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It's easy to look at the extreme examples and get widespread agreement, sure. The problem is in all the grey areas between benign, reasonable, controversial, fa

by zo1 6y ago

It's easy to look at the extreme examples and get widespread agreement, sure. The problem is in all the grey areas between benign, reasonable, controversial, factually-incorrect, manipulative and then "really bad" content. And the argument becomes even more moot when you consider that no one is "forcing" people to watch content that they don't like, they simply ignore it and heck the platform can just hide content you ignore/report. At that point, we're conceding that we actually don't want people to see certain content because of certain reasons. And I think those reasons boil down to us collectively thinking that people can be manipulated/influenced, are unable to look at these videos objectively, and can fall for the lies contained within it.

dewey 6y ago
> when you consider that no one is "forcing" people to watch content that they don't like, they simply ignore it Throwing something into the recommendation algorithm over periods of time or showing you ads will likely have an influence on you even if you wouldn't usually look at the content or search for it. Facebook itself already experimented with that in the early days of social media: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
- zo1 6y ago
  One can block the channels on a per-user basis. And you can "personalize" recommendations to users to exclude channels or videos that are similar to ones they've previously blocked/excluded. Heck you can have curated block-lists that people can subscribe to. You can allow users to disable any non-subscription feed mechanisms so that the only way to find content is through search or other discovery mechanisms that may be external to the platform. There are so many different ways to solve the user-experience issue without deplatforming. The more you peel back the superficial layers, the more you find that this is just about control as we "don't want to let people make their own opinions by finding content that we don't like". Edit. Grammar.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    Blocklists don't solve the problem of dishonest or scammy ads. If they did we would have solved the spam problem by now. Someone still has to review all that stuff manually.

by zo1 6y ago

dewey 6y ago

> when you consider that no one is "forcing" people to watch content that they don't like, they simply ignore it Throwing something into the recommendation algorithm over periods of time or showing you ads will likely have an influence on you even if you wouldn't usually look at the content or search for it. Facebook itself already experimented with that in the early days of social media: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

zo1 6y ago
One can block the channels on a per-user basis. And you can "personalize" recommendations to users to exclude channels or videos that are similar to ones they've previously blocked/excluded. Heck you can have curated block-lists that people can subscribe to. You can allow users to disable any non-subscription feed mechanisms so that the only way to find content is through search or other discovery mechanisms that may be external to the platform. There are so many different ways to solve the user-experience issue without deplatforming. The more you peel back the superficial layers, the more you find that this is just about control as we "don't want to let people make their own opinions by finding content that we don't like". Edit. Grammar.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  Blocklists don't solve the problem of dishonest or scammy ads. If they did we would have solved the spam problem by now. Someone still has to review all that stuff manually.