This only creates that same echo chamber effect we are trying to avoid.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

The first part is about politics, if you only care about the tech part, you can jump to the following headlines:

- Encrypted clients

- Protocol extraction and unauthorized clients

- The secure personal server

- Technology is hard, actually

https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

Well, that's a nice thought, but the goal of deplatforming is to remove somebody entirely. Nobody was forced to follow Trump on twitter - he had tens of millions of voluntary followers. If your goal is to get rid of Donald Trump, you have to centralize the decision.

Moderating social media, and the internet is in fact, doable, and absolutely necessary. This has nothing to do with "censorship".

The debate is actually easily settled if you understand what is happening with free speech online.

What typically happens in conspiracy-circles, is that people are radicalized because the disinformation is simply not challenged. It may be that a few users will dispute various claims, but their valuable, fact-based input, is typically drowned in a flood of spam, personal attacks, and claims unrelated to the claims that are being discussed in a given forum- or comment thread.

The problem with "unmoderated free speech" is that informationterrorists can abuse "free speech" to repeat the same disputed claims over and over, without ever addressing the fact that their claims have been disproven. This is also what I would label as "flooding the discussion" or "drowning the facts"; it is so effective that everyone who conducts themselves properly and respectfully are drowned in this flood of disinformation; this actually results in a "suppression" of free speech. When only one side is really heard, then we effectively do not have free speech.

Instead, what we have is a conversation that is dominated and suppressed by a few bullies that are shouting the loudest.

In addition, you would really hate to have governments influence the fact-checking processes on social media platforms, since governments have ultimate power, they are also the largest threat to free speech. Ideally fact-checking should be done 100% transparently by independent fact-checkers, and the facts that lead to a conclusion has to be tediously and transparently documented so that everyone can trust the processes. People who think the conclusion of a fact-check is inaccurate should take it up with the relevant fact-checkers, or possibly take it through the courts.

This "ideal" of "unmoderated free speech" has never really worked. It did not work in the real world, and surely will not work on the internet. The problem with this idea is that anti-social individuals will just try to control the narrative by spamming or repeating disproven claims (shouting), making new false claims, pushing disproven conspiracy theories. Etc.

A common technique I see used by malicious sources, is to release one claim, have people debate- and disprove it, only to release another, unrelated, claim without ever acknowledging the fact that their first claim was false. The result is that even old and disproven claims are circulating in an endless loop. They use this technique continuously with countless of subjects, both old and new — you would think that people will eventually reject claims made by known informationterrorists, due to their lack of credibility and history of publishing falsehoods, but that does not seem to be the case.

I am not a fan of banning people permanently from social media, as it just seems too merciless — there has to be ways to get un-banned — but, as a minimum, we should have fact-checking on profiles with large followings; and of course, groups and profiles used primarily to spread disinformation should be deleted.

To me this sounds something like "less walmart, more supply chains, warehouses, and storefronts." I agree in spirit, but it's the reverse of how capitalism usually works. The few giant platforms were built off the work of people who built their own interfaces, filters, and additional services. Why would we expect new/improved protocols (crypto or otherwise) to be any different?

NO: building protocols or decentralized networks, or anything really isn't going to solve the hate-speech/censorship problem.

This. Is. A. Culture. Problem.

The hate-speech/censorship problem exists everywhere. If you can publish somewhere, you can publish hate/spam. And if there is hate and/or spam, you need to censor. That's it. The very fact of publishing is the problem. In fact the only true way of solving the problem is to prevent people from publishing stuff.

The internet from the 90s didn't solve that problem. It just wasn't a problem so much at the time. Mastodon is certainly not solving that problem. Email, IRC, Usenet, BBses, etc. don't even address the problem...

Now, the real question is why do people get so worked up? And how can we shift the culture away from this partisan shithole we're in now?

Certainly not for me to answer that question. It maybe because people are poor, it may be because people lack some sense of purpose, it may be because of opioids, or video games, or because of vaccines and Gwyneth Paltrow. I honestly don't have a clue.

But stop making it about platforms vs decentralized crap.

It was summer of 2019 when the vast majority of those who are most 'plugged in' realized we're going to need a new censorship-resistant web, after the Vox Adpocolypse and other totalitarian and dictatorial over-reach by BigTech, which has been escalating steadily since then, culminating even with specific stories being blacked out (by cancelling people, and companies) and leading to a level of election interference that would've simply been impossible not many years ago. Committed by not just BigTech, but by M5M also.

Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter Laptop on election day.

(Full Disclosure: I'm the developer of Quanta.wiki, a new Fediverse App)

Of stories you could have presented to support your narrative without concern for the fact that they have no basis in reality? Sure.

But it's the concrete example you chose. If there was a real problem, you'd think it wouldn't be hard for you to cite a real example rather than an unsourced, invented, weirdly specific claim (not “a majority” or “a large majority” but “68%”) that is readily shown to be completely in opposition to the facts.

Also possibly the difference in sheer volume of content and people. It's much easier to moderate when you have at most a few dozen people discussing a given topic. HN is dealing with thousands of people who sometimes, during really heated discussions like the GameStop ones, post literally at the same time and make more content than a single moderator or even a team of moderators is capable of reviewing, even with community help in form of reports or flags.

Also, people are being excluded who have never called for violence. What "violent insurrection" was Discord suppressing by /r/WallStreetBets?

On the contrary. In most cases, it is imperative that illegal speech remain on online platforms. It's bad enough that governments censor criticism, alternative viewpoints (including ones we may abhor), and leaked information using the police, the judicial and prison systems, and their close ties with large media companies.

> Disliked speech is not illegal speech

Not so. There exist all of:

* Well-liked, illegal speech

* Disliked illegal speech

* Well-liked, legal speech

* Disliked legal speech

It seems like you're assuming the law, everywhere, is just and fair and should be not just followed but upheld.

> our first amendment

Most people don't live in the US, you know. In fact, less than 5% of people do. Not that I would agree with you had I lived there, but online content is not a US-local affair.

---

It looks like there are two ways this can happen: 1) transformation and 2) migration.

1. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: keep adding proprietary bits on top of the protocol until everyone's using what is essentially a proprietary platform.

2. A full migration. This is what happened to IM platforms that were once built atop Jabber/XMPP, like Google Talk.

I think the best way to keep this from happening is to make the open protocol robust enough to cover others' needs, and to get a large user base using different compliant client/server implementations to connect with each other. This is what's keeping Google's grip on email from growing more than it already has, and what prevented Microsoft from doing an EEE on the Web through Internet Explorer.

When diversity drops, an open platform can grow closed and allow domestication. Independent email providers must reckon with Google's spam filters, and non-Chromium browsers (Gecko-based, and to a lesser extend, Webkit-based browsers) are often treated as second-class citizens.

I might expand this into a follow-up article. While this article was an attempt at raising awareness and getting people to change their decision-making process when choosing platforms, my next article could be a call to action in which I encourage technical users to try clients/servers outside the mainstream and recommend good ones to their friends/families.

Thanks for your feedback, and for possibly inspiring my next post.

The shift in screen size is an interesting one. The technology influences the content and even the way we think. It's not a passive element.

Your someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet counter is that, no, it is half empty? Thanks for the contribution.

The risks are overblown, and so its ok to create places with decentralized freer speech.

Firstly- I removed the parts where you stated that this is like the phone network.

Phone calls are temporally limited, once you are done with a call its over. You can't hear that voice again, or relive that conversation, except through memory.

Text on a forum combines the worst of phone calls and books.

Not only is it easy to create and respond in real time (Like a phone, and unlike books or letters), but it is also persistent so people can read and participate in that moment of emotion repeatedly (like a phone call).

These are great and greatly bad depending on how they are used, but they are dramatically different from the way a phone call impacts human beings.

Which brings us to the second point - it isn't only the information, it is the emotion, or in combination the "content" of speech on forums/social media that matters.

Having actively tried to push for free speech and then managed speech, I can guarantee that without moderation, forums/social spaces collapse. They fall victim to our neurology, and the scale of people on it.

So you can't avoid the use of force here, the question is the amount of force being used, and whether it is commensurate to the specific event it is being used to mitigate.

The modern equivalent of the telephone network is the internet, specifically the cables, routers and switches that allow us to communicate.

The owners of said equipment are not liable if child pornography is send through their wires.

That is not a problem, we don’t close roads because child pornographers use them.

But the end point is a totally different matter.

But to the point: moderating the (tone of) the discussion, is essential for a good discussion. You can’t have the trolls interfering.

I think moderation and thus limiting free speech somewhat is actual fundamental essential for a good debate or discussion.

Maybe a better way of thinking about this is that “free speech” on the Internet is about decentralization of small communities even if many of those communities themselves skew authoritarian? If you are banned from a small private gathering, everyone’s practical speech rights remain in-tact. You aren’t banned from the larger system.

