5 ms·

why are you "split" on having a "complete free speech zone"?

by slamdance 9y ago

jackmott 9y ago
because so many people are horrible
- otakucode 9y ago
  That would be a problem if it wasn't trivially easy to block them. Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them. That's the only way their opinion can get to you. Of course, that training doesn't have to be conscious and a great many people have inadvertently trained themselves to be sensitive to the opinions of horrible people... but no one in the universe can do anything about that except the people themselves. (And no this doesn't remove blame from those hurling insults. I'm talking about how to deal with it yourself. If you're worried about how it reflects on them, and wanting to assign blame, you're still in the wrong mindset. You can control only yourself. Even if you were able to control others, it would make you a horrendously bad person to do so.)
  - wmf 9y ago
    If you get hit by thousands of trolls at once it's not trivial to block them. Also, in some cases other people see the trolling about you even after you block it.
    - Karunamon 9y ago
      I find that "thousands of trolls" generally amounts to "thousands of members of the public who responded to the statement I shouted out into public". The character of those responses doesn't even enter into it. Don't get me wrong, I see why it's a pain in the ass to wind up with a popular comment even if the comments are mostly positive (and especially if they're not not), but I think this is better handled by UI and rate limiting on notifications rather than the alternatives. >in some cases other people see the trolling about you even after you block it. Pardon my arrogance, but I don't believe it's your place to determine how other people are allowed to talk about you even if you've excused yourself from the conversation. Down that path lay dragons. For a quick example why, sub out "you" and "your" in the previous sentence for the name of any unpopular politician.
      - pjc50 9y ago
        > It's not your place to determine how other people are allowed to talk about you even if you've excused yourself from the conversation Even if they're discussing whether you should be murdered?
        Karunamon 9y ago
        Was the reduction to the extreme really necessary? But okay, in that particular case, we have the ToS and laws regarding threatening behavior to fall back on. (And if I've unsubscribed from the conversation, I can't even see it anymore to be threatened by it) This problem does not require the extreme step of giving the subject of a conversation an unconditional veto on the conversation.
        pjc50 9y ago
        > Was the reduction to the extreme really necessary? Well, we started with discussion of genocide at the top of the thread, so it's kind of in context. > giving the subject of a conversation an unconditional veto on the conversation. Isn't this the other extreme?
        Karunamon 9y ago
        I may have misinterpreted your original comment. You said: Also, in some cases other people see the trolling about you even after you block it. ..which implies it's a negative that you don't have control over the (valueJudgmentOf: comments) about you after you've blocked the conversation. Was this incorrect?
        pjc50 9y ago
        Yes, but that's not the same as unconditional veto. This is basically the situation where you'd want to appeal to a third party human.
        9y ago
    - otakucode 9y ago
      That is a technology problem. We could easily solve it and probably should.
    - synicalx 9y ago
      Genuine question here, unless you're some sort of controversial public figure, how would you wind up attracting the attention of thousands of trolls?
      - wmf 9y ago
        It just takes one troll leader to single you out for harassment. Usually they attack famous people but not always.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    No, if people are going to try to push goatse or other shock images into my field of vision then I'm going to assign blame to them.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    >Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them. I don't buy this. If an internet forum like FaceBook, Twitter, Reddit, or whatever allows increasingly toxic behavior it eventually spills into the real world. For example, unmoderated forums facilitate doxing and incitement. What happens when an online harasser posts someone's home address, work address, and childrens' schools online with a call to real world violence? Should the victim just not care? What if online trolls set about smearing your professional or personal reputation? What if they decide to out you as gay to your parents or in a country where being gay is illegal? And don't tell me you can simply avoid going online, that isn't practical. Its precisely places like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc where marginalized people can find a supportive community. Also the internet should be for everyone, not just the most horrible, hard, and callous among us.
