12 ms·

Did the early internet activists blow it?

113 points by IAmEveryone 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
justin66 7y ago
Ought to correct the title, "Godwin" is a name people might be familiar with.
- dang 7y ago
  The submitted title was "Goodwin: Did the early internet activists blow it?", but we've switched to the article's own title, as the HN guidelines request. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
klyrs 7y ago
*Godwin
hitekker 7y ago
It sounds like Godwin is trying to distract public attention away from his selling-out of .org to a private equity corporation. https://domainnamewire.com/2020/01/15/vint-cerf-and-mike-godwin-follow-bad-talking-points-for-org-deal/ https://domainnamewire.com/2020/01/15/vint-cerf-and-mike-god... https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200115/11301343739/techdirt-podcast-episode-234-mike-godwin-defends-selling-org.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200115/11301343739/techd... https://prospect.org/power/private-equity-corporate-takeover-org-domain-name/ https://prospect.org/power/private-equity-corporate-takeover...
- ggm 7y ago
  He can discuss multiple things at once. You think the world is single threaded? He has a life outside of his board role (I also think the board stuffed up, btw)
  - hitekker 7y ago
    A man who styles himself an internet visionary while abdicating his responsibility to the future of the internet is likely to have an ulterior motive when talking about the internet. However I also recognize that our community, like other communities, tend to forgive high status community members, as long as their lies aren’t too obvious.
    - ggm 7y ago
      Well done for simultaneous criticism of him and me. This feels like "if you are not against him, you must be for him" reductionism. I merely note he is capable of being seen, like all of us, as multithreaded.
      - hitekker 7y ago
        That criticism wasn’t against you; I was actually thinking about how the community handled Hans Reiser 10 years ago. If you feel personally attacked, though, then that might warrant some introspection.
        Dylan16807 7y ago
        If he was being unreasonably well-treated, why did ReiserFS for the most part get dropped like a hot coal just for being associated with him?
        ggm 7y ago
        I think you inverted the logic. His case is "Hans Reiser was an outsider, but when he turned out to be a killer (which does not strictly relate to his FS work) we dropped him like a hot potato. Contrast that with Mike Godwin, who did a thing (the respondand thinks is) reprehensible, but because he is a big name, we give him leeway" he's making a compare-and-contrast argument, as I understood it. The difference is, Hans Reiser was a murderer. Mike Godwin is just conflicted between his belief in a greater good outcome and his role as a PIR/ISOC conflicted person. I think its a bit apples-and-fishcakes as comparisons go, but I sort of get it.
carapace 7y ago
> But the reality is that no matter how much money and manpower (plus less-than-perfect “artificial intelligence”) Facebook throws at curating hateful or illegal content on its services, and no matter how well-meaning Facebook’s intentions are, a user base edging toward 3 billion people is always going to generate hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of false positives every year. In re: FB, there was an FB engineer saying the other day that it was impractical to have humans review every post. I almost responded (but refrained out of a sense of not being snarky) that the word "impractical" here actually means "uneconomical". No one's forcing Facebook to be what they are. > no matter how well-meaning Facebook’s intentions are They want money at the end of the day. I know I'm beating a dead horse here, y'all know this already, but the service is free to entice the "users" who are then sold to the ad/marketing folks, the REAL users of FB. It's possible to set up a non-exploitative social network (and indeed, many people are doing just that) but FB/Twitter/etc. have sucked the air out of the room and normal people do not care that they are digital cattle. They just don't, not in any effective operational way. If somehow FB shut down tomorrow everything their servers do could be done by other servers (the data would be a problem, archive it, yeah, but then who gets to access what? That's just more data though, eh?) FB doesn't fundamentally add anything to the underlying capabilities of the Internet, eh? There are no "magic angel babies" working there. I think if you somehow went back in time to, say, the 1950's and tried to tell people about FB they just wouldn't believe it. They wouldn't believe that so many hundreds of millions of people would voluntarily give a private company every detail of their private lives (more than the Stasi worked hard to collect) for no more than the Internet dressed up in a crappy UI. But people do crazy things as long as everyone else is doing it too and there we are. I don't really have anything constructive to say. Sorry.
- danielschonfeld 7y ago
  > as long as everyone else is doing it too That right there never ceases to amaze me. How everybody just willingly joins knowing they’re hurting themselves but out of the need to be in the loop with everybody else. I’d say you hit the nail on the head. Crazy things indeed.
- bawolff 7y ago
  >I almost responded (but refrained out of a sense of not being snarky) that the word "impractical" here actually means "uneconomical". Well yes, that is the definition of unpractical more or less. (Have you ever heard anyone say impractical and not just mean ecomomically unviable?)
v7x 7y ago
