8 ms·

Show HN: A decentralized index of banned users and where to find their content

74 points by Mattasher 8y ago

sverige 8y ago
This is a very timely service, given the current climate in which de-platforming is poised to accelerate.
- shawn 8y ago
  I’m crossing my fingers the hate machine will fizzle itself out. People have to get bored with outrage eventually, right?
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I thought this a while ago, but there are some people whose entire online identity revolves around sharing and propagating outrage. Which is to say I think that even if the things people get outraged about were to reduce, I think that people would in turn get outraged about smaller things.
    - krapp 8y ago
      >Which is to say I think that even if the things people get outraged about were to reduce, I think that people would in turn get outraged about smaller things. I think the cases for which that's true don't tend to correlate with the sort of content we're discussing. I don't think "outrage culture" is the reason people object to Alex Jones, as an example.
      - merpnderp 8y ago
        But crazy people like Alex Jones have always been around (not that I think he's crazy, only evilly making a mint of money taking advantage of the crazy and gullible). Outrage culture on the other hand is a fairly new phenomena associated with social media, and thrives due to socially reinforcing group building feigned outrage. If people who didn't like Alex Jones, simply ignored him, he'd sink back into the shadows and have a tiny fraction of his audience. But he's a handy foil for the outrage culture to get their outrage on.
        krapp 8y ago
        >If people who didn't like Alex Jones, simply ignored him, he'd sink back into the shadows and have a tiny fraction of his audience. He wouldn't necessarily, because the people who don't like him aren't the ones making him popular. And his message has real-world consequences which sometimes can't be simply ignored. Harassing the victims of mass shootings is going to become a thing now because he's convinced people that all of them are staged and the victims are crisis actors. >But he's a handy foil for the outrage culture to get their outrage on. We may simply be disagreeing on what constitutes outrage culture. To me, it's outrage for its own sake, outrage as identity politics and virtue signaling ... and there is certainly a lot of that on social media. But people also have legitimate and understandable reasons to be outraged at Alex Jones and people like him, which to me makes it no longer outrage culture, but just outrage.
        merpnderp 8y ago
        "...because the people who don't like him aren't the ones making him popular." He claims he's received over 5 million new subscriptions to his paid service since he was kicked off multiple social media sites. And even if he's lying about that, the Streisand effect is real. "But people also have legitimate and understandable reasons..." This is a guy who says lizard people from Mars are deeply involved in the ongoings of our politics. Being outraged that a (pretend) crazy person says something crazy seems like an incredibly useless and unproductive emotional response.
        krapp 8y ago
        Someone with an assault rifle showed up at a pizzeria because Alex Jones pushed Pizzagate. Sandy Hook victims are being harassed because Alex Jones convinced people they were just actors. He believes Jews did 9/11 and are secretly false-flagging the alt-right and white supremacist movements. If the only people he demonized were "lizard people from Mars," then yes, it would be silly to take him seriously, because there aren't any actual lizard people from Mars who could be victimized by that, but that isn't the case.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        Alex Jones is outrage culture, surely? His entire shtick was manufactured outrage about the government, "leftists" etc.
        krapp 8y ago
        His outrage may have been manufactured, but his listeners and detractors take him seriously, so I don't believe the reaction to his content counts as outrage culture.
        root_axis 8y ago
        Are you suggesting that the left doesn't take their outrage seriously?
        krapp 8y ago
        I... never even mentioned "the left." Or the right.
        root_axis 8y ago
        No, you did not explicitly mention it, but since you're stating that right-wing rhetoric (alex jones) "doesn't count" as outrage culture since the fans and critics take him seriously, there seems to be an unspoken implication that "actual" outrage culture (most often attributed to the left) does not similarly fall under the category of being taken seriously. I didn't want to make assumptions though so I asked.
        krapp 8y ago
        I'm stating that the reaction to Alex Jones is what doesn't count as outrage culture, specifically because people take him seriously. You could find the same phenomena at work on the other side of the spectrum but I'm lazy and CBA to equivocate. But my thesis is literally that once people take it seriously, it no longer becomes outrage culture, which is a politically neutral statement. Notwithstanding the implicit politically biased undertones which make "unspoken implications" difficult to avoid.