    - otakucode 9y ago
      Are we talking about online comments, or real-world harrassment? They are two different topics.
      - ch4s3 9y ago
        I'm talking about three things here, online harassment, how that activity can bleed into the real world, and how it's hard to tell when the second thing is beginning to happen. When does harassment slip into incitement for example? When does brigading by trolls shut down the online spaces of marginalized groups and make them less safe in real life for lack of a digital space to organize? Doxing again, is online harassment that may have nasty effects in the physical world, as does outing people based on their hidden minority status e.g. sexual orientation. Online and real world harassment aren't two different things is more or less my conclusion. They are different vectors for similar anti-social behavior. Would you defend someone following another person around every public space they visit screaming in their face as free speech and say the victim should toughen up? I doubt you would, and in fact it probably constitutes several crimes depending upon where you live. You could probably get a restraining order. Blocking online works similarly, but you have to do it site by site, alias by alias which doesn't scale. However, many of the tactics that trolls use scale rather well. So I think platforms have some responsibility here.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Each individual sock-puppet may be easy to block, but in aggregate they can overwhelm any attempts to constrain them individually. If you instead employ a whitelist, you miss out on conversations with people who tried to contact you but couldn't get through because you had no way to distinguish them from trolls. Offloading contact curation on each individual user doesn't solve the fundamental problem of identifying malicious users, it shoves it where someone else has to deal with it.
  - watwut 9y ago
    People by default care about what others think. It starts before kindergarten and is normal human psychology. No training is necessary of that. Neverthess, thinking the issue is just about insults is naive. The actual uncensored (especially anonymous) forum means hardcore bdsm porn posted for fun in the discussion about gardening or child raising. Or very disgusting pic of vivisection of animal. Or calls for another holocaust along with floorplan of your house. It also means most 'normal' people leave elsewhere due to above. Cause most people dont need above in their lives. Moreover, insults have meaning and it matters. If you ignore them, you are more likely to become target of bullying or mobbing. Because people parrot what they see and the more you allow it, the more people join on that to look like members of stringet group - to get popular. Or they simply feel it is socially ok. In the work, it affects your ability to push for ideas, to get leadership position, to get raise, to be trusted and given a bit more autonomy. All of that matters.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    > Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them. Humans are social animals. We care about what others think by default. Maybe you're an outlier, that's nice for you, but please don't think your experience is normal.
    - otakucode 9y ago
      That is true, and it is a problem that each and every single human being has had to deal with since the beginning of time. It was worse in the past, actually, because the people saying mean things to you were right there and could actually DO things to you in addition to simply espousing ideas or opinions you found offensive! That's why people always taught children to respond with "sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me." That's not an absolution of bullies, and people who interpret it that way are morons. It's a mantra. It is to teach a child that THEY have the control over whether those words hurt them, not the person saying them. By default, yes, we have mirror neurons and we are profoundly social. It evolved to perfectly fit our society of nomads travelling in tribes across a plentiful landscape, where anyone deigning to take control of others would simply be left behind as the tribe walks over the next hill. Wait, we don't LIVE in that type of society any longer. Which makes those evolutionary traits sub-optimal at best and downright dangerous at worst. I'd go with dangerous given the negative impact of cortisol and other stress hormones. Keeping them in check is a burden the modern world puts on us all.
- slamdance 9y ago
