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I find it really disconcerting how many people on Hacker News want a corporate entity to decide what information is deemed acceptable to know. Do you even know

I find it really disconcerting how many people on Hacker News want a corporate entity to decide what information is deemed acceptable to know. Do you even know where that word came from? The irony is almost overwhelming. But I digress... The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work. A cursory reading of history should make this clear. You cannot turn the entire world into West Coast USA by banning everyone that disagrees with you. You’ll only create further echo chambers, both on your own platform and on the (new) platforms inevitably created by the exiled.

tim333 6y ago
It's a free market. YouTube can host videos it wants to or not. Likewise you can get a $5 server and host what videos you want to or not. That's different from "decide what information is deemed acceptable to know."
- andrewprock 6y ago
  It's not just different, it's very different. The weirdest thing about this whole discussion is the number of people that want to impose more regulation on private entities, but who are trying to couch this as some kind of anti-censorship crusade.
kill-procrustes 6y ago
This is a really underrated point. This whole site is really "tech industry news" with some hacking sprinkled in, but its name at least is based on the idea of the hacker ethos. That whole thing about decentralization, distrusting authority, information being free? A curiosity for how things work and logical investigation rather than letting someone else do your thinking for you? Disinformation is a huge problem and I understand the impulse to grab for the easiest available solution, but this is fool's gold and anathema to what hackers and Western democracies claim are the foundations of their belief system.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  I really can’t think of anything more alien to the hacker ethos than, “A group of unknown people at a technology corporation should be the ultimate authority on what I’m allowed to say, read, or share with my friends.” Disinformation is indeed a difficult problem, but there are enough smart people in the world to figure it out without resorting to authoritarianism. We can do better.
  - twentydollars 6y ago
    > “A group of unknown people at a technology corporation should be the ultimate authority on what I’m allowed to say, read, or share with my friends.” Literally nobody is suggesting this. It's about freedom of Reach, not freedom of speech.
    - ceilingcorner 6y ago
      Right now, at this very moment, Facebook and Twitter prevent you from sending certain links via private message.
      - twentydollars 6y ago
        They're private platforms. You can send those links via many other routes which would be legally protected speech.
        dorkwood 6y ago
        As someone not familiar with what those routes are -- what are they? Is email sent through Gmail protected, or is that also a private platform?
        Reelin 6y ago
erichocean 6y ago
> The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work. The goal is not to make it disappear, it's to make the knowledge have a social cost. Normal people won't touch it, and they provide the 80M votes you need to win control of the government. It's a strategy that works exceedingly well.
balls187 6y ago
> a corporate entity to decide what information An AI algorithm.
- bussierem 6y ago
  An algorithm doesn't write or tune itself. This is unnecessary pedantry.
  - VyperCard 6y ago
    In YouTube’s case it may do in part. If you give it the wrong objective like „make people look at more Videos“ it will optimize its suggestions for this
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      It would be useful to give it a different objective, say, to "suggest content that disproves what you just saw using verifiable facts", but that'd be too hard without curating lists of such proofs and sources.
  - Reelin 6y ago
    Actually, in the age of ML it more or less does. You wire up the model, specify the metrics to optimize for, and then feed it lots of data. The algorithm figures out the details of how to achieve the specified goal on it's own. Have a look at (https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs).
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Who chooses the model, metrics and data?
      - Reelin 6y ago
        I suspect you're being rhetorical, but the algorithm and specific metrics to use are selected by the developer. The data is entirely user generated - it's the result of collecting the metrics over some period of time. The trained model is the result of feeding the collected data into the chosen algorithm. The point is that the algorithm is, for all practical purposes, tuning itself. The developer has essentially selected a black box to feed the data into, told it what to optimize for, and given it the ability to wiggle a bunch of unlabeled knobs. Which knobs it should tweak and in precisely what way is never specified by the developer. Instead of "show the following things to the following users", the developer just says "maximize number of videos viewed per visit" and the algorithm tweaks whatever parameters have been made available to it until it finds something that works. Unfortunately, "something that works" is often not what we might have liked. ML is a bit like a Djinn, fulfilling wishes in an unpredictable and borderline malicious manner.