I agree with most of the article, but the author faltered in the area I predicted he would before I began to read. He expresses fear that without some restraint that sites might become "like 8chan". To which I have to ask, why is that a problem? Because its a hotbed for hate speech? What is hate speech? I'm sure I dont need to elaborate further on what I see wrong with that. What people seem to forget/ignore is that hate speech and other forms of taboo content a) existed before 8chan, 4chan, and other sites with similar cultures, b) would continue to exist even if these sites were removed, and c) currently exists on every other digital platform where people may create communicative content. Taboo content will always exist. You may not like it. I may not like it. But even if it was made illegal to say anything stronger than "I do not accept <x>.", people would still go on the same way as before, albeit likely with more subtlety. With that in mind, I'd also argue that there should be spaces for "anything goes" content. If people are going to do it anyway, why not give them their own space? Let it be an outlet for those who choose to partake in such content. If we arent willing to accept certain kinds of content everywhere, lets at least allow it somewhere. It will still exist regardless of what we do, but at least if it has its own space we can separate oursepves if we so desire. Lastly, to make sites like 8chan out to have no value other than content some might find deplorable is, frankly, as close minded as those who the author apparently fears. If you hadn't geussed already I use 4chan regularlly and its brought much more positive value to my life than negative. The technology board is what got me into programming in the first place. Its through them that I learned about Linux, the benifits of FOSS, the history of computing, and skills that have lead me to be succesful in my life. They are even the ones who lead me to hacker news. Maybe the messages they gave me were worded in a way that some deem undesirable. But when looking at the message itself and not the envelope its wrapped in there is value to be found in these spaces. If the culture is not for you, thats fine! I understand. But please, don't see that as a reason to condemn those of us who do use these sites. We have a right to exist too.
- ColanR 7y ago
  Well said! > Lastly, to make sites like 8chan out to have no value other than content some might find deplorable is, frankly, as close minded as those who the author apparently fears. It's nice that someone actually came out and said this.
roenxi 7y ago
The internet does need regulation; what I'd like to see (but don't expect to) is a regime where platforms have to be transparent about their moderating systems. I have no objection to Facebook, Twitter, Google/Youtube, Hacker News or WeChat aggressively moderating their platform, or even running social engineering programs. Their platform, their problem, humans have lived with that sort of thing for centuries. My issue is that content recommendation systems are not transparent about why things don't appear. Zerohedge got booted from Twitter recently. I don't mind that sort of thing because it is obvious what happened; go to their twitter page and it says the account is suspended. If Google tried something similar and removed them from the index there isn't a tool (that I know of) saying "Zerohedge has been removed from Google's index" and that is upsetting. I'd support legislation where people had to provide that sort of information in a public and accessible manner. I suppose my big complaint is that if the big companies were organised against a group (maybe Google has an irrational dislike of Russia-based IT companies; it is possible) then that group has no way of identifying that they are being treated differently. This will always be a concern for political minorities.
- ivanhoe 7y ago
  I agree with you, but I don't see that as "regulating the Internet" (which is the idea I don't like at all), because: 1) you're really just aiming to regulate the selective censorship (which is in a direct relation to the existing monopoly laws) 2) why limit it on the Internet? TV and newspapers played exactly the same game for decades and they still do on some subjects. And when no major newspapers mentions a certain story, it's pretty much to the same effect as if google's removed it from the index. You need to first hear about something to know what to google for, and if it's not on a few mainstream media sites for most of people it just didn't happen.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    It isn't that (2) is a bad idea on the face of it, just that a further legislative push seems unnecessary as the tools are already in place. I assume the libraries have an index of newspaper articles dating back a few decades that can be used to chart out what stories get mentioned. A similar index of TV programming is probably already available. If it isn't it should be.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
One thing that I find amusing is that the same people worried about the government becoming too authoritarian, want to give the government the power to stifle “hate” speech, which can easily be defined to mean what the government wants it to mean.
- makomk 7y ago
  It's almost like, on some level, they don't actually believe that they're the downtrodden ones sticking it to those with power. Like this is just a talking point that's used to justify the actions they're trying to take with the power they claim not to have, and to dismiss any concerns about the morality and consequences of those actions as concern trolling - after all, if you really cared you'd be worrying about what the people with power were doing, not trying to police the powerless - and then thrown aside when it's not useful. What makes this particular approach really dangerous, of course, is that the easiest - and perhaps only - way to enact this censorship is if the people demanding it actually do have power within the existing system and aren't particularly oppressed. There's some truth to the oft-repeated argument that this can't be oppressive because of power structures - if, say, a bunch of woman of colour who're prominent for their activism within their community think this way, that affects no-one. If a chunk of the existing white male political establishment latches onto this for their own goals (like, say, defeating the Republicans), on the other hand...
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  Both the left and right (and centrist!) authoritarians are only annoyed when things that they agree with get censored. This is the whole point of authoritarianism after all, that you do not tolerate other's opinions.