  while horrible people do exist, is that a reason to strip them of their ability to express their ideas? Take for example some of the worst - Vegan Cross-fitters. Now, while i see them as 'horrible' people, I also see them as misinformed. This does not stop me from eating bacon in front of them. There are a myriad of ways to avoid them and their ilk. Here's the rub - THEY probably think the same thing as me (ikr, man-bun cray-cray). So while you and others here are correct in that there are ignorant and horrible people out there that post goatse and blue waffles, racism, etc... and yes, it may interrupt your viewing/reading/research, that doesn't mean they should be stripped of their expression any more than you are for looking up amino acids or small engine repair. In my (admittedly low-tech experience) Generally, if you're looking for an answer or doing research or have a specific point to be online, you know what sites are legit, and which are not - and which ones allow anything-goes. That list ebbs and flows as you visit more or less often, just like you know what bars are too rowdy at night. you know because you went there, once. ONCE. <insert Johnny Dangerously line here>.
  - Pulcinella 9y ago
    “and yes, it may interrupt your viewing/reading/research,...” My eyeballs are not a “free speech zone.” No one has any right to show me whatever they want. Also, while I am not vegan, I would not describe vegans as horrible people on the level of bigots and nazis.
    - nnfy 9y ago
      >No one has any right to show me whatever they want. Sure, but you have no right to look my way and then complain that I'm forcing you to view something you consider offensive, in case that's what you're insinuating.
    - xtreme 9y ago
      You can close your eyes. Or cover your ears. Or close your browser tab.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    >you know what sites are legit Yes, the ones with moderators.
- 3131s 9y ago
  Censoring them doesn't make them go away. It only removes any hope of turning them into not-horrible people, and in the process many controversial but worthwhile ideas are filtered out. I think individuals should have the tools to disengage from trolls, harassment, spam, etc. (even if it's a catch-all "block everyone that my extended network has blocked" checkbox, or something similar) but I personally want the option to see the dregs of humanity and actively engage with those people.
  - FooHentai 9y ago
    The pollution analogy might be useful. Specifically: "The solution to pollution is dilution". Now, that mantra has been mostly rejected for environmental pollution because there's a far better option: Gather the pollutants, process/eliminate them, and work to eliminate the sources. Back in our context, hopefully the elimination of people with unsavoury viewpoints is not on the table. We must fundamentally agree that humans being what they are, free thought being what it is, these ideas will never be 'gone'. So accepting that, perhaps "the solution to pollution is dilution" applies. Apply it and we quickly see how censorship will be counter-productive - Those people, viewpoints and opinions don't go away and instead they concentrate in localized 'hot spots' (or cesspools), where they actually do far more intense and immediate damage. Obvious example: 4chan/8ch. Less obvious example: People's minds. By avoiding chasing these things into the shadows they remain open to challenge. While the mind of the person you're challenging might not be changed, when its out in the open all others that come past and read that interaction get to judge it on it's merits and make their own judgement call. Without that, folks end up in echo chambers. When newcomers get to those places, they are not exposed to a balance of viewpoints and the opinions they themselves form will tend to conform to the leanings of the echo chamber where they spend their time.
    - yongjik 9y ago
      > Apply it and we quickly see how censorship will be counter-productive - Those people, viewpoints and opinions don't go away and instead they concentrate in localized 'hot spots' (or cesspools), where they actually do far more intense and immediate damage. This is an often-repeated theory, but I'm not sure it actually works that way. For example, consider the recent discussion about Reddit's "censorship" of hate subs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15220305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15220305 When you openly engage some people, they decide that their idea is now "normal" and then demand the rest of the society to accommodate them. There's a reason why most scientists refrain from debating creationists.
- eighthnate 9y ago
  There are so many horrible people, so you want these horrible people to be moderators? If there are so many horrible people, wouldn't you be against censorship and moderation?
jonathankoren 9y ago
Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.[0] This experiment has been repeatedly played out over decades. Without moderation, it always degenerates into shitposting trolls. [0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Because I find I prefer the places on the web which pay for good moderation to the places on the web which are complete free speech zones (or as close as they can legally be.)

