What ever happened to the marketplace of ideas?
When you have to rely on indoctrination and censorship your beliefs lack merit.
When you have to rely on indoctrination and censorship your beliefs lack merit.
It has the same flaws that plague the marketplace of goods and services, but fewer consumer protections.
Perhaps we could jail people who post contradictory ones?
Part of what makes Hackernews enjoyable to read is the strong and very reasonable moderation. We aren't subject to walls of Viagra/Cialis ads or back-and-forth flamewars.
I'd argue it's because of content moderation that HN is an environment that generally promotes a marketplace of ideas.
I agree with the enjoyable part but "reasonable" would require careful examination of the things that didn't make the cut and is highly subjective. I have no idea what "strong" means.
Most moderation seems to get done by the voting system (powered by weak and very unreasonable users?)
What is missing is a user manual to formalize this social credit system. I never knew that I have to upvote the correct posts. I thought the system was curious about my opinion. Quite preposterous in hindsight. Ill make more of an effort, who knows, in a few years we might go full North Korea retroactively.
wait, did I say all that out loud?
Conservatives and reactionaries want to get their ideas into the mainstream but they know that just going straight out and saying race science or whatever will not get play in mainstream media. So they make the argument about how these ideas (which they claim not to hold) are being silenced by illiberal institutions. Then centrist organizations, who do at least want to believe that they ascribe to these principles, take the bait. Suddenly the New York Times is writing feature story after feature story about how universities are being oh so mean to the professor who writes "I don't shy away from the word 'superior'" and "everybody wants to live in the countries run by white people" (she didn't even get fired, by the way).
This convinces some center-left folks that various institutions have gone to far and they become participants in efforts to expel black people, women, and lgbt people from institutions of power.
But now people like Chris Rufo don't need the New York Times anymore, so they are happy to start saying that actually businesses should be allowed to only hire married men and that the civil rights act should be overturned.