[HN Gopher] Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach t...
___________________________________________________________________
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech
(2019)
Author : ege_erdogan
Score : 466 points
Date : 2021-01-28 14:55 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (knightcolumbia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (knightcolumbia.org)
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| How about, god forbid, constrain ourselves and only use these
| platforms to keep in touch and share pleasant pet images?
|
| Why in fuck's name does everybody and their cat fight holy wars
| with each other? I feel that is the real issue, the platforms are
| just symptoms of it.
| Ambolia wrote:
| This is a related article:
| https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech...
|
| The first part is about politics, if you only care about the tech
| part, you can jump to the following headlines:
|
| - Encrypted clients
|
| - Protocol extraction and unauthorized clients
|
| - The secure personal server
|
| - Technology is hard, actually
| carapace wrote:
| > Moving us back toward a world where protocols are dominant over
| platforms could be of tremendous benefit to free speech and
| innovation online.
|
| Let's say I agree with this, what's the next step? What's the
| "call to action"?
|
| > It would represent a radical change, but one that should be
| looked at seriously.
|
| Okay. Looked at by whom?
|
| I would say we already have the protocols (Napster was founded in
| 1999, P2P protocols are old enough to drink.) _Then what?_
|
| (My own cynical reaction is that people like what they have and
| deserve what they get. But I recognize and admit that that is not
| a productive area of discussion.)
|
| Given that pirating movies is unfashionable now, what could some
| P2P protocol offer that would entice people away from FAANG?
| (Assuming that that would be a net benefit to humanity and the
| world is itself more of a hope than something you could prove one
| way or another. Does anyone have any sort of science that could
| even begin to predict the results of any of this?)
| anarchogeek wrote:
| This philosophy is whas has been driving our work at
| planetary.social, building out protocols and tools for public
| sphere managed by the participants instead of the platforms.
| every wrote:
| It's a vast smorgasbord. Choose the things you like and avoid
| those you don't. And if you're feeling adventurous or are simply
| curious, perhaps try a dollop of the odd or unfamiliar. You are
| perfectly at liberty to accept or reject the advice of others
| about your choices, as are they of your mutterings on the
| subject. Everyone ends up with a different selection of
| delectables and, most importantly, everyone eats...
| mcguire wrote:
| " _In a protocols-based system, those who have always believed
| that Jones was not an honest actor would likely have blocked him
| much earlier, while other interface providers, filter providers,
| and individuals could make a decision to intervene based on any
| particularly egregious act. While his strongest supporters would
| probably never cut him off, his overall reach would be limited.
| Thus, those who don't wish to be bothered with his nonsense need
| not deal with it; those who do wish to see it still have access
| to it._ "
|
| Somebody has very different memories of USENET than I do.
|
| It does not seem possible for a technological solution to work as
| long as it is trivial and without consequence to set up new
| online identities.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I read, and re-read the article and I am yet to understand how a
| protocol will help what the author describes in the first few
| paragraphs. (BTW very nicely walked around that hot bowl of
| mess!)
|
| First, Usenet was just as much of a dumpster fire as Reddit et
| al. in some branches ( _alt._ I am looking at you). The rest
| (comp. soc. sci. etc) were heavily self moderated.
|
| Second, I am not sure the author is clear on what is the primary
| product of social media, as I see it. We, the users are the
| product. By moving to a protocol, there is little to no
| opportunity to capture private information about the product.
| (Not complexity, too big, or filter bubble.)
|
| Why would a platform give up such income stream?
|
| Am I misunderstanding what the author means by protocol here?
| Ambolia wrote:
| I don't think zero-moderation is possible, at a minimum you'll
| have to ban bots and spam. The larger problem is concentration
| of communities in 3-4 big providers, there was heavy moderation
| before, but it was easy to move to a different community if you
| didn't like it.
| mon_ wrote:
| He's advocating for the users to move away from the platforms,
| not for the platforms to change (or surrender) their business
| model.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059
| jugg1es wrote:
| What if the problem with free speech on the internet is not
| technological but rather anonymity? In the Ender's Game sequels,
| they have two different networks. One that is anonymous and a
| wild west and another that is only accessible with a verified
| identity.
| [deleted]
| uniqueid wrote:
| Afaict, the missing piece that undermines this is a mechanism to
| uniquely identify users.
|
| I don't mean that more than one entity needs to know a user's
| name (in fact, you could probably create a system where _nobody_
| can realistically _retrieve_ a user 's name), or personal
| information.
|
| If you don't know whether you've seen an account before, though,
| how can you effectively deter bad actors? Not much of a ban if
| someone can create a second account and resume the same unwanted
| behavior.
| jancsika wrote:
| > missing piece
|
| But it's not a missing _technical_ piece. It 's just that FOSS
| is terrible at paying experts to do the work necessary to
| design a service usable by non-technical folks.
|
| In other words, I think people look at the problem you've
| described and assume that it must be open research because no
| unpaid dev has posted a hobby project to Github to solve it.
| But that wouldn't be an accurate conclusion-- in fact everyone
| has used Google's annoying hairball of sophisticated, hidden
| techniques which solves pretty much this problem (and probably
| other problems as well).
|
| You wouldn't need anything as sophisticated as that. But you
| _do_ need to pay experts the going rate to design, implement,
| test, and tweak such a service.
|
| If any FOSS orgs had the foresight and funding to do this, I
| believe it would reveal that all commercial social media
| networks including Reddit haven't "solved" this problem simply
| because it isn't in their financial interest to do so.
| rcardo11 wrote:
| > In short, it would push the power and decision making out to
| the ends of the network, rather than keeping it centralized among
| a small group of very powerful companies.
|
| This only creates that same echo chamber effect we are trying to
| avoid.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)
| throwarayes wrote:
| When you realize Twitter, etc are _media companies_ their actions
| make sense. They are places that frankly cater to a certain
| audience or way of interacting with content. It was always
| perhaps naive to think such places could stay neutral free speech
| havens, in the same way we can't expect that from a newspaper or
| tv media company.
|
| I do wonder about hosting providers though, like AWS. Should a
| utility be deciding who gets electricity because of what happens
| in a business or home? I feel this is much less defensible.
| anewguy9000 wrote:
| just please keep me safe as i evolve into a plant
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| a space plant?
|
| whose leaves glitter in the void?
|
| i think that's the meta.
| godelzilla wrote:
| > Rather than relying on a few giant platforms to police speech
| online, there could be widespread competition, in which anyone
| could design their own interfaces, filters, and additional
| services
|
| To me this sounds something like "less walmart, more supply
| chains, warehouses, and storefronts." I agree in spirit, but it's
| the reverse of how capitalism usually works. The few giant
| platforms were built off the work of people who built their own
| interfaces, filters, and additional services. Why would we expect
| new/improved protocols (crypto or otherwise) to be any different?
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| It's still so bizarre to me to see techno-libertarians act like a
| few extremely popular social media platforms run by private
| companies is some kind of government, and that their first
| amendment rights are somehow under attack.
| seiferteric wrote:
| While I agree that private companies can do what they like, I
| am growing more concerned that we are being increasingly
| funneled into platforms that inevitably begin the
| "disneyfication" process once ad revenues are involved.
| wtfrmyinitials wrote:
| It's so bizarre to me that people think that the only thing
| libertarians can advocate for have to do with government.
| mbostleman wrote:
| "build protocols, not platforms"
|
| When something (in this case technology) becomes a problem, I'm
| not usually in favor of trying to add more of that same thing to
| solve the problem. Similarly, if a platform is going to control
| speech, I don't see the point of adding more control to control
| Facebook's control. I think this is a structural rabbit hole that
| constantly repeats itself in our institutions.
|
| And even if "we" did apply more technology, who exactly is going
| to lead this effort? If we drop solutions with n more protocols
| in the market, the same 3 companies will end up owning the
| content on them. And through some remarkable defiance of
| probability, all of those companies will act in identical
| lockstep when it comes to behavior and policies. Of course,
| there's no evidence of collusion, they just happen to be
| culturally identical in every way. And that is reasonably
| believable given how few actual people are involved in running
| the organizations.
|
| "Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of
| trolling, bigotry, and hatred."
|
| Some? I'm assuming (possibly wrongly) that this sentence is
| intended to express one particular side's feeling about the other
| particular side. But I think everyone feels this. Both sides make
| arguments (some more data driven than others) that show how the
| other side is motivated by hate. In fact, the prevalence of the
| conviction that love, compassion, and morality exist exclusively
| on one side appears to be a large part of the problem.
|
| There are over 3000 counties in the US and if you colored them by
| their political and cultural sentiment and look at the map of the
| country, you would see the full diversity and distribution of
| ideas - at least geographically. The lack of this level of
| resolution on Internet platforms is the problem imo.
|
| Maybe there can't be 3000 platforms. But there can be more than
| 3-5 groupings of capital that control them all and they can be
| more culturally diverse. Not sure about the value of being more
| protocol diverse.
| breck wrote:
| I do some research with some people on a dead simple new low
| level encoding for new protocols called Tree Notation.
|
| It's all public domain.
|
| I plug it a lot here when I see something relevant, which this
| post is (and I've long been a fan of the Knight orgs and
| supporter of them).
|
| Anyway, always happy to chat with people about how this stuff
| could help a new generation of simple open protocols:
|
| Homepage: (needs a refresh) https://treenotation.org/
|
| Demos: (also needs a refresh)
| https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/
| ilaksh wrote:
| How would you encode a protocol with Tree Notation?
|
| If you specify the fields and hierarchy with Tree Notation or
| YAML or JSON or EBNF or whatever, that's a starting point which
| can help with implementation the communication and data storage
| part. But you still need to write code for each language and
| each protocol right? Or can we encode the protocol-handling
| code using Tree Notation also?
|
| I have always felt like web assembly was missing a well-defined
| system for extending the API and also a strong external module
| system. Or even if you could not extend the API much, if WASI
| had UDP, and there was a good WASM module distribution system,
| that seems like a way that one could distribute protocols.
|
| But also Ethereum 2 seems like a decent way to distribute
| protocols.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| No honest person actually wants free speech.
| afinlayson wrote:
| 100% This is why phone and internet work together. Imagine if
| AT&T said Verizon couldn't call its customers or couldn't connect
| to other websites? Yet Facebook doesn't have a way to connect to
| Twitter, meaning they own the whole sandbox ....
| Rochus wrote:
| This article made no specific proposal, or did I miss something?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| crazypython wrote:
| We need freedom of speech as much as we need freedom to not hear.
| We need community-moderation blocklists for speech.
| shafyy wrote:
| I talk about this more in my blog post [0], but I think that the
| only viable way out of this mess if anti-trust laws ensure that
| social network companies who have more than X users need to use
| open and decentralized protocols. This would be much easier to
| achieve than trying to break up companies (not saying we
| shouldn't break them up).
|
| 0: https://canolcer.com/post/social-media-decentralized-by-law/
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > social network companies who have more than X users need to
| use open and decentralized protocols
|
| The problem with this is that a corporation can claim that its
| protocol is open and decentralized, while in practice making it
| hard for others to implement. Remember how Microsoft managed to
| make .docx an ISO standard, even though Microsoft Word was the
| only application that would be able to read and write it 100%?
|
| Also, once an open protocol is widespread, embrace-extend-
| extinguish is possible because the dominant player can claim
| that while it still supports the protocol as written, the world
| moves on and it needs to add some new functionality that its
| peers won't be able to implement in at least the short term.
