7 ms·

That seems like a good idea but it's simplify the issue way too much. > but also allow all content, Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If

by dwild 7y ago

That seems like a good idea but it's simplify the issue way too much. > but also allow all content, Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc... Add that to the fact that you'll get people that will just push to boycott such kind of platforms, and thus you'll no longer have much possible ways to make this kind of platform exist. > but if someone posts something illegal, they take their share of legal responsibility for publishing it. That's also kind of impossible. The law evolved to consider that impossibility to look at every piece of content, and this is why the DMCA exist. Look at Youtube which try to filter their content much further than the law currently require, they have HUGE teams of moderators, multiple tens of thousands, with some of the best kind of neural network, working on this and yet it fail so often. The world isn't binary, we need a bit of both. It could be an interesting experiment though to allow legally the kind of platform you suggest. Someway to protect website owner from any legal retaliation. It would most probably look like 4chan, but still interesting.

dntbnmpls 7y ago
> Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc... There is moderation and there is censorship. Nobody is against filtering spam. Trolling is fine in my opinion. Just let the user have the option of blocking who they want to block an follow who they want to follow. > Add that to the fact that you'll get people that will just push to boycott such kind of platforms, and thus you'll no longer have much possible ways to make this kind of platform exist. If that was true, twitter, reddit, facebook, google wouldn't exist in the first place. > That's also kind of impossible. No it is not. Publishers don't find it impossible. Platforms don't find it impossible. If it was impossible, telcoms and publishers wouldn't exist. > It could be an interesting experiment though to allow legally the kind of platform you suggest. We already had this kind of platform. > It would most probably look like 4chan, but still interesting. No, it would look like 2009-2013 twitter, reddit, facebook, etc.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > There is moderation and there is censorship All moderation is censorship, though not all censorship is moderation.
  - remarkEon 7y ago
    Pretty sure you have that backwards
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      No, moderation is censorship of user-submitted content by forum operators (whether owners or some other kind of host) or their agents. Censorship not directed at user-submitted content or carried out by other entities (e.g., the state) is not moderation.
- foota 7y ago
  Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook all have moderation.
- AlexMax 7y ago
  > There is moderation and there is censorship. Nobody is against filtering spam. Trolling is fine in my opinion. Just let the user have the option of blocking who they want to block an follow who they want to follow. In my experience, most people are not interested in sifting through mountains of garbage just to pick out a few morsels of a decent conversation. If you let trolls and bad-faith actors persist on your site, soon those people will be the only folks who are left.
  - dntbnmpls 7y ago
    > In my experience, most people are not interested in sifting through mountains of garbage just to pick out a few morsels of a decent conversation. If that was true, HN would be infinitely more popular than reddit. > If you let trolls and bad-faith actors persist on your site, soon those people will be the only folks who are left. No. If you let users block trolls and bad-faith actors, they go away. Once again, if you were right, twitter, reddit, facebook, etc wouldn't have grown to what they are today.
saurik 7y ago
> Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc... If you create your own Twitter account and post a bunch of spam there, no one will follow you; so it shouldn't matter. You can also limit someone's access to "discovery" mechanisms without deleting their content or preventing them from posting entirely so even their opted-in followers can't see their content. The core problem is when social media companies create mechanisms for users to bother each other without knowing each other, and there "span" is the tip of the ice berg: people routinely abuse and harass other people--which should be construed very very broadly: if you had a child who died in a school shooting and someone likes to keep reminding you of it as they take glee in your pain, that is obviously abuse and harassment, and yet it isn't "illegal" and clearly isn't "spam", so is almost always considered "totally fair game"--these websites don't remove that content or punish people for it, and yet they remove photos of people breast feeding, as if that is some crime against humanity. What forcing websites to be platforms would do is fix social media by causing the people who make these websites to reconsider features that should probably not have existed in the first place.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
stale2002 7y ago
> . If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc.. There is a reasonable solution to this. Give people the tools to self moderate. Things like reddit, for example, work pretty great, in that if you don't like a community, then you can go to a different one, which moderation rules that you prefer.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  But how does that work as a regulation? It's hard enough to get community moderators to sign up to do unpleasant work for no money, how do you expect to get anyone to do it after you impose liability for getting it wrong? Actually, maybe there's something to this: Impose no liability on anybody for moderating as long as they're not moderating more than ten million users. If you are, the only way to avoid liability is to be a common carrier. Then you can actually have community moderation, but you can't have Zuckerberg deciding what a billion people don't get to see.
  - stale2002 7y ago
    > how do you expect to get anyone to do it after you impose liability for getting it wrong? I am suggesting that there would no platform wide moderation, but would instead be things like public block lists that users could voluntarily subscribe to. IE, on Twitter, anyone could publish a "spam account list" or whatever, and people could choose whatever their preferred block list is. Or they could choose not to follow any block lists, if they so desire. Some blocklists might only block spammers, another might block Donald Trump, and another might block anyone who posts any swear words at all, and individual people would choose how they would like to view their content.
- root_axis 7y ago
  > Things like reddit, for example, work pretty great, in that if you don't like a community, then you can go to a different one, which moderation rules that you prefer. The internet already works this way, if you don't like the moderation policies of a website you have the freedom to use a different website.
Notorious_BLT 7y ago
Oh I'll definitely agree I'm oversimplifying it, and there's room for improvement. But I think the core issue remains: if they are allowed to control discourse by choosing who can speak and who cannot, then they must be held responsible for who they allow to speak, and they need to be transparent about it. And to your last point: as a decently frequent user of 4chan, that's pretty much what I like about it, though there absolutely IS moderation on most boards. People's minds go to /b/ and /pol/ when they think of 4chan, but there are several niche hobby communities on other boards which thrive in a (relatively) low-moderation, low-interferance. setting.
- kick 7y ago
  Relatively low-moderation? Half of the boards ban for political discussion in its entirety.
- root_axis 7y ago
  > if they are allowed to control discourse by choosing who can speak and who cannot, then they must be held responsible for who they allow to speak, and they need to be transparent about it. Wouldn't this idea in essence eliminate the possibility of moderation of any kind? In order to do any moderation, every post by every user would have to be manually reviewed. This obviously doesn't scale, so in effect the law would eliminate the ability for website owners to moderate content on their own site. Also, what happens to sites like reddit and github where moderation is a feature offered by the product? How would people be able to find a moderated community if that's what they wanted? The idea seems totally unworkable.
  - akersten 7y ago
    Hey root_axis, I see you pop up pretty frequently on threads like this where people really don't understand the consequences of forcing companies to host speech and removing their legal protections if they decide to moderate. Personally I've seen the same dialog hash out so many times it's become exhausting to even reply to them. I just want to thank you for continuing to fight for what's right.
fgonzag 7y ago
That's the way the system had handled it for ages. Common carriers vs publishers. Tech companies decided that didn't apply to them, and they could have the best of both worlds.
- davidw 7y ago
  Social media is a bit different than, say, the phone system, in its ability to widely broadcast things. It's different from traditional publishers in that there are orders of magnitude more 'publishers', rather than, say, a newspaper and a few TV stations per city. It's a tricky problem.
nogabebop23 7y ago
>> The world isn't binary, we need a bit of both. I believe the point the GP is making is that social media sites play both sides when it's in their best interest and neither when it isn't. So they moderate in the name of "public safety" when it suits them, but can't catch everything so they hide behind "impartial utility" to avoid responsibility. They aren't walking a line, they are switching sides when it's in their best interest.
- dwild 7y ago
  > They aren't walking a line, they are switching sides when it's in their best interest. Yeah my comment kind of mentions how that's just not in the interest of website owner thus won't happens. Since when does business works toward anything else than their best interest? That's kind of the whole point of that.