    - fipple 8y ago
      Isn’t that what’s already happened? We went from civil rights movements for blacks (>10%) to gays (<5%) to transgender (<1%).
      - pjc50 8y ago
        Just because - in fact especially because - someone is in the numerical minority doesn't make it right to abuse them.
        fipple 8y ago
        Sure, but it limits the amount of impact your movement can have. If you save black Jewish vegan disabled lesbians from oppression that’s admirable but ultimately only affects 10 people.
- nickthemagicman 8y ago
  Anger and Rightousness are powerful human emotions. Especially towards people deemed to be 'different' than your in-group. It basically is a fundamental part of our psyche. It's never going away.
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    It basically is a fundamental part of our psyche. It's never going away. What a piss-poor cop out argument this is. There are lots of impulsive, animalistic features still baked into our slightly more evolved reptilian brains, and it seems we haven't had much problem ironing out some of the worst of those impulses for net positive outcomes. Clubbing people from different tribes over the head with tree branches, for example-being one of them. Why, pray tell-is/should this be any different?
    - aeorgnoieang 8y ago
      People still murder each other fairly commonly. I imagine that's the sense in which similar bad human behaviors should be expected to persist indefinitely.
    - SuoDuanDao 8y ago
      Because labelling emotions toxic and unacceptable makes them come out in other ways. Try as they might, the Victorians could not get rid of 'licentiousness'.
    - nickthemagicman 8y ago
      Sorry. I'm just going by thousands of years of history.
hokumguru 8y ago
If this catches on, I could see it becoming a bastion for conservative voices who have found themselves at odds with Twitter and other social media platforms.
- cbasoftware 8y ago
  These aren't conservative voices, they're hate voices and should be banned. There's lots of legitimate conservative voices out there who are not being listened to. And, they're not banned either.
  - Mizza 8y ago
    I can't believe this needs to be stated, but the objection that normal people have to censorship is that we don't want a small handful of corporations and celebrity bullies to be the ones who get to decide what is or isn't "legitimate voice", as you put it.
    - codingdave 8y ago
      "normal people"? This is a discussion that has some serious points on both sides. I don't believe throwing judgments on the people who choose a side that differs from your own will be helpful.
      - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
        I think they meant "normal people" as in not a corporation or a celebrity
        close04 8y ago
        I tend to use regular people just to avoid this confusion :).
        DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
geoah 8y ago
I'm wondering if the service will eventually take sides. After all they are still serving content that people got banned for, so what happens if the content is actually illegal or is deemed offensive by the service? Will they get banned from it as well? Or would that content be removed?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Mattasher 8y ago
  The goal of the project is to be as decentralized as possible, and to make it as uncensorable as blockchain or bittorrent.
- joemaller1 8y ago
  Take sides or reveal bias? If this gets traction it will be fascinating to see whose claims of systematic oppression are validated.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I expect that if this ever becomes a metric that is looked at, it'll be gamed by "victims" getting themselves banned on purpose, and then crying foul.
- clarkmoody 8y ago
  "Illegal" is regime-specific. Discussing private property or opposing the dictator/emperor/king/president/pope in some countries has been punishable by death over the years. "Deemed offensive" by the service gets us back to exactly the same situation with the major social platforms now, so it's legitimate concern.
shawn 8y ago
This is especially relevant considering YouTube killed Terry’s videos. (Losetheos, templeos) He had literally hundreds. For reference, pewdiepie has around 2800, I think. I believe you can still access them through archive.org. I’ve thought it might be worthwhile creating a new YouTube account for terry, reupping all his videos, then give him the keys. But I bet that’d run afoul of YouTube’s tos.
- dmead 8y ago
  Terry is an insane person who would rant about people using racial slurs. Lets not be too kind because he also happens to be good at programming.
  - Raphmedia 8y ago
    He is not an "insane person". He is a good programmer who suffers from schizophrenia.
    - prions 8y ago
      That doesn't excuse his fans/followers encouraging and condoning his racist tirades