| shafyy wrote:
| Yes, good points. I understand that it's not that simple in
| practice. But at least such laws would lay a foundation and
| then the details can be discussed better. Anti-trust laws are
| never black and white, but I would argue that we are better
| off for them.
| solus_factor wrote:
| When you look at the state of things, you should realize that
| things evolved to be this way _for_a_reason_.
|
| What specific reason or reasons might not be clear, but those
| reasons and forces nevertheless exist.
|
| Calls to return "back to roots" are quite naive, for example,
| "let's abandon governments and have private police!". No, we have
| what we have for a reason.
|
| Same with the state of the Internet. "Let's all go back to
| protocols! Remember gopher? Let's all do that!".
|
| You cannot "unroll" progress. You cannot go back and live like
| the Amish. Well, you can, in a tiny weird closed community, while
| the rest of the world continues to march on.
| Ambolia wrote:
| The same could be said about decentralization of information
| sources. And big tech seems to be trying to contain it rather
| than embrace it. Maybe not because they want, but because they
| get political pressure.
|
| If big tech can't embrace those new decentralization currents
| because of political pressure, people will look for them
| somewhere else.
| melenaos wrote:
| We have RSS, if only the people could use it for simple stuff
| like they do in Facebook.
|
| Unfortunately people thought of blogging of something difficult,
| something that needs thought and not something that could just
| express themselves.
|
| Imagine that you can create a blog post within your RSS feed, add
| comments to the displayed rss items and simply own all of your
| data.
| rcardo11 wrote:
| Social media, as search engines and maybe other handful of
| things, became basic social infrastructure such as roads,
| goverments will have to pay for the servers where these "open
| protcols" run and they should be moderated from The Constitution
| itself.
| nynx wrote:
| Certain events that have taken place over the last few days and
| weeks will drive decentralization forward like never before.
| amelius wrote:
| Let's hope it also works for the _platform economy_ (e.g.
| UberEats, AppStore, YouTube, ...)
|
| Companies should not own or regulate entire markets.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I think fast cryptocurrency transactions is going to help a
| lot. I am really hopeful about Ethereum 2.0 because I think
| it has the right technical approach, leadership and will have
| the momentum to get widely rolled out.
| d--b wrote:
| I am getting really sick of these articles.
|
| NO: building protocols or decentralized networks, or anything
| really isn't going to solve the hate-speech/censorship problem.
|
| This. Is. A. Culture. Problem.
|
| The hate-speech/censorship problem exists everywhere. If you can
| publish somewhere, you can publish hate/spam. And if there is
| hate and/or spam, you need to censor. That's it. The very fact of
| publishing is the problem. In fact the only true way of solving
| the problem is to prevent people from publishing stuff.
|
| The internet from the 90s didn't solve that problem. It just
| wasn't a problem so much at the time. Mastodon is certainly not
| solving that problem. Email, IRC, Usenet, BBses, etc. don't even
| address the problem...
|
| Now, the real question is why do people get so worked up? And how
| can we shift the culture away from this partisan shithole we're
| in now?
|
| Certainly not for me to answer that question. It maybe because
| people are poor, it may be because people lack some sense of
| purpose, it may be because of opioids, or video games, or because
| of vaccines and Gwyneth Paltrow. I honestly don't have a clue.
|
| But stop making it about platforms vs decentralized crap.
| ilaksh wrote:
| https://youtu.be/gjufYwIbITw Johnathan Haidt with Andrew Yang
| CharlesW wrote:
| FWIW, I'm glad you posted this.
|
| I think most people on HN have the breadth of experience to
| understand your main point. For example, many of us have
| extensive experience running communities and/or have seen how
| quickly bad actors will overrun even well-intentioned
| unmoderated communities.
|
| Other folks here do not necessarily have this experience, don't
| see the extensive "gardening" that happens in the background of
| healthy online communities (see: dang), and believe that all
| human problems can be solved by implementation details like
| protocols.
|
| There's the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything
| looks like a nail." Do HNers know of good resources for folks
| who only have a hammer, but want to develop a more holistic,
| humanistic understanding of online communities?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > In fact the only true way of solving the problem is to
| prevent people from publishing stuff.
|
| No, actually. The solution would be instead to allow you
| personally to choose what you read/listen to, and to let other
| people do the same.
|
| If you don't like certain content, you should certainly have
| the right to not see it. But other people should be able to see
| it if they choose to do so.
| smoyer wrote:
| I agree that it's a culture problem but I don't think it's a
| new one. There are several problems with today's as I see it:
|
| 1) Each small town used to have a crazy person who didn't quite
| live up to societal expectations. They might even "publish" but
| they had a limited audience (their town) who wasn't receptive
| to the message. With the huge "communications platforms" we've
| adopted on the Internet, those crazies can now find each other
| quite easily and band together into a group that has a much
| louder voice. Please note here that my use of the word
| "crazies" is not a medical diagnosis but rather a description
| of someone whose thoughts are significantly outside the
| mainstream.
|
| 2) In those small towns, there was societal pressure to NOT act
| on every non-conforming thought that you had. If you got
| shunned from your town, you might not survive and/or would be
| actively hunted down. If everyone knew you, the town gossip
| mill would make sure that you were continuously under a
| microscope. Now that the non-conformists have banded together
| in a large forum, they're outside the confines of their own
| community.
|
| If the goal is to quash hate speech and calls to violence, I
| think it's also important to note that there are some types of
| non-conformance that are good for society. Some is a gradual
| constant pressure that keeps our society ready for the day we
| live in. Others result in scientific advancement - most of us
| here consider "thinking-outside-the-box" to be a good thing.
| Doc Brown's town all considered him a little crazy but he was a
| "harmless crazy".
|
| As you might have expected, I don't have an answer to the
| current problem either but I think this is a discussion we have
| to have. How do we put societal pressure to use on a large
| scale? Can we in fact have constructive arguments with these
| groups? If we're willing to endure censorship, where is the
| boundary and how do we keep it from expanding?
|
| I for one would like community guidelines to determine where
| those edges are - perhaps we're "too far gone" as a society and
| we're just headed into another version of the dark ages.
| vixen99 wrote:
| Not defining terms and making huge assumptions is vital if you
| want to offer a comment like this.
| WClayFerguson wrote:
| You can tell this article is well over a year old, because it
| doesn't mention the words Fediverse, ActivityPub, Mastodon (or
| Quanta.wiki!)
|
| It was summer of 2019 when the vast majority of those who are
| most 'plugged in' realized we're going to need a new censorship-
| resistant web, after the Vox Adpocolypse and other totalitarian
| and dictatorial over-reach by BigTech, which has been escalating
| steadily since then, culminating even with specific stories being
| blacked out (by cancelling people, and companies) and leading to
| a level of election interference that would've simply been
| impossible not many years ago. Committed by not just BigTech, but
| by M5M also.
|
| Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter Laptop
| on election day.
|
| (Full Disclosure: I'm the developer of Quanta.wiki, a new
| Fediverse App)
| barbacoa wrote:
| >Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter
| Laptop on election day.
|
| Do you have a source for that? I'm interested to read more
| about that.
| mac01021 wrote:
| I've never heard of it before now.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter
| Laptop on election day.
|
| Point of fact: that's bullshit.
|
| https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
|
| ---[begin quote]---
|
| At the final presidential debate Donald Trump tried to land a
| blow on Democratic rival Joe Biden by suggesting that purported
| evidence from a laptop computer links him to alleged corrupt
| business dealings by his son, Hunter Biden.
|
| [...] the results of a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll (conducted
| Oct 23-25) highlight the extent to which it has cut through to
| the voting public. More than three quarters (77%) of registered
| voters say they have heard at least a little about the story,
| with four in ten (39%) saying they had heard "a lot".
|
| ---[end quote]---
| WClayFerguson wrote:
| The Hunter scandal was just one random example of countless
| examples of censorship by BigTech and M5M. I could care less
| about the laptop story.
|
| I care about the censorship story. One corrupt family can't
| destroy a democracy, but a loss of free speech rights is
| guaranteed to.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The Hunter scandal was just one random example of
| countless examples
|
| Of stories you could have presented to support your
| narrative without concern for the fact that they have no
| basis in reality? Sure.
|
| But it's the concrete example you chose. If there was a
| real problem, you'd think it wouldn't be hard for you to
| cite a real example rather than an unsourced, invented,
| weirdly specific claim (not "a majority" or "a large
| majority" but "68%") that is readily shown to be completely
| in opposition to the facts.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > in which the marketplace of filters is enabled to compete
|
| Well, that's a nice thought, but the goal of deplatforming is to
| remove somebody entirely. Nobody was forced to follow Trump on
| twitter - he had tens of millions of voluntary followers. If your
| goal is to get rid of Donald Trump, you _have_ to centralize the
| decision.
| jayd16 wrote:
| This isn't exactly right. Part of the debate was that Twitter
| is _the_ platform and _the_ platform should not censor. This
| left Trump without any authoritative criticism other than the
| sea of response tweets.
|
| In a decentralized systems, you would have many platform
| providers, many decentralized features and also many filters.
| In a decentralized system, the filtering/curating holds less
| ethical baggage (ie just choose another filter you like more!).
| Curators are free to curate more heavily.
|
| If there was one single email platform, every spam marking
| would be a political and ethical hill to die on. Instead its a
| non-issue.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| It's worth separating two goals
|
| 1. I don't want to hear Donald Trump, and I don't want to
| associate with anyone who likes him, or hear their ideas in my
| feed: this is solvable by distributed systems like Mastodon
| where node operators can just blacklist the Trump-aligned
| servers, and apply rules on their own.
|
| 2. I want Donald Trump to be silenced and not be able to say
| dangerous inflammatory things that rile his supporters up into
| violent attacks on democratic processes: this is going to
| require a centralized decision and really probably would work
| best if it was a law.
|
| Deplatforming can partially work by demanding all reasonable
| node operators block the person. But then you get the ones
| whose niche is to be a haven of scum and villainy, like Gab,
| and they refuse.
|
| This may be enough, though, if it isolates awful people into
| inaccessible backwaters.
| JacobSeated wrote:
| This take is inaccurate and a myopic understanding of free
| speech.
|
| Moderating social media, and the internet is in fact, doable, and
| absolutely necessary. This has nothing to do with "censorship".
|
| The debate is actually easily settled if you understand what is
| happening with free speech online.
|
| What typically happens in conspiracy-circles, is that people are
| radicalized because the disinformation is simply not challenged.
| It may be that a few users will dispute various claims, but their
| valuable, fact-based input, is typically drowned in a flood of
| spam, personal attacks, and claims unrelated to the claims that
| are being discussed in a given forum- or comment thread.
|
| The problem with "unmoderated free speech" is that
| informationterrorists can abuse "free speech" to repeat the same
| disputed claims over and over, without ever addressing the fact
| that their claims have been disproven. This is also what I would
| label as "flooding the discussion" or "drowning the facts"; it is
| so effective that everyone who conducts themselves properly and
| respectfully are drowned in this flood of disinformation; this
| actually results in a "suppression" of free speech. When only one
| side is really heard, then we effectively do not have free
| speech.
|
| Instead, what we have is a conversation that is dominated and
| suppressed by a few bullies that are shouting the loudest.
