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This board regularly ‘censors’ people who break the rules. It’s the price of having a reasonably nice board to post on. There’s a difference between censorship

This board regularly ‘censors’ people who break the rules. It’s the price of having a reasonably nice board to post on. There’s a difference between censorship and punishing bad behavior.

rlt 6y ago
See this comment which makes this point already, and the subthread discussing the differences between YouTube and Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23064505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23064505
- lstamour 6y ago
  If I'm interested in content not on HN, I'll find it elsewhere. Why is it any different for YouTube? Now, if you'd said to me that Google doesn't prioritize other content, I'd argue that those wanting to talk about other content always have smaller forums to do it in, they just might be more local or viral in other ways. To me it's the difference between national broadcast TV "I'll know it's wrong when I see it," and the ability to post flyers or posters in a community. One is local and the other is wide-reaching. There is, I suppose, another alternative. If we want to promote fringe ideas, we should make it easier to organize and elect local candidates, abolish "first-past-the-post" voting systems that encourage a two-party system, and so on. But currently scientific reasoning is an accepted system of analysis for evidence-based decisions, and most politicians rely on it in addition to emotional intelligence to alter and guide their behaviour and decisions, even as they generally do whatever the person with the deepest pockets says to do, whether because that person sponsors scientific research or conducts surveys and campaigns to sway public opinion. The issue I have is that fringe opinion, like this, would reject cause-and-effect reasoning and evidence to rely almost entirely on emotions instead. And because it's controversial, people click on it and watch it and wonder about it. When there's no actual evidence to it. We used to and probably still do, have courses in grade/high school on media literacy, or not believing everything you see on TV. We routinely, as an HN community, encourage reading source materials and deciding for ourselves. But we're a small community, and for YouTube, it's easier to say "it's not our problem any longer" than it is to try and provide counterpoints to the material. There's a serious risk to YouTube to not pull this down, because of how the feedback loop of their algorithms will encourage folks who like this to watch other fringe videos, until eventually they think all of YouTube, or the world, thinks the same way as these commentators. It's easier in the short term to pull down the content than to change how the algorithms work to make them somehow less relevant. And back to my original point, folks who want this content, they will find it, regardless of what platform it's on.
  - t0ughcritic 6y ago
    Have you found any new blogs or websites you visit on a frequent basis in the last 3 months? You can’t discover the voice of the little guy, there’s too much noise.
    - lstamour 6y ago
      I’m probably not the best target audience as yes, I have. I use an RSS reader and manually curate a list of blogs to follow and podcasts to listen to, in addition to, yes, YouTube playlists I subscribe to as well. I even support content authors directly on Patreon. But not all good content is on YouTube — I’ve actually purchased content on Vimeo, for example, and have bookmarked a number of non-YouTube content sources, some of which are aggregators but some of which aren’t. How do you find it? Same way you always did... by following links, subscribing to email lists, searching Google with plus signs, err double quotes, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, YouTube is “easy” but sometimes it’s impossible to find that video you were watching the other day (if you have history disabled). As I said before, though, the problem is some folks want a worldwide platform to broadcast their ideas, no audience or community necessary. I think it’s just fine for such an audience to have content moderation strings attached. Nothing’s free, not even the soap box. If you really want an audience, work for it, and if you just want clicks in exchange for ad dollars, it shouldn’t be at the detriment of what’s considered acceptable by society. And yes, that might, indeed, mean censorship, but as pointed out, that’s the compromise we made for broadcast radio, TV and to some degree, newspapers. Any platform with enough viewers seems to inevitably become a cesspool without community reinforcement and guidelines. Not to say there shouldn’t be choices of platform, I don’t think ISPs or AWS should be banning individuals from the Internet, that’s something local police and judicial systems can determine. But if anything I’d say the opposite, the more unknown something is, the less culturally censored it should be, the more famous, the more cautious we should be, as a society... I don’t want to support regimes but I do support political systems and political discourse in general, and I think societal norms eventually change as needed, they have in the past without such widespread individual broadcasting platforms...

This board regularly ‘censors’ people who break the rules. It’s the price of having a reasonably nice board to post on. There’s a difference between censorship and punishing bad behavior.

rlt 6y ago

See this comment which makes this point already, and the subthread discussing the differences between YouTube and Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23064505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23064505

lstamour 6y ago
If I'm interested in content not on HN, I'll find it elsewhere. Why is it any different for YouTube? Now, if you'd said to me that Google doesn't prioritize other content, I'd argue that those wanting to talk about other content always have smaller forums to do it in, they just might be more local or viral in other ways. To me it's the difference between national broadcast TV "I'll know it's wrong when I see it," and the ability to post flyers or posters in a community. One is local and the other is wide-reaching. There is, I suppose, another alternative. If we want to promote fringe ideas, we should make it easier to organize and elect local candidates, abolish "first-past-the-post" voting systems that encourage a two-party system, and so on. But currently scientific reasoning is an accepted system of analysis for evidence-based decisions, and most politicians rely on it in addition to emotional intelligence to alter and guide their behaviour and decisions, even as they generally do whatever the person with the deepest pockets says to do, whether because that person sponsors scientific research or conducts surveys and campaigns to sway public opinion. The issue I have is that fringe opinion, like this, would reject cause-and-effect reasoning and evidence to rely almost entirely on emotions instead. And because it's controversial, people click on it and watch it and wonder about it. When there's no actual evidence to it. We used to and probably still do, have courses in grade/high school on media literacy, or not believing everything you see on TV. We routinely, as an HN community, encourage reading source materials and deciding for ourselves. But we're a small community, and for YouTube, it's easier to say "it's not our problem any longer" than it is to try and provide counterpoints to the material. There's a serious risk to YouTube to not pull this down, because of how the feedback loop of their algorithms will encourage folks who like this to watch other fringe videos, until eventually they think all of YouTube, or the world, thinks the same way as these commentators. It's easier in the short term to pull down the content than to change how the algorithms work to make them somehow less relevant. And back to my original point, folks who want this content, they will find it, regardless of what platform it's on.
- t0ughcritic 6y ago
  Have you found any new blogs or websites you visit on a frequent basis in the last 3 months? You can’t discover the voice of the little guy, there’s too much noise.
  - lstamour 6y ago
    I’m probably not the best target audience as yes, I have. I use an RSS reader and manually curate a list of blogs to follow and podcasts to listen to, in addition to, yes, YouTube playlists I subscribe to as well. I even support content authors directly on Patreon. But not all good content is on YouTube — I’ve actually purchased content on Vimeo, for example, and have bookmarked a number of non-YouTube content sources, some of which are aggregators but some of which aren’t. How do you find it? Same way you always did... by following links, subscribing to email lists, searching Google with plus signs, err double quotes, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, YouTube is “easy” but sometimes it’s impossible to find that video you were watching the other day (if you have history disabled). As I said before, though, the problem is some folks want a worldwide platform to broadcast their ideas, no audience or community necessary. I think it’s just fine for such an audience to have content moderation strings attached. Nothing’s free, not even the soap box. If you really want an audience, work for it, and if you just want clicks in exchange for ad dollars, it shouldn’t be at the detriment of what’s considered acceptable by society. And yes, that might, indeed, mean censorship, but as pointed out, that’s the compromise we made for broadcast radio, TV and to some degree, newspapers. Any platform with enough viewers seems to inevitably become a cesspool without community reinforcement and guidelines. Not to say there shouldn’t be choices of platform, I don’t think ISPs or AWS should be banning individuals from the Internet, that’s something local police and judicial systems can determine. But if anything I’d say the opposite, the more unknown something is, the less culturally censored it should be, the more famous, the more cautious we should be, as a society... I don’t want to support regimes but I do support political systems and political discourse in general, and I think societal norms eventually change as needed, they have in the past without such widespread individual broadcasting platforms...