CapitalistCartr 7y ago
Freedom is the right to be wrong. If I am free as long as I only do it "The Right Way", I'm not free. People need to try different things, make mistakes, be foolish. Without that freedom, we become a(n at least metaphoric) theocracy. Society's disapproval cannot be incorporated into law in a free society.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >. If I am free as long as I only do it "The Right Way", I'm not free This is a shallow definition of freedom, the sort of idea of freedom that children instinctively have when they're told to go to bed and start throwing a tantrum and it is largely what the internet was built on, maybe not accidentally by people who in many ways were juvenile adults. There's a deeper version of freedom, a more adult one, that recognises not only ones capacity to do what one wants, but responsibility for the social good at large. Freedom doesn't just consist of running against the current, it also consists of maintaining enough order so that authentic expression of freedom is possible. A society where everyone is at the danger of being robbed while crossing the street is not free, it's just in chaos. Likewise an internet without hierarchies, without controls and without enforcement of social taboos, be that by law, by gatekeepers or through exclusion incentivizes the very worst actors to run amok. Social approval should be incorporated into law, (either literal or culturally) because places that don't do it become uninhabitable. (as the current public internet increasingly is).
  - iamnothere 7y ago
    > Likewise an internet without hierarchies, without controls and without enforcement of social taboos, be that by law, by gatekeepers or through exclusion incentivizes the very worst actors to run amok. Social approval should be incorporated into law, (either literal or culturally) because places that don't do it become uninhabitable. (as the current public internet increasingly is). "Uninhabitable?" To me it seems like the web is plenty full of people, especially in the gated communities of the social networks. Small community forums are still running as they always have. I would even say that things have improved noticeably since 2016, which was a low point. When you say "uninhabitable", I suspect that is actually code for "uninhabitable to me." I also find certain parts of the web distateful, and I avoid them. There are other places where I spend quite a bit of time, and I don't find them uninhabitable at all, nor do I find them becoming generally worse off. The problem with your statement about taboo enforcement is the question of which taboos do you select? There is no such thing as an impartial viewpoint here. Creating a moral arbiter with actual power is just creating another cultural battlefield that will oscillate between left-wing and right-wing control. In that, it will further entrench the current two-party duopoly and prevent meaningful change. It will also force businesses to be dragged further into the conflict, and may eventually lead to explicitly partisan companies--something I hope to never see. Frankly I find the mores of contemporary society to be awful. I wouldn't want their taboos enforced on me. In fact, I would actively resist it using whatever measures I could muster. But since I have the option of moving to spaces where dissent and nonconformism is allowed, I choose to do so.
cwyers 7y ago
I don't really like the premise of the article. It seems to revolve around "how Wikipedia remains so information-rich and useful when the rest of the internet (in his view) is filled with divisive, corrosive misinformation." I think Wikipedia has a lot of problems, and coming at it from a perspective of "how can we repeat Wikipedia's success" cuts us off from talking about a lot of topics that are important. The first examples I could remember off the top of my head: https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1227060591350566912 https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1227060591350566912
smsm42 7y ago
> I hear this too-much-free-speech argument a lot these days, but I can’t get used to it. That has been my feeling for the last decade. When I grew up, there were all this talk about how Internet would be a truly free medium of information exchange, and what immense benefits this will bring to humanity. Usually, there's generations between new things appearing and their effects being seen, and one can only read in books about what your ancestors though about this new thing and marvel about how wrong they are. Now, we live in the happy time where it takes mere decades. And so, 30 years after, the Internet did change the world. And it didn't. We got the awesome freedom of information - and we've got the usual suspects gnawing at it from all directions, and unlike what early enthusiasts predicted, largely they succeeded. Some expected that. What they - and myself - didn't expect at all that formerly "progressive" movement, academia and large segments or highly educated and cultured people will join the most oppressive governments in calling to reign in free speech, restrict the freedom of information flow, and deny people with non-mainstream opinions access to free speech, and threatening with vicious harassment and prosecution anybody who dares (or ever dared) to voice a controversial opinion. I remember when freedom of speech debate was about "should we allow the (actual) Nazis to express themselves publicly" and the answer was "we don't like them, but yes". Now the debate is "should we allow people who support a mainstream political candidate to listen to what she has to say within 10 miles of where we are" and the answer seems to be again and again "we don't like them, so no". And it's even worse on the Internet, because it's not 10 miles, it's everywhere. What happened to all those free speech supporters? Did they get old and die? Did they only support free speech because they didn't think nobody would say anything they don't like? I can't believe they were so stupid as to think that. So what happened?

