So while companies are legally allowed to disassociate for almost any reason, we have to ask why illegal websites remain while legal ones are disassociated. And considering CloudFlare initially sided with KiwiFarms, it truly is not as clear cut as “they found the content disagreeable”.

On topic to your off topic, I was definitely not expecting KiwiFarms to mentioned either.

I don’t think you are aware of the depth of depravity users of kf engaged in, regularly. I said wanna be murderers, you know, the weird kids with poor social skills that probably have shit home lives and get bullied/ostracized harshly. When they find community on these boards they also find recruiters for all sorts of awful communities from neo nazis to pedophiles to whatever.

>A “haven” for murderers would not obsessively archive information relating to murderers, such as social medias (which consistently delete the information to avoid being associated), prior convictions, etc with the intent to study and publicly shame them.

This is not logical. Many murderers study infamous murder cases to learn how to be better murderers. For some it may merely be a morbid curiosity, for others, it’s research. You cannot discern the intentions from the comments, but rather the outcomes, which speaks voluminously; if you’d bother to look for the reports on this.

>KiwiFarms can be attributed to the destruction of a CP/animal torture ring and multiple arrests, due to their archival efforts and Internet sleuthing.

And 4chan got a terrorist training camp bombed. And Reddit got an innocent killed during the hunt for the Boston bomber. These are not examples of uniformly good character, even the worst criminals have soft spots. Nazis made some wondrous technology, should we forgive their attempted genocides and eugenics?

Re cloud flare, I support shaming them for this support of bad actors and hurting their bottom line but that is off topic goal post moving.

> I don’t think you are aware of the depth of depravity users of kf engaged in, regularly.

Alright, can you prove they funnel others into such depraved communities?

> This is not logical.

By your own “logic” anyone who studies crime is practicing to be a mass murderer, which is objectively not true. If they were truly some murderous training ground, why is their so little as a result?

> Nazis made some wondrous technology, should we forgive their attempted genocides and eugenics?

Well the USA, Europe, and many others certainly did when harvesting their best minds. However that is besides the point, as KiwiFarms has done nothing comparable. They say mean things and archive actions taken by others in public. Making fun of others is seen as rude, however it is not illegal. If it was false and caused damages it could be slander/libel, however that has yet to be the case to my knowledge.

> I support shaming them for this support of bad actors

The problem is that there is inconsistency here. You and many others do not campaign CloudFlare to remove illegal websites, or even websites in a similar vein to KF, yet you urge them to remove a single legal (albeit unsavory) gossip forum? If this stance was uniform I could understand it better. As it stands it simply comes off as intellectually dishonest.

The underplaying of what KiwiFarms are is ridiculous. Issue is not they offended someone, issue is that they seek intentional real world harm.

>the point is, currently NO ROAD is the Autobahn. thats not a balance, thats censorship.

If you think this is true, you're not looking very hard.

More and more of the digital world, from the internet to what applications our devices allow us to install, is about filing off the edges and rounding all corners to make the world safer for the common denominator and i don't have to like it.

And as the digital world increasingly invades and influences our realities and experiences the importance of not only serving the common denominator gets more important, not less.

That sounds a lot like "telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it," to paraphrase Mark Twain.

> is about filing off the edges and rounding all corners to make the world safer for the common denominator and i don't have to like it.

In my opinion it is about making the online world safer for advertisers. The advertisers are the real customers of the internet - users are just the product.

The evolution of the internet is being increasingly driven by profit seeking and most common way people try to monetize the internet is through advertising. That is primarily what drives censorship and moderation - a need to protect the advertiser's brands.

The old internet that so many people are pining for in this thread comes from a time before big ad-tech. All the old schools forums, newsgroups etc didn't care about making a buck - heck most of them probably ran at a loss. All of that was eaten by social media, there was a transition away from internet communities, to for profit businesses instead.

Strangely enough, the more you regulate the internet, the more you empower the advertisers and the more users become just the product.

If you are a parent weary of an internet riddled with porn, traffickers, drugs, or other dangerous things. I believe it is on the parent to filter whats acceptable content for their kid to watch and not the website administrators to moderate whats acceptable. Its baffling to me that people see it the other way around. The latter is certainly easier and the parent can come up with all sorts of excuse why they cant find the time to do that given how hard life is and how it gets in the way, but at the end of the day. Who knows what's best for you or your family than yourself?

I’m absolutely sick of this trite argument being wheeled out by non parents. Try having a teenager and (in a practical way) regulating what they can see on the internet. These comments seem to imply that parents watch over their children by the minute regulating their media diet. This is not only impossible, it would be really weird.

IRL we outsource some roles of the parent to the community. I send children out into parts of the real world confident that they won’t have shown magazines of animal torture or have abuse screamed at them because they are female or gay. The internet is an important part of our cultural space and it’s not ok for children not to be able to use it.

My main point of the parent must play an ACTIVE role. No one said be a helicopter parent or do not outsource. The fact you knee jerk to thinking this and immediately reaching for the downvote button is really weird.

I know plenty of parents who give a smart phone with complete control to the teen on what app or content they can see, and are shocked to find out to where on the internet they find their kid. Parents need to take some accountability for what their kids do. Shocking right?

So how do you protect your kid on the internet if popular social media sites don't flag or moderate away pornography or animal torture or the like? The only possible option I see is to become a helicopter parent.

I should note on the other hand that I don't understand why pornography is such a proeminent issue in these discussions. As a teenager, I definitely consumed porn (as I suspect the vast majority have) and no damage has come to me.

>>> I should note on the other hand that I don't understand why pornography is such a proeminent issue in these discussions. As a teenager, I definitely consumed porn (as I suspect the vast majority have) and no damage has come to me.

There are reddit groups above 1 million members who feel porn has interrupted their life and incubated as an addiction because of early and excessive teenage use. The field is not studied well but there are certainly many many others that feel different than what you wrote, me included.

>>> The only possible option I see is to become a helicopter parent.

I dunno I think the main issue is you see this as a black and white issue. No good discussion can come when you always see the different side as the most extreme option.

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