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Would forums like HN survive? I can think of a few incidents where malicious information about people made the front page then turned out to be false. Is HN pre

Would forums like HN survive? I can think of a few incidents where malicious information about people made the front page then turned out to be false. Is HN prepared to defend against lawsuits about that? Is HN prepared to lose lawsuits about that? It sounds like you're basically suggesting that making the internet useless is a good thing, because maybe something something cool will come out of the ashes and there's a chance it could be even better after a bunch of extremely hard and broad problems are solved. I don't like those odds.

ColanR 6y ago
I think the odds are pretty good. There's a lot of smart & motivated people who really like the internet, who would probably go a long way to replace it.
- gowld 6y ago
  Why aren't those people interested in working on that today?
wahern 6y ago
HN already has moderators who do a very good job of filtering posts in a timely manner. HN's exposure to liability for libel would be rather minimal. People and companies are exposed to legal risk all the time, everywhere they go, and somehow they don't curl up into a ball and die of starvation in their basements. Big, diverse sites like Facebook and Twitter need Section 230 because they can't effectively use human moderators to sift through the content. They have to rely on machine learning, which has false negative rates magnitudes higher than a human. Yet at the same time, they're constantly trying to shape and edit and, basically, narrate the user content, as part of their monetization strategy. That's their dilemma. Moreover, the distinction between publisher and distributor will still exist. The alternative to strong moderation is no moderation--you're just a distributor, like a Usenet node or the telephone company. But that's more difficult to monetize. (Of course, the legal landscape would be more nuanced than that--traditional libel law wouldn't demand a simple dichotomy between moderation and no moderation.) Without Section 230 companies would have a more difficult time trading profit potential for legal liability, but it would still be done. Newspapers, write-in columns, bulletin boards, and other forums were around for centuries, all the same exposed to libel law. Even the internet was around for decades prior to Section 230.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- NationalPark 6y ago
  We won't know the actual exposure until it ends up in the courts. Remember, we're talking about removing the good faith liability protections. Maybe a few thousand views of a libelous comment is enough, even if it was eventually removed. Either way, someone has to hire lawyers to go defend this, so it's not free. We should also expect new bad actors to take advantage of this. As long as they can spam libel faster than moderators can delete it, they can force the site to shut down or risk the lawsuits. While I'm sure YC has its share of enemies deserved or not, even perfectly innocent people are attacked online every day for no reason at all.
  - gowld 6y ago
    There's no reason to assume that an operator would be liable for libel spam, since they lack mens rea intent. Libel would only be in play if they intentionally refused to take down content or tried to extort people with it.
- eli 6y ago
  > HN's exposure to liability for libel would be rather minimal. I don't understand how you reached that conclusion. They could be sued over any comment that appears for any amount of time. There are definitely comments that have appeared on HN that are libelous. Moreover even if they pre-screened every comment before it was posted with a team of lawyers who never make any mistakes, they'd STILL have to worry about defending against frivolous lawsuits. Would it even be possible to buy liability insurance for a forum in this world? It would cost a fortune. And this is for a site that has the resources to have full time moderators. Smaller sites are even worse off. I don't see how anyone could practically operate any forum or discussion board or comments section that allowed people to post messages in real time. >Even the internet was around for decades prior to Section 230. Sure and sometimes your ISP got successfully sued because someone didn't like a comment posted on a message board they hosted.
  - 6y ago

ColanR 6y ago

I think the odds are pretty good. There's a lot of smart & motivated people who really like the internet, who would probably go a long way to replace it.

gowld 6y ago
Why aren't those people interested in working on that today?

wahern 6y ago

HN already has moderators who do a very good job of filtering posts in a timely manner. HN's exposure to liability for libel would be rather minimal. People and companies are exposed to legal risk all the time, everywhere they go, and somehow they don't curl up into a ball and die of starvation in their basements. Big, diverse sites like Facebook and Twitter need Section 230 because they can't effectively use human moderators to sift through the content. They have to rely on machine learning, which has false negative rates magnitudes higher than a human. Yet at the same time, they're constantly trying to shape and edit and, basically, narrate the user content, as part of their monetization strategy. That's their dilemma. Moreover, the distinction between publisher and distributor will still exist. The alternative to strong moderation is no moderation--you're just a distributor, like a Usenet node or the telephone company. But that's more difficult to monetize. (Of course, the legal landscape would be more nuanced than that--traditional libel law wouldn't demand a simple dichotomy between moderation and no moderation.) Without Section 230 companies would have a more difficult time trading profit potential for legal liability, but it would still be done. Newspapers, write-in columns, bulletin boards, and other forums were around for centuries, all the same exposed to libel law. Even the internet was around for decades prior to Section 230.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
NationalPark 6y ago
We won't know the actual exposure until it ends up in the courts. Remember, we're talking about removing the good faith liability protections. Maybe a few thousand views of a libelous comment is enough, even if it was eventually removed. Either way, someone has to hire lawyers to go defend this, so it's not free. We should also expect new bad actors to take advantage of this. As long as they can spam libel faster than moderators can delete it, they can force the site to shut down or risk the lawsuits. While I'm sure YC has its share of enemies deserved or not, even perfectly innocent people are attacked online every day for no reason at all.
- gowld 6y ago
  There's no reason to assume that an operator would be liable for libel spam, since they lack mens rea intent. Libel would only be in play if they intentionally refused to take down content or tried to extort people with it.
eli 6y ago
> HN's exposure to liability for libel would be rather minimal. I don't understand how you reached that conclusion. They could be sued over any comment that appears for any amount of time. There are definitely comments that have appeared on HN that are libelous. Moreover even if they pre-screened every comment before it was posted with a team of lawyers who never make any mistakes, they'd STILL have to worry about defending against frivolous lawsuits. Would it even be possible to buy liability insurance for a forum in this world? It would cost a fortune. And this is for a site that has the resources to have full time moderators. Smaller sites are even worse off. I don't see how anyone could practically operate any forum or discussion board or comments section that allowed people to post messages in real time. >Even the internet was around for decades prior to Section 230. Sure and sometimes your ISP got successfully sued because someone didn't like a comment posted on a message board they hosted.
- 6y ago