7 ms·

Burning Digital Books and the Fight over Online Ideology

32 points by theNJR 8y ago

Causality1 8y ago
The quest for profit has resulted in companies giving us the ability to curate everything we see even when we think we're getting a random selection of the latest news. Every time we go online we remake the world in our own image, only reflecting ourselves. I'm tired of the constant stream of news stories designed to make me feel smugly correct or spark righteous fury. I'm tired of being told I'm right every moment of every day.
- adam12 8y ago
  You might not want hear it, but you are right.
- theNJR 8y ago
  So very well said. We need to rethink what social platforms can be. The power of connection across borders is amazing, but it's turned into funhouse mirrors.
  - m-p-3 8y ago
    I just want a most recent feed, not these algorithms that thinks they know better.
- IAmEveryone 8y ago
  A "random selection of the latest news" is neither well-defined, nor a useful concept: (1) A red car just passed outside my window. (2) Tensions in Kashmir are easing. Both statements are true. They weren't true five days ago. Therefore they are "news". I fail to see why it's the fault of "the quest for profit" when newspapers will tend to give the second news higher billing. Profit-driven (and also non-profit) publishers have a motive to publish stories that "people want to read", yes. But there's a difference between "want to read" and "feel-good news". I'm no fan of global warming, and yet the pesky newspaper I subscribe to insist on reminding me that it exists. Restaurants and supermarkets are just as, or even more, profit-driven. But that has not lead to a monopolisation of nutrition at the low quality end of the spectrum that appeals to our base instincts: McDonald's exists, just as tabloids do. But spinach or the New York Times steadfastly refuse to disappear.
  - msla 8y ago
    And even if you select for news which might affect a large portion of the world, you run into issues of which stories to present first, which ones to go in-depth on, and other issues of news judgment that any paper or TV station made. Back in the Old Days, newsrooms were full of people who debated what the news was, in terms of which stories to run, which ones were headlines, and which ones were below the fold on the second page. Those people were, let us be clear, straight White men who either were cis and hetero or were able to fake it well enough to have a professional career. Most of them were Christian, and if you go back far enough in some regions that effectively excludes Catholics. They were news judgment, in terms of the news sources which mattered. They were the gatekeepers. So we have different gatekeepers now. This is only deeply disturbing if you thought the gatekeepers never existed, or went away entirely.
- criddell 8y ago
  Maybe eventually news outlets will have enough information about you that they will figure out how to serve you better. I mostly use Apple News for reading news and after a few months of marking stories as good or bad, it's getting better and better at showing me stuff I actually want to see.
  - devoply 8y ago
    Yes the anti-vax stories are also on top of my lists. I know the elite rather have me seeing stories about how Iran is evil and needs to be liberated, but I prefer these stories. /s Maybe if everyone just shut up about everything we could all get some peace. Those who know don't say and those who say don't know.
    - lixtra 8y ago
      If you stop reading then you’ll live in a world where everyone shut up.
  - vanattab 8y ago
    >Maybe eventually news outlets will have enough information about you that they will figure out how to serve you better. They don't gather that information to "serve you better" they gather it "serve you up better"! They are going to use the information to grab the attention of your eyeballs for their own purposes not to better serve you. Remember if your not paying for the product you are the product.
    - lixtra 8y ago
      It totally depends on what you mark good and bad. If you mark shallow, screaming articles as bad and they continue serving them you’ll soon switch to another platform. It’s in your responsibility to use the tools wisely.
- epicureanideal 8y ago
  The thing I worry about is even if the news networks try to show us "opposing viewpoints" they'll curate those, alter them somehow, etc. Maybe it'll be used as an excuse to flood us with one particular view they happen to share...
- kayfox 8y ago