|
| In addition, you would really hate to have governments influence
| the fact-checking processes on social media platforms, since
| governments have ultimate power, they are also the largest threat
| to free speech. Ideally fact-checking should be done 100%
| transparently by independent fact-checkers, and the facts that
| lead to a conclusion has to be tediously and transparently
| documented so that everyone can trust the processes. People who
| think the conclusion of a fact-check is inaccurate should take it
| up with the relevant fact-checkers, or possibly take it through
| the courts.
|
| This "ideal" of "unmoderated free speech" has never really
| worked. It did not work in the real world, and surely will not
| work on the internet. The problem with this idea is that anti-
| social individuals will just try to control the narrative by
| spamming or repeating disproven claims (shouting), making new
| false claims, pushing disproven conspiracy theories. Etc.
|
| A common technique I see used by malicious sources, is to release
| one claim, have people debate- and disprove it, only to release
| another, unrelated, claim without ever acknowledging the fact
| that their first claim was false. The result is that even old and
| disproven claims are circulating in an endless loop. They use
| this technique continuously with countless of subjects, both old
| and new -- you would think that people will eventually reject
| claims made by known informationterrorists, due to their lack of
| credibility and history of publishing falsehoods, but that does
| not seem to be the case.
|
| I am not a fan of banning people permanently from social media,
| as it just seems too merciless -- there has to be ways to get un-
| banned -- but, as a minimum, we should have fact-checking on
| profiles with large followings; and of course, groups and
| profiles used primarily to spread disinformation should be
| deleted.
| CharlesW wrote:
| That your (thoughtful, IMO) response is being downvoted into
| oblivion by the same people who purport to want "free speech"
| is sort of perfect.
| dang wrote:
| Please follow the site guidelines, which ask you not to post
| like this.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| The GP comment is no longer in a downvoted state, let alone
| "oblivion". Meanwhile comments like yours linger on as
| uncollected garbage even after they have been falsified. The
| thing to do instead is to give a corrective upvote and move
| on. Most often, fair-minded readers do enough of that to
| restore thoughtful comments to a non-negative state. In
| egregious cases, you can always give us a heads-up at
| hn@ycombinator.com.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corrective%20upvote&dateRange=.
| ..
| CharlesW wrote:
| I appreciate the feedback, dang. Please feel welcome to
| replace it with "[removed]" (I'm not able to.)
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| I always thought Google missed a perfect opportunity when they
| released Google+, they should have created a new open protocol
| for social media instead of another platform, something like RSS
| feeds for blogs. Then people could host their "pages" anywhere
| they want and still own their own data. The protocol would allow
| the aggregation of comments, likes etc. Google has a vested
| interest in keeping the web open to protect their indexing/search
| business and they have the industry weight to force new
| standards. Instead of course they opted to create another
| platform...
| kevincox wrote:
| Going this route makes sense if you think you can't win in a
| centralized manor. Of course I suspect the people in charge of
| Google+ were sure that they could win so why bother with the
| centralization?
| julianmarq wrote:
| It's interesting, the usual go-to argument of the censorship
| apologists is to claim that they're not actually advocating for
| censorship because the hopeless gigantic corporations they so
| nobly defend are private actors and thus have the right to ban
| whatever they want.
|
| Then this article (posted long before recent events made the
| discussion a hot topic) presents how we need a serious
| alternative to these giant platforms and build protocols to
| replace them... And those same people immediately start saying
| that no, they in fact do want to forbid whoever they choose from
| saying/publishing anything anywhere.
|
| Mind you, not that "Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc are private
| companies and can allow anything they want and that's not
| censorship" wasn't _always_ a motte-and-bailey, but it 's sad to
| see it on display so transparently.
|
| At least most of them are downvoted, if nothing else.
| Solar19 wrote:
| I agree. In fact, I'm not aware of any context or venue where
| leftists have supported freedom of speech (for non-leftists).
| They're failing every test. Campuses, disinviting speakers like
| Ayaan Hirsi Ali or even Condi Rice - don't know if the latter
| was successful). Twitter. Facebook. Any action to remove apps
| from stores because they lack the vigorous and extremely
| expensive censorship infrastructure of the big leftist corps
| line FB and Twitter. Even removing apps and services from web
| servers, like Amazon did, which was breathtaking. Any
| infrastructure-level censorship/sabotage like Cloudflare has
| done at various bizarre points (I think one was an alleged Neo-
| Nazi website, and the other was merely one of the _chans,
| apparently for the sin of being used by a killer; I have no
| idea if Prince has tried to censor more, but I found it too
| depressing to dig into further).
|
| I thought we had a deal, but clearly we don't. I assumed that
| everyone understood and could predict their own future motives
| and emotions toward a desire to censor speech they disagree
| with or find "offensive" (if you're the kind of person who
| chronically experiences that state of being "offended" - I'm
| not).
|
| I assumed we all knew that we couldn't possibly trust ourselves
| to censor dissent from our own views. I assumed that we all
| knew that our initial impulses toward that would have to be
| dismissed out of hand, given everything we know about human
| fallibility, cognitive biases, how incredibly easy it is to be
| wrong, and the obvious arbitrariness of this time and place -
| that is, the time and place we happen to be alive. Leftists
| seem to not be accounting for any of these factors. They think
| they're right. Well, they know they're right. And they
| apparently think there's no way their ideology could be
| mistaken or unwise or harmful in any serious way, or that any
| of a dozen or so discrete beliefs/narratives/dogmas could be
| wrong. They for some reason believe that early 21st-century
| American leftist ideology is airtight, mostly complete, the
| first complete and totally true belief system in human history,
| and it's not a huge coincidence that it happens to be the one
| that's sitting there when they happen to be alive.
|
| And that their whole framework and dogma around their
| preemptive marginalization of outsiders with the idiosyncratic
| usage of the word "hate", and an associated set of evidence-
| free abstractions like "privilege", and a bunch of _-phobias
| that don't actually exist, at all, to the knowledge of serious
| scientists... well that whole package is of course completely
| true, just like everything else. No only is it true, but
| they'll recursively use that sort of immune system package to
| justify censoring non-leftists, much like how Scientologists
| tag people as Suppressive Persons (SPs).
|
| This is bad news. Their epistemology is terrible. It was always
| the elites who were the vanguard defending freedom of speech.
| It was never expected that regular Joes could be counted on to
| grok the epistemic and psychological facts that motivated a
| principled commitment to freedom of speech. It was the
| intellectuals who understood how easy it is to be wrong, how
| ideologies can blind us, how our own subjective sense of the
| certain truth of our beliefs was completely irrelevant to their
| objective standing, how so many humans in history have had that
| subjective experience of certainty, with mixed results. Now we
| face an awkward situation where intellectuals have let
| themselves stumble into a cult, a cult that has conveniently
| constructed arguments and rationalizations that purport to
| justify censorship. So now they can just skirt on past the many
| robust reasons to defend freedom of speech, if they ever knew
| them. Because, "hate" obviously. That's all they needed to
| abandon something so crucial to human progress and growth. Just
| use an arbitrary human negative emotion word in contradiction
| to its actual, dictionary meaning, applying it to a huge swath
| of outsider/non-cult speech, even encompassing someone noting
| that humans are a sexually dimorphic species. Boom..."hate".
| Something huge is falling to something very small.
| dang wrote:
| > _the censorship apologists in HN 's usual go-to argument_
|
| Please don't make spurious generalizations like this, which is
| obviously false. Instead, please familiarize yourself (I don't
| mean you personally, but all of us) with the cognitive biases
| that lead to these false feelings of generality [1]. Yes, a lot
| of people make the argument you're mentioning--and a lot of
| people also make the opposite argument. I don't know if it's
| evenly split (no one knows that), but it's close enough not to
| matter.
|
| It's important that this community get educated about this so
| we don't tear ourselves apart--which is what the fantasy of
| being an embattled minority, surrounded by enemies and demons
| [2, 3], will lead to. In reality, there's a range of views
| here, more or less homomorphic to the range of views in society
| at large. That's what any sufficiently large population sample
| converges to.
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=notice%20dislike%20by:dang&dat...
|
| [2]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=demons%20by:dang&dateRange=all...
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
| julianmarq wrote:
| I apologize, dang. I understand how my phrasing can be taken
| as a generalization of everyone in HN, but that was not my
| intention.
|
| I wasn't trying to say that everyone in HN was advocating for
| censorship (if anything, I always feel a little better when I
| read people defending free speech, they're what keep me
| coming back, at least to this type of posts); I was talking
| about what those in specific who speak in favor of censorship
| say.
|
| I'll edit it to make it less ambiguous. Thanks.
| johbjo wrote:
| The reason Reddit is a better user experience than usenet is 1)
| voting on posts and karma, and 2) continually polished user
| interface.
|
| Design a decentralized protocol that can handle voting/karma,
| while also incentivising developers of clients. The problem is
| that this is not easy.
| kevincox wrote:
| > voting on posts and karma
|
| I agree that this is Reddit's main feature. However it isn't
| necessarily good. It is basically an amplification of
| "interest" whether that is good or bad. Assuming that votes
| represent general quality is a dangerous mistake.
|
| > continually polished user interface
|
| Ok, this must be a joke.
|
| > Design a decentralized protocol that can handle voting/karma,
| while also incentivizing developers of clients.
|
| In order to do this in a decentralized manor you need to choose
| who's votes you trust. This is a very interesting problem and
| solving it may be helpful even in the context of a centralized
| network.
| johbjo wrote:
| > Assuming that votes represent general quality
|
| Maybe but if we let voting/karma/moderation be "perspectives"
| of the content rather than lossy filters, then it won't
| matter much.
|
| > you need to choose who's votes you trust.
|
| If users can freely choose their "root" in a trust tree, then
| it might be interesting. Each upvote confers trust and
| "karma".
| jancsika wrote:
| Design a decentralized protocol that can handle quick
| incremental tweaks as it scales.
|
| AFAICT there's no consensus model for federated or distributed
| services that can go fast. So you'd better get your design
| right the first time around to minimize tweaks and changes.
| _That_ requires domain expertise, and FOSS is famously bad at
| paying what it costs for that.
| chasing wrote:
| Maintaining healthy communities is, unfortunately, a human
| endeavor. Tools can help, but they cannot do it for us.
| jasode wrote:
| _> a workable plan that enables more free speech, [...] That
| approach: build protocols, not platforms. To be clear, this is an
| approach that would bring us back to the way the internet used to
| be. The early internet involved many different protocols--
| instructions and standards that anyone could then use to build a
| compatible interface. _
|
| As I've commented before[1][2], discussing _protocols_ and
| advocating for them is a popular topic but it does not _make
| progress_.
|
| The real issue is _funding_ and trying to make humans do _what
| they don 't want to do_.
|
| If HN is overrepresented by vanguards of decentralization and
| free speech, why are a lot of us here on HN instead of running
| USENET nodes and posting to a newsgroup such as
| "comp.programming.hackernews" to avoid being moderated by dang?
|
| If most of HN knows how to set up git and stand up a web server,
| why do most of use Github instead of running Gitlab on a home
| pc/laptop/RaspberryPi or rent a Digital Ocean vps?
|
| It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the issue!
|
| A lot of us _don 't want_ to run a USENET node or manage our own
| git server to share code.