by dwild 7y ago

dntbnmpls 7y ago

> Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc... There is moderation and there is censorship. Nobody is against filtering spam. Trolling is fine in my opinion. Just let the user have the option of blocking who they want to block an follow who they want to follow. > Add that to the fact that you'll get people that will just push to boycott such kind of platforms, and thus you'll no longer have much possible ways to make this kind of platform exist. If that was true, twitter, reddit, facebook, google wouldn't exist in the first place. > That's also kind of impossible. No it is not. Publishers don't find it impossible. Platforms don't find it impossible. If it was impossible, telcoms and publishers wouldn't exist. > It could be an interesting experiment though to allow legally the kind of platform you suggest. We already had this kind of platform. > It would most probably look like 4chan, but still interesting. No, it would look like 2009-2013 twitter, reddit, facebook, etc.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> There is moderation and there is censorship All moderation is censorship, though not all censorship is moderation.
- remarkEon 7y ago
  Pretty sure you have that backwards
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    No, moderation is censorship of user-submitted content by forum operators (whether owners or some other kind of host) or their agents. Censorship not directed at user-submitted content or carried out by other entities (e.g., the state) is not moderation.
foota 7y ago
Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook all have moderation.
AlexMax 7y ago
> There is moderation and there is censorship. Nobody is against filtering spam. Trolling is fine in my opinion. Just let the user have the option of blocking who they want to block an follow who they want to follow. In my experience, most people are not interested in sifting through mountains of garbage just to pick out a few morsels of a decent conversation. If you let trolls and bad-faith actors persist on your site, soon those people will be the only folks who are left.
- dntbnmpls 7y ago
  > In my experience, most people are not interested in sifting through mountains of garbage just to pick out a few morsels of a decent conversation. If that was true, HN would be infinitely more popular than reddit. > If you let trolls and bad-faith actors persist on your site, soon those people will be the only folks who are left. No. If you let users block trolls and bad-faith actors, they go away. Once again, if you were right, twitter, reddit, facebook, etc wouldn't have grown to what they are today.