  I think one of the things we loose when we transitioned from newspapers to reading news online is the drive to condense information and curate what is reported for such a broad audience. I distinctly remember how my grandfathers, both of them, would not consider themselves done with the daily newspaper unless they read the first section, or typically for one of them, the whole paper. These days we selectivaly choose which articles to read, which to not read. We read what we enjoy or are passionate about, we don't read what depresses us, or conflicts with our worldview. From what I can see, this is leading to greatly warped worldviews all around. We feel like we are fully informed while only having seen one side of the issue, we then dismiss reporting from the other side or more and more, centrist or neutral reporting as driven by ideology as if what we are reading and hearing is not driven by ideology.
scandox 8y ago
> sets a scary president for alls voices that are other I can't read past this kind of error. It's a typo too far for an article that is asking me to take it seriously. Proofreading is "proof" that the author has taken care of both their language and their ideas.
- theNJR 8y ago
  Fixed. Thank you for holding me to a high standard, truly.
  - scandox 8y ago
    Oh good on you. I'll carry on from that point then.
    - scandox 8y ago
      Ok so while we're here: - preveriable -> proverbial - rediculuded -> ridiculed - bares -> bears - By unleashing a never-ending stream of fiction, masked a truth -> By unleashing a never-ending stream of fiction, masked as truth
      - theNJR 8y ago
        I really appreciate that. The fact that simple spellcheck catchable errors made it into the final piece is upsetting. I need to give my editor (aka my wife) more time with the final before pushing live.
      - gambler 8y ago
        We have AI that supposedly can "compose" articles, but there are no open-source grammar-aware spellcheckers. I love modern technology. And yes, this is one of the projects on my 1000-item todo list.
        theNJR 8y ago
        Have you ever tried Grammarly? I see them advertise on Hulu, not sure if its any good.
FutureSpec 8y ago
This reads like someone's college freshman essay. It's just a recap of existing knowledge, with no concrete call to action.
- 4RealFreedom 8y ago
  I enjoyed the article. I do not believe every article needs to include a call to action. Describing the situation can lead others to come up with ideas for solutions.
- gipp 8y ago
  I agree. It's a scattering of good (if not novel) observations about the issue, but there's just no through line connecting any of them. The last paragraph is phrased as though it follows logically from the preceding one, when it seems to make pretty much the opposite point.
jerf 8y ago
I am increasingly of the opinion that there's a case to be made that there simply is no positive way to jam more than a few dozen thousand people onto a single site, into a single community, with the hyperconnectivity implied by modern technology, without a problem. At some point, the community as a whole is going to have to take some stances on some things, and society can't afford to have those stances be writ so large. The governnment may very well come along someday and break up Facebook, but I bet it would be broken up into three or four pieces or something. I'd say it should be shattered, though. A new BabyBook shouldn't have more than 50,000-100,000 users in it. And that's still a single community starting out at what may very well be already the maximum size. Of all the places, it's the hardest sell here, because this is where Facebook's ideology comes from and it's hard for a lot of HN denizens to see much light of day between truth and Facebook's politics, but abstractly, there's no compelling reason to believe that everything labeled as bad and wrong by Facebook actually is wrong. The odds that all "conspiracy theories" are false approaches zero, honestly. The availability heuristic will bring the most obviously false ones to mind like "flat earth" and "moon landing hoax", but the HN gestalt believes plenty of conspiracy theories like companies conspiring to hold prices down or blocking research that shows negative side effects for pharmaceuticals, or honestly I could go on for quite a while here; there are many other things of a similar level of believability that are either getting blocked by Facebook now, or where the frontier of Facebook censorship is about to reach at its current pace, that simply don't flatter Facebook's political positions and choices. I think it ought to be OK for Facebook to make those decisions, because I'm serious about communities having to make calls about what it's going to accept. There's no