It's all "Trump, Trump, Trump" and tolerates anti-white sentiment. Actual conversations are rare, it seems to mostly be impressionable young people trying to out-do each other in taking offence to things and being angry.
It seems you can't block subreddits like r/politics without making an account.
/r/cpp has some good stuff sometimes.
What would a reddit alternative bring? More of the same? No thanks.
Reddit's main fault is their willingness to participate in politically motivated banning. I'm talking about the fate of The_Donald. (There are also other examples.) Reddit first persecuted and then effectively banned The_Donald because, in my opinion, Reddit is run by people who hate president Trump.
It's important to understand that the hate is not something that will go away after Trump but it will be replaced by hate for the next guy. It's driven by political tribalism, not Trump.
As basically all social media platforms are doing the exactly same thing as Reddit, we are not in a good place. We really can't allow our political discourse and views to be dictated by a handful of group thinking denizens of Silicon Valley blinded by political tribalism.
This seems to presuppose that all presidents are equal in terms of the acts they perform that generate hate or upset in the supporters of their political opponents.
I don’t think that is true. Not all presidents have been, or need to be, culture warriors.
Indeed, it would appear that Americans are way more united on a number of huge issues now more than ever: COVID response, racial equality, economic recovery.
Just based on circumstance, I think whoever next holds the office of POTUS, regardless of party, stands to polarize people less than they have been in the past due to the fact that many, many people are in agreement about federal government priorities right now.
That seems, to me, relatively unprecedented in recent times.
Any platform that emphasises “free speech” will be full of fascists sooner or later
No, I don't want to have anything to do with a website controlled by an unusually foolish five year old.
I softened on it a little over the years since, but I think that was just the dearth of new things coming out that ran on it. Now I'm starting to think that was just a reflection of the fact that the obvious, low-hanging fruit was handled (write.as/Pixelfed/PeerTube/Mastodon) and the next round will take a while as people who got on later get ideas and develop them into something like, for example, Lemmy.
Maybe I’m old, but isn’t this what Usenet was / is?
Is there anyone out there who can answer this?
Welp, I just completely wrote off this site and I'm about as middle of the road as they come in America. What a short sighted and ignorant way to look at the world.
"I think we should eliminate all of (((those people)))." I didn't use the k-word, but everyone knows what the sentence means.
On the other hand, you can't post "tranny" or "bitch" but, bitch is contextual: it's definition is a female dog, but even in the context of "wow she's such a bitch" bitch is not a slur. "Tranny" is derogatory in the context when used against trans people, but it's also used quite often in mechanics to mean "transmission." There are so many different contexts in which these words aren't derogatory, and in some cases represent the power of people to reclaim what was previously a slur.
Banning certain words is incredibly short-sighted, and punishes everyone who uses the platform while not addressing the real issue: extreme right-wingers can still use it just fine, and have absolutely no problem coming up with new dog whistles in order to get around your elementary word filter.
If I don't want to see offensive slurs, I won't associate with people who use them. Let me decide what is a slur or not, and let me decide who to associate with.
I'm pretty sure the n-word is used a lot more by black people than by "right wingers"
Reddit has been a mostly free for all in terms of moderation, and it is explicitly set up to allow thought bubbles, which gives rise to communities that dox activists, that incite violence, that promote conspiracy theories, etc. I love Reddit’s good parts and really detest its bad parts. Problem is that you can only solve that with strong application of content guidelines, or by not even pretending to be a good place a la 4chan. There is no model as far as I’ve seen, not even an academic one, that allows for mostly moderation free or self-moderated content while also not prominently featuring at least one neo-Nazi group using it to communicate and coordinate.
A new reddit alternative should think what makes Reddit useful in the first place. A community drive social bookmarking. Today's Internet have large volume of info hidden behind paywalls and walled gardens, something like Thread Reader App could replace Reddit from ground zero.
> We have > 2200 connections to the server right now, its a DDOS. Rust seems to be handling it fine, but the nginx is having issues.
https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/35712
Sounds about right - I'm amused that whoever saw this thought it was a ddos though.
dessalines - if you're reading this - I expect looking at referrers would be a good way to (manually) diagnose real attacks vs people becoming interested in your site.
Good luck filtering for stuff like that. And even if you did, people would just come up with new version.
Re: The core problem... Why would having extreme right wingers use your site even be a problem? Presumably extreme left wingers are okay?
The developers are extreme left wingers, so yes, it's just a tribal thing, not a "I don't want to write software for extremists" thing.
I'm a gay person and if I call someone the f-word I would generally mean it as a slur / insult.
Bigotry / offensive words doesn't just lose meaning because you're a minority.
When I saw lemmy my first thought was that I wanted to host my own instance of this once federation works.
I'm already hosting mastodon and synapse instances for the community. I believe strongly in hosting small federated community instances. This hobby costs me about 80USD/mon.
That sounds like it would immediately exclude a huge number of potential participants from doing something similar.
> No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
Code of conduct links to https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUC...
Their rules are a lot stricter than Reddit’s. I’m not sure how that in practice works with it being federated, but assuming their rules are enforceable and enforced it looks like they’re just not interested in that content.
This is not necessarily a bad thing for users - I often wish for a place similar to hacker news but with a wider range of topics - however, it almost certainly means they will never reach Reddit levels of popularity.
I do think that Reddit fills an important niche - a place where any topic is open for discussion, including porn and other forbidden topics like drugs. It's just unfortunate that the company currently ruling this niche is so morally bereft that they can't tell the difference between open discussion and fueling hate speech.
If we're to take reddit as an example moderation happens by individuals rather than all members of the community. And as such it is open to abuse whether it happens or not.
I thought about this for a long time and decided to write up what I would consider to be an acceptable framework for any given social media platform which would:
1. Help define the Overton window in a more organic fashion
2. Allow the platform to function within different jurisdictions.
3. Remove the overhead of central administration and opinion checking.
If it helps, I wrote it up here: https://gist.github.com/TheMightyLlama/bb77a05d3dde4da251142...
New platforms do solve the "oh no I've been deplatformed from Reddit" problem for... people who've been deplatformed from Reddit, so certainly it has real value for them. If Reddit swings the moderation hammer too hard, that could be certainly become a draw, but as it stands Reddit has actually banned very few communities, considering.
Getting people to use a new website in any significant numbers is really hard, and there aren't that many examples of communities that have managed it in the time the internet has been alive. It's impressive that any have managed to stay relevant for more than a couple years.
1. It needs to position itself as something other than not-reddit
2. There are a lot of issues Reddit really doesn't solve. Reddit encourages short, pithy, drive-by posts without much in the way of engagement at all. Compare old newsgroups, old forums, or even the average post here, compared to the average post (even in a niche sub) on reddit. Reddit:??Mysteryreplacement::Twitter:Blogs. I don't know what ??Mysteryreplacement will be, but there's certainly room for it.
If you find yourself collecting them too, ban them.
I think it is important however to have a strong emphasis on the separation of the servers from the protocol though - no one seems to care that Nazis could use email to have their own mailing lists.
If you make the mistake of discussing this on any other Canadian related sub where the /r/canada mods frequent, they'll ban you for life and say that you were "brigading."
Am I missing something?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/about/moderators/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/metacanada/about/moderators/
But hey, that's the beauty (and ugliness) of federation: I don't have to like it and I can just start my own server. On the flipside, it also means I need to be beholden to a considerable amount of social rules, some of them unwritten, if I want to federate with the majority of the servers out there. I know how it goes, I've seen it first-hand when it comes to ActivityPub instances. That's how you get cliques.
If those start creeping into your politics, memes, and video game subreddits, then yeah you’ve got a rough problem.
Which wasn't enough as I understand since those communities would en-mass attack other communities that they disagreed with.
See: 4chan. It wasn't always like it is now, but since /pol/ grew to be so big, now pretty much every board has a sizable or majority far-right contingent. It's even worse on Voat.
Quite a few people on reddit are frustrated by how opaque moderation is, but looking at the meta community of power users that seems to mod the bigger subs, I doubt the devs will ever copy this feature.
The fact that being banned from one sub doesn't usually get you banned from another sub is totally understandable, but combined with how easy it is to make a new account, in practice it's just never-ending whack-a-mole with shithead posters.
Always glad to see more eyeballs on the space, so I wish then the best. Here are a few differences I can see at the first glance:
- Aether is decentralised (as in torrent) this appears to be federated. That means Aether truly has no servers and every user is a peer, while federated means there are smaller ‘Reddits’ as servers that talk to each other.
- By proxy that means we can’t really have a web app unfortunately (working on it by the way of running a daemon on a raspberry pi) and they can - we need a native app running on your machine and seeding context to the network.
- By another proxy, this means Aether avoids the issue of having a ‘middle management’ in the form of the ownership of your home server that federated networks have. You are the home server, so no one can control what you see. We call this user sovereignty
- In Aether we have elections which elect mods based on popular vote and you control who is a mod, precisely because the ‘social compiler’ runs on your machine and allows you to compile it however you want. Two people with two different mod lists for the same community can see drastically different communities
- We have a mod audit log and have had it for a while - everyone’s mod actions are visible to everyone (this I think they also have)
- Lastly, we have made the decision to not monetise Aether itself and create a team communication app called Aether Pro, and monetise that. This creates a ‘Chinese wall’ between where we make our money and the P2P network, which means it’s a shield against drifting towards trying to make money from a social network. The code bases are separate but similar, so that also means work done on the Pro helps Aether as well. We have gotten some funding for the Pro, and we consider the P2P version a ‘marketing / goodwill expense’ in the context of that funding. That aligns us towards making sure Aether is long-term viable, well maintained and monetisation-free.
In contrast I think they’ve gotten money to work directly on this, which has both good and more hazardous sides. In summary, we opted for a long term structure that has less moral hazard (in my opinion, of course), in favour of a more stable app without a need for monetisation that has fewer, more stable releases.
For context, here's how a recent thread looks on my Aether client: https://i.imgur.com/45tXQEO.png
There's only one thing that can change my mind a little: if you guarantee email is not and will never be required to sign up or use a feature. Edit: if you think this is irrelevant, consider how both reddit (until recently) and HN didn't require email for signup, also the majority lurker population and importance of lurker-> user conversion. If email is your hill to die on, it will also be mine and I hope a majority of lurkers' hill to die on against you.
As a techie I support federated and decentralized systems but as a user, how the platorm is architected is irrelevant, my experience is all I care about. Also,how will it monetize? Ads? If so I will stay with reddit. Non-crypto payment? Yeah, crappy reddit is better.
It's easy to slide by with haphazard (or no) moderation when you're small. Discussion extremists (trolls, bigots, and the like) are less attracted to smaller platforms; they'd prefer bigger ones, if any would take them.
I'm curious what will happen with the central listing of communities if a particularly vile community gains popularity. If there's a community unapologetically dedicated to, say, neo-nazism, and they like to do things like praise Hitler or discuss ways they can kill racial minorities, do they still get listed? How will others feel about that?
now, can you start a federated instance with that kind of content? sure. but just like how none of the normal mastodon servers federate with Gab, no one would have to federate with the cesspool.
Lacking global moderation, eventually every one of those subreddits will end up in Lemmy. Also somethingawful/4chan/8chan style "asshole feedback loops".
Everyone at HN likes to claim they want free speech and hate moderation, but in fact moderation is the foundation of our discourse.
Everyone here who disagrees is just saying, "I don't want to join those communities, so they shouldn't even be allowed to exist."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/imzy-the-nice-reddit...