113 points by IAmEveryone 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

justin66 7y ago

Ought to correct the title, "Godwin" is a name people might be familiar with.

dang 7y ago
The submitted title was "Goodwin: Did the early internet activists blow it?", but we've switched to the article's own title, as the HN guidelines request. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

klyrs 7y ago

*Godwin

hitekker 7y ago

It sounds like Godwin is trying to distract public attention away from his selling-out of .org to a private equity corporation. https://domainnamewire.com/2020/01/15/vint-cerf-and-mike-godwin-follow-bad-talking-points-for-org-deal/ https://domainnamewire.com/2020/01/15/vint-cerf-and-mike-god... https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200115/11301343739/techdirt-podcast-episode-234-mike-godwin-defends-selling-org.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200115/11301343739/techd... https://prospect.org/power/private-equity-corporate-takeover-org-domain-name/ https://prospect.org/power/private-equity-corporate-takeover...

ggm 7y ago
He can discuss multiple things at once. You think the world is single threaded? He has a life outside of his board role (I also think the board stuffed up, btw)
- hitekker 7y ago
  A man who styles himself an internet visionary while abdicating his responsibility to the future of the internet is likely to have an ulterior motive when talking about the internet. However I also recognize that our community, like other communities, tend to forgive high status community members, as long as their lies aren’t too obvious.
  - ggm 7y ago
    Well done for simultaneous criticism of him and me. This feels like "if you are not against him, you must be for him" reductionism. I merely note he is capable of being seen, like all of us, as multithreaded.
    - hitekker 7y ago
      That criticism wasn’t against you; I was actually thinking about how the community handled Hans Reiser 10 years ago. If you feel personally attacked, though, then that might warrant some introspection.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        If he was being unreasonably well-treated, why did ReiserFS for the most part get dropped like a hot coal just for being associated with him?
        ggm 7y ago
        I think you inverted the logic. His case is "Hans Reiser was an outsider, but when he turned out to be a killer (which does not strictly relate to his FS work) we dropped him like a hot potato. Contrast that with Mike Godwin, who did a thing (the respondand thinks is) reprehensible, but because he is a big name, we give him leeway" he's making a compare-and-contrast argument, as I understood it. The difference is, Hans Reiser was a murderer. Mike Godwin is just conflicted between his belief in a greater good outcome and his role as a PIR/ISOC conflicted person. I think its a bit apples-and-fishcakes as comparisons go, but I sort of get it.

carapace 7y ago

> But the reality is that no matter how much money and manpower (plus less-than-perfect “artificial intelligence”) Facebook throws at curating hateful or illegal content on its services, and no matter how well-meaning Facebook’s intentions are, a user base edging toward 3 billion people is always going to generate hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of false positives every year. In re: FB, there was an FB engineer saying the other day that it was impractical to have humans review every post. I almost responded (but refrained out of a sense of not being snarky) that the word "impractical" here actually means "uneconomical". No one's forcing Facebook to be what they are. > no matter how well-meaning Facebook’s intentions are They want money at the end of the day. I know I'm beating a dead horse here, y'all know this already, but the service is free to entice the "users" who are then sold to the ad/marketing folks, the REAL users of FB. It's possible to set up a non-exploitative social network (and indeed, many people are doing just that) but FB/Twitter/etc. have sucked the air out of the room and normal people do not care that they are digital cattle. They just don't, not in any effective operational way. If somehow FB shut down tomorrow everything their servers do could be done by other servers (the data would be a problem, archive it, yeah, but then who gets to access what? That's just more data though, eh?) FB doesn't fundamentally add anything to the underlying capabilities of the Internet, eh? There are no "magic angel babies" working there. I think if you somehow went back in time to, say, the 1950's and tried to tell people about FB they just wouldn't believe it. They wouldn't believe that so many hundreds of millions of people would voluntarily give a private company every detail of their private lives (more than the Stasi worked hard to collect) for no more than the Internet dressed up in a crappy UI. But people do crazy things as long as everyone else is doing it too and there we are. I don't really have anything constructive to say. Sorry.

danielschonfeld 7y ago
> as long as everyone else is doing it too That right there never ceases to amaze me. How everybody just willingly joins knowing they’re hurting themselves but out of the need to be in the loop with everybody else. I’d say you hit the nail on the head. Crazy things indeed.
bawolff 7y ago
>I almost responded (but refrained out of a sense of not being snarky) that the word "impractical" here actually means "uneconomical". Well yes, that is the definition of unpractical more or less. (Have you ever heard anyone say impractical and not just mean ecomomically unviable?)

v7x 7y ago

I agree with most of the article, but the author faltered in the area I predicted he would before I began to read. He expresses fear that without some restraint that sites might become "like 8chan". To which I have to ask, why is that a problem? Because its a hotbed for hate speech? What is hate speech? I'm sure I dont need to elaborate further on what I see wrong with that. What people seem to forget/ignore is that hate speech and other forms of taboo content a) existed before 8chan, 4chan, and other sites with similar cultures, b) would continue to exist even if these sites were removed, and c) currently exists on every other digital platform where people may create communicative content. Taboo content will always exist. You may not like it. I may not like it. But even if it was made illegal to say anything stronger than "I do not accept <x>.", people would still go on the same way as before, albeit likely with more subtlety. With that in mind, I'd also argue that there should be spaces for "anything goes" content. If people are going to do it anyway, why not give them their own space? Let it be an outlet for those who choose to partake in such content. If we arent willing to accept certain kinds of content everywhere, lets at least allow it somewhere. It will still exist regardless of what we do, but at least if it has its own space we can separate oursepves if we so desire. Lastly, to make sites like 8chan out to have no value other than content some might find deplorable is, frankly, as close minded as those who the author apparently fears. If you hadn't geussed already I use 4chan regularlly and its brought much more positive value to my life than negative. The technology board is what got me into programming in the first place. Its through them that I learned about Linux, the benifits of FOSS, the history of computing, and skills that have lead me to be succesful in my life. They are even the ones who lead me to hacker news. Maybe the messages they gave me were worded in a way that some deem undesirable. But when looking at the message itself and not the envelope its wrapped in there is value to be found in these spaces. If the culture is not for you, thats fine! I understand. But please, don't see that as a reason to condemn those of us who do use these sites. We have a right to exist too.