way around it, it's as inevitable with community growth as gravity pulling a large body into a spherical shape. What's wrong with that is that we have small numbers of managers at Facebook making these decisions for the entire Internet, inevitably inflaming everything in the process. It should be a more distributed process. As for those who hope that there's some way to leverage Facebook's concentrated power to simply eliminate all the bad ideas, even if we stipulate that Facebook's aribtration of truth is in fact totally accurate and totally unbiased, a rather astonishing and frankly unbelievable accomplishment for an advertising company, you need to give that idea up now. History tends to show this sort of suppression just energizes those movements. Rather than deplatforming them by trying to deny them access to the Facebook of today, you need to deplatform them by destroying the entire platform that has that reach in the first place. You can't get rid of them, if for no other reason than there's a baseline of literal mental illness that isn't going away any time soon. You can't prevent them from speaking out. But you can make it so that they're in a corner of the Internet, because everyone's in some corner of the Internet somewhere. We kinda had that in the 200x's and late 1990s. It mostly worked.
cortesoft 8y ago
> But this is where it gets tricky; Every major scientific theory ends being wrong over time. This is just not true. Many scientific theories end up being wrong, but not all. Many are refined, and added to, but not all end up just being wrong.
- Jun8 8y ago
  We should keep posting this excellent rebuttal from Isaac Asimov to stamp out this misunderstanding: https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.ht...
  - theNJR 8y ago
    That was a great read!
    - lixtra 8y ago
      It’s kind of confusing if you adjust your article during a discussion whiteout marking it.
      - theNJR 8y ago
        Any suggestions for how to best do that? I like the idea of living documents (to a degree).
        lixtra 8y ago
        You can place an “edit” in front of your change and even link it to the comment that caused the change. That has the added benefit of giving credit. Of course not in front of each typo. Here: > Every major scientific theory ends up being wrong over time (edit: sort of). I agree that your already read-worthy text gains through interaction.
        theNJR 8y ago
jasode 8y ago
>It’s promoting diversity in its truest sense – a broad perspective on shared challenges. [...] To let three online platforms decide what’s real and who gets to speak, will almost certainly result in nothing good, or new. Too many essays about "free speech" focus on stating principles that feel good to read and agree with. However, the more difficult analysis is how to implement a true free speech platform. That's the puzzle nobody talks about: how to make a uncensorable free speech platform that's financially sustainable. If one does Ctrl+F in Robinson's essay to search for "advertisers" or "sponsors", those terms are not mentioned once. Youtube/Facebook/Twitter are funded by advertisers. Youtube isn't the arbiter of diverse topics, it's the advertisers. And indirectly, it's the mainstream viewers that arbitrate what's viewable because they threaten to boycott the advertisers. (Previous comment about this.[1]) If big advertisers like Proctor & Gamble, Coca Cola, etc want to stop paying for ads because the platforms host controversial topics, how does this utopian vision of free speech get funded? That never seems to be discussed. Some alternative funding possibilities: - pass a law that requires advertisers to pay for unsavory content (e.g. including Nazi, Alt-Right, beheadings, etc.) However, this type of radical law seems impossible to pass. - create a new communications platform that's funded by the government (e.g. the USA government?) that allows anything except for child pornography. This just shifts the problem and whatever government that runs the site will eventually start censoring particular topics they don't like. Also, if the website does not censor, it will devolve into a cesspool and mainstream audiences won't bother to log into it. This is an example "freedom of speech" eating its own tail because the big audiences voluntarily shun it. - a uncensorable blockchain publishing platform. I see no realistic projects that non-techies want to use. Mastodon instances are run (and funded) by volunteers and by its nature, it won't be the true free speech platform people are looking for. Let's discuss the challenge of realistic implementations instead of repeating the same complaints about popular websites closing off topics. They are beholden to advertisers and therefore making editorial decisions to maintain a viable business. Complaining about content filtering decisions driven by financial self-preservation isn't going to solve the problem. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18372005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18372005