hackyhacky 6y ago
It's not about banning disagreement. It's not even about opinions. It's about combating weaponized misinformation. It's strange for Americans to be on the business side of a propaganda weapon, as we're more used to using against our enemies. Technology has finally made it feasible for malicious actors to cheaply and effectively manipulate people with lies, here in the US. If you don't believe it's a weapon, you're wrong. If you don't believe weaponized misinformation is dangerous, look at the regimes it's toppled. And if you think the "American spirit," or somesuch nonsense, makes us immune, I hope we won't have to find out.
- leovingi 6y ago
  "weaponized misinformation" scary buzzwords are scary
  - CyberRabbi 6y ago
    When you can’t call something a lie but you still want to invalidate its legitimacy, you say “misinformation”
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  You are assuming that the regular media is the default, the truth, and that propaganda didn’t exist prior to 2016. Read Manufacturing Consent for a brief overview of this history of widespread weaponization of information by innumerable actors. Weaponized misinformation has existed as long as human speech has existed. What is new is the democratization of it, hence the establishment’s hostility.
  - hackyhacky 6y ago
    This is the kinds of "both-sides-ism" that gives centrists a bad reputation. You're basically saying: "everyone uses media to achieve their goals, therefore all sides are equally bad." No. Using misinformation to intentionally disrupt a democratic election is demonstrably dangerous to society. Say what you will about the "establishment," but traditional media still bear some semblance of the truth. Now we're seeing that anyone with enough money and Twitter followers and completely ignore the truth. We have to draw the line somewhere.
autocorr 6y ago
Well, on the flip-side the previous thread from the announcement blog received the most comments I have ever seen on a HN post. About 3000? And most of those were displeased reactions. A lot of people are talking past each other in these posts or arguing against straw-men. In my view, many of the seemingly "pro censorship" posts are hacker-spirits, just arguing from the point: "look, this is a natural outcome of unrestricted, powerful BigCo's". I don't think a monolith like YouTube was as ever an acceptable solution for the Hacker. We should build technical, distributed systems for sharing videos that can't be controlled as easily and then fight for the right to use them at the ballot box.
parsimo2010 6y ago
“You’ll only create further echo chambers, both on your own platform and on the (new) platforms inevitably created by the exiled.” In case anyone is wondering, this isn’t just hypothetical. The website full30.com was created specifically because YouTube decided that talking about guns wasn’t advertiser-friendly. There weren’t that many gun-related videos that YouTube actually removed, but they started to de-monetize just about any video that focused on guns. So the affected creators didn’t stop making videos, they just made their own content delivery solution. So it’s not just a hypothetical, it has already happened and the other echo chambers are out there with a warm embrace for the affected content creators. The only thing YouTube is effectively doing is making its bubble more insular, so that Californians can act more surprised the next time the country elects someone like Trump.
- rayiner 6y ago
  Wait, YouTube censored guns?
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    Demonetized.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      Censorship by definition includes not only banning and deletion, but “suppression,” which fits denying monetization to particular content on a site otherwise designed for it. For example, it wouldn’t get around the first amendment for the government to say “we’re not banning this book, you just can’t charge money for it.” (I understand that Google as a private actor is permitted to engage in censorship while the government is not. My point is that demonetization is clearly censorship because of the government did it it would be illegal.)
      - nickysielicki 6y ago
        Demonetization is not censorship, imho. They support YouTube through their advertisers, and their advertisers don't want to be affiliated with guns. It makes sense that they won't pay you for videos that they can't monetize -- they're just passing on the loss to the video producer. Beyond demonetization, YouTube did categorically ban videos demonstrating how to install and/or fabricate an autosear. In practice, this also extends to purely educational videos explaining how an autosear works.
forgingahead 6y ago
It's similar to any other corporate/institutionalised group - imagine the "<College_name> Anarchists", or "<College_name> Communists", or so on. "Hacker" News, run by one of the most institutionalized Venture Capital companies out there, is simply marketing at this point. Luckily, the quality of discussion for tech matters, and the players in the industry that participate, still make this place one of the best ones on the internet for technical discussion. But don't expect the political/historical/cultural/non-technical discussions to be any more insightful than any other group of people having opinions on those subjects.