ColanR 7y ago
Well said! > Lastly, to make sites like 8chan out to have no value other than content some might find deplorable is, frankly, as close minded as those who the author apparently fears. It's nice that someone actually came out and said this.

roenxi 7y ago

The internet does need regulation; what I'd like to see (but don't expect to) is a regime where platforms have to be transparent about their moderating systems. I have no objection to Facebook, Twitter, Google/Youtube, Hacker News or WeChat aggressively moderating their platform, or even running social engineering programs. Their platform, their problem, humans have lived with that sort of thing for centuries. My issue is that content recommendation systems are not transparent about why things don't appear. Zerohedge got booted from Twitter recently. I don't mind that sort of thing because it is obvious what happened; go to their twitter page and it says the account is suspended. If Google tried something similar and removed them from the index there isn't a tool (that I know of) saying "Zerohedge has been removed from Google's index" and that is upsetting. I'd support legislation where people had to provide that sort of information in a public and accessible manner. I suppose my big complaint is that if the big companies were organised against a group (maybe Google has an irrational dislike of Russia-based IT companies; it is possible) then that group has no way of identifying that they are being treated differently. This will always be a concern for political minorities.

ivanhoe 7y ago
I agree with you, but I don't see that as "regulating the Internet" (which is the idea I don't like at all), because: 1) you're really just aiming to regulate the selective censorship (which is in a direct relation to the existing monopoly laws) 2) why limit it on the Internet? TV and newspapers played exactly the same game for decades and they still do on some subjects. And when no major newspapers mentions a certain story, it's pretty much to the same effect as if google's removed it from the index. You need to first hear about something to know what to google for, and if it's not on a few mainstream media sites for most of people it just didn't happen.
- roenxi 7y ago
  It isn't that (2) is a bad idea on the face of it, just that a further legislative push seems unnecessary as the tools are already in place. I assume the libraries have an index of newspaper articles dating back a few decades that can be used to chart out what stories get mentioned. A similar index of TV programming is probably already available. If it isn't it should be.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

One thing that I find amusing is that the same people worried about the government becoming too authoritarian, want to give the government the power to stifle “hate” speech, which can easily be defined to mean what the government wants it to mean.

makomk 7y ago
It's almost like, on some level, they don't actually believe that they're the downtrodden ones sticking it to those with power. Like this is just a talking point that's used to justify the actions they're trying to take with the power they claim not to have, and to dismiss any concerns about the morality and consequences of those actions as concern trolling - after all, if you really cared you'd be worrying about what the people with power were doing, not trying to police the powerless - and then thrown aside when it's not useful. What makes this particular approach really dangerous, of course, is that the easiest - and perhaps only - way to enact this censorship is if the people demanding it actually do have power within the existing system and aren't particularly oppressed. There's some truth to the oft-repeated argument that this can't be oppressive because of power structures - if, say, a bunch of woman of colour who're prominent for their activism within their community think this way, that affects no-one. If a chunk of the existing white male political establishment latches onto this for their own goals (like, say, defeating the Republicans), on the other hand...
dependenttypes 7y ago
Both the left and right (and centrist!) authoritarians are only annoyed when things that they agree with get censored. This is the whole point of authoritarianism after all, that you do not tolerate other's opinions.

CapitalistCartr 7y ago

Freedom is the right to be wrong. If I am free as long as I only do it "The Right Way", I'm not free. People need to try different things, make mistakes, be foolish. Without that freedom, we become a(n at least metaphoric) theocracy. Society's disapproval cannot be incorporated into law in a free society.