      - shawn 8y ago
        Not wanting his hundreds of programming videos to be whisked down the memory hole isn't condoning or encouraging racist tirades.
        dmead 8y ago
        So you're suggesting that archive.org should tell a half truth about the man?
        Raphmedia 8y ago
        How is someone personal life relevant to their work legacy? We all know what he suffers from, even his official website explains the situation. We do not need to archive every single symptom of it. The man deserves some privacy, especially when it's about a medical condition.
malvosenior 8y ago
Thank you for making this! I can't help but think the big platforms are shooting themselves in the foot by acting as censors and opening the door up to whole new categories of services (like this) that will ultimately replace them. Betting against decentralization seems like a long term losing strategy. Censoring content and promoting particular political viewpoints will accelerate the move away from centralization.
- Mattasher 8y ago
  I tend to agree about the shooting themselves in the foot part, the more these platforms decide to remove objectionable content, the more it looks like they are endorsing all content that hasn't yet been removed. Banning also encourages more users to try and get opposing viewpoints banned, not just downvoted or ignored.
finaliteration 8y ago
> Given a diverse enough population, your beliefs are almost certain to already be offensive to some sub group That is some top notch rationalization of hateful and racist speech and such a reductionist view of the issue. Let’s maybe take a step back and consider the reasons -why- someone may find a belief offensive rather than making some blanket statement about the issue. Let’s also consider that being offended by racism is not the same thing as being offended by someone calling you out for being racist.
- davidivadavid 8y ago
  It sounds like the sentence you're quoting is the one taking a step back, while you're reasoning from a very limited set of issues.
- shawn 8y ago
  Here’s an example. I think it’s not necessarily a good idea to encourage children to take puberty blockers, if they do any kind of irreversible effects. (I don’t know whether it’s reversible or not.) Is this hate speech? Some would say that it oppresses people who are just trying to raise their children how they see fit. It’s certainly ignorant, since I haven’t done the research to know how to feel. But that’s partly the point. It’s a tricky issue. But I’ve seen people get banned for less. A few decades ago, it wasn’t ok to say that gay people shouldn’t be shunned.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    "Encourage" is a tremendously loaded word here, since you're making it sound like someone's trying to get them to try heroin, while a more neutral presentation would be "receive medical treatment prescribed by doctor in response to their psychological distress". > oppresses people who are just trying to raise their children how they see fit. I usually see this phrase in the context of people opposed to bans on smacking children... (I don't think either counts as hate speech as written, BTW, but similar things phrased more vehemently in a different context might.)
- iamdave 8y ago
  The quote doesn't seem even slightly remarkably contentious or incendiary, but you've somehow managed to make some sort of value statement about what was said and immediately made the association that the writer is rationalizing hatred for stating a pretty tame quantitative opinion. You've also described the quote as a 'reductionist view of the issue'. What issue? The decentralized archiving of content that some in a specific group of a certain segment of online denizens have deemed objectionable? Isn't this just proving exactly the point of the quote you're taking issue with? Where is the rationalization? How did you come to this conclusion? I'm curious what that logic ladder may look like.
Joeboy 8y ago
Having read the comments here, I think it would be useful if we could see a realistic sample of the kind of content this would be hosting. My guess is that it would primarily end up being a repository of racial epithets, threats, doxxing, child pornography etc. I think the framing of this as being about opinions that are somewhere in the ballpark of the Overton window is maybe causing some commenters to present themselves more righteously than they might if they were mindful of what most actual banned content looks like.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Is it going to include people driven off the Internet by FOSTA/SESTA, for example, or is it just going to be the collection of alt-right types who are currently getting banned from major services?
  - Joeboy 8y ago
    If I'm understanding the intent correctly, there would be no authority capable of keeping any of those people off the service.
jasonmp85 8y ago
Cool. All the Nazis in one handy list
jasonmp85 8y ago
Also, I like the Indiana Jones logo where they couldn't even Do It Right enough to have the correct kind of hat.
kapauldo 8y ago
I love this.