- theNJR 8y ago
  I've long thought the answer is a social network you pay for. Overcoming the free big three, however, is a challenge I haven't found a way around yet.
IAmEveryone 8y ago
Does anyone believe we have gained more with this "democratisation" of publishing than we are losing to conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and populism? Because until ca. ten to twenty years ago, the "establishment" acted as de facto gatekeepers for the public discourse. And while that does strike me as a bad idea in principle, I really couldn't argue that they didn't do a far better job than today's cacophony. Sort of like presidential nominees: smoke-filled backrooms certainly are not perfect venues for decision-making. But they nominated Eisenhower and Roosevelt, while we can't find anyone better than you-know-who?
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  Which conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and populist ideas would you ban from being accessed by US civilians if you had the moral or legal power?
  - IAmEveryone 8y ago
    I wouldn't ban anything. What we need is a bit of trust in some institutions. There is a rather obvious difference in quality going from, say, The New England Journal of Medicine to http://thespians-against-government-mind-control.hoax http://thespians-against-government-mind-control.hoax. It is impossible for you to independently verify even a tiny fraction of what you read/hear on a daily basis. Therefore, you need proxies that can be trusted. These proxies can be evaluated by their performance over time, and there should be many, and they should compete for your trust. This is exactly how everybody is already operating, almost all the time: when your spouse asks to borrow your car, you will probably give it to them. Because they have a track record of giving it back, and a long-term interest that outweighs any momentary impulse to just sell it and go on vacation. If a stranger on the street asks the same, you will be more sceptical.
    - spaginal 8y ago
      That’s a utopian view though. Institutions that were trustworthy became untrustworthy over time because of their own current actions. Who is in charge of establishing truthiness? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchmen. The only logical and rational way to disseminate information in a free society is you put it all out there and let people make up their own damn minds. I know it doesn’t appeal to the control freak side that is scarily manifesting itself everywhere lately, but if our schools were more focused on education instead of politics, logic instead of propaganda, we wouldn’t need to control narratives, we could just entrust people to make their own decisions.
IAmEveryone 8y ago
I don't quite understand how the proposed "diversity of platforms" is supposed to help? Ending up with a "liberal facebook" and a separate "conservative facebook" seems like the worst possible outcome. It will just reinforce tribalism, and destroy any remaining resemblance of a commonly trusted source of truth. There will be two sets of economic indicators every quarter, and both will be wrong. At that point, political discussions will just be fan-fic. The root of the problem seems to be a large fraction of people opposed to either the existence, or at least the possibility to adjudicate, truth: "Some people say the earth is round(ish). Others say it's flat. Who am I to judge?"
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > Ending up with a "liberal facebook" and a separate "conservative facebook" seems like the worst possible outcome. Indeed. Which is why two is still the wrong number, and the right number has three or more digits.
jlkuester7 8y ago
It is interesting to consider how federated social networks (e.g. https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org) fit in here. They seem uniquely positioned to be able to thread the needle of broad inter-connectivity combined with more localized control.
AzzieElbab 8y ago
Personally I view given example of antivaxxing movement as a side effect of lacking research on rise of autism in kids. Muting these people is immoral and will backfire badly
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