why are you "split" on having a "complete free speech zone"?

jackmott 9y ago

because so many people are horrible

otakucode 9y ago
That would be a problem if it wasn't trivially easy to block them. Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them. That's the only way their opinion can get to you. Of course, that training doesn't have to be conscious and a great many people have inadvertently trained themselves to be sensitive to the opinions of horrible people... but no one in the universe can do anything about that except the people themselves. (And no this doesn't remove blame from those hurling insults. I'm talking about how to deal with it yourself. If you're worried about how it reflects on them, and wanting to assign blame, you're still in the wrong mindset. You can control only yourself. Even if you were able to control others, it would make you a horrendously bad person to do so.)
- wmf 9y ago
  If you get hit by thousands of trolls at once it's not trivial to block them. Also, in some cases other people see the trolling about you even after you block it.
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    I find that "thousands of trolls" generally amounts to "thousands of members of the public who responded to the statement I shouted out into public". The character of those responses doesn't even enter into it. Don't get me wrong, I see why it's a pain in the ass to wind up with a popular comment even if the comments are mostly positive (and especially if they're not not), but I think this is better handled by UI and rate limiting on notifications rather than the alternatives. >in some cases other people see the trolling about you even after you block it. Pardon my arrogance, but I don't believe it's your place to determine how other people are allowed to talk about you even if you've excused yourself from the conversation. Down that path lay dragons. For a quick example why, sub out "you" and "your" in the previous sentence for the name of any unpopular politician.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      > It's not your place to determine how other people are allowed to talk about you even if you've excused yourself from the conversation Even if they're discussing whether you should be murdered?
      - Karunamon 9y ago
        Was the reduction to the extreme really necessary? But okay, in that particular case, we have the ToS and laws regarding threatening behavior to fall back on. (And if I've unsubscribed from the conversation, I can't even see it anymore to be threatened by it) This problem does not require the extreme step of giving the subject of a conversation an unconditional veto on the conversation.
        pjc50 9y ago
        > Was the reduction to the extreme really necessary? Well, we started with discussion of genocide at the top of the thread, so it's kind of in context. > giving the subject of a conversation an unconditional veto on the conversation. Isn't this the other extreme?
        Karunamon 9y ago
        I may have misinterpreted your original comment. You said: Also, in some cases other people see the trolling about you even after you block it. ..which implies it's a negative that you don't have control over the (valueJudgmentOf: comments) about you after you've blocked the conversation. Was this incorrect?
        pjc50 9y ago
        Yes, but that's not the same as unconditional veto. This is basically the situation where you'd want to appeal to a third party human.
        9y ago
  - otakucode 9y ago
    That is a technology problem. We could easily solve it and probably should.
  - synicalx 9y ago
    Genuine question here, unless you're some sort of controversial public figure, how would you wind up attracting the attention of thousands of trolls?
    - wmf 9y ago
      It just takes one troll leader to single you out for harassment. Usually they attack famous people but not always.
- pjc50 9y ago
  No, if people are going to try to push goatse or other shock images into my field of vision then I'm going to assign blame to them.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  >Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them. I don't buy this. If an internet forum like FaceBook, Twitter, Reddit, or whatever allows increasingly toxic behavior it eventually spills into the real world. For example, unmoderated forums facilitate doxing and incitement. What happens when an online harasser posts someone's home address, work address, and childrens' schools online with a call to real world violence? Should the victim just not care? What if online trolls set about smearing your professional or personal reputation? What if they decide to out you as gay to your parents or in a country where being gay is illegal? And don't tell me you can simply avoid going online, that isn't practical. Its precisely places like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc where marginalized people can find a supportive community. Also the internet should be for everyone, not just the most horrible, hard, and callous among us.
  - otakucode 9y ago
    Are we talking about online comments, or real-world harrassment? They are two different topics.
    - ch4s3 9y ago
      I'm talking about three things here, online harassment, how that activity can bleed into the real world, and how it's hard to tell when the second thing is beginning to happen. When does harassment slip into incitement for example? When does brigading by trolls shut down the online spaces of marginalized groups and make them less safe in real life for lack of a digital space to organize? Doxing again, is online harassment that may have nasty effects in the physical world, as does outing people based on their hidden minority status e.g. sexual orientation. Online and real world harassment aren't two different things is more or less my conclusion. They are different vectors for similar anti-social behavior. Would you defend someone following another person around every public space they visit screaming in their face as free speech and say the victim should toughen up? I doubt you would, and in fact it probably constitutes several crimes depending upon where you live. You could probably get a restraining order. Blocking online works similarly, but you have to do it site by site, alias by alias which doesn't scale. However, many of the tactics that trolls use scale rather well. So I think platforms have some responsibility here.
- yorwba 9y ago
  Each individual sock-puppet may be easy to block, but in aggregate they can overwhelm any attempts to constrain them individually. If you instead employ a whitelist, you miss out on conversations with people who tried to contact you but couldn't get through because you had no way to distinguish them from trolls. Offloading contact curation on each individual user doesn't solve the fundamental problem of identifying malicious users, it shoves it where someone else has to deal with it.
- watwut 9y ago