74 points by Mattasher 8y ago

sverige 8y ago

This is a very timely service, given the current climate in which de-platforming is poised to accelerate.

shawn 8y ago
I’m crossing my fingers the hate machine will fizzle itself out. People have to get bored with outrage eventually, right?
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I thought this a while ago, but there are some people whose entire online identity revolves around sharing and propagating outrage. Which is to say I think that even if the things people get outraged about were to reduce, I think that people would in turn get outraged about smaller things.
  - krapp 8y ago
    >Which is to say I think that even if the things people get outraged about were to reduce, I think that people would in turn get outraged about smaller things. I think the cases for which that's true don't tend to correlate with the sort of content we're discussing. I don't think "outrage culture" is the reason people object to Alex Jones, as an example.
    - merpnderp 8y ago
      But crazy people like Alex Jones have always been around (not that I think he's crazy, only evilly making a mint of money taking advantage of the crazy and gullible). Outrage culture on the other hand is a fairly new phenomena associated with social media, and thrives due to socially reinforcing group building feigned outrage. If people who didn't like Alex Jones, simply ignored him, he'd sink back into the shadows and have a tiny fraction of his audience. But he's a handy foil for the outrage culture to get their outrage on.
      - krapp 8y ago
        >If people who didn't like Alex Jones, simply ignored him, he'd sink back into the shadows and have a tiny fraction of his audience. He wouldn't necessarily, because the people who don't like him aren't the ones making him popular. And his message has real-world consequences which sometimes can't be simply ignored. Harassing the victims of mass shootings is going to become a thing now because he's convinced people that all of them are staged and the victims are crisis actors. >But he's a handy foil for the outrage culture to get their outrage on. We may simply be disagreeing on what constitutes outrage culture. To me, it's outrage for its own sake, outrage as identity politics and virtue signaling ... and there is certainly a lot of that on social media. But people also have legitimate and understandable reasons to be outraged at Alex Jones and people like him, which to me makes it no longer outrage culture, but just outrage.
        merpnderp 8y ago
        "...because the people who don't like him aren't the ones making him popular." He claims he's received over 5 million new subscriptions to his paid service since he was kicked off multiple social media sites. And even if he's lying about that, the Streisand effect is real. "But people also have legitimate and understandable reasons..." This is a guy who says lizard people from Mars are deeply involved in the ongoings of our politics. Being outraged that a (pretend) crazy person says something crazy seems like an incredibly useless and unproductive emotional response.
        krapp 8y ago
        Someone with an assault rifle showed up at a pizzeria because Alex Jones pushed Pizzagate. Sandy Hook victims are being harassed because Alex Jones convinced people they were just actors. He believes Jews did 9/11 and are secretly false-flagging the alt-right and white supremacist movements. If the only people he demonized were "lizard people from Mars," then yes, it would be silly to take him seriously, because there aren't any actual lizard people from Mars who could be victimized by that, but that isn't the case.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Alex Jones is outrage culture, surely? His entire shtick was manufactured outrage about the government, "leftists" etc.
      - krapp 8y ago
        His outrage may have been manufactured, but his listeners and detractors take him seriously, so I don't believe the reaction to his content counts as outrage culture.
        root_axis 8y ago
        Are you suggesting that the left doesn't take their outrage seriously?
        krapp 8y ago
        I... never even mentioned "the left." Or the right.
        root_axis 8y ago
        No, you did not explicitly mention it, but since you're stating that right-wing rhetoric (alex jones) "doesn't count" as outrage culture since the fans and critics take him seriously, there seems to be an unspoken implication that "actual" outrage culture (most often attributed to the left) does not similarly fall under the category of being taken seriously. I didn't want to make assumptions though so I asked.
        krapp 8y ago
        I'm stating that the reaction to Alex Jones is what doesn't count as outrage culture, specifically because people take him seriously. You could find the same phenomena at work on the other side of the spectrum but I'm lazy and CBA to equivocate. But my thesis is literally that once people take it seriously, it no longer becomes outrage culture, which is a politically neutral statement. Notwithstanding the implicit politically biased undertones which make "unspoken implications" difficult to avoid.
  - fipple 8y ago
    Isn’t that what’s already happened? We went from civil rights movements for blacks (>10%) to gays (<5%) to transgender (<1%).
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Just because - in fact especially because - someone is in the numerical minority doesn't make it right to abuse them.
      - fipple 8y ago
        Sure, but it limits the amount of impact your movement can have. If you save black Jewish vegan disabled lesbians from oppression that’s admirable but ultimately only affects 10 people.
nickthemagicman 8y ago
Anger and Rightousness are powerful human emotions. Especially towards people deemed to be 'different' than your in-group. It basically is a fundamental part of our psyche. It's never going away.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  It basically is a fundamental part of our psyche. It's never going away. What a piss-poor cop out argument this is. There are lots of impulsive, animalistic features still baked into our slightly more evolved reptilian brains, and it seems we haven't had much problem ironing out some of the worst of those impulses for net positive outcomes. Clubbing people from different tribes over the head with tree branches, for example-being one of them. Why, pray tell-is/should this be any different?
  - aeorgnoieang 8y ago
    People still murder each other fairly commonly. I imagine that's the sense in which similar bad human behaviors should be expected to persist indefinitely.
  - SuoDuanDao 8y ago
    Because labelling emotions toxic and unacceptable makes them come out in other ways. Try as they might, the Victorians could not get rid of 'licentiousness'.
  - nickthemagicman 8y ago
    Sorry. I'm just going by thousands of years of history.