saurik 7y ago

> Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc... If you create your own Twitter account and post a bunch of spam there, no one will follow you; so it shouldn't matter. You can also limit someone's access to "discovery" mechanisms without deleting their content or preventing them from posting entirely so even their opted-in followers can't see their content. The core problem is when social media companies create mechanisms for users to bother each other without knowing each other, and there "span" is the tip of the ice berg: people routinely abuse and harass other people--which should be construed very very broadly: if you had a child who died in a school shooting and someone likes to keep reminding you of it as they take glee in your pain, that is obviously abuse and harassment, and yet it isn't "illegal" and clearly isn't "spam", so is almost always considered "totally fair game"--these websites don't remove that content or punish people for it, and yet they remove photos of people breast feeding, as if that is some crime against humanity. What forcing websites to be platforms would do is fix social media by causing the people who make these websites to reconsider features that should probably not have existed in the first place.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

stale2002 7y ago

> . If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc.. There is a reasonable solution to this. Give people the tools to self moderate. Things like reddit, for example, work pretty great, in that if you don't like a community, then you can go to a different one, which moderation rules that you prefer.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
But how does that work as a regulation? It's hard enough to get community moderators to sign up to do unpleasant work for no money, how do you expect to get anyone to do it after you impose liability for getting it wrong? Actually, maybe there's something to this: Impose no liability on anybody for moderating as long as they're not moderating more than ten million users. If you are, the only way to avoid liability is to be a common carrier. Then you can actually have community moderation, but you can't have Zuckerberg deciding what a billion people don't get to see.
- stale2002 7y ago
  > how do you expect to get anyone to do it after you impose liability for getting it wrong? I am suggesting that there would no platform wide moderation, but would instead be things like public block lists that users could voluntarily subscribe to. IE, on Twitter, anyone could publish a "spam account list" or whatever, and people could choose whatever their preferred block list is. Or they could choose not to follow any block lists, if they so desire. Some blocklists might only block spammers, another might block Donald Trump, and another might block anyone who posts any swear words at all, and individual people would choose how they would like to view their content.
root_axis 7y ago
> Things like reddit, for example, work pretty great, in that if you don't like a community, then you can go to a different one, which moderation rules that you prefer. The internet already works this way, if you don't like the moderation policies of a website you have the freedom to use a different website.

Notorious_BLT 7y ago

Oh I'll definitely agree I'm oversimplifying it, and there's room for improvement. But I think the core issue remains: if they are allowed to control discourse by choosing who can speak and who cannot, then they must be held responsible for who they allow to speak, and they need to be transparent about it. And to your last point: as a decently frequent user of 4chan, that's pretty much what I like about it, though there absolutely IS moderation on most boards. People's minds go to /b/ and /pol/ when they think of 4chan, but there are several niche hobby communities on other boards which thrive in a (relatively) low-moderation, low-interferance. setting.

kick 7y ago
Relatively low-moderation? Half of the boards ban for political discussion in its entirety.
root_axis 7y ago
> if they are allowed to control discourse by choosing who can speak and who cannot, then they must be held responsible for who they allow to speak, and they need to be transparent about it. Wouldn't this idea in essence eliminate the possibility of moderation of any kind? In order to do any moderation, every post by every user would have to be manually reviewed. This obviously doesn't scale, so in effect the law would eliminate the ability for website owners to moderate content on their own site. Also, what happens to sites like reddit and github where moderation is a feature offered by the product? How would people be able to find a moderated community if that's what they wanted? The idea seems totally unworkable.
- akersten 7y ago
  Hey root_axis, I see you pop up pretty frequently on threads like this where people really don't understand the consequences of forcing companies to host speech and removing their legal protections if they decide to moderate. Personally I've seen the same dialog hash out so many times it's become exhausting to even reply to them. I just want to thank you for continuing to fight for what's right.

fgonzag 7y ago

That's the way the system had handled it for ages. Common carriers vs publishers. Tech companies decided that didn't apply to them, and they could have the best of both worlds.

davidw 7y ago
Social media is a bit different than, say, the phone system, in its ability to widely broadcast things. It's different from traditional publishers in that there are orders of magnitude more 'publishers', rather than, say, a newspaper and a few TV stations per city. It's a tricky problem.

nogabebop23 7y ago

>> The world isn't binary, we need a bit of both. I believe the point the GP is making is that social media sites play both sides when it's in their best interest and neither when it isn't. So they moderate in the name of "public safety" when it suits them, but can't catch everything so they hide behind "impartial utility" to avoid responsibility. They aren't walking a line, they are switching sides when it's in their best interest.

dwild 7y ago
> They aren't walking a line, they are switching sides when it's in their best interest. Yeah my comment kind of mentions how that's just not in the interest of website owner thus won't happens. Since when does business works toward anything else than their best interest? That's kind of the whole point of that.