  People by default care about what others think. It starts before kindergarten and is normal human psychology. No training is necessary of that. Neverthess, thinking the issue is just about insults is naive. The actual uncensored (especially anonymous) forum means hardcore bdsm porn posted for fun in the discussion about gardening or child raising. Or very disgusting pic of vivisection of animal. Or calls for another holocaust along with floorplan of your house. It also means most 'normal' people leave elsewhere due to above. Cause most people dont need above in their lives. Moreover, insults have meaning and it matters. If you ignore them, you are more likely to become target of bullying or mobbing. Because people parrot what they see and the more you allow it, the more people join on that to look like members of stringet group - to get popular. Or they simply feel it is socially ok. In the work, it affects your ability to push for ideas, to get leadership position, to get raise, to be trusted and given a bit more autonomy. All of that matters.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them. Humans are social animals. We care about what others think by default. Maybe you're an outlier, that's nice for you, but please don't think your experience is normal.
  - otakucode 9y ago
    That is true, and it is a problem that each and every single human being has had to deal with since the beginning of time. It was worse in the past, actually, because the people saying mean things to you were right there and could actually DO things to you in addition to simply espousing ideas or opinions you found offensive! That's why people always taught children to respond with "sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me." That's not an absolution of bullies, and people who interpret it that way are morons. It's a mantra. It is to teach a child that THEY have the control over whether those words hurt them, not the person saying them. By default, yes, we have mirror neurons and we are profoundly social. It evolved to perfectly fit our society of nomads travelling in tribes across a plentiful landscape, where anyone deigning to take control of others would simply be left behind as the tribe walks over the next hill. Wait, we don't LIVE in that type of society any longer. Which makes those evolutionary traits sub-optimal at best and downright dangerous at worst. I'd go with dangerous given the negative impact of cortisol and other stress hormones. Keeping them in check is a burden the modern world puts on us all.
slamdance 9y ago
while horrible people do exist, is that a reason to strip them of their ability to express their ideas? Take for example some of the worst - Vegan Cross-fitters. Now, while i see them as 'horrible' people, I also see them as misinformed. This does not stop me from eating bacon in front of them. There are a myriad of ways to avoid them and their ilk. Here's the rub - THEY probably think the same thing as me (ikr, man-bun cray-cray). So while you and others here are correct in that there are ignorant and horrible people out there that post goatse and blue waffles, racism, etc... and yes, it may interrupt your viewing/reading/research, that doesn't mean they should be stripped of their expression any more than you are for looking up amino acids or small engine repair. In my (admittedly low-tech experience) Generally, if you're looking for an answer or doing research or have a specific point to be online, you know what sites are legit, and which are not - and which ones allow anything-goes. That list ebbs and flows as you visit more or less often, just like you know what bars are too rowdy at night. you know because you went there, once. ONCE. <insert Johnny Dangerously line here>.
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  “and yes, it may interrupt your viewing/reading/research,...” My eyeballs are not a “free speech zone.” No one has any right to show me whatever they want. Also, while I am not vegan, I would not describe vegans as horrible people on the level of bigots and nazis.
  - nnfy 9y ago
    >No one has any right to show me whatever they want. Sure, but you have no right to look my way and then complain that I'm forcing you to view something you consider offensive, in case that's what you're insinuating.
  - xtreme 9y ago
    You can close your eyes. Or cover your ears. Or close your browser tab.
- pjc50 9y ago
  >you know what sites are legit Yes, the ones with moderators.
3131s 9y ago
Censoring them doesn't make them go away. It only removes any hope of turning them into not-horrible people, and in the process many controversial but worthwhile ideas are filtered out. I think individuals should have the tools to disengage from trolls, harassment, spam, etc. (even if it's a catch-all "block everyone that my extended network has blocked" checkbox, or something similar) but I personally want the option to see the dregs of humanity and actively engage with those people.
- FooHentai 9y ago
  The pollution analogy might be useful. Specifically: "The solution to pollution is dilution". Now, that mantra has been mostly rejected for environmental pollution because there's a far better option: Gather the pollutants, process/eliminate them, and work to eliminate the sources. Back in our context, hopefully the elimination of people with unsavoury viewpoints is not on the table. We must fundamentally agree that humans being what they are, free thought being what it is, these ideas will never be 'gone'. So accepting that, perhaps "the solution to pollution is dilution" applies. Apply it and we quickly see how censorship will be counter-productive - Those people, viewpoints and opinions don't go away and instead they concentrate in localized 'hot spots' (or cesspools), where they actually do far more intense and immediate damage. Obvious example: 4chan/8ch. Less obvious example: People's minds. By avoiding chasing these things into the shadows they remain open to challenge. While the mind of the person you're challenging might not be changed, when its out in the open all others that come past and read that interaction get to judge it on it's merits and make their own judgement call. Without that, folks end up in echo chambers. When newcomers get to those places, they are not exposed to a balance of viewpoints and the opinions they themselves form will tend to conform to the leanings of the echo chamber where they spend their time.
  - yongjik 9y ago
    > Apply it and we quickly see how censorship will be counter-productive - Those people, viewpoints and opinions don't go away and instead they concentrate in localized 'hot spots' (or cesspools), where they actually do far more intense and immediate damage. This is an often-repeated theory, but I'm not sure it actually works that way. For example, consider the recent discussion about Reddit's "censorship" of hate subs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15220305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15220305 When you openly engage some people, they decide that their idea is now "normal" and then demand the rest of the society to accommodate them. There's a reason why most scientists refrain from debating creationists.
eighthnate 9y ago
There are so many horrible people, so you want these horrible people to be moderators? If there are so many horrible people, wouldn't you be against censorship and moderation?

jonathankoren 9y ago

Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.[0] This experiment has been repeatedly played out over decades. Without moderation, it always degenerates into shitposting trolls. [0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

Because I find I prefer the places on the web which pay for good moderation to the places on the web which are complete free speech zones (or as close as they can legally be.)