Hacker News Reader

Comment by dev0p | Hacker News Reader

Have you considered parenting your children instead of letting the state do it for you? The latter means they can use the good old “for the children” rhetoric to control what adults can and cannot see: for example, they can choose that homosexuality is a sin and bad therefore any LGBT friendly website is bad. Apply freely as your government dictates, such as pro-Palestine content. We must protect our kids from terrorists, after all. :)

Meanwhile your children are absolutely going to find a way to get that content regardless, likely in darker corners of the internet, exposing them to much, MUCH worse content than if they would have just gone on the good old hub (plus actual predators) while also making it basically impossible for you to control instead of just making it a firewall rule away from locking it yourself instead of letting the government do it.

View on HN

I don't understand why you see these as either-or propositions. It's important that I parent my children to understand the dangers of alcohol, and it's also a good idea that it's illegal for my local grocery store to sell them any, and neither of these are contradicted by the fact that they'll be able to find some if they really want to. Norms and friction matter.

Plenty of friction exists. Access to devices being banned at schools, ISP parental controls, selective DNS blocking, Google/Apple child accounts. For the most part it's just carelessness. Before the Internet children that were persistent enough and that had apathetic parents still found a way (perhaps less volumes and less extreme though)

It’s a good idea for grocery stores to not sell children alchohol. It’s a bad idea for grocery stores to not sell alcohol to ANYONE, adults included, because children might buy it by faking their IDs. That’s the difference here.

Alcohol is a perfect example as well, because I personally drink it only occasionally but would very much rather see it completely banned, as I think it would solve a lot of problems with society. In reality it likely wouldn’t, but the gut feeling is there. If I were to blindly follow my instinct and not know history, I would call for a total ban on it to protect the children.

The same is happening here, but at a much more dangerous level.

> it's also a good idea that it's illegal for my local grocery store to sell them any

As someone who has been a kid, I would call such restrictions "performative" rather than a "good idea".

I'm a full adult (legally anyway) but I can't control everything I see on HN or Reddit or whatever when I'm passively scrolling; I for one am glad that there's giant teams of moderators curating the internet for me.

I'll advocate for freedom of speech but I don't want to have to listen to everything.

Hard disagree. I would love for moderation to be opt-out, for example. I might not agree with moderator actions, so I would very much prefer to see an unfiltered HN instead of having someone else dictate what I am allowed to see or not. The same applies to other websites, especially Reddit.

Alas, I have no choice in the matter, but I would very much prefer I did.

While I understand some content HAS to be regulated (CSAM) doesn’t mean everything has to be, because inevitably that will devolve into the government policing wrongthink.

enable showdead to see killed comments/articles on HN.

Thank you!

Unfortunately this doesn't let you reply to dead comments. Still better than hiding the wrongthink completely though.

i’ve browsed with showdead for over a decade and have vouched for exactly one comment. it’s usually just no-think.

>I'll advocate for freedom of speech but I don't want to have to listen to everything.

Nobody is preventing you from filtering out at the client side whatever it is that you don't want to hear.

And you just end up with poorly integrated moderation with extra steps when community starts cooperating to make it more efficient (e.g. maintaining filter lists). Or there's no effective moderation so people that want more curated content and better UX moderation-wise will move elsewhere. Nobody's forcing you to use moderated platforms either.

That said, I think the showdead setting in HN is good to have, so you can still opt to see content that would otherwise be filtered.

> Nobody's forcing you to use moderated platforms either.

Except that's exactly what is happening when the "moderation" is mandated by law. Which is the topic of discussion here.

I think the GP was talking about usefulness of moderation in HN, Reddit, etc. in general. And parent was implying that filtering should exist only client-side (so no moderation by the platform), which I thought was unrealistic for some users that want moderation and who are then free to seek out more fitting platforms.

But yes, in a world where "moderation" is mandated by law, there'd be no alternatives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com