- nucleardog 6y ago
  Yeah, it's kind of weird. The technical (and many other discussions) are often quite insightful here. It's always fascinating to get into some obscure topic and have a world-renowned subject-matter-expert suddenly drop in to give their two cents or clarify what they meant in some quoted piece. I'm quickly learning to just steer clear of the political discussions though. They're usually a very jarring reminder that intelligence in one or several areas does not preclude intellectual dishonesty and intentional ignorance in another.
  - Reelin 6y ago
    This mirrors my experience perfectly. Conduct on HN is uncommonly civil (for the internet) across the board - props to Dang and whoever else moderates things. Insightful discussion, however, is almost entirely limited to the extremely technical submissions. From biochemistry to compilers to machine learning, they consistently attract participation at a truly impressive caliber. Sometimes I wonder what HN would be like if it were somehow possible to preemptively block the majority of the "fluff" articles that make it to the front page. I guess there's no way to automate such a determination though, and even if there were any such action would probably anger the majority of the user base.
rayiner 6y ago
> The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work. A cursory reading of history should make this clear. You cannot turn the entire world into West Coast USA by banning everyone that disagrees with you. You’ll only create further echo chambers, both on your own platform and on the (new) platforms inevitably created by the exiled. And in the process you’ll create a system that will eventually alienate enough people in the middle to undermine you. Banning discussion of this—instead of letting the courts do their work—will alienate the half of the country that voted for Trump. It’ll alienate traditional liberals for whom free speech (not in the narrow legal sense but the larger social sense) is a core value. And eventually the system you’ve created will do something to overreach. The desire to censor the other side won’t end here. And at that point, the majority of people will find themselves on the other side and you’ll have a problem. Traditional liberal values were a good thing and we should hesitate to abandon them. Liberals defended nazis marching through American cities in the name of free speech. If we can handle that we can have handle baseless claims of election fraud that are being swiftly dealt with by the courts.
- hackyhacky 6y ago
  The half of the country that voted for Trump is already alienated. They're fully prepared to destroy every American institution, simply because Trump them that they should. As we've already seen countless times, there is no amount of rational discussion or documented evidence that will persuade them otherwise. The question is, do the rest of us have to go along with it, or are allowed to fight back?
  - tomcam 6y ago
    > They're fully prepared to destroy every American institution, simply because Trump them that they should. Reading minds is not your strong point.
  - yew 6y ago
    Speaking as an American who didn't vote for Trump, either time, you've certainly alienated me. You'd (collectively) best hope you're making more friends than enemies. Hope's all any of us have at this point.
gd1 6y ago
>The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work Maybe it didn't work in the old days. But now maybe the CEO of Cloudflare will wake up one morning, decide he doesn't like your politics and block your DNS. Now you might wake up one morning and find that Mailchimp have terminated your account because they don't like your politics (Molyneux). Now your social media twitter clone might be banned by the Apple/Google store because they don't like what people are posting on it (Gab). As if you're a publisher... which you're not under section 230... Now your GoFundme gets pulled if whatever leftist running GoFundme decides they don't like you. Now the payment companies won't process your payments (too many examples to name). Now, despite being the fourth largest newspaper in the country, your twitter account will be disabled indefinitely for posting "hacked" "russian disinformation" that turns out to be neither hacked nor disinformation. And we find out after the election that the Attorney General of Delaware has been investigating this matter for over a year. Now some dipshit moderator on Hacker News will shadowban you permanently on a whim. Your google docs will be blocked for violating the terms of service. Youtube will demonetize you. There is nowhere to hide from the dystopia that every fucking retarded left-winger here is so eager to embrace. It's like being in the middle of the red scare, but everyone says they're ok with telephone companies listening to the bad people's conversations and disconnecting their phone lines if they mention communism. Because, you know, they're "private companies" or something. The only cold comfort is that it will surely be used against them one day. AnD wHy dId PeOpLe vOtE fOr a RacIst??!!