This has been tried and tried 1000 times. The problem is reddit is good enough for most people so an alternative will never take off until reddit starts being not good enough
Ultimately any platform big enough becomes cancerous unless it has sponsors who are willing to fund the platform without turning a profit, like HN is funded by ycombinator (though notice how over time there are more and more hiring advertisements for ycombinator companies).
The bigger a platform becomes, the more expensive it becomes to maintain; the people who were volunteers at first have to either monetize to be able to continue supporting the platform, or they have to sell the company to someone who can support it.
Once money is brought into the equation, a community starts to slowly deteriorate, as money slowly starts taking over all aspects of the platform, which is nothing more than human nature.
I guess use a people solution instead of a technical one.
Yeah, I'm out. That was a problem with the federated reddit-alike notabug.io too. It was just one giant javascript application, not html. And doing "pre-rendering" of the javascript on the host machine made the VPS costs too much to be tenable for people to federate.
Reddit already has competitors. It is just that they are cesspools as the only people who have a strong reason to leave reddit are those reddit has banned.
What is the difference between this and usenet
Although if anyone knows good servers (ISPs no longer seem to offer them) or even better a way to connect own server to Usenet, I'm interested.
Hope that it becomes moderately successful. If it becomes too successful, it will become victim of it's success like Reddit.
Congrats team! Looking forward to tracking this project's development.
If not for old.reddit.com, my time on Reddit would've gone way down :/
Edit: to add, while touching the buttons for the different sections, it seems sometimes my touches are not registering, requiring me to try again.
A good solution will be to not allow (at least at the first few years) to open a sub around politics.
I see a link "Create Community", this takes me to a form where I get to create a community. I spend time naming and describing this community, and then click the Submit button. At this point it decides to tell me that I need to use lowercase for the community name.
So I fix that and hit Submit again. At this point I'm told I have to create an account first. WTF, why didn't you tell me earlier? If I leave this page to create an account, will you preserve what I've filled into this form for when I get back? Why didn't you just add the necessary username/password fields to this form at the same time you showed me the error?
Anyway, so I click on the link that says Login/Signup and get a popup that says "Are you sure you want to leave?" Now I have to click again to remove this popup. Another wasted click and +1 to the "annoyed" meter. See above for how this could have been avoided by just adding the login/signup forms to the form I just filled out to reduce friction.
Anyway, so I create an account. And it turns out the site forgot everything I'd done before that. Why ask me questions (make me fill out a "Create community" form) if you're going to immediately forget all my answers?
Absolutely no respect for the users time. Why would you do that when your very existence depends on attracting more users?
I guess it's a young project, so lots can be improved. I think the problems you mention are bad but they sound fixable.
I'd think about contributing or at least start by running my own instance and tweaking the interface to my liking. I'll also need to check if Inferno is worth learning.
If you want to take a look at something different you can try my side project https://taaalk.co. It's a platform for interviews.
(Sorry for the shameless plug, I just worked hard on my UX and would be interested to have it judged!)
The public timeline of all instances is by default public, without authentication. So technically you could scrape them.
Also I must advocate relaying. ActivityPub relays are very simple servers that receive all posts from any subscribed instance. Not just mastodon either, multiple AP services supported.
And then relays those posts to all subscribed instances.
Relaying does wonders for the public timeline of a small localized instance.
The media storage is dirt cheap but it grows with the instance and users. One major issue some instance admins have is a lot of users uploading a lot of data.
My instance is very small and also blocked registrations to EU.
I expect to have enough capacity left over in my existing cluster to also host lemmy.
A given community can pool money on a server of their own, and federate it with other communities' servers if they want.
I remember people doing it with TeamSpeak, Minecraft, Counter-strike, etc. server, its the same !
The great thing about federation is that you don't have to host an entire community; just a slice of it.
These days a web based NNTP client could offer an equivalent if not superior experience.
The main UI itself, again very width restricted, but also has strange paddings [1] which limit severely the area for the title (which is the most important UI element). Doesn't really make sense to me. The vertical centering is a bit of a mess, and the size of icons is also either way too big or way too small [2].
[0] https://i.imgur.com/gZEWEdJ.png
[1] https://i.imgur.com/nayP548.png
[2] https://i.imgur.com/XZPToxy.png
EDIT: Huh, I hadn't used new reddit in a long time, I actually took a look now and it seems like it has improved significantly. I actually don't hate it as much, it looks much closer to old reddit now, with full width content and much less padding [3]
The UI itself isn't horrible, it's the UX. It's incredibly bulky and slow, and some user links have been hidden while others completely removed.
For extremely wide screens it obviously looks awkward, but the idea seems sound in principle.
IIRC, the reason you'd want to restrict width of content is that it's hard for your eyes to track back all the way left, to the start of the content, when you need to go down a line. But the header is just a single line, so it doesn't have this problem.
In the case of very wide screens they should probably restrict the header width too, just not quite as much.
Never would have happened if someone hadn't made a post like this, so thanks!
edit: Aaaand instant regret, wow. Are you guys seeing this "Top Broadcast Right Now" shit? The best part for me is not just the ~1000px high random garbage video that takes up my whole screen, but before the video itself loads I actually get a ~1000px "white noise" animation, except it isn't just white but brightly colored, too.
I had a brief urge to heat up my soldering iron and stick it in my eye.
UX design used to be about good usability. Now it's all about shoving the latest hipster trends from Dribbble and Behance that look all "Shiny" and gives the CxOs orgasms.
One more odd thing that I found - maybe this is anecdotal - Developers who design interfaces based on OTS frameworks (Eg. Bootstrap) have a much better sense of UX than dedicated UX designers.
Offering a second opinion; they barely know how to display text without using JavaScript. There is a lot of room for technical improvement.
I agree. I find this interface extremely readable (It clearly displays "JavaScript is required for this page") and simple to use; I close it and move on to something that actually works. Very minimal and intuitive. I approve.
The role of mods is to delete off topic submissions and remove illegal content. Nothing more.
Disclaimer: I made this
Many mods of popular subreddits abuse their power and enforce their world views on redditors. This is only possible because reddit admins don't care. That's why there is so much drama now and again when mods will wholesale-ban or delete legitimate content that doesn't break the rules and they just won't respond to questions. Or even worse - they respond by taunting the redditors who would like to know the reason behind the decision.
I was banned from a large sub for linking to statistics on official government website to help support my argument. This happens all the time on reddit.
And it's not like it's only my experience. Ask anyone on reddit what they think of mods and you'll hear the same story.
This right here is the main thing that will never let any fully-decentralized system become mainstream. Two problems:
- Most people do want "middle-management". They don't want to deal with security risks, technical issues, understanding how the protocol works just to be able to share memes and score points with their social peers. All they want is to open their browser, see what their friends/peers are posting and be done with it.
- This trade-off between federated systems/giving up control does not exist. A federated system can degenerate into a fully-distributed graph. Those that want to keep full control over their system can easily do with a federated system: they just run their own instances.
Decentralized systems for social networks fail the Zawinski test and do not provide one single use-case that can not be done with a federated alternative. I fail to see any benefit of pushing it except for buzzword investors.
Is running your own instance hard? Then at best you’ll inevitably have some users who lack the know-how or time to set up their own instance. At worst, federated systems often link identity to home instance, so you can’t switch to a new instance without giving up your profile. Or they may even require other instances to have a human agree to federate with you, which is a big ask for a one-person instance.
Or is running your own instance easy? So easy that anyone can do it? Then there should be no disadvantage in bundle that into the client app so that everyone does do it. But now you have a decentralized system.
In a fully decentralized network you can meet new people and moderate your own view of the world without putting any burden on others to adapt to what you want. Moderation can be done with a system like this: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...
Is Electron a hard dependency or is there a core lib that can be wrapped by the GUI framework of choice? And several hours of initial setup is pretty scary . Maybe providing a dev docker, snap or flatpak could get devs up and running much faster than that.
Other than that, I love the idea of a decentralized forum. If there are specs I'll have a look at them to see how the intricacies of operating something like is were solved.
We use Electron exclusively for GUI. The real app is a Go binary with a GRPC API. It’s all fully isolated, so if you don’t want to touch any Electron, you don’t have to. Use the API to build a CLI app, for example.
To be more specific, we have two Go binaries that we ship, one is the aether-backend that talks to the network, the other is the aether-frontend that compiles the content coming from the network into a social graph. Both are properly isolated and talk to each other only over declared GRPC APIs. I’ve tried very hard to keep it hackable that way.
Would this work with Aether?
- Default mods, which are either the creator of the community or those that are assigned by that person
- Elected mods, mods which are chosen by the community. Election goes both ways, you can both be elected or impeached. For example, a default mod can be impeached by the election system, and that would render that mod a non-mod for you
- Mods you've personally chosen. Choosing someone to be a mod for you is your vote in the election.
So the system isn't 'enforcing' mods you haven't chosen onto you as a result of the elections. Elections only make the decision only if you haven't made a decision for that mod in either way — if you make a decision that is ironclad (for you, in your personal, local view), since nothing can override your personal vote for or against somebody. The more you vote in elections, the more you shape your own view of the universe.
The article is long, but what I can see there that is not implemented in Aether is the transitive property of trust, instead of having a vote which is binary, he seems to be advocating for a 0 to 100 trust, and the idea that trust of the people you trust means something to you. (Let me know if I got this wrong).
This is great in theory — and this was actually considered for implementation at one point. The issue isn't that it doesn't make sense but it is quite literally impossible to implement, since it makes it so that almost every trust decision made by someone on the network at some point in time affects almost all other entities, which leaves you with an almost entirely 'dirty' graph that you have to traverse in entirety and recompile.
This can be done on a centralised service since there is one graph to compile and everyone submits to it. However, in Aether, what we try to do is that we try to keep the graph compilation part on the user end, both because it's a P2P network, and also because custom graphs compiled on the client end is what allows the votes to be able to modify the graph structure itself. That sort of gradual outflow of trust across a social graph making decisions on what to show or not show for every single piece of content is an intense amount of computation to do for every new modification to the trust gradient.
> You are the home server, so no one can control what you see. We call this user sovereignty
I’m wondering what I’d have to do to just bare minimum make sure no illegal content gets onto any hardware that I own. Just to use the obvious extreme example, I don’t want to see any illegal pornography, which in addition to not wanting to see I’d have to report to authorities, which I’d presumably have to explain the presence of, which I’m guessing worst case involves them confiscating my devices for some time. There’s a practical benefit to me in having some middle manager taking responsibility for making sure that never gets to my network.
However, this is actually the most common feature request we have right now, an ability to block certain communities from transmitting. We are converting the SFW list to a 'filter lists' feature, much like adblock filter lists. These lists can be whitelists or blacklists, and they will be able to control not just visibility, but also the receiving and transmittance of content as well.
So the expected behaviour is that if a community is in your blacklist, your computer will never fetch that content from that community by checking against its fingerprint. That should be helpful to solve this issue. We'll be providing a default whitelist as well.
Are you familiar with https://notabug.io/ ? IIRC this is decentralized.
I do think both decentralized and federated platforms can coexist just fine. They serve slightly different needs and both provide alternatives to the centralized platforms that pervade the Internet these days.
> Two people with two different mod lists for the same community can see drastically different communities
Reminds me of the 'sharding' idea in World of Warcraft. I'm really curious if you'll end up with issues of 'social dissonance' where your perception of a community differs drastically from someone else's because you literally see different content, and if that affects how people engage with the community.
Also, it seems like with user sovereignty and decentralization, that there will be various objectionable or even vile communities is inevitable, right? Is there a plan for how to deal with that, should Aether ever become popular enough to get more mainstream news attention? I imagine responding to tech blogs with, "yes, there are white supremacist sub-communities, but you don't have to see them if you don't want to" won't come across as a very satisfying answer from their perspective.