hokumguru 8y ago

If this catches on, I could see it becoming a bastion for conservative voices who have found themselves at odds with Twitter and other social media platforms.

cbasoftware 8y ago
These aren't conservative voices, they're hate voices and should be banned. There's lots of legitimate conservative voices out there who are not being listened to. And, they're not banned either.
- Mizza 8y ago
  I can't believe this needs to be stated, but the objection that normal people have to censorship is that we don't want a small handful of corporations and celebrity bullies to be the ones who get to decide what is or isn't "legitimate voice", as you put it.
  - codingdave 8y ago
    "normal people"? This is a discussion that has some serious points on both sides. I don't believe throwing judgments on the people who choose a side that differs from your own will be helpful.
    - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
      I think they meant "normal people" as in not a corporation or a celebrity
      - close04 8y ago
        I tend to use regular people just to avoid this confusion :).
        DoofusOfDeath 8y ago

geoah 8y ago

I'm wondering if the service will eventually take sides. After all they are still serving content that people got banned for, so what happens if the content is actually illegal or is deemed offensive by the service? Will they get banned from it as well? Or would that content be removed?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Mattasher 8y ago
The goal of the project is to be as decentralized as possible, and to make it as uncensorable as blockchain or bittorrent.
joemaller1 8y ago
Take sides or reveal bias? If this gets traction it will be fascinating to see whose claims of systematic oppression are validated.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I expect that if this ever becomes a metric that is looked at, it'll be gamed by "victims" getting themselves banned on purpose, and then crying foul.
clarkmoody 8y ago
"Illegal" is regime-specific. Discussing private property or opposing the dictator/emperor/king/president/pope in some countries has been punishable by death over the years. "Deemed offensive" by the service gets us back to exactly the same situation with the major social platforms now, so it's legitimate concern.

shawn 8y ago

This is especially relevant considering YouTube killed Terry’s videos. (Losetheos, templeos) He had literally hundreds. For reference, pewdiepie has around 2800, I think. I believe you can still access them through archive.org. I’ve thought it might be worthwhile creating a new YouTube account for terry, reupping all his videos, then give him the keys. But I bet that’d run afoul of YouTube’s tos.

