Comment by GenericPoster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GenericPoster | Hacker News Reader

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>YouTube was popular and had very little moderation.

Emphasis on the AND. There is some correlation between Youtube's popularity and the lack of moderation but that isn't what made them popular.

I do agree on the advertiser's demanding moderation and I honestly don't blame them. If I made a product and I'm paying good money for advertising. I wouldn't want my products to be even remotely associated with anything that might promote controversy AND lower sales. Emphasis on the AND. The companies job is to make money and if that means embracing censorship or decrying it then they'll do it. Hell, they'll even do both at the same time. Advertisers are a leech on society and I hate that I'm defending them. But they pay the bills so....

That doesn't mean that vast majority of users don't want moderation. Every "free-speech" alternative to an already existing platform that I've visited has been complete shit. Filled with nutjobs that couldn't play nice with the normal folk.

You're making the exact same logical fallacy you're pointing out. The reason free speech alternatives tend to be filled with less than desirable types is precisely because they're alternatives. Who are you going to disproportionately attract as early adopters? It's the same reason anti-Musk driven alternatives to Twitter are also failing. Instead of having a normal sampling of society, you end up with a hardcore bias which is offputting to most of everybody except those of that bias.

I also think Threads is perhaps a reasonable challenge to the idea that society wants moderation. Unlike the anti-Musk Twitter alternatives it started with a massive and mixed userbase and was a completely viable alternative, yet it almost immediately collapsed. It's really hard to see why without looking to the fact that were also featuring the sort of "moderation" that historically only comes as a bait-and-switch after a platform is extremely well established.

No idea what you are talking about with Threads.

The reason people stopped using it was because after the initial install they realised it was missing basic features like a web app, search, chronological feed etc.

Those have now been added and reports from popular users is that engagement across the board is increasing again. Far from collapsing and well on its way to being a true Twitter alternative.

Multiple third party reports [1] are showing the site has lost ~80% of daily active users and of the < 10 million daily active users left, time spent in the app has decreased from nearly 20 minutes, to less than 3. I'm left to reference third party sites since Meta stopped reporting their numbers officially when it started cratering. That scale of collapse is unlikely to be due to the lack of effective search or a chronological feed.

[1] - https://gizmodo.com/threads-has-lost-more-than-80-of-daily-a...

This "association" business smells like a logical fallacy to me. Since when has advertisement even implied endorsement of nearby content?

If I see a billboard on a bus station, what is the advertiser endorsing here?

What about a magazine ad? Reasonable people assume the advertiser supports every view expressed therein?

If I happened to see an ad on a website with user generated content, would I really think the advertiser endorsed each post?

Sorry, this argument is fallacious. Reasonable people do not make these conclusions.

> Since when has advertisement even implied endorsement of nearby content?

It's not an endorsement. People make associations all the time consciously or not. There are obviously positive and negative associations. And if it's within your power to reduce the negative associations which might impact the perception of your product then why won't you do it? Advertising is primarily an appeal towards emotion not logic. It's manipulative by nature.

I don't know what I'm saying that's so unreasonable.

Also, I can't control whether some homeless person pees next to my billboard, but if my competitors also have billboards in the area then I may still come out on top. But if I can move my weight to move those homeless people elsewhere, preferably to my competitors billboards then I'll do it. This isn't a moral argument.

Because there's no such association.

Nobody associates Coke with the reek of bum piss because they encountered a messy billboard. This is simply an unreal line of argument.

It certainly would be interesting if we lived in a world where advertisers refused to run ads in stadiums of losing teams, ran their ads only on sunny days, and only on positive, uplifting tv episodes while entirely avoiding shows about serial killers. We can fantasize, but the actual world has never worked this way.

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