Barrin92 7y ago
>. If I am free as long as I only do it "The Right Way", I'm not free This is a shallow definition of freedom, the sort of idea of freedom that children instinctively have when they're told to go to bed and start throwing a tantrum and it is largely what the internet was built on, maybe not accidentally by people who in many ways were juvenile adults. There's a deeper version of freedom, a more adult one, that recognises not only ones capacity to do what one wants, but responsibility for the social good at large. Freedom doesn't just consist of running against the current, it also consists of maintaining enough order so that authentic expression of freedom is possible. A society where everyone is at the danger of being robbed while crossing the street is not free, it's just in chaos. Likewise an internet without hierarchies, without controls and without enforcement of social taboos, be that by law, by gatekeepers or through exclusion incentivizes the very worst actors to run amok. Social approval should be incorporated into law, (either literal or culturally) because places that don't do it become uninhabitable. (as the current public internet increasingly is).
- iamnothere 7y ago
  > Likewise an internet without hierarchies, without controls and without enforcement of social taboos, be that by law, by gatekeepers or through exclusion incentivizes the very worst actors to run amok. Social approval should be incorporated into law, (either literal or culturally) because places that don't do it become uninhabitable. (as the current public internet increasingly is). "Uninhabitable?" To me it seems like the web is plenty full of people, especially in the gated communities of the social networks. Small community forums are still running as they always have. I would even say that things have improved noticeably since 2016, which was a low point. When you say "uninhabitable", I suspect that is actually code for "uninhabitable to me." I also find certain parts of the web distateful, and I avoid them. There are other places where I spend quite a bit of time, and I don't find them uninhabitable at all, nor do I find them becoming generally worse off. The problem with your statement about taboo enforcement is the question of which taboos do you select? There is no such thing as an impartial viewpoint here. Creating a moral arbiter with actual power is just creating another cultural battlefield that will oscillate between left-wing and right-wing control. In that, it will further entrench the current two-party duopoly and prevent meaningful change. It will also force businesses to be dragged further into the conflict, and may eventually lead to explicitly partisan companies--something I hope to never see. Frankly I find the mores of contemporary society to be awful. I wouldn't want their taboos enforced on me. In fact, I would actively resist it using whatever measures I could muster. But since I have the option of moving to spaces where dissent and nonconformism is allowed, I choose to do so.

cwyers 7y ago

I don't really like the premise of the article. It seems to revolve around "how Wikipedia remains so information-rich and useful when the rest of the internet (in his view) is filled with divisive, corrosive misinformation." I think Wikipedia has a lot of problems, and coming at it from a perspective of "how can we repeat Wikipedia's success" cuts us off from talking about a lot of topics that are important. The first examples I could remember off the top of my head: https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1227060591350566912 https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1227060591350566912

smsm42 7y ago

> I hear this too-much-free-speech argument a lot these days, but I can’t get used to it. That has been my feeling for the last decade. When I grew up, there were all this talk about how Internet would be a truly free medium of information exchange, and what immense benefits this will bring to humanity. Usually, there's generations between new things appearing and their effects being seen, and one can only read in books about what your ancestors though about this new thing and marvel about how wrong they are. Now, we live in the happy time where it takes mere decades. And so, 30 years after, the Internet did change the world. And it didn't. We got the awesome freedom of information - and we've got the usual suspects gnawing at it from all directions, and unlike what early enthusiasts predicted, largely they succeeded. Some expected that. What they - and myself - didn't expect at all that formerly "progressive" movement, academia and large segments or highly educated and cultured people will join the most oppressive governments in calling to reign in free speech, restrict the freedom of information flow, and deny people with non-mainstream opinions access to free speech, and threatening with vicious harassment and prosecution anybody who dares (or ever dared) to voice a controversial opinion. I remember when freedom of speech debate was about "should we allow the (actual) Nazis to express themselves publicly" and the answer was "we don't like them, but yes". Now the debate is "should we allow people who support a mainstream political candidate to listen to what she has to say within 10 miles of where we are" and the answer seems to be again and again "we don't like them, so no". And it's even worse on the Internet, because it's not 10 miles, it's everywhere. What happened to all those free speech supporters? Did they get old and die? Did they only support free speech because they didn't think nobody would say anything they don't like? I can't believe they were so stupid as to think that. So what happened?