dmead 8y ago
Terry is an insane person who would rant about people using racial slurs. Lets not be too kind because he also happens to be good at programming.
- Raphmedia 8y ago
  He is not an "insane person". He is a good programmer who suffers from schizophrenia.
  - prions 8y ago
    That doesn't excuse his fans/followers encouraging and condoning his racist tirades
    - shawn 8y ago
      Not wanting his hundreds of programming videos to be whisked down the memory hole isn't condoning or encouraging racist tirades.
      - dmead 8y ago
        So you're suggesting that archive.org should tell a half truth about the man?
        Raphmedia 8y ago
        How is someone personal life relevant to their work legacy? We all know what he suffers from, even his official website explains the situation. We do not need to archive every single symptom of it. The man deserves some privacy, especially when it's about a medical condition.

malvosenior 8y ago

Thank you for making this! I can't help but think the big platforms are shooting themselves in the foot by acting as censors and opening the door up to whole new categories of services (like this) that will ultimately replace them. Betting against decentralization seems like a long term losing strategy. Censoring content and promoting particular political viewpoints will accelerate the move away from centralization.

Mattasher 8y ago
I tend to agree about the shooting themselves in the foot part, the more these platforms decide to remove objectionable content, the more it looks like they are endorsing all content that hasn't yet been removed. Banning also encourages more users to try and get opposing viewpoints banned, not just downvoted or ignored.

finaliteration 8y ago

> Given a diverse enough population, your beliefs are almost certain to already be offensive to some sub group That is some top notch rationalization of hateful and racist speech and such a reductionist view of the issue. Let’s maybe take a step back and consider the reasons -why- someone may find a belief offensive rather than making some blanket statement about the issue. Let’s also consider that being offended by racism is not the same thing as being offended by someone calling you out for being racist.

davidivadavid 8y ago
It sounds like the sentence you're quoting is the one taking a step back, while you're reasoning from a very limited set of issues.
shawn 8y ago
Here’s an example. I think it’s not necessarily a good idea to encourage children to take puberty blockers, if they do any kind of irreversible effects. (I don’t know whether it’s reversible or not.) Is this hate speech? Some would say that it oppresses people who are just trying to raise their children how they see fit. It’s certainly ignorant, since I haven’t done the research to know how to feel. But that’s partly the point. It’s a tricky issue. But I’ve seen people get banned for less. A few decades ago, it wasn’t ok to say that gay people shouldn’t be shunned.
- pjc50 8y ago
  "Encourage" is a tremendously loaded word here, since you're making it sound like someone's trying to get them to try heroin, while a more neutral presentation would be "receive medical treatment prescribed by doctor in response to their psychological distress". > oppresses people who are just trying to raise their children how they see fit. I usually see this phrase in the context of people opposed to bans on smacking children... (I don't think either counts as hate speech as written, BTW, but similar things phrased more vehemently in a different context might.)
iamdave 8y ago
The quote doesn't seem even slightly remarkably contentious or incendiary, but you've somehow managed to make some sort of value statement about what was said and immediately made the association that the writer is rationalizing hatred for stating a pretty tame quantitative opinion. You've also described the quote as a 'reductionist view of the issue'. What issue? The decentralized archiving of content that some in a specific group of a certain segment of online denizens have deemed objectionable? Isn't this just proving exactly the point of the quote you're taking issue with? Where is the rationalization? How did you come to this conclusion? I'm curious what that logic ladder may look like.

Joeboy 8y ago

Having read the comments here, I think it would be useful if we could see a realistic sample of the kind of content this would be hosting. My guess is that it would primarily end up being a repository of racial epithets, threats, doxxing, child pornography etc. I think the framing of this as being about opinions that are somewhere in the ballpark of the Overton window is maybe causing some commenters to present themselves more righteously than they might if they were mindful of what most actual banned content looks like.

pjc50 8y ago
Is it going to include people driven off the Internet by FOSTA/SESTA, for example, or is it just going to be the collection of alt-right types who are currently getting banned from major services?
- Joeboy 8y ago
  If I'm understanding the intent correctly, there would be no authority capable of keeping any of those people off the service.

jasonmp85 8y ago

Cool. All the Nazis in one handy list

jasonmp85 8y ago

Also, I like the Indiana Jones logo where they couldn't even Do It Right enough to have the correct kind of hat.

kapauldo 8y ago

I love this.