32 points by theNJR 8y ago

The quest for profit has resulted in companies giving us the ability to curate everything we see even when we think we're getting a random selection of the latest news. Every time we go online we remake the world in our own image, only reflecting ourselves. I'm tired of the constant stream of news stories designed to make me feel smugly correct or spark righteous fury. I'm tired of being told I'm right every moment of every day.

adam12 8y ago
You might not want hear it, but you are right.
theNJR 8y ago
So very well said. We need to rethink what social platforms can be. The power of connection across borders is amazing, but it's turned into funhouse mirrors.
- m-p-3 8y ago
  I just want a most recent feed, not these algorithms that thinks they know better.
IAmEveryone 8y ago
A "random selection of the latest news" is neither well-defined, nor a useful concept: (1) A red car just passed outside my window. (2) Tensions in Kashmir are easing. Both statements are true. They weren't true five days ago. Therefore they are "news". I fail to see why it's the fault of "the quest for profit" when newspapers will tend to give the second news higher billing. Profit-driven (and also non-profit) publishers have a motive to publish stories that "people want to read", yes. But there's a difference between "want to read" and "feel-good news". I'm no fan of global warming, and yet the pesky newspaper I subscribe to insist on reminding me that it exists. Restaurants and supermarkets are just as, or even more, profit-driven. But that has not lead to a monopolisation of nutrition at the low quality end of the spectrum that appeals to our base instincts: McDonald's exists, just as tabloids do. But spinach or the New York Times steadfastly refuse to disappear.
- msla 8y ago
  And even if you select for news which might affect a large portion of the world, you run into issues of which stories to present first, which ones to go in-depth on, and other issues of news judgment that any paper or TV station made. Back in the Old Days, newsrooms were full of people who debated what the news was, in terms of which stories to run, which ones were headlines, and which ones were below the fold on the second page. Those people were, let us be clear, straight White men who either were cis and hetero or were able to fake it well enough to have a professional career. Most of them were Christian, and if you go back far enough in some regions that effectively excludes Catholics. They were news judgment, in terms of the news sources which mattered. They were the gatekeepers. So we have different gatekeepers now. This is only deeply disturbing if you thought the gatekeepers never existed, or went away entirely.
criddell 8y ago
Maybe eventually news outlets will have enough information about you that they will figure out how to serve you better. I mostly use Apple News for reading news and after a few months of marking stories as good or bad, it's getting better and better at showing me stuff I actually want to see.
- devoply 8y ago
  Yes the anti-vax stories are also on top of my lists. I know the elite rather have me seeing stories about how Iran is evil and needs to be liberated, but I prefer these stories. /s Maybe if everyone just shut up about everything we could all get some peace. Those who know don't say and those who say don't know.
  - lixtra 8y ago
    If you stop reading then you’ll live in a world where everyone shut up.
- vanattab 8y ago
  >Maybe eventually news outlets will have enough information about you that they will figure out how to serve you better. They don't gather that information to "serve you better" they gather it "serve you up better"! They are going to use the information to grab the attention of your eyeballs for their own purposes not to better serve you. Remember if your not paying for the product you are the product.
  - lixtra 8y ago
    It totally depends on what you mark good and bad. If you mark shallow, screaming articles as bad and they continue serving them you’ll soon switch to another platform. It’s in your responsibility to use the tools wisely.
epicureanideal 8y ago
The thing I worry about is even if the news networks try to show us "opposing viewpoints" they'll curate those, alter them somehow, etc. Maybe it'll be used as an excuse to flood us with one particular view they happen to share...
kayfox 8y ago
I think one of the things we loose when we transitioned from newspapers to reading news online is the drive to condense information and curate what is reported for such a broad audience. I distinctly remember how my grandfathers, both of them, would not consider themselves done with the daily newspaper unless they read the first section, or typically for one of them, the whole paper. These days we selectivaly choose which articles to read, which to not read. We read what we enjoy or are passionate about, we don't read what depresses us, or conflicts with our worldview. From what I can see, this is leading to greatly warped worldviews all around. We feel like we are fully informed while only having seen one side of the issue, we then dismiss reporting from the other side or more and more, centrist or neutral reporting as driven by ideology as if what we are reading and hearing is not driven by ideology.

scandox 8y ago

> sets a scary president for alls voices that are other I can't read past this kind of error. It's a typo too far for an article that is asking me to take it seriously. Proofreading is "proof" that the author has taken care of both their language and their ideas.

theNJR 8y ago
Fixed. Thank you for holding me to a high standard, truly.
- scandox 8y ago
  Oh good on you. I'll carry on from that point then.
  - scandox 8y ago
    Ok so while we're here: - preveriable -> proverbial - rediculuded -> ridiculed - bares -> bears - By unleashing a never-ending stream of fiction, masked a truth -> By unleashing a never-ending stream of fiction, masked as truth
    - theNJR 8y ago
      I really appreciate that. The fact that simple spellcheck catchable errors made it into the final piece is upsetting. I need to give my editor (aka my wife) more time with the final before pushing live.
    - gambler 8y ago
      We have AI that supposedly can "compose" articles, but there are no open-source grammar-aware spellcheckers. I love modern technology. And yes, this is one of the projects on my 1000-item todo list.
      - theNJR 8y ago
        Have you ever tried Grammarly? I see them advertise on Hulu, not sure if its any good.

FutureSpec 8y ago

This reads like someone's college freshman essay. It's just a recap of existing knowledge, with no concrete call to action.

4RealFreedom 8y ago
I enjoyed the article. I do not believe every article needs to include a call to action. Describing the situation can lead others to come up with ideas for solutions.
gipp 8y ago
I agree. It's a scattering of good (if not novel) observations about the issue, but there's just no through line connecting any of them. The last paragraph is phrased as though it follows logically from the preceding one, when it seems to make pretty much the opposite point.

jerf 8y ago

I am increasingly of the opinion that there's a case to be made that there simply is no positive way to jam more than a few dozen thousand people onto a single site, into a single community, with the hyperconnectivity implied by modern technology, without a problem. At some point, the community as a whole is going to have to take some stances on some things, and society can't afford to have those stances be writ so large. The governnment may very well come along someday and break up Facebook, but I bet it would be broken up into three or four pieces or something. I'd say it should be shattered, though. A new BabyBook shouldn't have more than 50,000-100,000 users in it. And that's still a single community starting out at what may very well be already the maximum size. Of all the places, it's the hardest sell here, because this is where Facebook's ideology comes from and it's hard for a lot of HN denizens to see much light of day between truth and Facebook's politics, but abstractly, there's no compelling reason to believe that everything labeled as bad and wrong by Facebook actually is wrong. The odds that all "conspiracy theories" are false approaches zero, honestly. The availability heuristic will bring the most obviously false ones to mind like "flat earth" and "moon landing hoax", but the HN gestalt believes plenty of conspiracy theories like companies conspiring to hold prices down or blocking research that shows negative side effects for pharmaceuticals, or honestly I could go on for quite a while here; there are many other things of a similar level of believability that are either getting blocked by Facebook now, or where the frontier of Facebook censorship is about to reach at its current pace, that simply don't flatter Facebook's political positions and choices. I think it ought to be OK for Facebook to make those decisions, because I'm serious about communities having to make calls about what it's going to accept. There's no way around it, it's as inevitable with community growth as gravity pulling a large body into a spherical shape. What's wrong with that is that we have small numbers of managers at Facebook making these decisions for the entire Internet, inevitably inflaming everything in the process. It should be a more distributed process. As for those who hope that there's some way to leverage Facebook's concentrated power to simply eliminate all the bad ideas, even if we stipulate that Facebook's aribtration of truth is in fact totally accurate and totally unbiased, a rather astonishing and frankly unbelievable accomplishment for an advertising company, you need to give that idea up now. History tends to show this sort of suppression just energizes those movements. Rather than deplatforming them by trying to deny them access to the Facebook of today, you need to deplatform them by destroying the entire platform that has that reach in the first place. You can't get rid of them, if for no other reason than there's a baseline of literal mental illness that isn't going away any time soon. You can't prevent them from speaking out. But you can make it so that they're in a corner of the Internet, because everyone's in some corner of the Internet somewhere. We kinda had that in the 200x's and late 1990s. It mostly worked.

cortesoft 8y ago

> But this is where it gets tricky; Every major scientific theory ends being wrong over time. This is just not true. Many scientific theories end up being wrong, but not all. Many are refined, and added to, but not all end up just being wrong.

Jun8 8y ago
We should keep posting this excellent rebuttal from Isaac Asimov to stamp out this misunderstanding: https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.ht...
- theNJR 8y ago
  That was a great read!
  - lixtra 8y ago
    It’s kind of confusing if you adjust your article during a discussion whiteout marking it.
    - theNJR 8y ago
      Any suggestions for how to best do that? I like the idea of living documents (to a degree).
      - lixtra 8y ago
        You can place an “edit” in front of your change and even link it to the comment that caused the change. That has the added benefit of giving credit. Of course not in front of each typo. Here: > Every major scientific theory ends up being wrong over time (edit: sort of). I agree that your already read-worthy text gains through interaction.
        theNJR 8y ago

jasode 8y ago

>It’s promoting diversity in its truest sense – a broad perspective on shared challenges. [...] To let three online platforms decide what’s real and who gets to speak, will almost certainly result in nothing good, or new. Too many essays about "free speech" focus on stating principles that feel good to read and agree with. However, the more difficult analysis is how to implement a true free speech platform. That's the puzzle nobody talks about: how to make a uncensorable free speech platform that's financially sustainable. If one does Ctrl+F in Robinson's essay to search for "advertisers" or "sponsors", those terms are not mentioned once. Youtube/Facebook/Twitter are funded by advertisers. Youtube isn't the arbiter of diverse topics, it's the advertisers. And indirectly, it's the mainstream viewers that arbitrate what's viewable because they threaten to boycott the advertisers. (Previous comment about this.[1]) If big advertisers like Proctor & Gamble, Coca Cola, etc want to stop paying for ads because the platforms host controversial topics, how does this utopian vision of free speech get funded? That never seems to be discussed. Some alternative funding possibilities: - pass a law that requires advertisers to pay for unsavory content (e.g. including Nazi, Alt-Right, beheadings, etc.) However, this type of radical law seems impossible to pass. - create a new communications platform that's funded by the government (e.g. the USA government?) that allows anything except for child pornography. This just shifts the problem and whatever government that runs the site will eventually start censoring particular topics they don't like. Also, if the website does not censor, it will devolve into a cesspool and mainstream audiences won't bother to log into it. This is an example "freedom of speech" eating its own tail because the big audiences voluntarily shun it. - a uncensorable blockchain publishing platform. I see no realistic projects that non-techies want to use. Mastodon instances are run (and funded) by volunteers and by its nature, it won't be the true free speech platform people are looking for. Let's discuss the challenge of realistic implementations instead of repeating the same complaints about popular websites closing off topics. They are beholden to advertisers and therefore making editorial decisions to maintain a viable business. Complaining about content filtering decisions driven by financial self-preservation isn't going to solve the problem. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18372005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18372005

theNJR 8y ago
I've long thought the answer is a social network you pay for. Overcoming the free big three, however, is a challenge I haven't found a way around yet.

IAmEveryone 8y ago

Does anyone believe we have gained more with this "democratisation" of publishing than we are losing to conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and populism? Because until ca. ten to twenty years ago, the "establishment" acted as de facto gatekeepers for the public discourse. And while that does strike me as a bad idea in principle, I really couldn't argue that they didn't do a far better job than today's cacophony. Sort of like presidential nominees: smoke-filled backrooms certainly are not perfect venues for decision-making. But they nominated Eisenhower and Roosevelt, while we can't find anyone better than you-know-who?

creaghpatr 8y ago
Which conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and populist ideas would you ban from being accessed by US civilians if you had the moral or legal power?
- IAmEveryone 8y ago
  I wouldn't ban anything. What we need is a bit of trust in some institutions. There is a rather obvious difference in quality going from, say, The New England Journal of Medicine to http://thespians-against-government-mind-control.hoax http://thespians-against-government-mind-control.hoax. It is impossible for you to independently verify even a tiny fraction of what you read/hear on a daily basis. Therefore, you need proxies that can be trusted. These proxies can be evaluated by their performance over time, and there should be many, and they should compete for your trust. This is exactly how everybody is already operating, almost all the time: when your spouse asks to borrow your car, you will probably give it to them. Because they have a track record of giving it back, and a long-term interest that outweighs any momentary impulse to just sell it and go on vacation. If a stranger on the street asks the same, you will be more sceptical.
  - spaginal 8y ago
    That’s a utopian view though. Institutions that were trustworthy became untrustworthy over time because of their own current actions. Who is in charge of establishing truthiness? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchmen. The only logical and rational way to disseminate information in a free society is you put it all out there and let people make up their own damn minds. I know it doesn’t appeal to the control freak side that is scarily manifesting itself everywhere lately, but if our schools were more focused on education instead of politics, logic instead of propaganda, we wouldn’t need to control narratives, we could just entrust people to make their own decisions.

IAmEveryone 8y ago

I don't quite understand how the proposed "diversity of platforms" is supposed to help? Ending up with a "liberal facebook" and a separate "conservative facebook" seems like the worst possible outcome. It will just reinforce tribalism, and destroy any remaining resemblance of a commonly trusted source of truth. There will be two sets of economic indicators every quarter, and both will be wrong. At that point, political discussions will just be fan-fic. The root of the problem seems to be a large fraction of people opposed to either the existence, or at least the possibility to adjudicate, truth: "Some people say the earth is round(ish). Others say it's flat. Who am I to judge?"

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> Ending up with a "liberal facebook" and a separate "conservative facebook" seems like the worst possible outcome. Indeed. Which is why two is still the wrong number, and the right number has three or more digits.

jlkuester7 8y ago

It is interesting to consider how federated social networks (e.g. https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org) fit in here. They seem uniquely positioned to be able to thread the needle of broad inter-connectivity combined with more localized control.

AzzieElbab 8y ago

Personally I view given example of antivaxxing movement as a side effect of lacking research on rise of autism in kids. Muting these people is immoral and will backfire badly

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