- southeastern 6y ago
  >Because, you know, they're "private companies" or something. Wait so are you for them being able to do whatever they want, where you can be banned from their service? Or do you want them under the arm of the government where they could be regulated? I think you're just mad at the culture. Trump isn't gonna fix that
  - gd1 6y ago
    I want them to, of their own volition, uphold the principles that a liberal democracy is meant to hold dear. No one has a monopoly on the truth. Things like this have really happened: https://twitter.com/JeremyVineOn5/status/1239512626134224896 https://twitter.com/JeremyVineOn5/status/1239512626134224896 And you've all just memory-holed it.
onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
I think the idea is making things harder to access. The failed idea behind making drugs illegal is that they'd be harder to access and less people would do them. There's evidence this didn't work. I think the idea here is the same - if the big platforms ban certain types of egregious and harmful misinformation (that gets recommended to people susceptible to conspiracies) - these companies are hoping less people overall will watch this content, and probably more importantly, if anything bad comes of this, they won't have their brands tarnished because of it. Will it work? Who knows. They're companies. Why can't they do what they please as long as it's within the law? Does the law require YouTube to keep up all content? YouTube has a Terms of Service and has censored lots of content for a long time. Why is there such a big distinction between beheadings, child porn, anti-vax, hate speech, and election misinformation? These companies already have a history of censoring "political" content for foreign countries. What is new here?
- dasil003 6y ago
  I don't disagree, but the difference with drugs is that people specifically seek them out and there is a lot of effort and involved to make it happen through the whole supply chain. The problems with social media are largely around removing all friction from the process, and adding a huge dose of virality and highly specific targeting. The former means people get a vast amount of information with minimal effort, and the latter enables targeted propaganda which then gets magnified in echo chamber bubbles by the algo. The individual elements all existed before, but the combination creates pretty unique effects. I'm also skeptical these companies can effectively address the problem since these properties are what has fueled their growth.
  - southeastern 6y ago
    Take qanon. I don't it naturally spreads as virulently as drugs. But when you add Facebook into the mix, people are able to disseminate this information instantly to people who just don't understand how to vet sources. The comparison to drugs just doesn't work.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
lifeformed 6y ago
It's not about making information disappear, it's about recognizing that humans are very susceptible to mass manipulation (see cults, mass hysteria), and it is becoming an increasingly powerful strategy and weapon in our age of rapidly growing new communications technologies. How to combat this is debatable for sure - I don't think this Youtube stuff is the most effective solution - but I don't think we can just apply old principles to new problems without first acknowledging the real challenges it's meant to address.
cmdshiftf4 6y ago
>I find it really disconcerting how many people on Hacker News want a corporate entity to decide what information is deemed acceptable to know. You're saying the label on a forum for the shitshow that is corporate VC & the race for billions is incorrect? That it doesn't embody an authentic hacker spirit? Surely you jest? Anyway, know your audience. There's no shortage of corporate bootlickers who love their billionaire overlords and the antics their privacy/competition/small business/ethics/human rights crushing companies get up to posting on here all day every day. Some even feign giving a fuck about these things but unsurprisingly not enough to actually do something about it. Then you've the statists who, well, love the state although it often has the caveat of which side of the coin is currently pretending to run the place. Then you've got the union of the two who often rear their head and they're... well... fucked, but what are you going to do? Anyway, as I've said on here before as someone without skin in the game and who is at a safe distance, what seems like the final season of the hit reality TV show "USA" is most certainly an exciting one to be watching.
mjfl 6y ago
The culture has changed around here in the last 4 years to favor centralized regulation of communication, which is a dizzying reversal of what it was about every year before that.
bachmeier 6y ago
Your argument is unlikely to have anything to do with the reason for YouTube's decision. They're thinking about their brand. Do they want to be branded as the company that lets anyone post videos about the election being stolen without any evidence? They get to choose between "yes" and "no" and the choices lead to very different brands. The same point comes up again and again when porn is removed from [website]. "How dare they remove porn! I don't see anything wrong with it!" