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Many people want safe spaces not just far left movements. Do you think I want to go to a news site and the first thing I see is a post about white power? Freedo

Many people want safe spaces not just far left movements. Do you think I want to go to a news site and the first thing I see is a post about white power? Freedom of speech is very hard to do without offending people which I imagine is better off being solved technically.

orionblastar 10y ago
Problem is if we censor even one group then it is not free speech. I don't like racists or any other hate group. Some SJWs/Feminist attack men like the Twitter hashtag #killallmen and it does not get censored. That's sexist no matter what gender does it. There are technically solutions for it, like spam filtering, they can use racist words to filter online posts and hide them so nobody but the post that made them can see them, etc. Even like HN have a flag option to flag suspected posts. If you look at civil rights, it has equality for all races, genders, color of skin, etc. We have equality, but why does it not work? Yeah I don't want to go to a news site and read a post about white power either. I'd respond to them that it isn't my viewpoint, I believe in equality. Which would make them angry and post back attacking me. So news media companies have editors that control what stories they post, but it may or may not be a true story. It may be written for ratings to get more advertisers.
- majewsky 10y ago
  While we're talking about technical solutions, I would like to tell you the story of the "Trolldrossel" (German for "troll throttle"). German hacker culture has a prominent pundit called Fefe [1], whose blog [2] is probably one of the most frequented blogs in Germany. He digs up interesting news items and offers light-hearted political and technological commentary, but he does not have a comment section. A few years back, Linus Neumann [3] built a version of Fefe's Blog [4] with a comment section, originally as an April Fool's joke IIRC. There was no moderation at all, and naturally, all the worst commenters flocked to it. They left it running because, as it turned out, the comment sections on the blogs where Linus contributed were now much more civilised. A few years into the project, they realized that they couldn't run the site without any moderation, but with no intent to monetize it in any way, they could not rely on manual moderation. Instead, Linus invented the "Trolldrossel": He modified the captcha such that it would randomly reject the correct solution, with the probability correlated to the badness of the comment. So if you wanted to post a civilized comment, you would only have to solve one captcha. But if your comment included racist keywords, you would have to retry 5-10 times. That method proved surprisingly successful in deterring the worst trolls, but the comment sections were still horrible. At least, they got a nice talk [4] out of it, including the interesting finding that the quality of a comment can be predicted very well by its compression ratio. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_von_Leitner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_von_Leitner [2] https://blog.fefe.de/ https://blog.fefe.de/ [3] one of the speakers of the Chaos Computer Club; see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Neumann https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Neumann [4] http::/blog.refefe.de (now defunct, but you can get a glimpse at http://realternativlos.org/31/; http://realternativlos.org/31/; the site now contains background information about the project, unfortunately only in German)

orionblastar 10y ago

Problem is if we censor even one group then it is not free speech. I don't like racists or any other hate group. Some SJWs/Feminist attack men like the Twitter hashtag #killallmen and it does not get censored. That's sexist no matter what gender does it. There are technically solutions for it, like spam filtering, they can use racist words to filter online posts and hide them so nobody but the post that made them can see them, etc. Even like HN have a flag option to flag suspected posts. If you look at civil rights, it has equality for all races, genders, color of skin, etc. We have equality, but why does it not work? Yeah I don't want to go to a news site and read a post about white power either. I'd respond to them that it isn't my viewpoint, I believe in equality. Which would make them angry and post back attacking me. So news media companies have editors that control what stories they post, but it may or may not be a true story. It may be written for ratings to get more advertisers.

majewsky 10y ago
While we're talking about technical solutions, I would like to tell you the story of the "Trolldrossel" (German for "troll throttle"). German hacker culture has a prominent pundit called Fefe [1], whose blog [2] is probably one of the most frequented blogs in Germany. He digs up interesting news items and offers light-hearted political and technological commentary, but he does not have a comment section. A few years back, Linus Neumann [3] built a version of Fefe's Blog [4] with a comment section, originally as an April Fool's joke IIRC. There was no moderation at all, and naturally, all the worst commenters flocked to it. They left it running because, as it turned out, the comment sections on the blogs where Linus contributed were now much more civilised. A few years into the project, they realized that they couldn't run the site without any moderation, but with no intent to monetize it in any way, they could not rely on manual moderation. Instead, Linus invented the "Trolldrossel": He modified the captcha such that it would randomly reject the correct solution, with the probability correlated to the badness of the comment. So if you wanted to post a civilized comment, you would only have to solve one captcha. But if your comment included racist keywords, you would have to retry 5-10 times. That method proved surprisingly successful in deterring the worst trolls, but the comment sections were still horrible. At least, they got a nice talk [4] out of it, including the interesting finding that the quality of a comment can be predicted very well by its compression ratio. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_von_Leitner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_von_Leitner [2] https://blog.fefe.de/ https://blog.fefe.de/ [3] one of the speakers of the Chaos Computer Club; see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Neumann https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Neumann [4] http::/blog.refefe.de (now defunct, but you can get a glimpse at http://realternativlos.org/31/; http://realternativlos.org/31/; the site now contains background information about the project, unfortunately only in German)