|
| [1] the so-called "open" internet of free protocols:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960
|
| [2] free & royalty free protocol like Signal still doesn't solve
| the "who pays for running the server" problem:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499
| loceng wrote:
| You're exactly right that funding - or rather adequate effort -
| is what's missing, necessary to enforce and guide people along
| a protocol that will need to evolve as we learn how to better,
| more efficiently guide people towards calm rationality and
| reasoning; helping to open people's hearts and minds, healing
| whatever past unhealed/unprocessed trauma they likely have -
| along with helping them work through whatever blocks they have,
| whether misconceptions, emotion, or from an unhealthy body,
| nervous system.
| dennis_moore wrote:
| Github is a hosting service built around git. Likewise, gmail
| is a service built around e-mail protocols. It's fine for
| services like these to exist because you have a choice of
| whether you want to use them or not to facilitate the use of
| the underlying protocol (you are free to set up your own e-mail
| server if you want, and doing so does not prevent you from
| communicating with users who choose to use gmail).
|
| I think rather the big issue is, for instance, the use of
| Facebook Messenger for IM. If everyone I know uses it, I have
| no choice but to use it too because there is no underlying
| protocol behind it.
| gweinberg wrote:
| I can tell you why I stopped using USENET: because so few other
| people were using it it was no longer worthwhile. I would go
| back to it if enough other people did. I use Reddit now, and
| Reddit is just an inferior USENET.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > don't want to run a USENET node
|
| I would love to run a Usenet node, I just suspect my hosting
| provider would shut me down after too long.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| You do not have to carry all newsgroups, and the last time I
| used a free Usenet node they explicitly did not carry any
| binaries (too much traffic and too much liability). The
| reason nobody uses Usenet is that unmoderated newsgroups were
| taken over by nazis and trolls, and moderated newsgroups have
| no particular advantage over forums as far as "free speech"
| goes.
|
| (Though I take issue with the idea that moderation somehow
| implies less free speech. It is hard to express an idea when
| you are buried under a pile of off-topic trolling and nazi
| conspiracy theories.)
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > The reason nobody uses Usenet is that unmoderated
| newsgroups were taken over by nazis and trolls
|
| Some of the sci.* hierachy was taken over by the mentally
| ill and crackpots. They aren't hateful or intentionally
| trolling with their insistent claims that they have
| discovered free energy, come up with new insights into the
| evolution of human language, etc., but the effect on
| fruitful discussion was much the same.
| mcguire wrote:
| At some point, trolling becomes indistinguishable from
| mental illness and crackpottery.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| only in sufficiently advanced civilizations.
| Zak wrote:
| Moderated forums and moderated Usenet groups both have the
| characteristic of not being subject to the whims of a
| central platform. Contrast Facebook groups and subreddits.
| riffic wrote:
| > it does not make progress
|
| FUD. Making statements like this totally discounts the _healthy
| and vibrant_ communities that exist today making use of open
| protocols. Either your head is in the sand or you have an
| interest in stalling those systems from taking root.
|
| I got news for you though. The genie is out of the bottle, and
| there's no putting it back inside.
| zrm wrote:
| > If HN is overrepresented by vanguards of decentralization and
| free speech, why are a lot of us here on HN instead of running
| USENET nodes and posting to a newsgroup such as
| "comp.programming.hackernews" to avoid being moderated by dang?
|
| Because the point isn't to have no moderation, it's for the
| power of "moderation" not to be vested in a small number of
| oligarchs pressured by angry mobs spurred on by media companies
| with bad incentives to want to damage their political opponents
| and market competitors.
|
| Also notice that you're using a web page delivered via HTTP
| over TCP/IP over Ethernet, resolved via DNS, secured via TLS
| etc. These are all standard protocols. But Facebook isn't one
| and that's at the root of the problem.
|
| > If most of HN knows how to set up git and stand up a web
| server, why do most of use Github instead of running Gitlab on
| a home pc/laptop/RaspberryPi or rent a Digital Ocean vps?
|
| The network effect.
|
| > It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the
| issue!
|
| It's because "free & open protocols" are an important thing but
| not the only thing, and their importance relative to other
| things was until recently not under the spotlight.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| > Because the point isn't to have no moderation, it's for the
| power of "moderation" not to be vested in a small number of
| oligarchs pressured by angry mobs spurred on by media
| companies with bad incentives to want to damage their
| political opponents and market competitors
|
| I mean, or that the angry mobs don't like violent
| insurrections being encouraged and planned openly on these
| platforms. Is that what you mean by "damage their political
| opponents?" Phrases like that make it sound like the
| "opponents" are some innocent little scared children who did
| nothing wrong. If demanding that calls to violence are
| stopped is political for you, then ok, sure.
|
| As I've said and will keep saying: those most vocal about
| protecting the 'freedom' of domestic terrorists to terrorize
| are the ones most certain they'll never suffer from that
| terror.
| zrm wrote:
| Forcing your way into the capitol and taking over a police
| station are both illegal and should not be done. They both
| meet the formal definition of "violent insurrection" and
| they both happened over the last year. The media response
| has been asymmetrical.
|
| Also, people are being excluded who have never called for
| violence. What "violent insurrection" was Discord
| suppressing by /r/WallStreetBets?
| majormajor wrote:
| > Because the point isn't to have no moderation, it's for the
| power of "moderation" not to be vested in a small number of
| oligarchs pressured by angry mobs spurred on by media
| companies with bad incentives to want to damage their
| political opponents and market competitors.
|
| This is not a statement many people who have been angry
| recently would agree with.
|
| Trump would've gotten himself banned from any of the forums I
| hung out in from 2000 to now. Not for being conservative, for
| being an asshole.
|
| The "only remove illegal content" crowd has a problem with
| that. I don't.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _This is not a statement many people who have been angry
| recently would agree with._
|
| Well, what "angry people would agree with" is a pretty
| strange basis for an argument, anyway...
|
| > _Trump would 've gotten himself banned from any of the
| forums I hung out in from 2000 to now. Not for being
| conservative, for being an asshole._
|
| And that would be neither here nor there, cause your forums
| are not so massive as to shape public opinion and influence
| elections and news.
|
| In smaller, disperse and diverse, discussion platforms, you
| would be entitled to think that he should be banned for
| "being an asshole" and even ban him from your forums, while
| others would be entitled to ban others that say the same or
| worse things from the opposite side of the political
| spectrum.
|
| When one side, in a major public-opinion-influencing
| service can ban a whole side of the political spectrum
| though, and even the sitting president, that's a problem.
|
| It's actually analogous to election influencing - same as
| if 9 out of 10 channels in TV only carried the views from
| one party and not the other(s).
| majormajor wrote:
| > It's actually analogous to election influencing - same
| as if 9 out of 10 channels in TV only carried the views
| from one party and not the other(s).
|
| Thanks to the Reagan administration, that's fine, yes? It
| would violate Twitter's free speech rights to force them
| to do otherwise?
|
| This is an ancient argument and Twitter neither "banned a
| whole side of the political spectrum" (the asshole
| Trumpian wing is hardly all of conservatism) nor did
| anything new to US history.
|
| The reason Trump is pushing for the "public square"
| aspect is because in a decentralized world, his crowd
| would still be pushed to the fringes _because it 's
| expressing fringe (but loud) views_. 90 out of 100 forums
| would have issues with him. So instead, he wants to have
| access on his terms.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Thanks to the Reagan administration, that 's fine,
| yes? It would violate Twitter's free speech rights to
| force them to do otherwise?_
|
| Well, I don't particularly care for a corporation's free
| speech rights. I think it's better for citizens to have
| free speech rights, not corporations. Besides, I don't
| think Twitter's free speech rights are in danger or would
| be in danger if they were forced not to censor people.
| They could still print whatever message of their own
| (Twitter's) they want, exercizing their free speech. They
| just wouldn't be able to exercize censorship.
|
| Same way I want net neutrality from ISPs, I want it from
| social media.
| [deleted]
| atoav wrote:
| I think what many don't realise is that it is precisely the
| "unfree" parts of HN that make it attractive. And by that I
| don't mean centralized technical or organizational structure,
| but rather stuff like a culture of downvoting destructive,
| inflamatory or snarky comments, a good and mostly invisible
| moderation, a strong focus on certain topics etc.
|
| To have a good discourse it totally helps if that one guy over
| there isn't screaming at everybody that has a slightly
| different opinion while he is shitting onto the table in front
| of the rest of us. It helps if everybody agrees what _goes to
| far_.
|
| Federated, decentralized and free plattforms need to deal with
| this their own way. What if the free plattform you are hosting
| is used by a ring of child molestors and pedophiles? Do you
| accept that freedom for all also means freedom for them? Or do
| you enforce your own law on your own turf? While this is an
| extrem example, anybody who tried to run such a thing in a
| meaningful way had to ask themselves the same question. I am
| btw. aware that child molesters are a common scenario used by
| politicians to justify yet another crack down on encryption.
|
| The question here is, what kind of plattform would _you_ want
| to run? One where the discussions enrich the lives of a
| thousand people, show some of them perspectives they never had?
| Or rather the lawless zone where everything goes and the
| stronger person with the louder capslock and the meaner insults
| wins? Or something conspiratorial?
| henry_bone wrote:
| > I think what many don't realise is that it is precisely the
| "unfree" parts of HN that make it attractive. And by that I
| don't mean centralized technical or organizational structure,
| but rather stuff like a culture of downvoting destructive,
| inflamatory or snarky comments, a good and mostly invisible
| moderation, a strong focus on certain topics etc.
|
| I'm over it. I see many comments that politely present the
| opposing view get downvoted to oblivion. It isn't just the
| "inflamatory or snarky" comment. Dissenting opinion is
| censored on this platform.
|
| I made the mistake of reacting to it the other day and was
| punished for commenting on moderation. Fair enough, I guess,
| but the reason for the comment was exasperation at the
| downvoting of opinion.
|
| And it bites that downvoted comments just fade away, so later
| readers can no longer consider it, or respond to it. Remember
| that I am talking about unpopular opinion, which may
| sometimes be objectively wrong, but not rudely presented.
| It's common for such additions to the thread to be obliviated
| through moderation. (I know about showdead, but only learned
| about it recently).
|
| That's the thing about free speech: we often don't like what
| other people say. The price we must pay for that freedom is
| to be exposed to speech we do not like. It's a cost, that we
| must pay because we are imperfect. We make mistakes, we think
| incorrectly from time to time. So I say, let it all ride. On
| HN at least, the culture of thoughtfulness and
| intellectualism serves to curb the worst rudeness, but let us
| be willing to expose ourselves to views that we don't agree
| with. Let's be prepared to have the argument, and possibly be
| persuaded.
|
| So the next time someone says "You know, I think Trump was an
| alright president, for <reasons> .. ", curb your outrage. Let
| it ride, and engage with the argument.
| justinboogaard wrote:
| I don't think I would visit HN if the voting system worked
| like this. I like hearing the popular opinion, but I also
| like hearing the popular contrary opinion and very often -
| like with your comment - the popular contrary sits right
| below the popular.
|
| What I don't like reading is "zinger" comments - stuff like
| "X is bad and people that think X is good are dumb".
|
| From what I've seen - these are the comments downvoted the
| most. I don't dislike these comments because they cause me
| outrage, they just don't make me feel the same way that
| well thought out comments - popular and unpopular - make me
| feel.
| notahacker wrote:
| And on a related note, the ability to browse forums with
| vastly different themes, cultures, and tolerance has always
| been there. The big networks solve a _discoverability_
| problem for end users (and get accused of being the problem
| when they [don 't] stop certain things being discoverable).
| Moderation complaints have revolved around the platform
| companies promoting or refusing to promote stuff to their
| _widest possible audience_ even though other websites exist,
| and I don 't see how the biggest 'filter' providers don't run
| into the same issue (with the existence of niche and manually
| customisable 'filters' failing to be a 'solution' in the same
| sense many people are unhappy with being able to reach Gab
| followers but not Twitter ones)
| kangaroozach wrote:
| In all cases ILLEGAL speech can't be allowed to remain on
| platform.
|
| There needs to be a high tech system for logging and
| reporting Illegal Speech to government. And a means for
| government to take efficient and prompt action.
|
| Disliked speech is not illegal speech and this article states
| the unique definition that each person has and poses some
| solves to allow people to use systems that filter out what
| they dont want to hear in addition to what is illegal.
|
| The issue we are facing is what to do about the legal but
| disliked speech and whether to forcibly prevent people from
| hearing or seeing it.
|
| The spirit of of our first amendment is very much the
| opposite. It is to protect your ability to speak. Our public
| forum is now virtual, privatized and highly centralized and
| we didn't prepare for that as a society.
|
| As they say "...Defend to the death your right to say it."
