6 ms·

The iron fist is a double edged sword in some senses. Although reddit acted as a free speech haven for a long time, it was only overall, and not ever in major

by basch 6y ago

The iron fist is a double edged sword in some senses. Although reddit acted as a free speech haven for a long time, it was only overall, and not ever in major specific communities. True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying the existence of free speech. Fiefdoms more often than not were echo chambers, where to see a response to bad speech, a person would have to know where else to venture. By creating filter bubbles, tribes, echo chambers, reddit was not an exemplar of a free speech haven, but instead a collection of lopsided megaphones pointed in opposite directions, strewn across a hard to navigate map. Strong moderation is what allows communities with strict quality guidelines to function, but also amplifies division. And on the topic of history, a part of me finds it unfortunate that this banning will make historical, sociological, and psychological analysis of trends, thoughts of the times, past bad behavior etc much harder. It's no what.cd or house of wisdom or library of alexandria loss, but it is still a historical record loss of a huge event that happened. I may not have personally liked The_Donald but it was quite the experience, as a fish out of water, to go look at how other people think, communicate, and reason. The culture that developed there will continue to exist, but the ease with which one could passively observe it, and learn lessons from it is greatly diminished. Another double edged sword.

duxup 6y ago
> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. Is that really a thing on the internet though? It seems like the unmoderated free speech havens on the internet are bubbles themselves and I'm not sure there's much real debate going on there....
- basch 6y ago
  >Some observers argue that the counterspeech principle makes a better ideal than a reality, primarily because some people or groups in society possess far more power than do others. For example, proponents of critical race theory contend that minorities often are denied access to the marketplace of ideas to counter harmful speech. >Others argue that some types of speech — for example, pornography and hate speech — are so harmful that counterspeech alone is not an adequate response. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/940/counterspeech-doctrine https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/940/counterspee... I agree with your point, without some way to structure, weigh, and amplify the signal; noise and polarization are more likely to win out. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/the-illusion-of-a-marketplace-of-ideas-and-the-right-to-truth/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/the-illusion-of-a... The final result still leaves me conflicted, in a baby with the bathwater sense. Plenty of the speech in the sub was merely speech I disagreed with, and censoring it all is nowhere close to a least restrictive means way to erase hate. Moments like spez editing a users comment are now erased from the record, for the moment at least archived elsewhere. If a politician ever wanted to go back, look at the pain of others, and use what they learned to bridge divides, to be able to speak to the others, they are now denied this resource for research. That probably bothers me more than the structure of reddit being quasi-free-speech-incompatible. ChapoTrapHouse isnt somewhere I ever went, but from a communication sense, I now feel a missed opportunity to learn how to read their language, and understand or recognize it if I heard it. Between Reddit, Youtube, Twitch, and India; today itself might eventually be regarded as a historical day, where both public servants and private enterprise stood up and said enough, albeit for different reasons.
dmoy 6y ago
> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech Sure, but in practice this is what true free speech on reddit for a large sub looks like before moderation * 3 knee jerk replies * 10 pieces of spam asking you to buy their bit/altcoin or click on their affiliate links * 5 people who are hurling vile insults at you for whatever reason * 8 more people who are hurling vile insults at each other, and just happen to be in your comment chain for some reason * 1 reasonable, well thought out response * 2 people who are lost and looking for a different sub * 1 person replying half a year later after everyone's gone Something in that ratio With no moderation at all, you're lost in a sea of spam, scams, and insults. And because of the extremely poor SNR, your reasonable replies dry up and just leave. I agree not everyone has to go the r/askhistorians route of completely iron fist, but you can't actually run a communication forum with millions or tens of millions of subscribers without a lot of automated and manual moderation. True free speech ends up being no speech because everyone got scammed or insulted and just decides to leave to go somewhere smaller. (edit: trying to untangle my confusing sentence) It might work for smaller communities. It does not scale.
- basch 6y ago
  It would be interesting to see an implementation that lets you view but not interact with removed content. click the spam tag to see all the spam, grayed out. in some cases it might be helpful to know what not to say, or that something has already been said and removed. /r/askhistorians would probably be a place where marking something as removed but visible would not be as at risk of propagating urban legend or bad history. hopefully that community would know what they are getting when they peak beneath the curtain.
  - Natanael_L 6y ago
    On reddit you can do that natively for a whole thread by locking, but for individual comment chains you can only do it with mod bots.
    - dmoy 6y ago
HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
The loss of what.cd still saddens me every time I see it mentioned.
- monadgonad 6y ago
  In case you didn't know, redacted.ch replaced it and probably has all of the same torrents.
  - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
    I know about red. Unfortunately their tracker economy is way too hard for me to compete with my asymmetric adsl home connection( 0.5mbps uplink) and I'm not going to spend money for pirating. I do however have other private sources of music( including various ftp servers utilized by the known unknowns), p2p networks, soulseek etc.
totetsu 6y ago
>allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech That might work where people are physically speaking, and only have one voice, can only shout so loud, and the time taken to speak is equivalent to the time taken to listen. But in a digital medium, on voice can be amplified infinitely in volume and ..volume, at little cost of time to the speaker
guerrilla 6y ago
> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying the existence of free speech. No, you're missing the phenomenon of gish galloping[1]. Toxicity will overwhelm the community because it takes no effort to spew disgusting nonsense and spam while it takes significant effort to rebut it. The mythical "marketplace of ideas" only exists in presence of moderation, whether somewhat decentralized like HN or like the iron fist of places like r/AskHistorians. A literal free marketplace of ideas is a cesspool. "A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes" [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
- basch 6y ago
  I'm not arguing against moderation. Half way down I said "Strong moderation is what allows communities with strict quality guidelines to function.". Quality could mean very different things to The_Donald and AskHistorians

by basch 6y ago

duxup 6y ago

> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. Is that really a thing on the internet though? It seems like the unmoderated free speech havens on the internet are bubbles themselves and I'm not sure there's much real debate going on there....

basch 6y ago
>Some observers argue that the counterspeech principle makes a better ideal than a reality, primarily because some people or groups in society possess far more power than do others. For example, proponents of critical race theory contend that minorities often are denied access to the marketplace of ideas to counter harmful speech. >Others argue that some types of speech — for example, pornography and hate speech — are so harmful that counterspeech alone is not an adequate response. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/940/counterspeech-doctrine https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/940/counterspee... I agree with your point, without some way to structure, weigh, and amplify the signal; noise and polarization are more likely to win out. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/the-illusion-of-a-marketplace-of-ideas-and-the-right-to-truth/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/the-illusion-of-a... The final result still leaves me conflicted, in a baby with the bathwater sense. Plenty of the speech in the sub was merely speech I disagreed with, and censoring it all is nowhere close to a least restrictive means way to erase hate. Moments like spez editing a users comment are now erased from the record, for the moment at least archived elsewhere. If a politician ever wanted to go back, look at the pain of others, and use what they learned to bridge divides, to be able to speak to the others, they are now denied this resource for research. That probably bothers me more than the structure of reddit being quasi-free-speech-incompatible. ChapoTrapHouse isnt somewhere I ever went, but from a communication sense, I now feel a missed opportunity to learn how to read their language, and understand or recognize it if I heard it. Between Reddit, Youtube, Twitch, and India; today itself might eventually be regarded as a historical day, where both public servants and private enterprise stood up and said enough, albeit for different reasons.

dmoy 6y ago

> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech Sure, but in practice this is what true free speech on reddit for a large sub looks like before moderation * 3 knee jerk replies * 10 pieces of spam asking you to buy their bit/altcoin or click on their affiliate links * 5 people who are hurling vile insults at you for whatever reason * 8 more people who are hurling vile insults at each other, and just happen to be in your comment chain for some reason * 1 reasonable, well thought out response * 2 people who are lost and looking for a different sub * 1 person replying half a year later after everyone's gone Something in that ratio With no moderation at all, you're lost in a sea of spam, scams, and insults. And because of the extremely poor SNR, your reasonable replies dry up and just leave. I agree not everyone has to go the r/askhistorians route of completely iron fist, but you can't actually run a communication forum with millions or tens of millions of subscribers without a lot of automated and manual moderation. True free speech ends up being no speech because everyone got scammed or insulted and just decides to leave to go somewhere smaller. (edit: trying to untangle my confusing sentence) It might work for smaller communities. It does not scale.

basch 6y ago
It would be interesting to see an implementation that lets you view but not interact with removed content. click the spam tag to see all the spam, grayed out. in some cases it might be helpful to know what not to say, or that something has already been said and removed. /r/askhistorians would probably be a place where marking something as removed but visible would not be as at risk of propagating urban legend or bad history. hopefully that community would know what they are getting when they peak beneath the curtain.
- Natanael_L 6y ago
  On reddit you can do that natively for a whole thread by locking, but for individual comment chains you can only do it with mod bots.
  - dmoy 6y ago

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago

The loss of what.cd still saddens me every time I see it mentioned.

monadgonad 6y ago
In case you didn't know, redacted.ch replaced it and probably has all of the same torrents.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  I know about red. Unfortunately their tracker economy is way too hard for me to compete with my asymmetric adsl home connection( 0.5mbps uplink) and I'm not going to spend money for pirating. I do however have other private sources of music( including various ftp servers utilized by the known unknowns), p2p networks, soulseek etc.

totetsu 6y ago

>allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech That might work where people are physically speaking, and only have one voice, can only shout so loud, and the time taken to speak is equivalent to the time taken to listen. But in a digital medium, on voice can be amplified infinitely in volume and ..volume, at little cost of time to the speaker

guerrilla 6y ago

> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying the existence of free speech. No, you're missing the phenomenon of gish galloping[1]. Toxicity will overwhelm the community because it takes no effort to spew disgusting nonsense and spam while it takes significant effort to rebut it. The mythical "marketplace of ideas" only exists in presence of moderation, whether somewhat decentralized like HN or like the iron fist of places like r/AskHistorians. A literal free marketplace of ideas is a cesspool. "A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes" [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

basch 6y ago
I'm not arguing against moderation. Half way down I said "Strong moderation is what allows communities with strict quality guidelines to function.". Quality could mean very different things to The_Donald and AskHistorians