It's always irked me that most people seem to think that people with different politics to them shouldn't be allowed to communicate.
I'm not trying to play the devils advocate here, just genuinely curious: Why do you (or anyone else) have such a strong opinion on not using emails for signing up? Usually, when a service requires me to enter an email, I have no issue with using a service like 10minutemail and never checking that email account again.
Now, if I can give a limited use address that cant be tied to me as an individual,expires after a period of time and messages are E2EE encrypted with no metadata leakage I don't mind that.
I have spent almost an entire day trying to sign up to one service withour having to give up my phone number,real IP,creditcard or real email address to anyone as a challenge. I have tried countless anonymous email providers and sms code receiving services. I failed. Email abd phone number collection is a modern tech evil for me.
You may not care about these issues, and you might have the correct opinions for now which don't irritate the tech overlords. But lots of people have learned the hard way that providing an email address is, at the very best, going to result in spam. At the worst? You could be physically assaulted, lose your job to an outrage mob...
As an organizer, you don't want to host it yourself, but you'd also prefer not to depend on a single provider. Federation makes that possible.
I have been working on hosted Mastodon/XMPP/Matrix and I would definitely consider adding Lemmy to my list of supported services. If I can get authentication via LDAP for it, even better and quicker.
The one thing stopping me from a bigger announcement is that I am yet to finish my crypto payment integration. If you are indeed interesting in something like this, can I reach out to you once it's ready?
Why is this so important? You can just use any temp email service to sign up and never deal with it again.
Twitch and Discord did well there for instance. Started out as gaming focused, then became more mainstream.
By doing this, you bring in non extremists early on, and tilt the audience pecentages in such a way that most regulars aren't such extremists.
The problem is most 'alternative' platforms market themselves as 'Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube except with free speech and no rules' rather than 'an art/gaming/music/sports themed alternative to Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube with free speech'.
Former means you draw in the outcasts and extremists, latter means you draw in another audience that can then be made more mainstream by opening up support for more and more fields of interest.
I would love to switch to Reddit from 2008.
Their developer code of conduct also looks good in that regard
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUC...
Seeing how the flagship instance is run by people who are socially conscious I don't see this being a problem. Pretty much same thing happened with Mastodon Social, and with millions of users the community is still great. It's far friendlier and more civilized than Twitter.
Is it because:
- People on the far-right are magnitudes more vocal and active online than those on the left? That they spend a magnitude more time posting and voting on the internet?
- Or when people are anonymous, they reveal their "true selves" more which exhibits more far-right (selfish, tribal, conservative) values.
- Or we are underestimating how many people are on the far right, because they are constantly censored so in our minds we think they are the minority but maybe they're about half of the online population?
I'm just trying to figure out why it takes herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable. And if so, then then it seems like any social forum is going to require heavy censorship/moderation to even be tolerable to the general public.
Your own scenarios exhibit this, for example:
- You ask if the far-right are magnitudes more vocal, ignoring the comparison to the extremely vocal far-left which is heard regularly on mainstream social media
- You conflate "conservative" with "selfish", presumably ignoring the selfishness of the extremes at both sides.
Frankly, I think the left (and by extension, most social media sites) are WAY more comfortable with censorship, banning, hiding, etc., especially of ideas that don't align with the left. (Typically characterized as "evil".)
The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.
So when you have a whole segment of the political spectrum treated as evil and silenced, they tend to gravitate to fora that enable speech, even if unpleasant speech. The far-right might be most noticable on those platforms, but if you look carefully, you'll see a whole gradient of right-ness.
And even some lefties!
These large segments of the population will demand moderation from platforms they use to protect them from targeted harassment. It's these sorts of platforms that have the potential to truly become massive.
Platforms that are strongly moderated from day one (e.g. don't allow targeted harassment of minorities) don't need a "herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable." A good example is the Reddit alternative raddle.me or even hacker news.
The far left has people who are also very angry, but they're generally not as bigoted. The demographic they're most angry at is rich people, which is punching up instead of down at least.
And most of the rhetoric there simply isn't as vile. It's stuff like, "take rich people's assets so we can redistribute it equally". I may not agree with seizing wealthy people's stuff, but that's nowhere near as offensive as "kick out all the gay/non-white people".
So if 1% of the population are far-right extremists, but most normal platforms ban or restrict them, any new platform with poor regulation will tend to fill with them.
I do think that the very extreme (and thus bannable) far right _are_ probably more common than ditto on the far left; you just don't get that many Stalinists, anywhere. But the normal left (and normal right) aren't generally nasty enough to get banned everywhere, so most of the internet's displaced population of commenters is far right.
I think there is an aspect of option 1, too, though. In Ireland a while back we had a referendum on allowing same-sex marriage, which passed by 62%, and another one, on legalising abortion (until then only legal in very limited circumstances), a few years later, which passed by 66%. Now, if you'd gone based on web polls and opinions being expressed in the comments on mainstream sites, you'd have assumed that both would fail by a landslide; it was really kind of incredible. Comments on news sites etc were grossly unrepresentative of the actual public mood; the right really does seem to be a lot noisier.
or duplicate accounts to give the illusion of larger numbers.
For example there are a lot of Reddit accounts created with in the 3 months or so very active on the same post pushing the same agenda.
In a forum with ten reasonable conversation threads and one highly controversial one, attention is likely to move towards the controversial topic.
The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online and can witness and partake in minor and major conversations alike.
It also doesn't help that engagement (regardless of reason for engagement and any human stress created as a result; they're harder for software and metrics to capture) tends to be seen as something to optimize for, both within companies themselves and also by their investors.
Controversial conversations are sometimes necessary. People who repeatedly raise controversial topics to gain notoriety or attention are generally not - although their behaviour may be a sign that they need help in other ways.
- people who disagree with the restrictions of other places on principle and want a freer alternative
- people who can't say what they want to anywhere else, because it's generally disliked
and most people probably do not want to read stuff from the second group.
This did not used to be the case. It's a relatively extremely recent phenomenon, that I would say only really coalesced around 2014-2015.
It used to be that the wild west of the internet was, to the extent that it reinforced anything at all, a boon to liberal and left wing politics and organizing. And a lot of the cultural aspects weren't co-opted the way they currently are. Gamer culture was surely unconsciously sexist, misogynist, but not to the extent that it is now where it's a full-on reactionary identity. Internet atheists didn't used to be misogynist right-wing trolls, but they are now.
Trolling was just trolling, it wasn't organized into mobs or propaganda in the sophisticated way it is now. Anonymity and revealing one's 'true self' didn't channel it into a cultural current of toxicity that is now established and ready to welcome those impulse and stoke them and use them to nudge a person into a right wing trolling infrastructure.
I think it's been weaponized by state actors and by bad actors who figured out how to use the tools, to turn everything into a nuclear wasteland. I don't believe it inherently disposes anyone toward any particular set of politics necessarily, and it didn't used to be the case that it got channeled in this way.
The problem is not so subjectively limited as to be a right-wing problem. Communities, unless extremely well policed, tend to become gravities of like mindedness when there is a visible vote system. This seems to occur because vote counts, whether positive or negative, are viewed as a form of credibility and because people are generally hostile to disruption and originality.
When you step back from a subjective slant the phenomenon of group think has been well studied.
Now the virtually everybody out there already supports gay marriage and legal weed, and those are a baseline for everything left of center and basically mainstream thought now. Everybody right of that gets pushed out of communities, so whenever some new community pops up, you get a whole spectrum of right of center as well as sovereign citizen types again looking to settle down and establish a community like left of center people did with places like reddit all those years ago. One bad thing for these new communities is that the internet is far more accessible now, and the more extreme members see their chance to finally talk, and those with extreme opinions like talking a lot.
Consider two possible statements:
1. Hitler wasn't that bad.
2. Stalin wasn't that bad.
I think, for most people, the first provokes a much more extreme reaction. Both were objectively terrible human beings, but defending Hitler is seen as far more extreme than defending Stalin.
This has two effects:
Firstly, far-right people are continually kicked out of communities. Far-left people are not. So any new unmoderated community is going to attract these "refugees"
Secondly, nobody notices or cares when a community goes far-left. But its far more noticeable when a community goes far-right.
There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of, say, US citizens. (And everyone who wants to keep their job pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)
Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!
There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of your average person. (And everyone who wants to keep their jobs pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)
Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!
(Witch metaphor courtesy of Slatestarcodex, may it rest in peace.)
Far-right definitely stand their ground, and can easily go unfazed by logical arguments.
Dicks fuck pussies. We need assholes to shit on the dicks.
It's not hard to see why Reddit would ban any of these, but at some point there may be a critical mass of too-controversial-for-Reddit content that isn't just interesting to the Voat crowd. Is that point now? I'll have to wait and see how Lemmy turns out.
The other theoretical advantage of a federated service is that smaller instances are less expensive to run than one big centralized service. There are a lot of people who could afford to run a service on a $10/month VPS as a hobby but who couldn't afford to run anything at actual Reddit scale without corresponding revenue. That's important considering that Reddit leavers are more likely to be posting not-safe-for-brand content even if it's not specifically hateful content.
[1] Not a sub I ever visited, but by most accounts surprisingly non-toxic as a community, considering the subject matter.
https://medium.com/@pylorns/the-reddit-spring-the-great-liba...
Also you have a big "create community" button at the top. Surely that doesn't spin a completely new instance of the application every time? And if not, how can we tell which instance a community belongs to?
Honestly I don't really understand the need for something like that to be federated. In the olden days you had a bunch of forums/BBS/IRC network/Whatever that served various niches but didn't communicate with each other.
For instance, what would we gain if we decided to turn HN into a Lemmy federated service?
If anything it seems like in the long run it would be a disservice, as very large communities with lower standards would end up spilling and wrecking niches where the community is more tightly knit and post higher quality content.
This fediverse thing makes some sense for IM and similar applications where you want to be able to connect easily with anybody. For forums however, it feels rather pointless to me.
How is that different from how Reddit/Voat currently are?
He tried to get people to use it for a while, but since it was just a less-functional and empty Reddit, nobody was very interested. Eventually some of the users/subreddits banned from Reddit started using it since they had been kicked off real Reddit, and the developer ended up welcoming them while justifying it as "free speech". I think he mostly just seemed happy that some people actually wanted to use his site.
It's all been downhill from there, and the original creator even abandoned the site a few years ago and handed it over to someone else.
Take for instance Ruqqus, another site created as a free speech reddit alternative. It consistently has horrifying content on the front page regularly; viciously racist content, anti-Semitic memes, unironic pro-Nazism/pro-genocide discussion posts, and generally terrible content. This is likely because it is exactly this content that is being "censored" from Reddit, not these harmless free speech advocates who are silenced by a big company.
Can anyone actually tell me what valuable discussion is being censored on Twitter, Reddit, etc? Banning this type of content is mandatory if you want a platform that is safe and available for trans people, Jews, gay people, women, etc.
People shouldn't have to tolerate people @ing them with slurs, be exposed to "reasoned" arguments for their extermination, or memes dehumanizing them for the sake of "free speech."
If a mod removes, hides, or takes other mod action on a comment or post, the browser extension and federated storage system still allows me to see and interact with that content and it’s writer (“showdead” globally). You could subscribe to “mod actions” (which is just curation) by mod, which would govern your experience of the content.
I appreciate the mod work here, for example, but I also want to be able to bypass that “filter opinion” so I can still interact with folks and content out of band if I so choose (one person’s “flame war” is another person’s vigorous debate).
Also, Reddit has more moderation than Reddit. Subreddits exist for a reason.
That's the biggest limit of moderated forums, they only reflect the opinion of the most active groups who can steer the discussion helped by moderators who benefit from rewarding the largest groups instead of the best comments
If moderation was visible and moderators were forced to leave a note about why the moderation took place it would be a real discussion platform
HN is not
Slashdot is a lot better than many others in this regards, but it's not popular anymore and you can't make money on it, while a lot of people leave by posting shit on Reddit
Worse is better always wins
Which "Fediverse"? As I understand the concept, it applies to social networks in general. But it appears that you are referring to one specific network which contains the Gab server in it.
It has a number of things going for it. First, it's on activitypub, and will have the same kind of granular federating controls as mastodon, at least at the instance level.
And as another commenter mentioned about initial culture, the politics/cultural tilt of the devs are unapologetically anti-righ wing troll, which is a great start, and a lot of the stuff people post about is linux/open source/libre/fediverse stuff, which is a focused interest that doesn't fall back to the lowest common denominator of trolling.
I think it's off to a good start, it's starting with a good culture that's explicitly conscious of the trolling problem, and it shares a lot of the spirit and mission of the other fediverse projects which are driven by conscious concern in mitigating these issues.
In comparison, a large source of Fediverse users (Mastodon etc) are people that leave Twitter because they think it isn't moderated well enough.
However, it’s too far to the left and focused on solidarity to take all of SA’s threads and even forums.
You have such a mix over there, everything from tech to politics, guns, drugs... a lot like reddit.
It does?
> B+R is a community-owned space that seeks to foster solidarity between people from all backgrounds that share a common character. We reject policies of social dominance, Neo-liberalism, patriarchy, the gender binary, white supremacy, and other social ills espoused by capitalism. We support worker/union/trans rights, empowering those without a voice, and each other.
> Do not advocate for obvious bad shit like landlords/cops/capitalism/etc. This is a leftist space.
Sounds like they're quite explicit about what things they're non-open/inviting about.
Their attitude sounds like D&D/C-SPAM turned up to 11. Even as a Bernie-loving social democrat, I'd have to say 'pass'.
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/
I think the right answer is federation. Having a lot of instances moderated by different people gives people a lot more freedom of choice.
Sometimes the lack of exposure to real-world problems creates people that are completely disconnected from reality.
Like as in "used by right-wing people who got kicked out of Reddit"? Probably by heavy moderation, the Lemmy developers are left to far-left as far as I can see form a glance.
Like as in "used to create an echo chamber for ideologically aligned people to talk to each other"? That may well be the goal.
I wonder if that's even the case, or if the range of allowed opinions is rather set by advertisers and investors. If Reddit had a very large, very lucrative Pro-Life community that essentially "kept the lights on" by providing high ad revenue, I doubt that they wouldn't cater to that community's wishes. They lean strongly to the left, because their audience does, and they want their audience to be happy so they stay and watch ads on their site.
Is a hatepost sub the best of a world?
>Everyone here who disagrees is just saying, "I don't want to join those communities, so they shouldn't even be allowed to exist."
There is a huge leap between "I don't want to be a part of a hate platform" and "hate platforms shouldn't be allowed to exist."
Look, if a super laissez faire social media platform attracts a huge amount of neo-nazis then I have no interest in spending time on it's alternative vanilla areas. I don't owe anything to websites or decentralized torrent-like systems that harbor these groups. They can decide to win me over or not. My eyeballs on their vanilla shit provides legitimacy to their horrifying shit. That is very different than saying they shouldn't be allowed to exist.
This isn't a new trend of course, but I personally find it sad that the very people who claim to champion freedom and civil liberties are now actively trying to destroy them.
I think the diversity of people and their opinions in the world are scary. In the past, you could ignore or were unaware of just how different other people seemed. Now, this diversity is in the forefront, and people are scared shitless.
Ultimately, I believe that being exposed to people that disagree with you existentially shakes you and exposes you to the most scary thing imaginable: that nothing is actually true and that nothing matters. After all, if some guy believes everything I don't believe and vice versa, then maybe what I believe is arbitrary, made-up, and confabulated. And if that is the case, maybe none of us know anything at all. Or, as Heidegger would put it, this contradiction of beliefs removes us from being-in-the-world, and replaces it with being-towards-death.
If you created a platform, then later found out that ISIS was using it to coordinate attacks on hospitals around the world, how would you react?
As for CoC: I believe it's more of a signalling act than a reaction to past issues. Just like the KKK would add "no race mixing" to the rules, a left wing open source project needs to signal to their in group, and their main way of doing that is to say "no harassment based on [some criteria]".
Logged out though, yeah, I manually replace "www" with "old" whenever I open a link...
Reddit is unavoidable these days since everyone's moved there and there's a lot of good content :/
Everybody use to run a PhpBB or alternative for their own community. I remember being part of multiple of them in the early 2010. A lot of them got replaced by subreddit or facebook page, and this is what the fediverse can replace. Not the whole of reddit or Facebook, but if you want a place for you and your friends to organize your dnd party, run your minecraft server, talk about passion X or Y, the fediverse can do that :) .
Open Source doesn't need 'masses' in order to 'be successful. A lot of people make the mistake of applying generic economics to Open Source and related communities.
A federated mastodon or Lemmy instance is successful the moment one or more people use and enjoy it, nothing more. It does not need to have huge audiences to advertise to. It does not need to have Big Data to mine and sell. It doesn't need to pay employees, offices and bonuses. All it needs is one person enjoying it. Or two people having a meaningful interaction, to be successful .
Also, on mobile it gets rid of this "switch to the native app" nag!
Yes, and those users will use managed services, something that the "principled" decentralized community (not your keys, not your money/not your identity/etc) is completely against and invariably leads to re-centralization of the system around market players that go to serve this market. Case in point: Github, Coinbase, MtGox, Signal, any of the big cloud providers...
> At worst, federated systems often link identity to home instance
Why? I can have a domain name and move email providers freely. Same for XMPP, Matrix, websites in general, etc. The identity part of the system can be separate from the service provider.
If anything, this idea is more of an argument against decentralized services. It is an all-or-nothing approach: do you want to run this service with your identity? Great, then you need to be responsible in managing the service and secure your identity.
> Or is running your own instance easy? So easy that anyone can do it?
There is no such thing. Nevermind the case for those simply can not control the hardware where they run their systems, UI/UX of decentralized systems is always an afterthought. Even something as "easy" as bittorrent requires so much of a learning curve that most people simply do not want to be bothered to learn.
Besides, it's not just "running". It's keeping it up. Paying for operational costs. Decentralized systems by definition need to be able to do everything by themselves. There is no way to achieve any kind of economies of scale.
Worst of all: it's not having any one to blame/be responsible for things when it breaks. Oh, you got scammed into downloading a keylogger: fuck you, you lost all of your keys. Oh, you "just" bought something with Bitcoin from a site that seemed legit, but they delivered a counterfeit product? "Consider it an lesson in how to look for things online"
What I am trying to say is that decentralization vs centralization should be considered as a continuous spectrum of choices and trade-offs that need to be made by users. Federated systems allow basically everyone to be whatever is best for them on this spectrum, while this "decentralize all the things!" and treating it as binary choice does little to non-technical users and basically guarantees they will be confined in the walled gardens.
Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it, given that he retracted it on the grounds that too many people subverted the idea to justify all of bad practices related to social software.
Anyway, archive is your friend: https://web.archive.org/web/20050217051819/https://www.jwz.o...
0. https://www.npmjs.com/package/@grpc/grpc-js 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...
That's a great architecture! I look forward to hacking on it when I have the time!
Can I contact you in a few days outside of here? If so, how? Keybase?
Depends on how relevant you consider a social "scientist" having build a career on creating a bogeyman on mixing up nationalism, extreme right and white supremacy. A former columnist at "Huffington Post", she is now writing a book on "Undoing White Womanhood". Calls herself a "change agent" on her own webiste.
Sounds rather like "anti-White" activist to me, like an intellectual Robin DiAngelo.
Do you have a crystal clear definition then, on where is exactly the difference?
I doubt there exists one.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to convey though?
We can't just say, "The boundaries of hate speech are unclear, so we'll do nothing and have uncensored speech." This experiment has been tried over and over again, with uniformly bad results.
The problem is that having uncensored speech doesn't scale, because eventually you'll become big enough to attract media scrutiny, which inevitably cherry-picks the worst parts of the user base. This cause 1) advertisers to pull out and 2) starts attracting more of the wrong type of users.
But actually I do believe in the concept of unrestricted speech.
But I really don't know when was the last time, that was tried. There were times, when certain topics were ok to speak freely about, like racism, yes, but at those times other topics were restricted, so what exactly are you talking about?
This used to be the case years ago but Reddit is anything but open now. It's a giant echo chamber and if you harbor unpopular beliefs or opinions you are not welcome.
The _old_ reddit always just worked. I never had to reload the page multiple times, sometimes giving up entirely.
Obviously I'm still using the site or I wouldn't be complaining, but like, what exactly was wrong with old reddit again?
I blame typical tech dysfunctions and the interests of users not align with short term stakeholder interests.
But anyway: if you are someone that only cares about looking at whatever BigCorp allows you to look, then sure, keep using reddit.
If you'd like to have some form of control over the content you value, create and would like to promote, then your best bet is to fight for alternatives to the current big centralized systems.
I wouldn't say that technology is full of actual "leftists", more a group ranging from overly-myopic liberals who struggle to do what would actually benefit minority communities in a more positive sense to the libertarian types who only end up restricting what people say because it ends up affecting their advertising revenue. Simply by virtue of being in a position of financial power, it's very difficult to hold truly leftist views.
Deplatforming has been the go to method of the right for at least a century (see mccarthyism) and longer if you include lynching/death as essentially equivalent (ie: you can't speak if you're dead). The left has simply finally got enough critical mass to do it themselves.
More seriously though, the important thing about ActivityPub is that it removes central points of control. No matter how much you agree/disagree with the governance of Reddit/Facebook/Twitter et caterva, they are just too big for the good of society. Federated systems is one chance to take this power from them and bring to people - if not directly (say, because you don't want the pain of hosting/managing all that crap) at least you can delegate this power to someone closer to you - or at very least to a bigger number of smaller providers who will them have no monopoly and will have to keep your interests first.
The small groups of Twitter and Reddit moderators are far too small to ever represent the diversity of human thought. You may think the rules prevent harm today, but what happens if and when they encourage harm tomorrow? What if the rules turned against you? Wouldn't you want to be able to speak out?
This just feels like a rehash of the "think about the children" argument. We should not base human communication on the idea that some grown adult somehow somewhere could have such an adverse reaction to your content that they suffer serious mental or physical harm. Especially when said communication is hidden behind NSFW spoilers and other appropriate trigger warnings. Nobody could have possibly stumbled upon r/watchpeopledie and thought it was anything other than what it said it was.
For instance, can an ethical case be made for watching people die? Is there any benefit to be gained from this beyond the first novelty factor. (A rhetorical question, just to note that the ethical debate precedes rule making)
Every other social media giant operates the same way. To my knowledge no mainstream social network has ever polled its users for changes to its community policing model. Which is crazy, because in actual society we all have the right to vote, but online we are beholden to nameless moderators and provided no representation whatsoever. It's entirely up to chance whether your case gets seen by someone who would be sympathetic to you (assuming it even gets seen by a person instead of some glorified regex matcher posing as 'AI').
I know in tech we like to outsource lots of hard problems, but nobody should accept outsourcing their moral framework to Twitter, Inc. or Condé Nast.
I don't feel the need to make an ethical argument for or against HN
That's funny, I find the moderators stifle talking about the rules on Hackernews via secret shadowbans, post rate limiting, and other secret punishments...yet here you are.
