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There’s a difference between “has some of it” and “is full of it”. As SSC says, even if witch hunts are genuinely bad, if you found a town with the founding pr

by drdeca 6y ago

There’s a difference between “has some of it” and “is full of it”. As SSC says, even if witch hunts are genuinely bad, if you found a town with the founding principle of having no witch hunts, you will end up with a town with 5 genuine civil libertarians, and 100 witches. I think an interesting strategy would be to found a site with an initially high level of censorship, but a public commitment to reduce the amount/degree of censorship on the site over time with a particular timetable.

quotemstr 6y ago
No, there's no difference between "has some of it" and "is full of it". Where could the line possibly be drawn between those two? Why should your values in particular control other people's speech? If you don't want to participate on a discussion because it's full of something you dislike, that's your call. But big tech companies have no business shutting down other people's legal conversations.
- drdeca 6y ago
  Quantitative differences are still differences. 1% is different from 1.01% and from 80% . My preferences determine what communities I prefer to be a part of. I prefer to not be part of a community where the majority says super racist garbage. As such, I choose not to join such a community/website.
  - UnFleshedOne 6y ago
    I think you guys agree. You are free to not participate. The point of contention is: are you free to deny others ability to participate if they want? (if you had that ability) That's where idea of public platforms as infrastructure (and actual infrastructure like DNS and carriers) if coming from. This reminds me of people wanting to ban or filter torrent protocol itself, instead of illegal content on it.
luckylion 6y ago
Unless there's a limitless supply of witches somewhere, the more witch-hunt-free towns there are, the more the witches will be distributed among those towns, because witches aren't a homogeneous group either. So in theory, voat & co should either shrink or get less radical the more reddit-alternatives there are. That is, unless reddit is turning normal people into witches that will then populate the new alternative platforms.
- drdeca 6y ago
  This is an interesting point! However, I also note that there is a limited number of “genuine civil libertarians” (or, of people in general I guess), so I am not sure that having more of these would necessarily improve the ratios between the two within any particular town/site ? Also if people are spread sufficiently thin, some of the sites will die from “no one is using this”, I think. I don’t know how this all balances out, but what you brought up does seem like an important force/mechanism to take into account. So, I’ll say “Further work is needed in order to understand the behavior in this area.”, haha.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    I'd guess that the need for genuine civil libertarians would go down with the witch density. The super majority of people is probably fine with seeing one witch per day, but they really don't want to live anywhere where they feel surrounded by witches. The dynamics involved in city districts rising and falling and rising again might be similar. Online communities lack the rent-dynamic however. A "difficult" part of town gets more attractive because the rent is much cheaper. I don't know whether there's anything equivalent in online communities that would "gentrify" a toxic community.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  What do you think a normal person thinks when he sees a witch being burned?
  - krapp 6y ago
    Historically speaking, "Good riddance."
mike00632 6y ago
I think you just described TikTok. There is an extreme level of censorship due to how many children use the app. They've achieved a level of family-friendlyness that YouTube is trying very hard to get. Regarding politics, TikTok has often said that they just aren't a place for politics, and now they are being pressured to let up on political censorship because of issues about China and the coming US presidential election.
- drdeca 6y ago
  Huh. I was imagining an organization which from the outset planned to be very permissive in what they eventually allowed, with initial restrictions just being in order to cultivate a desirable community to start with, but now that you mention it, perhaps the motivation behind the policies don’t matter so much as the policies themselves. Good point. That being said, I don’t imagine that TikTok will become quite as permissive in the end as I was imagining?

by drdeca 6y ago

quotemstr 6y ago

No, there's no difference between "has some of it" and "is full of it". Where could the line possibly be drawn between those two? Why should your values in particular control other people's speech? If you don't want to participate on a discussion because it's full of something you dislike, that's your call. But big tech companies have no business shutting down other people's legal conversations.

drdeca 6y ago
Quantitative differences are still differences. 1% is different from 1.01% and from 80% . My preferences determine what communities I prefer to be a part of. I prefer to not be part of a community where the majority says super racist garbage. As such, I choose not to join such a community/website.
- UnFleshedOne 6y ago
  I think you guys agree. You are free to not participate. The point of contention is: are you free to deny others ability to participate if they want? (if you had that ability) That's where idea of public platforms as infrastructure (and actual infrastructure like DNS and carriers) if coming from. This reminds me of people wanting to ban or filter torrent protocol itself, instead of illegal content on it.

luckylion 6y ago

Unless there's a limitless supply of witches somewhere, the more witch-hunt-free towns there are, the more the witches will be distributed among those towns, because witches aren't a homogeneous group either. So in theory, voat & co should either shrink or get less radical the more reddit-alternatives there are. That is, unless reddit is turning normal people into witches that will then populate the new alternative platforms.

drdeca 6y ago
This is an interesting point! However, I also note that there is a limited number of “genuine civil libertarians” (or, of people in general I guess), so I am not sure that having more of these would necessarily improve the ratios between the two within any particular town/site ? Also if people are spread sufficiently thin, some of the sites will die from “no one is using this”, I think. I don’t know how this all balances out, but what you brought up does seem like an important force/mechanism to take into account. So, I’ll say “Further work is needed in order to understand the behavior in this area.”, haha.
- luckylion 6y ago
  I'd guess that the need for genuine civil libertarians would go down with the witch density. The super majority of people is probably fine with seeing one witch per day, but they really don't want to live anywhere where they feel surrounded by witches. The dynamics involved in city districts rising and falling and rising again might be similar. Online communities lack the rent-dynamic however. A "difficult" part of town gets more attractive because the rent is much cheaper. I don't know whether there's anything equivalent in online communities that would "gentrify" a toxic community.
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
What do you think a normal person thinks when he sees a witch being burned?
- krapp 6y ago
  Historically speaking, "Good riddance."

mike00632 6y ago

I think you just described TikTok. There is an extreme level of censorship due to how many children use the app. They've achieved a level of family-friendlyness that YouTube is trying very hard to get. Regarding politics, TikTok has often said that they just aren't a place for politics, and now they are being pressured to let up on political censorship because of issues about China and the coming US presidential election.

drdeca 6y ago
Huh. I was imagining an organization which from the outset planned to be very permissive in what they eventually allowed, with initial restrictions just being in order to cultivate a desirable community to start with, but now that you mention it, perhaps the motivation behind the policies don’t matter so much as the policies themselves. Good point. That being said, I don’t imagine that TikTok will become quite as permissive in the end as I was imagining?