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| The end goal is to make sure "ILLEGAL" speech can not be
| suppressed. If you can block "illegal" speech you can block
| legal speech any protocol designed to be immune to
| censorship will have to make that sacrifice; I am very much
| willing too.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> To have a good discourse_
|
| ...is not the primary purpose of Google, Facebook, and
| Twitter. Which may be a better way of stating the root
| problem than focusing on either protocols or platforms.
| cousin_it wrote:
| Yeah. Recommendation systems, like HN, are attractive to people
| and difficult to replace with open protocols.
| deadbunny wrote:
| I don't know, HN isn't much more than a focused subreddit (no
| offense meant!).
|
| I could imagine some kind of federated Reddit where HN could
| be a community fully managed by dang et al. according to
| their own needs/wants.
|
| Then you just subscribe to each community as you like. Much
| like you can unsubscribe to all the default subreddits and
| only subscribe to the subreddits that interest you, only this
| time you don't have Reddit 's commercial interests/standards
| hanging over your head with the power to shut you down.
|
| Granted I'm not sure of the value (other than censorship
| resistance) vs. a set of fragmented, specialized forums we
| had way back when.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Lemmy is Mastodon for Reddit, so it lets you have a
| instance with a set of subreddits, basically, from a user
| can also subscribe to other instances' subreddits. I'm not
| involved with the code or anything, I just think it's neat.
| https://lemmy.ml
| deadbunny wrote:
| Thansk for the heads up, will give it a look!
| Zak wrote:
| ON the contrary, I think HN is a good example of the open
| web, a protocol based around pages hosted in all manner of
| places and links between them. HN is one of many places you
| could go to find recommendations for content hosted
| elsewhere.
|
| Hosting comments is platformy, but other than that HN doesn't
| try to get people to host content on HN, and while dang can
| decide that HN won't recommend a particular piece of content,
| he cannot remove that content from wherever it's hosted
| (except by recommending it too much and hugging the server to
| death).
| lifty wrote:
| I think a very important reason why people don't run their own
| USENET node or Gitlab instance is because it's not easy. In
| fact, it's the opposite of easy. It's extremely difficult in
| the long run. If using your own server was as easy as using an
| iPhone, then we would see way more people doing it.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| You are exactly right. And you can see the same thing with the
| Internet as a network as well as with Bitcoin.
|
| Both of those can, by design, be run by individuals and
| independent entities. However, in the end most people end up
| preferring to delegate the administration of their share of the
| network to someone else, either out of ignorance or
| convenience.
| rusk wrote:
| > avoid being moderated by dang?
|
| Maybe we like being moderated by dang? Maybe he's a key feature
| of the "hacker news application" that runs over the open
| protocols ...
| HotVector wrote:
| Peer-to-peer communication with sparsely decentralized data
| storage is the answer.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I think this is the right set of questions. I can add my own
| anecdotal experience. In the past, I ran voice chat servers,
| IRC servers, forums, rsync and sftp servers. I gave people a
| way to have their own small communities that were mostly free
| of censorship provided they were not breaking the laws of my
| country. For a while, those things were popular, but as the big
| centralized sites came along, they designed their UX to be low
| friction and high endorphin reward. They added more
| discoverability and ability to have bigger communities. People
| preferred this over what I could give them. With time, my IRC
| servers lost favor for things like Facebook messenger and
| Discord. Rsync and SFTP were "too hard" and everyone moved to
| Dropbox and related sites. My remaining SFTP server is now just
| hit by bots, very confused bots. I shut down the last voice
| chat server because people would only use it when Discord was
| offline. On top of all that, internet trolls have evolved
| beyond psychological warfare. Now they are good at scripting
| uploads of bad content and auto-reporting their own content to
| take down domains and servers regardless of how fast response-
| driven moderation is. This means I would have to set up forums
| to require every message to be screened, or use some expensive
| machine learning and that gets into a whole mess of privacy
| problems. It's just not worth my time and effort to play those
| games, especially given the lack of interest in using smaller
| communities.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Decentralized doesn't have to mean "everyone self-hosts": it
| just means there's more than one offering on the market.
|
| I pay an email provider because I don't want to deal with
| configuring Dovecot, but I don't use Gmail because I don't want
| the risk that some algo deletes my account, and I'm glad that's
| (so far still) an option.
| _jal wrote:
| The reason people don't run nntp servers is the same reason I
| don't go to Antarctica to socialize.
|
| The reason people use github is because it it there.
|
| > It's because "free & open protocols" weren't really the
| issue!
|
| Why do VC funded startups build platforms? Because that's how
| you get the gate-keeping function. Protocols do not get funded
| because they do not let you exclude.
|
| Chiding others for not making progress on hard problems against
| well-funded opponents doesn't make one look wise.
| dqpb wrote:
| GitHub is an interesting example, because if I push code to
| GitHub, I still have my local source, and being an open
| protocol I can easily push it elsewhere as well.
| kangaroozach wrote:
| Can an open source repo contain illegal speech commented in
| the code itself? What happens then?
| deadbunny wrote:
| Which is fine if you're only managing code and not using
| all the other functionality like bug tracking/feature
| requests, documentation, pull requests.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There's no conflict between these things. You can run
| your own private/semi-private repo, mirror to github and
| use github for the public facing features you're
| mentioning. That doesn't stop your own repo from
| continuing to exist (whether or not it is considered
| canonical or not).
| snarf21 wrote:
| Well said. Free and lazy over freedom and work.
| ridaj wrote:
| Economies of scale and specialization. Same reason not
| everyone is fabbing their own chips, running their own power
| plant, digging for their own oil and growing their own fruit.
| Aside from people living in complete isolation from the rest
| of the world, we all put a price on freedom at some point.
| pmlnr wrote:
| > A lot of us don't want to run a USENET node or manage our own
| git server to share code.
|
| Yeah. See how well it goes when everyone takes the comfortable
| approach?
| ilaksh wrote:
| I still think it's quite strange how peer-to-peer systems are
| dismissed offhand these days. At one time the idea was quite
| popular. I believe it will come back into popularity again.
|
| One thing that probably will affect that dramatically is
| rollout of IPv6.
|
| But the author also addresses another aspect of it which is the
| economics. Cryptocurrency can help with that.
| he0001 wrote:
| Speaking from experience, I've been on internet since 1990. Even
| back then there were censorship. Moderators that took away your
| post if it was irrelevant or wasn't on topic. You couldn't store
| specific types of images (porn) etc.
|
| I've never believed that internet was about "free speech" but
| more "grouping of specific type of speech". If you were
| interested in something you either created that or hang out with
| others that thought the same. For me it has never been about free
| speech, just a way to reach stuff. Free speech in IRL is another
| thing.
| zer0gravity wrote:
| What I think we need is Interoperability, not just protocols.
| What I understand by interoperability is what a mature (spoken)
| language provides. Although its body of words remains pretty much
| fixed, it offers a wide range of expression. I think that what we
| need is a _language of the internet_ to achieve this type of
| interoperability. So, in a way, a language can be seen as a
| communication protocol and, with such a language, two systems can
| talk and _discover_ and consume each other 's services. This
| language shouldn't change too much, but it should be complex
| enough, to start with, in order to allow a high degree of
| expression and, ultimately, interoperability.
| hirundo wrote:
| Discoverability is a fundamental part of protocol design.
| Here's a list of service discovery protocols:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_discovery
|
| We could use a C-3PO (protocol droid, fluent in over six
| million forms of communication) for interop.
| zer0gravity wrote:
| I'm not talking about a zillion protocols with discoverable
| services, but of a _single_ language of the internet that
| allows service discoverability and _concept_ sharing
| dynamically between peers.
| catmanjan wrote:
| You mean like HTTP? Isn't Google already doing this?
| colllectorof wrote:
| _" After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor
| of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech
| and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the
| view has shifted dramatically--now it seems that almost no one is
| happy."_
|
| 10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good
| communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to
| protect free speech".
|
| Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see
| mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized speech
| control.
|
| This is understandable, but highly reactionary and irrational.
| Speech control is facilitated by big tech at their own
| discretion. Advocating for more of it means you're advocating for
| giving more power to the companies who fucked up the system in
| the first place.
| WClayFerguson wrote:
| The left wing is still not wanting to rise up against
| censorship because they believe it's still benefiting them,
| since BigTech (+M5M) is their leftist ally...for now.
|
| What they need to realize is that once you give Tyrannical
| Control over to your leaders (governments, or BigTech censors),
| because you consider them benevolent today, it's foolish
| because they won't be benevolent forever.
|
| Our founding fathers knew power corrupts, but today's
| 20-somethings seem quite unaware. They think we can create a
| system where all forms of "bad" speech are stopped. But the
| problem with that is you end up having to define "bad". My
| definition of "patriotic speech" might be your definition of
| "mean speech", so unless you appoint power-wielding dictators
| to make the final decision, the only solution is to just say
| everyone is free. Once you allow dictators they'll always
| become corrupt and self-interested.
|
| The left thinks they're in a war against evil and meanies, but
| really the only opponent they're fighting is freedom itself.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| "The left" is for democracy. There was once a time when that
| sentiment was shared across the political spectrum, but
| lately it seems that "the right" remains undecided about
| whether or not it is acceptable to threaten the lives of
| politicians who refused to overturn the results of an
| election. I still remember a time when both the left and
| right celebrated the strength of American democracy and the
| fact that people in America do not turn to violence when
| their side loses an election. The fact that right wing
| activists are crying "censorship" when platforms react to an
| attempt to use violence to overturn the results of an
| election by banning the terrorists who organized that attack
| speaks volumes about how far America has fallen.
|
| It was not all that long ago that right wing activists were
| joining left wing activists in demanding that tech companies
| stop providing service to ISIS. Where were all these cries of
| censorship back then? It is only now that the right wing of
| American politics has aligned itself with terrorists that
| they have started whining about "free speech" and calling for
| increased regulation of tech companies that dare to kick
| terrorists off their platforms.
| WClayFerguson wrote:
| The entire summer long while buildings burned, and entire
| cities looted by violent murdering thugs it was called
| "peaceful protests".
|
| Then when some actual peaceful protesters go to a
| legitimate politically organized rally in clown outfits in
| Washington brandishing American flags and are literally
| ushered into the buildings by security it's portrayed by
| the lying media as serious military coup attempt. To quote
| Biden: "Gimme a break man."
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It took me a while to place the cognitive dissonance, but
| I found it eventually: you've made stuff up. Buildings
| weren't burning all summer, "violent murdering thugs"
| weren't called peaceful, "politically organized rally"
| doesn't mean anything...
| deadbunny wrote:
| > actual peaceful protestors
|
| They killed a Police Officer, chanted "Hang Pence", and
| tried to stop the democratic process of verifying votes
| for the new president.
|
| Now of course you will likely argue that they were a
| small minority, but I don't see you making that
| concession for those on the "other side" so I'm not sure
| how much weight it'll have.
| farias0 wrote:
| Do you have a source to the "ushered into the buildings"
| thing? Like, are you saying they didn't intend into
| storming the Capitol but were guided/leaded there by the
| security staff?
|
| Also I think you're being unfair by ignoring the causes
| of both of the protests, as (IMO, feel free to disagree)
| one of them was directly supporting democratic and
| liberal interests and the other was directly against
| them. I don't think you can discuss the protests without
| taking into account what they were protesting.
| SamBam wrote:
| > literally ushered into the buildings by security
|
| Are you serious?
|
| The fact that some cops eventually decided that 20 cops
| could not stand against 1000 violent protestors smashing
| through windows and doors, after at least one cop had
| been dragged out of his position and beaten senseless by
| the mob, and another cop killed, and so decided that the
| safest thing to do was open the doors, doesn't mean that
| all of a sudden they were peaceful protestors. Give me a
| fucking break.
| mcguire wrote:
| Since no one else mentioned it,
|
| " _The entire summer long while buildings burned, and
| entire cities looted by violent murdering thugs..._ "
|
| Could you provide some evidence for "entire cities looted
| by violent murdering thugs"?
| WClayFerguson wrote:
| Well, if you watched the M5M you won't really know about
| any of it. lol. Thanks for helping make my point!
| mbostleman wrote:
| >>lately it seems that "the right" remains undecided about
| whether or not it is acceptable to threaten the lives of
| politicians who refused to overturn the results of an
| election>>
|
| This isn't even remotely a representative sentiment of the
| 70+ million people that are not on the "left".
|
| >>"The left" is for democracy>>
|
| Again, I don't think we would find this accurate if data
| were collected. Both sides are "for democracy". I think
| what you would find is something slightly more refined:
| that one side appreciates that democracy alone is flawed
| and requires a strong constitution to guard against its
| propensity to oppress individuals. The other side finds a
| constitution that limits democracy too constraining.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| From this description, I can't tell which side you're
| characterizing as which. That would generally imply it's
| more of a platitude than a real realization.
|
| Also while that may be true of individuals (I don't think
| it is), it clearly isn't true of party leadership.
| cgrealy wrote:
| > This isn't even remotely a representative sentiment of
| the 70+ million people that are not on the "left".
|
| Probably not, but it's a pretty accurate summary of their
| leadership.
|
| The facts are the 45 and the Republicans attempted to
| throw out the results of an election.
|
| You can argue that most people on the right do not agree
| with this, but they should really stop voting for these
| people then.
| mbostleman wrote:
| "...45 and the Republicans attempted to throw out the
| results of an election."
|
| Do you mean that 45 Republicans voted against ratifying
| the electoral college votes? My understanding is that
| that vote is largely procedural and that the losing side
| voting against it as a protest is common in every
| election. If you take away that context it makes for a
| great narrative in this election (the whole histrionic
| overthrow theme), but context often matters.
|
| My understanding could be wrong, though. I couldn't
| quickly put my hands on the historical voting record. Or
| maybe that's not what you're referring to.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > My understanding is that that vote is largely
| procedural and that the losing side voting against it as
| a protest is common in every election
|
| No. The only times prior to 2021 that an objection in
| proper form to trigger a debate and vote on any state's
| submitted electoral votes since the modern process was
| adopted in 1887 were in 2005 and 1969 (the latter over a
| faithless elector), both addressing only a single state,
| and the 2005 example was explicitly stated to be an
| effort to draw attention to electoral system issues
| rather than alter the outcome; there weren't members who
| voted for it stating on national TV the expectation that
| who would be President was in doubt based on the action
| the way, e.g., Sen. Hawley did in regard to the
| challenges this month.
| cgrealy wrote:
| No, "45" was a reference to the last president.
|
| >the losing side voting against it as a protest is common
| in every election.
|
| Really? That would be news to me. Do you have a source
| for that?
| mbostleman wrote:
| I think I addressed that in my last paragraph.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Your understanding is wrong.
|
| Voting against result certification is occasionally used
| as a protest against certain specific irregularities. It
| is absolutely not common to vote against them, and not in
| these numbers (i.e. not as a lone congressperson or two
| drawing attention to something they see as a problem).
|
| [ EDIT: added known historical examples ]
|
| Specific examples: 2016, 11 Democrats rose to object to
| certifying Trump's results; none of them had obtained a
| Senator's cosignature and so all were dismissed
| immediately. Objections were based on reports of Russian
| interference, subsequently confirmed in the broadest
| sense by the Mueller and Senate reports, though their
| findings would not have likely invalidated any actual
| results.
|
| 2004: 1 Senator and 1 Representative raised objections to
| results favoring Bush from a single state. They both
| stressed that their objections were not intended to
| change the outcome of that election.
|
| 2001: on the order of 15 Representatives raised
| objections to the Gore/Bush result, which had been
| decided by the SCOTUS. No Senator joined them, and Gore
| himself dropped the Gavel on their protest.
| mbostleman wrote:
| Ok, only 40% wrong. So protesting that the election was
| flawed occurred in 60% of the elections in the last two
| decades, which more than supports my point that without
| such context the overthrow narrative loses a good deal of
| its exaggerated effect when one learns that this election
| was not unique on that point.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I think that scale matters. The number of house members
| and their coordination with 6 senators in my mind makes
| what happened this year different in so many important
| ways. Obviously, YMMV.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The world is not divided into two camps, not should it
| be. Some people are neither with nor against you; they've
| got their own things going on.
| WClayFerguson wrote:
| Labels can be divisive and tribal when used against
| individuals, to smear them by saying they're guilty of
| the bad actions of a few in a group. However language
| itself is built on "labels", so they're required.
|
| It's impossible to criticize bad ideas without some
| shorthand label for those kinds of thinking and
| ideologies. The fact that whole entire groups hold those
| same ideas necessarily is a critique of the entire group,
| and is necessarily tribal. But labels are nonetheless
| also necessary for the discussion to take place.
|
| Democracies can only thrive when there's an educated
| population free to discuss all ideas, and allowed to
| strongly criticize or even ridicule those they disagree
| with. Yet people like Jack Dorsey think it's their duty
| to step in as a referee to make sure everyone's polite
| and behaves according to his personal political views. He
| needs to be put back in his place, because no one elected
| him, and he just fell backwards by accident into a power
| position over millions by pure luck.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You implied that "the right" means everyone not on "the
| left" - but I thought "the right" and "the left" were
| labels for political ideologies.
| WClayFerguson wrote:
| To me "The Left" means the set of beliefs more than it
| means the set of believers, but you can't have a belief
| without a believer.
| majormajor wrote:
| > Our founding fathers knew power corrupts, but today's
| 20-somethings seem quite unaware.
|
| The government has to be able to actively respond to the
| problems of the moment, and those problems will constantly
| change. A handcuffed government only benefits the already-
| powerful.
|
| The dirty secrets of the "but the founding fathers!" argument
| are that (a) they knew they weren't creating a perfect set of
| rules in the Constitution, and planned for us to be modifying
| it as we learned new things and the world changes, and (b)
| it's failed anyway. Abstract principles listed on a page
| don't "protect freedom," bad actors can find ways to sneak
| things through (sometimes in plain sight, like that whole
| slavery thing that took a century to get figured out, or the
| followup forms of discrimination that are still with us).
| WClayFerguson wrote:
| Our founding fathers and subsequent forefathers fought wars
| to protect our freedoms, and sadly the current generation
| don't value or even want to preserve that freedom. Good
| times create weak men, and weak men will happily surrender
| to Tyranny.
| majormajor wrote:
| Some of that "subsequent" group actually even fought a
| war to _prevent_ some of our freedoms!
|
| There's no weakness in challenging the storybook fable-
| ized versions of history.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Reactionary perhaps. Irrational is unfair, I feel.
|
| We, anyone who knows what an article titled "Protocols, Not
| Platforms" is probably about... our discussions have failed to
| have enough impact outside of niche. People see there is a
| problem. "Marketplace of ideas" is somewhat of a hard sell . As
| you say... mismanaged cesspits, but also monopolies. Also,
| "marketplace" is more euphemism than metaphor when referring to
| a handful of click-optimizing algorithms.
|
| I'm on the fence, but don't tend to think whatever the current
| politics does give more power to those companies who fucked up
| the system in the first place.
|
| Facebook and Twitter were already in an uncanny valley of free
| speech. It has been, Free speech at their discretion all along,
| and this wasn't a theoretical problem. At least now it is clear
| what we are looking at.
|
| In any case, this post in on point. It's disheartening that
| decades into this discussion we have not had enough impact that
| politicians even know what the hell we are talking about.
| Twitter doesn't need to be regulated. It just needs to die.
| Twitter does not need to be a company. It's already basically a
| protocol. Free the protocol. Discard the company. They are not
| needed.
| newswasboring wrote:
| > Advocating for more of it means you're advocating for giving
| more power to the companies who fucked up the system in the
| first place.
|
| You mean that in the current framework right? Because in the
| proposed framework in the article more speech does not lead to
| more power to the companies.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| The problem is that this speech control isn't just used for
| cleaning the cesspool but is now demonstrably used to protect
| the elite. Just this week we have escalated from just blocking
| hate speech and violence to blocking people who are
| inconveniencing Wall Street.
| fareesh wrote:
| I remember watching a very strange segment on American news
| about a man who owns a mattress and pillow company who was
| banned from Twitter because he continuously expressed his
| disbelief in the legitimacy of the election result of 2020, and
| was organizing various events along this theme.
|
| From what I recall the 2016 election was frequently attributed
| to some vague accusation of hacking from Russia but the same
| standard was not applied at the time, nor is it applied today.
| The people espousing this view were eventually proven
| inconclusive in all the different inquiries into the matter,
| and they were far more influential than a man who sells
| pillows.
|
| There seems to be a very disproportionate level of enforcement
| towards offenders on the social media platforms, and this seems
| to stem from the personal politics of the people working there.
|
| If the employees at these companies had the opposite politics,
| I am quite sure the rhetoric around this issue would be framed
| in terms of authoritarianism. Are you not allowed to criticize
| your government anymore in the USA? I find that to be quite
| incredible.
| froh wrote:
| Maybe it also stems from the global diversity of the
| employees in said companies.
|
| To the European eye the idea of allowing any and all public
| utterance feels like a free ticket to disaster.
|
| Deliberate and carefully crafted representation of "reality",
| and indirect communication via various "trusted channels" is
| part of winning elections anywhere.
|
| The carefully and orchestrated use of mass media in the 1920s
| and 1930s, skillfully crafted to lead the electorate to
| certain political choices, was later used to even accept
| certain political atrocities (internment camps in the
| beginning, war and industrial mass murder later).
|
| So to protect the electorate (!) from being grossly misled,
| many European countries in the aftermath of the 1940s decided
| to counterbalance the freedom of speech with rules what is
| _not_ freedom of speech.
|
| And yes, the details are tricky and courts have to decide.
|
| Is that ever in the public debate in the USA? Reasonable
| limits to free speech?
|
| Here is a fairly straightforward example from the German
| penal code:
|
| https://www.gesetze-im-
| internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
|
| https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__130.html
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The carefully and orchestrated use of mass media in the
| 1920s and 1930s, skillfully crafted to lead the electorate
| to certain political choices, was later used to even accept
| certain political atrocities (internment camps in the
| beginning, war and industrial mass murder later)._
|
| This is true. However, the part nobody wants to talk about
| is that it didn't just happen in Germany.
| ameister14 wrote:
| >So to protect the electorate (!) from being grossly
| misled, many European countries in the aftermath of the
| 1940s decided to counterbalance the freedom of speech with
| rules what is not freedom of speech.
|
| That's a very generous way of looking at it. In the West, I
| would say that it would be more accurate to look at it
| through the lens of the cold war, though. Communism and
| radicalism were to be prevented and so freedom of speech
| was necessarily curtailed. In the East, it was likewise
| curtailed, ostensibly to 'protect the youth' and 'prevent
| disinformation' but with more potential for immediate
| consequences.
|
| >Is that ever in the public debate in the USA? Reasonable
| limits to free speech?
|
| Sure. It's been debated a lot, actually. Laws have changed
| significantly over the last hundred years, almost entirely
| to the expansion of free speech side.
| retrac wrote:
| Here in Canada, we have laws which don't originate from
| cold war paranoia. They're just attempts to cool the
| heatedness of elections. For example, you can't campaign
| before the official election season begins, and there are
| limits on how much you can spend, and how much people can
| donate, there are limits on polling close to the
| election, it's illegal to reveal early results in the
| eastern parts of the country (where polls close earlier)
| to the western parts until all polls are closed, and so
| on.
|
| Many Western democracies have laws like this, which would
| be incompatible with the American First Amendment, but
| which are basically intended to foster democratic health,
| and aren't particularly authoritarian.
| ameister14 wrote:
| There are limits on campaigns like that in the US as
| well. That's the problem with the Citizens United ruling
| - it broke some of that for us.
|
| The rules he was talking about though are more to do with
| the limitations on speech that can be considered
| insulting, transgressive or hateful. They also include
| constitutionality of political parties in general,
| disparaging the president, and many other things.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| While I agree, one predictable counter-argument is that
| Twitter et al are private organizations with a legal
| prerogative to ban whomever they like (freedom of
| association). This is true, but we should think about how
| this was intended to work and the property that this was
| designed to protect: the original idea was that you had a
| decentralized network of communities that could individually
| excommunicate whomever they liked (freedom of association)
| but any individual was still allowed to participate in the
| broader network, the public square. Now, social media has
| become the de facto public square--a small group of social
| media companies hold dominion over an overwhelming amount of
| our speech--worse, these companies coordinate with each other
| to behave as a single large entity. We shouldn't get
| distracted by the fact that Twitter is a de facto public
| square and not a de jure public square, because we want to
| protect the _functional property_. We can do that either by
| regulating Twitter like we would regulate the public square,
| or we can do it by breaking up this powerful trust of
| corporations (I favor the latter).
| fareesh wrote:
| I am curious as to whether the predictable counter-argument
| of "private organization with prerogative" will shift in
| the wake of the recent Robinhood fiasco.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Twitter has a monopoly on things that work exactly like
| Twitter. That's all. I'm a lot more sympathetic to
| arguments about how Google and Facebook have a worrying
| degree of control online, because services owned by them
| are used by an absolute majority of English speaking
| people.
|
| Twitter is only used by 22% of Americans as of 2019 [1]. If
| Twitter banned me I wouldn't even _know about it_ for
| several months because that 's about how frequently I log
| in. It's important to a certain kind of "very online"
| person but from my POV it's as inessential as Pinterest or
| Twitch.
|
| I think that Twitter's perceived importance has been
| exaggerated beyond its actual user numbers because the
| previous US President used it so heavily. It was also an
| easy, cheap, reliable way for other publishers to churn out
| content. "Trump Tweets Something -- We React" was a daily
| staple for TV and written publications for 4 years. But 78%
| of Americans get along just fine without using Twitter
| itself.
|
| [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-
| of-u-...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Twitter has a de facto monopoly on things that work
| exactly like Twitter.
|
| No, Twitter has a monopoly on _people who use Twitter_.
| If you decoupled the users from the technology (e.g., by
| way of some common protocol that allows human
| communication networks to span social media platforms),
| Twitter would probably vanish overnight (surely losing
| out to a competitor with an "edit" button).
|
| > Twitter is only used by 22% of Americans as of 2019
|
| In what world is it okay for one company to monopolize
| much of the communication of 22% of Americans? Especially
| since Twitter isn't some neatly isolated system, but
| rather its effects spill over into the outside world;
| consider how often traditional media cites Twitter (not
| only with respect to Trump's own Tweets) or even
| Twitter's role in BLM protests/riots and the Capitol Hill
| riot. Twitter's reach pretty clearly far exceeds its own
| user base.
|
| Moreover, Twitter and other social media giants often act
| in concert, so it's not "just Twitter" or "just Facebook"
| that we need to be concerned about, but also these giants
| acting in their mutual interests.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Well there was the attempt at violent overthrow of a
| government... That's one difference.
| fareesh wrote:
| Seemed like one of the poorest attempts I have ever seen,
| is it really being treated as a serious one?
| lallysingh wrote:
| The defenses were so poor it was a coin flip whether it
| would succeed.
| konjin wrote:
| What would success have looked like? Stealing the
| original copy of the constitution and using whiteout to
| change the bits they didn't like?
| kibwen wrote:
| Success for them would have looked like apprehending the
| legislature and coercing them into throwing out the votes
| of states that didn't go to Trump. And this is charitably
| assuming that their chants of "hang Mike Pence", along
| with the gallows they erected out front, might have only
| been for show.
| konjin wrote:
| My version of editing the constitution is vastly more
| likely to happen than whatever fever dream this is.
| kibwen wrote:
| Perhaps you're so naive that you think that a murderous
| mob successfully overthrowing an elected government is
| unprecedented in US history? https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
| i/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...
| konjin wrote:
| Ah yes, Wilmington NC 1890, the place I go to when I need
| to imagine what could possibly happen in DC not 130 years
| later.
| kibwen wrote:
| If oblivious sarcasm is your only recourse for when you
| have nothing left to contribute to an argument, then I
| accept your concession.
| konjin wrote:
| Yelling at the top of your lungs that cosplayers are a
| real danger to the most powerful superpower on the planet
| makes you either dishonest or insane.
|
| Either of those precludes a good faith argument.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Personally I think it's a security problem that Pillow
| Man's LARPer mob constituted a credible threat to our
| National Security. This doesn't seem like cause to restrict
| speech. (Of course, Twitter is technically a private
| platform, but it's also the de facto public square as I
| discussed elsewhere in this thread, and the property we
| ought to care about is that free speech is protected in the
| public square).
| lallysingh wrote:
| I think the Free Speech problem is really a problem of
| automatic amplification by platforms that have
| motivations sometimes opposed to the well-being of the
| speakers or listenrrs.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Maybe, but even then the "free speech problem" should
| never have become a "national security problem". National
| security aside, free speech works pretty well when the
| public square isn't privatized by a handful of entities
| with the same general business model (using outrage to
| sell ads), which is perhaps your very point.
| majormajor wrote:
| The dominant strains of consternation about 2016 were that
| social media had been abused to propagandize voters into
| voting for Trump, that the electoral college was a problem,
| that democratic politicians needed to listen to rural white
| voters and target them more, and that Clinton was a we-
| should've-seen-this-sooner hugely flawed candidate.
|
| The vote count being fraudulent, the idea that fellow
| citizens had stolen the election, wasn't an ongoing
| discussion in December 2015, January 2016, etc...
|
| It's curious you think that people claiming Russia hacked the
| vote totals in 2016 were "far more influential" than the
| people who've been shouting "stop the steal" when only one of
| those groups of people convinced folks to march and riot to
| try to "take back" the election. The message against Trump
| after his election was "resistance," a message which
| _accepts_ that Trump won the election, but sought to keep
| people engaged to try to minimize what he could do.
|
| I challenge you to find those people you think were
| continually organizing events to get Trump's election
| overturned.
| mcguire wrote:
| At what point did those who made the "vague accusation of
| hacking" storm the United States Capitol in a coup attempt?
| fareesh wrote:
| Do people really believe that it was a coup attempt though?
| I see people framing it that way but always assumed it was
| political exaggeration
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| What term would you use for an event, even if if doomed
| to fail, that involves at least hundreds of people
| outside (and then inside) of the building where the vice-
| president is present, chanting "Hang Mike Pence" ? Do you
| think it's just some of kiddie protest party? Do you
| think they didn't mean it? Do you think that because it
| wasn't 100,000 people it doesn't count? Do you think that
| because they didn't have the army on their side, it can't
| be an attempt at a coup?
| pfraze wrote:
| This is a pretty biased take on what's been happening.
|
| The 2020 election's fraud claims were thrown out by courts.
| They were entirely evidence-free. Even Lindsey Graham gave a
| concise speech on the night of 1/6 explaining precisely how
| false those fraud claims were.
|
| The 2016 election involved Russia hacking the DNC and leaking
| their emails, which became a centerpiece of the election
| debate ("Hillary's emails!"). It also involved Trump publicly
| asking for Russia to leak the emails, and then (once elected)
| firing the head of the FBI and saying in an interview with
| Lester Holt it was because Comey was investigating any
| possible ties with Russia.
|
| The response to 2016 was the Mueller investigation. The
| response to 2020 was an attempted insurrection. One of these
| is not like the other, and you're attempting to paint a false
| political logic behind how the two have been treated.
| unishark wrote:
| There were nationwide protests against the election result
| in 2016. They blocked the highways here in california.
| People also disrupted confirmation hearings back then.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Those protests mostly fizzled out with a week or two of
| the election results (even before all state results were
| certified).
|
| "Disrupted confirmation hearings" seems fairly different
| to me from "smashed windows and doors to gain entrance to
| the US Capitol while hundreds of people chanted "Hang
| Mike Pence!".
| unishark wrote:
| Different in some ways, of course, same in others.
| Ultimately I'm just seeing the same news with one side
| one-upping the other. They weren't even the first armed
| group to try and defy the government in the last year,
| though perhaps the most ambitious.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| In what ways are these the same?
| [deleted]
| jjcon wrote:
| I do think there are stark differences between 2020 and the
| 2016 elections BUT I still agree with everything you said.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > From what I recall the 2016 election was frequently
| attributed to some vague accusation of hacking from Russia
| but the same standard was not applied at the time, nor is it
| applied today. The people espousing this view were eventually
| proven inconclusive in all the different inquiries into the
| matter, and they were far more influential than a man who
| sells pillows.
|
| Your recollection seems at odds with reality. There has been
| a Senate inquiry with conclusions at odd with your
| recollections. The Mueller report came to conclusions at odd
| with your recollections. A reminder: that report, while not
| indicting the president or his team in anything in
| particular, found what it considered incontrovertible
| evidence of Russian interference designed to favor the
| election of Trump. The Senate report came to the same
| conclusions, even more strongly stated.
|
| As for your claim that the people espousing this view being
| "far more influential than a man who sells pillows", I think
| you'd need to establish a metric for "influential", since it
| is far from clear precisely what you mean.
|
| Furthermore, the sense that some people had regarding Russian
| interference in the 2016 elections never resulted in violence
| or death (certainly not directly). Nobody claimed that the
| election had been "stolen" (that's a direct quote from a
| large number of people regarding the 2020 elections). There
| was just a sense of unease and disquiet that the election may
| not have been fair _but the result was accepted anyway_.
| fareesh wrote:
| I was referring to the fact that none of those findings
| concluded that the outcome of the 2016 election was
| affected. That is the standard that's being applied for
| 2020 so I was applying the same standard.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The standard for 2020 is whether the alleged fraud
| actually took place at all. There is no court-worthy
| evidence that it did. Some would say there is no evidence
| at all.
|
| The standard for 2016 is therefore whether or not Russian
| interference occured, which two high level US government
| reports have confirmed took place.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I'm shocked (/s) that Silicon Valley's brand of libertarianism
| led to five companies dominating everything and then pulling up
| the ladder behind them by abandoning open standards in favor or
| proprietary silos.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > I'm shocked (/s) that Silicon Valley's brand of
| libertarianism led to five companies dominating everything
| and then pulling up the ladder behind them by abandoning open
| standards in favor or proprietary silos.
|
| That's kind of to be expected, since that's what
| libertarianism is about: empowering those with property in
| proportion to their property, and disempowering everyone else
| in proportion to their lack of it. Of course, it's not
| usually stated that way (usually the focus is on rights and
| liberties for private property holders and ripping on
| competing institutional forms), but that's what it is.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Expect to be down voted for speaking such heresy on HN.
| dalu wrote:
| Yup. Ivory tower circle jerk HN.
| [deleted]
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It's the sarcasm, not the heresy.
| unishark wrote:
| > 10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good
| communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to
| protect free speech".
|
| > Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see
| mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized
| speech control.
|
| ...In other words people are completely taking all the amazing
| things we have today for granted.
| mcguire wrote:
| Or perhaps realizing that those amazing things really aren't
| all that wonderful.
|
| Very few things are an unalloyed good.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Basically, we've learned that the current laws against threats,
| defamation of character, slander, fraud, false advertising,
| etc. fail catastrophically at handling those crimes/torts when
| they occur in large decentralized online communities.
|
| Governments have no idea how to tackle the problems, so it's
| either private corporations that directly host these
| communities do it or _nobody_ does. And that means going more
| years with a growing population that is getting radicalized by
| the above false information.
| HotVector wrote:
| If you look at it that way, then what Facebook was advocating
| for starts to look noble. They wanted ultimate transparency so
| that if anyone said anything stupid, it would get instantly
| knocked down, preventing the spread of misinformation, but
| obviously they failed really badly.
| wussboy wrote:
| I don't think they failed at all. They also realized that
| this "stupid" conversation was very profitable, and the more
| they pushed it to other people, the more money they made.
|
| If there is a failing, it is that Facebook is still claiming
| the moral high ground while they have ground our public
| discourse in to the manure.
| majormajor wrote:
| > 10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good
| communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to
| protect free speech".
|
| But these places almost all had "speech control". The
| exceptions were (in)famous.
|
| It was decentralized, which has a lot of benefits compared to
| having fewer, huge platforms, but the control existed and was
| essential.
|
| The "don't let platforms moderate anything but illegal content"
| argument is extremely disingenous. That's not how you get back
| to the "good old days" - or how you keep current smaller places
| like HN alive.
|
| If there are problems created specifically by the big platforms
| being too big, _target their size specifically_. Regulating
| advertising and privacy and data tracking might be one way to
| start, reduce the incentive and rewards for being huge; but I
| think more likely, you 'd want specific taxes, fees, or
| actions, based on userbase size.
| jrumbut wrote:
| I look at it this way: 10-15 years ago many of us were
| complaining the web was being turned into TV.
|
| I think that was basically right, and now social media is
| rediscovering the other things that made TV work, which is that
| you can't just continually show the most upsetting/titillating
| media 24/7.
|
| And with the benefit of hindsight, I don't believe
| Twitter/Facebook have the obligation to be the venue where we
| exercise our freedom of speech. They tried and it turned out
| they were very bad at it.
|
| It's time to move on and use those services for keeping in
| touch with old classmates or whatever they are good at and
| develop platforms that are good for holding serious
| conversations.
| naravara wrote:
| > It's time to move on and use those services for keeping in
| touch with old classmates or whatever they are good at and
| develop platforms that are good for holding serious
| conversations.
|
| The challenge is, there's no money in that. The money is in
| serving ads, which depends on serving up
| upsetting/titillating media 24/7.
|
| Paywalls can't work because the barrier to entry keeps you
| from getting a sufficient network effect. You can have a
| small community that way, but you can't do a global
| "connecting everyone" thing. Such services will simply be
| outcompeted by the Facebook model.
|
| I think the headlining article's point on open protocols
| might be the only way to square that circle and I'm not even
| very optimistic about that working. I think the real
| disjunction happens when we merge news with a general social
| feed of every random person's opinion. If you stream your
| facts and porthole into the broader world through the same
| framework that you stream advertizing and deranged soapbox
| rants, then you're conceptually putting all those things in
| the same box and blurring the lines between them. News
| articles present themselves more like ads (e.g.". . .and you
| won't believe what happens next"). Conversations start to
| resemble ads too, with people throwing out provocative
| statements to get attention and likes instead of engaging in
| a more genuine/1to1 way.And the ads start to try looking like
| news or advice from a 'friend' (read: influencer) to slip
| past your "this is marketing BS" filter.
|
| The context collapse is what's unsustainable. In the olden
| days, when forums ruled the web, people got links and memes
| shared in forums, but the people sharing those things were
| getting them from other forums or they were finding them in
| blogs or pages via an RSS reader or just a daily roll of
| bookmarked sites they would go through. This maintained some
| cognitive difference between when you're seeing a blog
| written by an irascible and opinionated shock jock versus a
| piece in The NYTimes. Even if the person sharing had the
| point of an article go over their heads or ends up 'eating
| the onion' on something whatever harebrained aspect of it
| remains sequestered in whatever subforum they're in if it
| doesn't get fact checked there. The collapse makes the
| consumer stop being aware of the distinctions, and it cuts
| off the small-scale testbeds these things have to go through
| before they go truly viral. It also drives the producers to
| not care. So now the NYTimes hires irascible shock jocks as
| editorial columnists too because nothing matters anymore.
| jrumbut wrote:
| > You can have a small community that way, but you can't do
| a global "connecting everyone" thing.
|
| But they already have a giant global community. They now
| need to sustain it, that's a very different task and one
| better served by moderation. They are already being out-
| competed on how extreme a community can be by the various
| newcomers.
|
| They are the incumbent now, with the incumbent's
| advantages. What remains to be seen is if they will move to
| take on the incumbent's responsibilities (which they have
| done here and there, and seem to be doing more of) or if
| they'll shirk it (which they did for far too long). In the
| long term they will make more money in a world that isn't
| on fire.
| mfer wrote:
| Technology shapes conversations and changes in the way
| technology works has changed the way the conversations have
| happened.
|
| > 10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good
| communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to
| protect free speech".
|
| Look at how the conversations happened. They were in places
| like forums and forums were often around topics. I belonged to
| many forums on topics and the general conversation was around
| those (with some water cooler).
|
| This is worthy of protecting. Just this week I ended up in a
| forum on a topic because I was trying to figure out how to
| repair something and there was discussion around people on it.
| Very valuable.
|
| > Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see
| mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized
| speech control.
|
| These are general conversation channels with the exception of
| Reddit. They are also paired with targeted ads. They tend to be
| short form. In a forum I see all the things and navigate it. In
| Twitter/FB/etc I see what they put in front of me. They control
| the flow of information.
|
| The platforms the conversations are happening on are shaping
| the conversations themselves. This cannot be discounted.
| Steltek wrote:
| Going unremarked in this nostalgia is that those old forums
| were still moderated, sometimes heavily, and the #1 tool was
| the ban hammer. It was not a free speech love-in. Hell,
| Something Awful would automatically replace your post with
| "yams" if you merely hit a trigger word, if you weren't
| ejected outright.
| mfer wrote:
| Bringing up moderation is a good point. But, it isn't so
| simple.
|
| Moderation isn't something that's changed. Forums and
| modern social media both moderate. They do it to varying
| degrees.
|
| Social media moderation comes in multiple forms. First they
| will choose which posts people see in their feed. This is a
| form of moderation. It's easy to have topics and even
| people just not show up. What shows up is based around
| engagement and money.
|
| There is also moderation about content. People can be
| labeled or removed from visibility.
|
| Then there is banning where banning isn't on the topic but
| the whole system. And the systems are tied to other things
| (e.g., banning on FB impacts your Oculus ownership).
|
| Old school forums were based on topics and were different
| systems. They were moderated, if they were, for that
| system. The moderation was typically around content you
| posted. They didn't control the flow or order you saw it
| in. It was the content.
|
| When banning came up, it was just for that form. So, if
| someone is banned from a jeep owners forum they are just
| fine interacting in a forum on web design.
|
| I say this to note that the way the technology is developed
| has an impact on the way people act.
|
| For example, these days there are people who don't want to
| speak out on some topics because they are fearful they will
| be banned or negatively impacted globally.
|
| I'm not suggesting how the technology should be built. I'm
| trying to point out how the system design impacts the way
| people think and behave. Older systems were designed
| differently and had a different impact. It's worth noting
| these things.
| jabl wrote:
| And, one might add, unmoderated fora like Usenet were
| cesspools also back then.
|
| Of course, Usenet was mostly techies and there were no
| teams of data scientists optimizing for clicks.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This is an interesting point. But being banned from a small
| forum feels like disassociation. Being banned from a huge
| central platform--the de facto public square--feels a lot
| less like free speech.
|
| Maybe a better way of thinking about this is that "free
| speech" on the Internet is about decentralization of small
| communities even if many of those communities themselves
| skew authoritarian? If you are banned from a small private
| gathering, everyone's practical speech rights remain in-
| tact. You aren't banned from the larger system.
| z3t4 wrote:
| I think the problem is that most people use mobile phones,
| rather then computer workstations. In the 90's everyone had a
| proper PC workstation. But now people have touch screens
| instead. You wont type long blog posts or participate in
| lengthy forum discussions using a touch screen. If you would
| put a graph with PC sales vs pads and phones showing the last
| 30 years you would see where it shifted from
| creating/consuming to passive/consuming. There are still
| normal PC users, it's just that the number have now grown
| much, while the number of touch screen users has grown
| exponentially.
| mfer wrote:
| I've read that there are books composed in the form of text
| messages. People like the short style. The impact of this
| is that people who read that way end up with lower
| literacy. Full length books are hard for them to read.
|
| The shift in screen size is an interesting one. The
| technology influences the content and even the way we
| think. It's not a passive element.
| kebman wrote:
| I did think the InterPanetary File System was promising:
| https://ipfs.io/
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