When we ban an account, we don't use shadowbanning it unless it is relatively new and shows signs of spamming or trolling, or being related to past abuses [1]. When an account has an established history, we say that we're banning it and why [2].
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars [3]. We're happy to take the rate limit off (and often do) when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to do that.
Creating accounts to get around these restrictions is obviously a repetition of the original abuse and will get your main account banned as well if you keep doing it, so please don't do that.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'm on HN because dang and the others in charge of moderating repeatedly make good faith efforts to explain their moderation philosophy and keep the rules updated and visible.
If Twitter and Reddit moderators were as public as dang were I would feel far more comfortable relying on them to make decisions for me.
Most things in the world outside of pure mathematics are subjective. If you’re looking to do nothing if it involves subjective decision making, nothing would ever get done.
All around us, all day every day, we look at a problem, we take the best info and expertise available to us, and we make a judgement call.
The fact that almost always some level of subjectivity exists doesn’t mean we do nothing.
> For instance, what would we gain if we decided to turn HN into a Lemmy federated service?
It doesn't have to be a "Lemmy" Service. But let's pretend that dang decides to implement ActivityPub for HN. What would we get? Some guesses:
- Less people trying to game/break HN. There is great value in gaming HN now because of its centralization. If HN is just one in a place with a bigger number of actors, I would guess the incentive to game it would be reduced.
- Easier to have cross-pollination of ideas. There is an overlap between some subreddits, HN, lobste.rs, etc. Now, we can accept these services are big enough that there is always some cross-posting. What about the other topics that are HN-worthy (gratifies one's intellectual curiosity) but are under-represented elsewhere?
- More room for dissenting/non-status quo views. With ActivityPub, your client could easily allow you to subscribe to an account. So let's say that I want to see whatever more controversial people post - e.g, idlewords. With HN, I need to either stalk him or hope that the echo chamber has decided on his favor on a given day.
Granted, I think is highly unlikely that dang or YC would have any interest in doing something like that. They would be giving away control of the conversation and the risks are unknown for very little benefit. But is it really our job to be concerned about this? I'd rather have more people and more actors sharing this control than having to trust entities that become too big to fail.
The most popular of such networks is Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/), which everyone can run on their own server (often referred to as an "instance"). By default, you create an account on one server and just speak to everyone like if you were on the same server. If one of such servers turns out to be a cesspool full of bigots (like Gab is), an admin can simply say "my server will no longer communicate with that server". When a bunch of servers do that, Gab is pretty much isolated, even though it's using an open protocol.
To put it in layman's terms: if a lot of spam comes from user@example.com, Gmail can just dismiss the emails coming from all addresses that end in @example.com.
Server owners are usually transparent and keep lists of servers they're not speaking to on GitHub or somewhere.
A relatively small group "migrated" for a few days, but didn't stay. Here's Whoaverse one month after the up/down counts were removed from Reddit (notice that they added visible vote counts, which they didn't have before): http://web.archive.org/web/20140718134533/http://whoaverse.c...
Other than the stickied site announcement, almost all of the posts only have a handful of votes and only a few have any comments.
The banned users were the first group that actually stuck around on Whoaverse/Voat, because they didn't have the option of just going back to Reddit.
Maybe the figure-head isn't en vogue anymore. The methods are always popular.
Leftists(Socialists, Communists, Anarchists) often publically revel in the idea of when "the revolution comes" to put anyone dissenting up against the wall or sending them to a Gulag camp of some sort. I don't find that exactly reassuring. Seeing how "protesters" in the US and Europe act like chinese Red Guards during the cultural revolution, this day doesn't seem far off.
I'm reading the "Three-Body Problem" right now and the first chapter eerily reminded me of the current situation where not being enough of an "ally" to the racial BLM movement is a thought-crime punishable by having your life destroyed.
One of the few infomercial products that are actually good.
I think this is similar to the economics of spam: the cost of spamming is so low that even if a small fraction of a percent respond and convert, it's still profitable to spam.
People who troll are just looking to rile people up. All they need is one or two people to respond (out of hundreds or thousands or more). Even someone who knows better will occasionally be triggered enough to respond to a troll.
I wonder if it's possible to have a community where the moderation is more focused on educating people to identify trolling and discourage posters from engaging with emotionally charged/inciting posters. Instead of warning the troller, encourage people to just downvote and move on instead of engaging.
I consider a troll as someone who is seeking to create a strong negative (anger, hate, frustration, etc) emotion in a reader intentionally or unintentionally. I dont know if this is too subjective and impossible to enforce.
Teasing aside, I like Mastodon. I’ve used it a bit myself too, and I have a profile on an instance of it.
Gopher is a success when you browse wikipedia on it.
I think the decision of users to continue to spend their valuable free-time using these social media sites is their vote in this scenario.
And I don’t mean that to come across as a flippant dismissal, I really don’t. When we consider those who like to say they simply want a place to explore unpopular ideas, people are correct to question why they keep coming back to these sites.
The wider internet has no shortage of places for these people to explore the craziest ideas imaginable, and if there isn’t a place for some idea, it takes minutes to spin a server up with already packaged freely available open-source platforms.
People are voting with their valuable free-time to go back to these platforms, it is personal preference in action.
If you tell someone NEVER GO INTO THE LAST DOOR ON THE THIRD STORY, they’ll endlessly wonder what’s inside. If you show them that it’s your amateur paintings, they’ll never care again.
We want to act like we are purely rational beings, and maybe some of us operate on that level consistently, but those of us that do not, even for a moment, are ripe to have their animal brains taken advantage of for evil.
No. Please let's stop with the "both sides" fallacy.
This is what the parent poster wrote:
>> the worst of the worst: jailbait, creepshots, beatingwomen
There is no "argument" being debated here. Only victims being harmed (more) by the sharing of the pictures.
I don’t need to talk to a Nazi to know that gassing Jews and gays is wrong.
People seem to think that there are some unexplored ideas here that merit further discussion. We have already established that this shit is not what we want. Those in doubt can read accounts of domestic violence victims or a couple of history books to educate themselves.
If you don't want to talk to those people, then don't. But to stand there and claim to speak for all of us and claim you are the authority on what topics are authorised for discussion is such an disgusting level of narcisistic meglomania that needs to be stamped out.
You're just a Totalitarian, and you should be put on a podium along side your historial commrades (and their outcomes) for all to hear and see.
This shit has happened before, and many millions were silenced into the siberian wastelands for it.
Ah, yes. "We were wrong about morality all those other times throughout history but THIS time we're right! Forever and ever!"
Also, the things being banned are nowhere as far outside the Overton Window as your strawmen.
You don’t have to browse Nazi forums to know that gassing Jews is wrong. But you may start to discover the reasons why these (mostly) young men are so angry, which I posit allows one to do more to prevent the spread of such ideologies.
The differences between your stance and our parents stance emerge from different world views not from different information levels or a difference in academic rigor. (Or faith!)
> There isn't really any doubt now that people can use platforms to radicalize others to extreme and often dangerous viewpoints.
What you actually said here ("people can use platforms to radicalize") is true but also trivial. They can use platforms for all kind of things.
More broadly:
It's neither proven that the possibility of radicalization is a problem related to new technologies nor that censorship is a tool effective in mitigating it. Last but not least there's the philosophical question: it's not even clear that this problem we're perceiving is something that should be mitigated on a technical level.
That is very much an ongoing research project and will continue to be for a long time as long as communities continue to adapt to new communication technologies.
Interesting... I don't think I've previously seen the argument that such communities are, in effect, an "attractive nuisance".
A similar argument applies to pro-anorexia communities, although the danger there is self-harming behavior.
From the benchmarks [1] of a simple naive JavaScript version is can recalculate one persons trust in a huge network in just a few ms. With partial updates when new ratings come in it could be done even faster.
1: https://github.com/adecentralizedworld/decentralized-trust-d...
It would seem very easy to just create a lot of accounts to vote or trigger impeachments (if that is a thing).
That said, there is still quite a bit of power in controlling the view of those who can't be bothered to make a decision, so we make it so that an election vote only counts after the user actually first posted in that community 2 weeks ago. So if there's a flood of new votes, the mods can temporarily suspend voting process.
Lastly, the elections are not mandatory for all communities, so if a community is created as a 'monarchy', for the lack of a better word, the elections are not applied by default. This makes it so that there is no incentive for mods to keep 'temporary suspension due to vote flood' state indefinitely, since they can just switch to monarchy if they want to do that.
Mind that in that case, the user can still make choices, or even enable elections - the only thing that would change is that the default user would not get election results applied to the default mods. But if that user wants, it can still enable elections and vote, and by enabling that it would get the election results applied — but due to his or her own explicit choice, not by default.
This really depends on the design. Email is "federated" but that doesn't require you to get anybody else to use your email server in order for you send or receive emails with them.
What I'd kind of like to see is a system that separates hosting and accounts from moderation.
So you have a host, like email, and a username on the host. Then you have a forum, which has operators/moderators (who are users), but the forum is host-independent. Maybe it only actually runs on a specific host at a given time, but the operators can move it without anybody noticing and anybody can use it regardless of who their own host is.
It makes it so you can be a forum operator without having to be a host.
I can run a single-user Mastodon instance and follow people from any other instance. They can follow me as well. I can send emails from my personal server to anyone on gmail, and vice-versa.
Where do I need to "attract other users" to my instance? It's quite the opposite!
With Mastadon if say I'm on another instance and the host of that instance blocks yours (because they don't agree with your politics or whatever) then won't I be unable to see your feed? I'd have to setup my own Mastadon instance to get around this? What if I'm not technically inclined enough to do this? Then I'm subject to the whims of the moderators of the instance.
What if I live in China and they block access to the biggest instances so I'm cut off from all the big communities and can't participate?
What if an instance of Mastadon crashes and the admins can't be bothered restoring it. As a user on that instance haven't you lost everything?
These are the problems decentralized networks are solving, being subject to the whims of other people.
First: Mastodon, with an "O".
Second: I already had this discussion before. This "blocking" of instances is something that is going on only on Mastodon, AFAIK, because most of the current members are conflating the idea of federation with tribes. They want to be insular at this point. This will change as soon as there are more people using ActivityPub like email or Matrix and stop associating the instances with the identities/ideologies of its members.
So, no. You won't have to "setup your Mastodon" instance to get around this. You can do it, but you also can just find a more professional hosting provider that is not managed by a fourteen year old or tweenagers that love to spout their love for diversity and yet can only tolerate any conversation that is exactly aligned with their existing preconceptions of their uniform peer group.
> What if I live in China and they block access to the biggest instances so I'm cut off from all the big communities and can't participate?
What if you live in China and they block the decentralized service altogether? What if they use the decentralized nature of the service and set up honeypots to find dissidents? "Decentralized" != "Private" != "Secure"
> What if an instance crashes (...) the admins can't be bothered restoring it.
If it is important to you, then (a) you run your own service or (b) you pay someone that actually cares about this. With a decentralized service, the only alternative you have is (a). Then not only you have to make this choice, but also everyone that you would like to join the network.
My point all along is that federated systems are already enough for those that do not "want to be subject to the whims of other people", while decentralized systems shut out those that don't care about it or would rather trust/delegate these concerns to someone else.
"Decentralized systems" bring no benefit that can't be had by federated systems and remove all sorts of free options from the potential users. It is limiting instead of liberating.
Switching between accounts on Twitter means your follows/followers are lost, switching accounts on Reddit doesn't lose you anything (unless you're subscrived to private subreddits or are a moderator for a subreddit)
Saying you have no moderation is attractive to one crowd in particular (there are other people who theoretically favour it, but practically they’ll use a moderated forum anyway). So you get a quick numbers boost but you’ve now fundamentally limited your audience to people prepared to share head-space with that crowd.
Reddit, Facebook and Twitter got in early and got to spend a lot of time learning on the job. Unless you start small, you’re not going to get that luxury now.
(Please don’t take this as an endorsement of any particular moderation policy, in theory or practice. Most of them are kind of awful at times. But the problem is hard.)
The only thing good are the vast majority of users here have good intention. If only HN had multiple boards with various mods.
But when you start to gain popularity, the way you treat "free speech" becomes an issue. Discord is not a great example in that niche communities are not scraped for web search (that I know of).
It's very clear that this is YOUR community. I don't think that's a bad thing, community wise. Just own it. It's OK. Being dictator-like isn't bad if you have clear goals and limited scope. It's just unfortunate that one of your goals is to squelch those who have unpopular opinions. And I'm not talking about neo-nazi white supremacy bullshit, it's clear you support that edge.
The tell in comments like this is that they are linkless. Supplying the relevant links would reveal the rest of the story and let readers make up their own minds. That's why they're conspicuously missing.
I posed a poll, let's see if we can get an hn specific answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23665907
2. Wanting them to be banned from a particular platform isn't a general ban on communication. Private communities are under no obligation to tolerate the intolerant.
Personally, I don't object to this kind of power in principle, I just think that it is used in the wrong direction in the United States. Rather than being used to target and remove individuals who promote instability, it has been used to target and remove individuals who promote stability. Much of the United States now believes property destruction is acceptable if it achieves honorable ends.
No, they're completely the actions of private companies.
It turns out, private companies exist in a mostly-shared culture and often have similar ideas about how to behave. Currently -- thank god -- deplatforming blatant bigots is generally agreed upon as A Good Thing. No conspiracy here, just good sense.
> Rather than being used to target and remove individuals who promote instability, it has been used to target and remove individuals who promote stability.
Seriously? White supremacists are now "individuals who promote stability"?
> Much of the United States now believes property destruction is acceptable if it achieves honorable ends.
I mean, yeah, the US has always believed that. The country had basically two starting points, after all: stealing the natives' land, and then later on destroying property as part of a protest.
Simply write "All lives matter" on Twitter (because all lives DO matter, right?) and watch what happens.
If you tried to herd state socialists/tankies and anarcho-capitalists/voluntarists into the same discussion space, they're so violently opposed they'd just be constantly screaming epithets at each other. That's not a useful thing.
Not to mention even when you have ideologically-aligned folks, some people are just anti-social dickwads who will constantly pick fights or argue in bad faith. I don't understand some people's seeming obsession with defending this kind of person, Some people just suck and everyone else is better off if they're not around. A private space is under no obligation to tolerate a poster who adamantly refuses to get along.
If I'm having a discussion with people in real life I decide what I accept or not, there's no third party that decides for me what is right.
Decentralisation is exactly about that: it empowers you and not someone else to decide what you like to read or not.
Yes, and that works fine because there's no platform there, just a 1 on 1 or small group conversation. You can still easily replicate this, unmoderated, with email or various messaging apps.
Once you can talk to potentially hundreds or thousands of people at once, once there's a platform, that model breaks down. Bad actors who would be uninterested in trolling single individuals are very interested in trolling hundreds at a time. And nobody wants to "walk away" from an otherwise good community because of handful of very loud people are spouting hate there.
Any platform that's both popular and unmoderated will eventually be dominated by extreme content, and will push out normal people, who will go somewhere that's popular and moderated.
If a platform wants people to engage but don't want people to be passionate about their beliefs, it is not a discussion platform, it's a walled garden for a certain type of opinions.
Does it make discussions better? probably, if you already agree with the rules or can (or want) to follow them.
What if you can't?
What if a topic is divisive because on HN people refuse to acknowledge that the general view on HN is simply wrong?
Nobody will ever know.
Imagine a person going to a vegan restaurant asking for a steak. How long will it take to get kicked out?
That's a feature, if you are vegan, but it's not desirable for every restaurant, especially if they want (or like) to serve a broad range of customers.
Of course HN can say that this is exactly what they want, but what about the discussion about "is what they want right?"
I'm talking about HN because one of the post mentioned it like a good example of a free and open platform, but a platform that bans users for talking about politics is not really a good example of good moderation.
Moderation should happen on the receiving side, when it happens on the publisher's side it's called editing.
Any news outlets has editorial boards, there's nothing wrong about it, but it should be clear that the opinions expressed on an editorialised platform are not free.
Decentralisation has, among the many downsides, the advantage of being controlled by the party who receive the content, not the one who generates it.
I don't have an issue with it if anyone finds inclusivity to be the most important issue, but it is a progressive policy, not "core to democracy". Please stop moralizing your personal political convictions. No, you're not a good person because of random political beliefs you happen to have, no, people who don't share those beliefs are not bad persons, and no, democracy does not rely on everyone sharing your beliefs.
Before: https://i.imgur.com/sgODcLW.png
After: https://i.imgur.com/8j7P1YE.png
The latter is objectively worse. I understand that > 1080p monitors are a small fraction of your user base, but that's still not reason to not test your UI on larger resolutions, for a site as big (and prominently used by devs with large screens) as GitHub.
My eye still has to jump back and forth long distances if I want to fork the repo for example.
I’d agree this is bad design, but I’d be somewhat surprised if it’s a big practical problem for most people.
It's the most basic form of window management, and it works pretty well.
It's especially helpful if you want to be able to focus on one thing at a time only, and not have multiple different windows with disparate screen noise visible at once.
I often operate in that mode, using a tiling window manager to have a single maximized window on my primary monitor, and optionally a tile of auxiliary windows on my secondary monitor.
You can reduce it by making real or fake windows on the left and right. Haven't gotten around to making a macro for that yet. If it's an article reader mode also exists.
I don't understand why people are so hellbent on getting subreddits that exceed their tolerances removed from the platform. There are orders of magnitude more subreddits that I ignore altogether than the ones that I choose to subscribe to.
And the users will get mad and blame the service provider. That said users are dumb/wrong or whatever is irrelevant, what matters to the business is that they're pissing off users and getting a bad reputation. Thus, requiring emails from the user is entirely rational and in fact is a good business practice.
Yes. But this doesn't make it a bad protocol to use. Email is one of the best things that remain for individiuals who value their privacy. It's pretty much the only popular messaging tool that doesn't require a phone number and isn't tied to one vendor.
>Both reddit and HN prospered as a result of not requiring email
This is untrue. HN and reddit prospered because users wanted to use the service, not because they don't require email to set up an account. If you have any evidence that suggests otherwise, please tell me, I'd be very interested in resources on that topic. To contradict your point: Pretty much every other website, regardless it it's a small one man operation or a giant company require email or even a working phone number, and those seem to be doing just fine.
>Email was not meant to be abusef this way
Well, how is it "abused" in it's current form? It's electronic mail, so people use it as such
>and I have seen first hand how it can be used against people
And how would that look like
>Email abd phone number collection is a modern tech evil for me
You should strike email from that list. Phone confirmation is the real problem, because it is tied to your identity in most of the western hemisphere now. However, there's still plenty of serious email providers where you can start a trial account to sign up of whatever requires it, just don't use the usual blacklisted expiring address suspects. I can highly recommend mailbox.org, they provide a very good service and have a 30 day trial period for new accounts.
>That doesn't mean I stand with Antifa.
Do you know what antifa is short for
After all, it's all in the name!
https://ifunny.co/picture/we-call-ourselves-the-anti-bad-guy...
Dismissing an argument based on rhetorical sophistry is keeping your head in the sand while trying to get others to do the same. It’s reckless.
The US has the freest speech that I know of (granted it’s also the only model that I’m so familiar with), and even it has plenty of restrictions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
And no, shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater is not illegal and is protected by the First Amendment.
Including illegal things?
In Saudia Arabia it is illegal to say, God does not exist. (and in germany under special circumstances, too - meaning, if enough people would get angry at you saying that, it would be illegal for you to say so)
It currently is recognized as a good thing, but it wasn't before. Before the consensus was "I may disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." That said, a consensus cannot be defended simply because it has previously existed.
> Seriously? White supremacists are now "individuals who promote stability"?
I'm talking about people who opposed defunding the police. In a healthy society, people who supported defunding the police would have been fired from their jobs and sanctioned, but the opposite has happened. 'White supremacy' has been redefined to include fundamental state structures that are required for the functioning of society.
> I mean, yeah, the US has always believed that. The country had basically two starting points, after all: stealing the natives' land, and then later on destroying property as part of a protest.
The United States does not need to justify its existence. Almost every nation in existence today was formed on the backs of millions of deaths, and most of the natives died through communicable disease that was inevitably spread once any european landed on the North American shores. The only major mistakes the United States ever made were 1) allowing the establishment of slavery in North America and 2) trying to spread 'freedom and democracy' around the world.
Otherwise, the United States is responsible for almost all fundamental technology that the developed world employs and may (hopefully) be responsible for spreading human life to another planet. If the latter happens, then that alone justifies the sins of the United States.
Yes if I go trigger the worst kind of people on the worst social network, I will get mean messages. But I don't do that.
The left does this on Reddit/Twitter constantly towards right wing people and no one bats an eye. It's like maybe those in power are extremely biased towards the left.
Perhaps there'd be more legitimacy in a comparison to the vitriol on the left against billionaires and cops, but these are positions of power, not identity groups one is born into. All revolutionaries of all political persuasions will oppose those in positions of power currently.
"People should be marginalised, and made second class citizens, and marginalised people should be kept marginalised" is a pretty common theme on the far right. It is rare on the far left; not that it's non-existent, but there just aren't that many sincere Stalinists or similar left.
What dehumanising content are you seeing from the left? I mean, if it's just "the other side are bad people" stuff, well, everyone does that. The "these classes of people should be socially and politically suppressed" stuff is overwhelmingly from one side, though.
What? Not that there is no one with this view but it is an extreme minority. Same with people calling for the killing of all cops on the left, very small minority.
Monks walk away from pretty much everything, and have been doing so for a long time now. They continue living. Does the result of that qualify as either better or worse than what you have now?
A reddit user was kind enough to spontaneously donate 40 dollar (in btc) to me despite the fact that I didn't solicit donations. It's also been a pretty productive endeavor for learning about front end development, listening to feedback and giving users what they're asking for, learning to use cloudflare/gcp, and now learning to optimize glsl shaders to enable a fancier renderer while still getting reasonable performance on cheap hardware.
I feel like I often learn a lot about one random topic or another when I research so I can accurately correct someone who is being wrong on the internet. The above is an interesting example because there was a concrete deliverable at the end of the process, but I don't feel the fact that I learned from the process is particularly unique.
I also learn a lot of new stuff.
I certainly spend some amount of time on HN replying to things I shouldn't bother with, but the majority of my time on HN is filled with learning new things and hearing interesting perspectives on those things. I consider it a net positive in my life, and over the years I've gotten better at avoiding the negative parts.
A large well formed community can survive a portion of its users with negative comments and posts, but I doubt you can build a community on the back of those users. Instead that negative group poisons the the platform for a more mainstream crowd. People won't join a plateform if the first thing they are exposed to supports extremist views.
That's not the case with the alternatives, most tend to go really hard on one side of the extremism scale (right: voat, left: raddle).
Yes it hosts /r/the_donald or whatever but reddit as a whole is very left-leaning.
Edit: Hey ya'll instead of downvoting me how about providing some evidence of widespread right-leaning thoughts that aren't isolated to individual subreddits and shamed throughout the rest of reddit? Spoiler: You can't
They shut it down. 0 new posts for past 3 months.
It's pointless trying to be a "respectable" right wing intellectual because you have to spend all your time running around justifying the completely incoherent things that Trump is talking about.
Chicago school economics? You can have a discussion with that, and leave it civil. That doesn't work with the_donald.
The right thinks explicit "censorship", which happens via the community or site owner, is bad.
Implicit "censorship", however, which happens when the targets of racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia[0] leave the site, is just fine.
[0] or their allies or people who don't want to be surrounded by assholes.
The Left typically wants to silence/ignore while the Right typically wants to fight/berate about it.
Also, "berating" is a kind word. We're talking about "I have the right to exist" vs "we should systematically exterminate/enslave people like you"
E.g. a large subset of Fediverse (Mastodon etc) communities are communities that avoid Twitter because they don't feel Twitter is doing enough to be safe for them. And instances have a varying policies about how they handle instances with different moderation standards.
Where does the line between "free speech" and moderation exists?
Free speech advocates who aren't convinced by the "just go to another platform" argument in a discussion about Reddit or Twitter censorship likely won't think the argument is worth accepting simply by redefining what a platform is.
I may not have done a good job of illustrating it in the previous post, but the example was mainly focused on platforms that bill themselves as an anti-censorship alternative to Reddit. Censorship and free speech on social media are incredibly complex topics, and the development of an endless stream of tiny, far right echo chambers doesn't seem to capture the spirit of this "town square" that free speech advocates are looking for.
Democracy does not require Universal Suffrage.
Also fun quote from Wikipedia: In its original 19th-century usage by reformers in Britain, universal suffrage was understood to mean only universal manhood suffrage
Just look at the recent supreme court ruling that made it illegal to fire people based on you being gay or transgendered. Tons of conservatives shot back on that one. I don't know how you can look at a viewpoint like, "yes, employers should be allowed to fire you for merely being gay" and think that that doesn't mean they want to keep marginalised people marginalised.
1 - https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...
As far as I can tell, there are no politicians or indeed anyone with significant power calling for the killing of all cops.
Unless Nancy Pelosi or someone starts retweeting videos demanding the liquidation of the kulak class, you'll forgive me if I don't take your claims of 'extreme minority on both sides' all that seriously.
Email must die. No buts or ifs. It must die. You are a poor or ignorant engineer and architect if you build new things that depend on email in 2020.
If you give the most mediocre hacker 100 emails of users of your service that depends on email for account security, I am confident he/she will compromise at least a 3rd of accounts.
Yes, they will. Most will not have even noticed the warning you put up.
This is absurd, you either have an extremely idealistic view of the abilities of users or your thinking is warped by your extreme hatred towards a ubiquitous protocol.
You have three fingers pointing back at yourself
If you want a subreddit for enthusiasts of $NICHE, you're likely to find it, and it's likely to be useful.
You can read their speech policy: https://legal.parler.com/documents/guidelines.pdf
"Yeah, saving trees and whales sounds fine, but they should stop it with all the LGBTQ, BLM, socialist stuff"
You can't have a civil discussion with those people either. In fact it's getting increasingly difficult to have civil discussions with anyone (HN is an exception because everyone is on their best behaviour, but to a large extent this results in self-censorship; you can see that the least politically correct comments are made with throw-away accounts).
There's no intrinsical limitation on the number of participants
Don't you like what a user says?
You can ignore them
Don't you like what some instance does, you can block it.
Any platform that is popular has an editorial board and doesn't want you to say things they don't like.
Simple as that.
Newspaper had no comments sections because it's silly to comment the news, they already decide what to publish and what not.
They already chose who to talk to, there's no point in discussing when you can only comment what someone else wants you to talk about.
Have you seen today on HN a post about exactly 40 years ago, when an Italian civil plane, the Itavia Flight 870, was shot down by a fight between NATO and Libyan fighter jets and 81 innocent people died?
You won't, because it's gonna be flagged as politics.
But you're going to read about every cat fight between über rich silicon valley founders because that's not politics for them, it's what they wanna talk about.
Trolling is a problem for the platform, not for the users.
I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.
If they do it for me, it's censorship.
Censorship is not bad per se, but it's not done in my name, it's only in the platform's interests.
Do platforms ever ask users what do they think about banning someone?
Of course they don't...
This only works for small communities. You can't feasibly block the literally thousands of trolls and petty assholes that are posting on Reddit every day without that task consuming all your time. Multiply that by every single user having to do it personally and it gets even sillier.
There's a reason basically every popular platform is moderated on some level, and it's not because of some grand meta-moderator conspiracy.
Moderation is near-universally used because it works. Non-moderating doesn't work for conversations that eclipse some size. Disliking how moderators behave doesn't change that.
That's simply not true
Ad blocking works because I decide what to block, not because the websites posting the ads are moderating them in a good way
Let me decide, is it really that scary?
My email account is not on Gmail, I manage the spam, and it's ridiculously easy to get just the content I want and delete everything else
It's hard to scale it for hundreds of accounts automatically, but it's not on a personal level
Forums are about what I want to read, not about what it's good for me because a platform says so.
"People have the power" Patty Smith used to say
The answer, of course, is that these people should build their own cities. But first, of course, they'll just have to build their own websites, servers, datacentres, ISPs, and nations.
(And militaries, to stop USGOV from killing them all, presuming they dare challenge the banks by building alternatives to traditional payment processors.)
Yeah! I’m proposing building systems on top of Reddit and Hacker News (just two examples, any forum really that serves its data as http) to backfill their content and discussion data (comments), and prevent global censorship by mod actions. If you can’t censor The Pirate Bay and SciHub, you’d expect such a system to be equally durable. It’s all JSON blobs, identifies, and endpoints.
These sites are temporary (remember Digg?), so you want to build discussion systems that are durable, prevent censorship, and will outlive their underlying websites they sit on top of. These are not unreasonable amounts of data we’re dealing with, it’s mostly compressible text. I can store 100TB in Backblaze for $500/month, and front it from VMs around the world.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
I'd look at fat-people-hate and beat-women subreddits more like bank robberers planning their next attack on a bank, discussing weapons, and having a good time looking at viedos of robberies from the past.
Then you can visit them and tell them "But it's wrong to rob banks, it's not your money and think of the poor people working in the bank, they'll get PTSD".
Or you say "Let's discuss the big underlying systematic problem that is larger than all of us, and makes you rob banks, and how to solve it"
Then you get banned from that subreddit, and the bank robberers continue enjoying robbing banks.
Bank robbers don't rob banks because they enjoy robbing banks. Bullys don't bully because "omg wow have you tried bullying it so great".
I'm all with you that bullying sucks, but if you want bullying to stop, you better damn well understand the motivation. If you reach for "they are just evil people", you're not thinking hard enough.
Say you build walkie talkies, and a member of the KKK shows up and says he needs 100 of them because they are rioting in a black neighborhood tonight and need a way to coordinate their plans. Do you say “sure in fact take some for free!” just so you can listen in to understand exactly how they are terrorizing their black neighbors, or do you tell them to fuck off because you don’t want to provide tools to a hate group?
The hypothesis that forums dedicated to the spread of neo-Nazism can be effectively used in such a way actually help the world do more to prevent the spread of such ideologies is largely unproven.
Unlike the fact that the dissemination and social reinforcement of Nazi propaganda is an efficient way to help people in a lot of pain 'realize' that the 'real' cause of their problem is Jews.
Also, again, I am happy to fund research on why men beat women (or any person of any gender beats any other gender, though let’s face it, most times domestic violence is by men against women), but I don’t need 1000 angry men trying to justify to me and each other why it’s ok.
And that’s my point: the web allows us to give voice to those who haven’t been heard before. If a former Nazi wants to explain why he did what he did and why he walked away from it, we should give them voice and listen. If a current incel wants to detail his struggles and ask for help, we should lend an ear. But what help can be given to a man who beats his wife by 1000 men who do the same and think it’s totally justified? What possible good comes of helping them reinforce their beliefs while providing tools to exclude all external points of view?
Lastly, yes it is true that some points of view are just wrong. There are in fact bad ideas. Eugenics is a bad idea. Racism is a bad idea. Misogyny is a bad idea. We can let the academics study it and the therapists try to fix it, but we absolutely do not need to entertain it, pretend like there is some valid point of view there, or give it a platform just so someone can turn around, point out that the existence of the platform means there are two sides to the argument and demand more equal representation. If you really want to help, try going on those fringe subreddits and offer to pay for therapy for those young men. If they take you up on that offer, yes you’ve done a good thing. But in my experience you get a nicely worded message from a mod saying that you and your ideas aren’t welcome here.
Edit: also, I don’t give a fuck if you are in pain because crushing system, etc. If you beat your wife, you deserve a beating. If you think it’s sometimes justified you deserve two. Don’t make your problems someone else’s pain. It doesn’t make you justified. It just objectively makes you an asshole.
Edit 2: Daryl Davis is a black man who has been befriending members of the KKK and successfully convinced over 200 of them to leave. That does not justify the existence of the KKK, just shows how difficult it is to do this kind of work: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
As someone who has been looking for good anti-racialist arguments for a long time (along with explanations for why eugenics is wrong and why we think there aren't substantial sex differences that make the sexes on average more suited to different things) the fact these kinds or things are censured and censored everywhere is immensely frustrating.
The only things I can find are sites talking about why racism is true or sites talking about why it's wrong, but I can't find resources talking about why it's false!
If you happen to have links about eugenics/racism/sexism that talk about their falseness (I mean, I presume you have actually seen arguments against them that makes you so sure they are bad/false?) then please let me know.
Racism isn't useful and isn't actionable at a policy level.
Let's suppose there is some trait X (could be IQ test score, high jump ability, whatever) that is statistically variant by rigorously defined race. Group A scores on average 98, group B scores on average 103.
The median difference between groups doesn't actually matter, because individual scores are spread on a normal distribution. Therefore some percentage of individuals of group A will score higher on trait X than individuals of group B even if on average they do not.
So how can you effectively filter out individuals for entry into some special program? (for example, the high jump event in the Olympics)
Well, you have to test each individual. And if you want the very best, it behooves you to test each individual as fairly as possible, because there's always a chance that you will sample an individual from group A who is a super star, and also find an individual from group B who is a dud.
And it is the same for any other trait you would like to filter for.
Racism is an attempt to find a convenient mental shortcut so that it may provide cover for hatred of an out-group. But racism is ineffective and stupid.
I don't know any sane person who thinks that.
Feminism was about that woman have the right to choose a role, that was traditionally reserved for men (and the other way around).
That women does not get discriminated for being women.
The fight against the idea, that women are made for household and kitchen (and bed).
But yes, that originate idea got forgotten quite a bit, to the point where women get he idea hat it is wrong for a woman to be at home and take care of the kids and not pursue a carieer.
* Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Make sure to get the NC17 unabridged book for the non-sugarcoated version. * All humans are virtually genetically identical. Can’t find a good primary source at 6am, but start with this: https://www.quora.com/Do-all-humans-have-the-same-genome-seq.... Black people are no different than white people, and you won’t find anything inherently different about either group other than some external appearance. It logically follows that discriminating by skin color is arbitrary, like discriminating say by height or eye color. * Racism is bad for society. https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Negative-Effects-Of-Racism-FJ... * Racism is bad for the economy: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/racism-riots-economics-.... * A much better explanation than I can write at the moment on why it’s wrong: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-racism-wrong?share=1
I am not going to spend more time Googling for you on this, but feel free to continue the research yourself. Try searching “effects of X on Y” and “morality of Z” and “why is W wrong” if you want to see those points of view. Form your own opinion, but keep one thing in mind: the often cited argument for a lot of this stuff is that “we’ve never implemented it correctly”. I hear this a lot about communism nowadays. There are a lot of setups where the idea inevitably leads to an outcome. For example, the US political and elections system inevitably leads to a two party system. It can be mathematically proven that this is the case. Similarly, ideas like racism inevitably lead to human and economic suffering, and those who try to separate the idea and it’s effect as implemented should be suspect of making arguments in bad faith. Examine their theories more closely.
Lastly, there is only so much you can learn from short form articles on the web. Read Sapiens. Read a couple or history books on WWII. Talk to a concentration camp survivor if you can find one. Talk to a Nazi solder. Talk to almost any woman in your life. I guarantee you that your mother experienced sexism, sexual harassment, and chances are outright sexual assault, since a very large percentage of women have in their lives statistically speaking.
Again, as with other comments above: I am not advocating for a slippery slope type of thing. I am however saying that specific groups mentioned above are widely (though not universally) considered undesirables. The specific groups: men who beat women, racists, and Nazis. Do you have a better ruler by which to measure those people and whether we should create software tools to help them communicate better/easier with each other? Do you condone any of those group and do you want to publicly defend their ideas as moral or valid? Because if not, feel free to get off the high horse and shut the fuck up.
Ad blocking isn't a community or discussion forum, and most people just use whatever blacklists some 'authority' comes up with.
I guess the equivalent for a forum would be where you could not only block users (which is already common), but also share/combine blocklists. That's an interesting idea.
I think you'd run into the WoW sharding problem where it creates a sort of dissonance where you're nominally in the same space but also not in the same space at the same time. Still, would be cool to at least experiment with.
It's a user's side tool to remove unwanted content based on community generated rules
It's content moderation nonetheless
The error IMO is to think that the current implementation, which is also very young and immature, it's the best possible
It isn't
HN is not really a community, it's a platform run by a commercial entity, with (legit) interests
Imagine if HN was just a node of a larger federated network
They could decide what to post on their node(s) and which comments to remove
I could run my instance and subscribe to their feed or their same source feeds and make different choices
People could share blocklists, whitelists, favourites, ratings and everything else and decide what to use and what not
HN would still be popular, but other nodes could benefit from having more freedom or making different choices
Now HN (and every other UGC out there) is an all or nothing experience
Facebook is facing an ad boycott because they can't moderate the platform the way corporations want, it means advertisers are the ones who ultimately decide which content is valuable and which is not, sometimes it can coincide with what users want, but more often than not it doesn't.
But if we produce the content (like this conversation we're having) we should have control over it, and be able to reproduce it on a instance we control and continue it ad libitum even when HN decides our karma doesn't allow more than a few comments a day or one of us is shadow banned for reasons completely unrelated to what we are discussing right now or because it looks like spam to them or any other reason they think it needs moderation.
It's their right if the content is free for someone else to pick up and they are not responsible for what happens on other nodes.
It should be part of giving back to the community, you generate content for us, we moderate it like a DJ selects music for the listeners, but you can make your own playlists if you want to, because we don't make the music, we just mix it.
Nobody said HN should not moderate their public instance, they have people to respond to, it simply shouldn't be the only instance
If I had a feed of every comment and every link posted, I could read them and make my own rules
Now I can't
Now combine the above with the fact that i'm using a ~23" 1366x768 monitor, the tendency of pretty much every site out there to use the window width as a means to differentiate between mobile and desktop sites and the stupid trend to use ginormous font sizes everywhere and you get an idea of how much i like browsing many sites out there (at least HN and old Reddit is perfectly fine). Well, i'm thankful that browsers have a zoom option at least, many of the sites out there are only usable at a 70-80% zoom for me.
But yeah, last time i had my browser maximized all the time was when i had a 4:3 monitor.
It's time to upgrade.
This is a brand new monitor i bought some months ago (late 2019) and the cost was much bigger than 5 dollars. In fact it was the most expensive VA monitor at this resolution (i avoid IPS because i actually want to be able to see dark colors and contrast and every single IPS monitor i've used, regardless of resolution, is garbage when it comes to that with the awful backlight glow), it has a ton of inputs at the back, relatively fast response time (for VA), etc. It is one of the best monitors i ever had.
The resolution was something i explicitly opted for, partly because at the time i had an APU-based system that i wanted to game on and i didn't want the blurry mess that a higher resolution would have and partly because 1366x768 on a monitor (as opposed to laptop) makes for very sharp icons, fonts (after you disable antialiasing) for everything (as opposed to using a hidpi monitor where some apps look crisp and others look either too tiny or blurred from scaling). Also as a (very high) bonus, it looks great when playing older games that often use 1024x768 as a resolution since i have 1:1 mapping there.
Finally 1366x768 is currently by far the most common resolution on PCs (mainly thanks to laptops, but desktops use it too - see mine) according to statcounter and the second most common on gaming PCs according to Steam, so it isn't something you'd only find in obscure old PCs, it is as mainstream as it gets.
How would you differentiate them? At least with the width you can use css media queries so no Javascript is needed.
Not sure, i'm not into web development, i just see using the window width as the wrong way. I keep my window down to that size even when i'm using monitors with larger resolutions (1080p or 1440p), it is a bad idea to assume window width == monitor resolution == device type.
Although in the case of Reddit the old design isn't perfect either, because if the browser window is narrow enough it'll have a bug where you can shift the whole website out of the visible area by writing a long line in a comment.
To be clear, I know this is not a trivial thing, but when UI designers don't know how to handle certain viewport sizes they should rather just let the browser's scrollbars do the job they've been doing fine for decades.
That said, I have done a fair bit of googling and for various reasons, which would be too much of a digression to go into, have found most of those kinds of resources unsatisfying (e.g. the idea that differences are only skin deep is trivially refutable by racists). By possible coincidence I've already looked at most of the resources you linked (e.g. Sapiens and Uncle Tom's Cabin) and the HBDers still make a more convincing case. And I think this is mostly because while the HBDers can easily read the arguments of anti-racists and come up with counters, anti-racists are not even aware of the content of HBDer stuff and so cannot argue against it.
I think the censorship of racist thought (and other outside-Overton-Window thought) has indirectly lead to anti-racist argumentation weakening due to lack of understanding of what their opponents actually think and argue.
Look closely, and you will find inconsistencies in these arguments. Oh, sure there are plenty of them but none of them seems to really hold up to scrutiny. Few will cite scientific studies (some will go as far as saying that science is censored so you shouldn’t trust it which is an obvious red flag for someone making shit up), and ones that do often misinterpret or misquote it. If you’d like we can try it out: find the best written argument for any of these points of view and we can together break down exactly where the lies and fabrications are.
According to steam 10.9% of users are running at that resolution. Only 4% are running at worse and 85% are running at higher resolution mostly at 1080p at a whopping 65%. Calling it the second most common is true but deceptive is it just means that its so old that there are so many different better choices that people are spread out over the many and varied better choices.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
>i didn't want the blurry mess that a higher resolution would have
https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/285860-720p-looks-bad-o...
If you mean that your apu is so weak that it can't do more than 720p and this would look bad at 1080p you are correct but that seems like a uniquely bad choice given that one would logically want to either get an actual gpu or give up on gaming and get a screen worth using instead of picking a compromise that is the worst of both worlds.
Regarding scalling 800x600 scales evenly to a 1920x1200 with black bars on the sides. 1152×900 scales to 1600x900 in the same fashion. You can also run the game in a window and avoid having to match it up evenly.
>1366x768 on a monitor (as opposed to laptop) makes for very sharp icons, fonts (after you disable antialiasing) for everything (as opposed to using a hidpi monitor where some apps look crisp and others look either too tiny or blurred from scaling).
I think your eyesight is bad.
Your PPI: 68 Common Resolution for your screen size: 95 Best in class: 191
Which is why right after the part you quoted and apparently ignored, i wrote "and the second most common on gaming PCs according to Steam". Gaming PCs are more likely to have higher resolution, but not every PC is a gaming PC. Statcounter.com has 1366x768 above 1920x1080.
Also 10.9% of Steam's user is still around 10 million active users, which is a lot of people.
> but that seems like a uniquely bad choice
That is your opinion, i find it a great choice and i like my monitor.
> given that one would logically want to either get an actual gpu
I have an actual GPU nowadays.
> or give up on gaming
I do not think you are in position to tell anyone give up anything.
> and get a screen worth using
I find my monitor worth using.
> instead of picking a compromise that is the worst of both worlds.
That is your opinion that i disagree with.
> Regarding scalling 800x600 scales evenly to a 1920x1200 with black bars on the sides.
1920x1200 is not 16:9 which will cause either black bars or stretched UIs on actually new titles and videos, i wouldn't personally buy a non-16:9 monitor these days. Also 800x600 looks fine on my 1366x768 monitor centered (even if a bit smaller image) with 1:1 pixels.
> 1152×900 scales to 1600x900 in the same fashion.
Pretty much no game where you have to use fixed resolutions (mostly 2D games) uses 1152x900. Earlier 3D games work at 1366x768 by centering 1024x768 but almost all of them have workarounds to work at higher 4:3 resolutions (when i used a 1920x1080 monitor i often ran older 3D games at 1440x1080).
> You can also run the game in a window and avoid having to match it up evenly.
If i had Windows 7 or using Linux, perhaps, but with Windows 8+ and the forced compositor that adds input lag i avoid running games in a window.
> I think your eyesight is bad.
Yes it is, which is why i sit close to the monitor so i can see stuff (and the reason i prefer smaller monitors). But i can clearly see the pixels, which is what i mean with "sharp" here.
> Best in class: 191
Subjective and it has all the issues with scaling and blurring i mentioned in my last message.
That said, it would be rude to ignore the effort you've made, so:
The main actionable things the HBDers I've spoken to want include no longer automatically treating mismatches between demographics in employment, prison, etc as a problem and introducing testing for those coming emmigrating into their country.
Also, there is a weakness in testing, namely that even racialists think things like intelligence are partly non-shared environment, so if you set a lower bar filter from a population with lower average IQ, then while the people you get will meet your threshhold, their children would often not (assuming this supposed genetic difference exists), which is relevant to immigration rules.
So are we going to kick out in-group children from the country when their IQ scores aren't high enough? No? Then that is a a bad argument.
Also, I have been trying to avoid the whole debate on what IQ test actually measure...
The article is perhaps extreme and overly performative, but I think the central idea of "races" not surviving the near-future is a good one.
If race realism is correct then job quotas, immigration and education policy will cause a fair few problems, and if it's wrong then the very large amounts of suffering enduring by some ethnic minorities will be fixable.
So while this is far from the most important issue (that goes to things like ageing, possible dysgenic trends and the possibility of true AI), it's still pretty important by the standards of modern policy debates.
http://nathancofnas.com/comments-on-my-rationalwiki-page/
and
https://medium.com/@NoahCarl/some-comments-on-the-rationalwi...
Frequently found are lies, deliberate misrepresentation, mocking, bullying.
Would you mind if I flagged your post?
White supremacists might say they want a meritocracy, but most/all of them actually don't. They just want to create filters slightly more subtle than "no X allowed" signs for their establishments.
As I mentioned, if you are going to test, it needs to be fair and accurate, or else it isn't useful. If you want chess champions, you don't hold a quiz on trivia, you stage a chess competition.
It seems like you and the word meritocracy have some issues. I never brought it up and frankly it has nothing to do with my argument. You inserted it into the conversation, then immediately played victim. I can’t tell if you are trolling or legitimately can’t figure out what we are talking about here so trying to switch the subject to your own grievance, but in either case, please stop.