Of course, Usenet was mostly techies and there were no teams of data scientists optimizing for clicks.

Moderation isn't something that's changed. Forums and modern social media both moderate. They do it to varying degrees.

Social media moderation comes in multiple forms. First they will choose which posts people see in their feed. This is a form of moderation. It's easy to have topics and even people just not show up. What shows up is based around engagement and money.

There is also moderation about content. People can be labeled or removed from visibility.

Then there is banning where banning isn't on the topic but the whole system. And the systems are tied to other things (e.g., banning on FB impacts your Oculus ownership).

Old school forums were based on topics and were different systems. They were moderated, if they were, for that system. The moderation was typically around content you posted. They didn't control the flow or order you saw it in. It was the content.

When banning came up, it was just for that form. So, if someone is banned from a jeep owners forum they are just fine interacting in a forum on web design.

I say this to note that the way the technology is developed has an impact on the way people act.

For example, these days there are people who don't want to speak out on some topics because they are fearful they will be banned or negatively impacted globally.

I'm not suggesting how the technology should be built. I'm trying to point out how the system design impacts the way people think and behave. Older systems were designed differently and had a different impact. It's worth noting these things.

It's not hard because it needs to be hard; it's hard because no one has invested the time and money to make it easy.

Twitter is only used by 22% of Americans as of 2019 [1]. If Twitter banned me I wouldn't even know about it for several months because that's about how frequently I log in. It's important to a certain kind of "very online" person but from my POV it's as inessential as Pinterest or Twitch.

I think that Twitter's perceived importance has been exaggerated beyond its actual user numbers because the previous US President used it so heavily. It was also an easy, cheap, reliable way for other publishers to churn out content. "Trump Tweets Something -- We React" was a daily staple for TV and written publications for 4 years. But 78% of Americans get along just fine without using Twitter itself.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-...

Some of the sci.* hierachy was taken over by the mentally ill and crackpots. They aren't hateful or intentionally trolling with their insistent claims that they have discovered free energy, come up with new insights into the evolution of human language, etc., but the effect on fruitful discussion was much the same.

What I don’t like reading is “zinger” comments - stuff like “X is bad and people that think X is good are dumb”.

From what I’ve seen - these are the comments downvoted the most. I don’t dislike these comments because they cause me outrage, they just don’t make me feel the same way that well thought out comments - popular and unpopular - make me feel.

But they already have a giant global community. They now need to sustain it, that's a very different task and one better served by moderation. They are already being out-competed on how extreme a community can be by the various newcomers.

They are the incumbent now, with the incumbent's advantages. What remains to be seen is if they will move to take on the incumbent's responsibilities (which they have done here and there, and seem to be doing more of) or if they'll shirk it (which they did for far too long). In the long term they will make more money in a world that isn't on fire.

This is true. However, the part nobody wants to talk about is that it didn't just happen in Germany.

That's a very generous way of looking at it. In the West, I would say that it would be more accurate to look at it through the lens of the cold war, though. Communism and radicalism were to be prevented and so freedom of speech was necessarily curtailed. In the East, it was likewise curtailed, ostensibly to 'protect the youth' and 'prevent disinformation' but with more potential for immediate consequences.

>Is that ever in the public debate in the USA? Reasonable limits to free speech?

Sure. It's been debated a lot, actually. Laws have changed significantly over the last hundred years, almost entirely to the expansion of free speech side.

Their recollection matches my recollection of events.

> There has been a Senate inquiry with conclusions at odd with your recollections.

The results of that inquiry weren't released until 2020.

> The Mueller report came to conclusions at odd with your recollections.

That report wasn't released until 2019.

That means there were at least three years of unverified allegations, swarming around - espcially prevalent on social media - sans ban hammers, censorship, etc., etc.

Well, what "angry people would agree with" is a pretty strange basis for an argument, anyway...

>Trump would've gotten himself banned from any of the forums I hung out in from 2000 to now. Not for being conservative, for being an asshole.

And that would be neither here nor there, cause your forums are not so massive as to shape public opinion and influence elections and news.

In smaller, disperse and diverse, discussion platforms, you would be entitled to think that he should be banned for "being an asshole" and even ban him from your forums, while others would be entitled to ban others that say the same or worse things from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

When one side, in a major public-opinion-influencing service can ban a whole side of the political spectrum though, and even the sitting president, that's a problem.

It's actually analogous to election influencing - same as if 9 out of 10 channels in TV only carried the views from one party and not the other(s).

>That doesn't fit the captiol protest very well. Sudden? Decisive? Exercise of force?

Tell that to Brian Sicknick's[0] family.

Or did you miss the part where five people died and dozens were injured?

Or the smashed windows to force entry into the Capitol building, with some explicitly saying they were there to overturn the results of the election.

Let's see. A mob overpowers the assembled security without warning. That's sudden. Check.

An armed group stormed the Capitol, assaulted police and other folks, and by their own claims, wished to injure, take hostage and/or kill elected officials. Exercise of force. Check.

That same group did so, again based on their own claims, to overturn legally certified election results. Political motive. Check.

So please tell me, what doesn't fit the term "coup d'etat"? Or in this case, attempted coup d'etat?

Note that just because it didn't succeed doesn't change the facts or the intent.

If I walk into a bank and demand money, I'm still a bank robber even if I don't actually get any money. The analogy is fairly exact.

[0] https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/what-we-know-about-the-5-p...

As I said, I am not sure I buy that anyone with half a brain thought that a plan could work, but there seems to be some supporting evidence that something like this had been imagined by at the very least some of the people at the protest. How far into the Trump administration that might have gone, I don't know (or if went into it at all).

Had something like that happened, it would definitely have been a decisive, sudden show of force in politics.

If it's true, where is this evidence? It hasn't been on Fox. It hasn't been on OAN. It hasn't been on Newsmax. What's been presented has been uniformly debunked in ways that I find completely convincing. If this is as big as it's claimed to be, you don't shut up just because a judge says you don't have standing.

I haven't found a statistical summary, but I've just surveyed the status of all the cases on several neutral sites (ABA, Ballotpedia and others). I don't see how it is possible to draw any conclusion other than a deeply incompetent legal team with no convincing evidence failed to get a single in-place ruling that supports their wild claims.

I don't think I'm that hard-done-by. I'm referring to gray comments that don't seem to be particularly hostile, but are just, say, conservative (for example) in nature.

Perhaps I've forgotten, but I don't think I've complained about being downvoted. Today doesn't count. It's not a complaint, just an observation in a thread about free speech and censorship.

Thanks for the feedback.

If Obama, or any other President, had acted the way Trump did on Twitter, I'd have no issue with them being banned, either.

>No, I'd say that having an account to social platforms above some population reach level shouldn't be a "privilege" but a right

And who judges what is a "social platform" objectively? Because you've just granted the government the right to use its monopoly on force to remove fundamental rights like freedom of speech and association from the people running any website which meets some arbitrary "population reach" threshold.

To me, that's a lot scarier than platforms fact-checking statements or banning racists and people calling for violence or spreading misinformation.

>(that is, subject to due process/law, not up to the whims of the company).

Companies aren't anarchist collectives, they are subject to due process and the law. You just disagree with companies having the right to choose with whom they do business, and with Twitter and other big social media platforms being able to moderate content and ban people. But they're still doing so within the framework of a state and its laws.

This illustrates a common misconception about HN's propensity to vote one way or another. Your reply came less than two hours later, whereas the voting isn't complete for a while longer and so the score still has plenty of time to change as the audience continues to process it. This phenomenon (and related handwringing about "is HN reddit now?") can be observed as far back as 2009, and likely even further[1].

You might notice that the comment you replied to (which I would argue is actually demonstrably factually wrong in a few ways, and yet) recovered from its time in the depths beyond. This is likely owing to the fact that it was at least tactfully written, so replies could be written without having to work around the expletive content of the original comment; yours did not, arguably because it was not.

Anyway, this all sort of sidesteps the fact that comment karma was never intended to represent the value of a post or how worthy it is for distribution. It's more like a temperature gauge allowing you to perceive honestly how your comment makes others feel. And disagreement is a feeling too. In the words of 'pg, downvotes have always been used for disagreement.[2]

My first reply to you originally earned one downvote. And I figured it would, from at least one person, but I said it anyway because I believed it should be said. And you have that same ability too. Don't let the numbers get to your head. Just try and have normal conversations with people and the points take care of themselves. (As an example of this, I broke even on my original reply after some time, and gained more in my second reply.) It's rare that people with the ability to read a room and at least attempt to be agreeable in some way end up censured.

Thanks for coming back to this thread! I feel like this became a little more substantive than it was when it began.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721455

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347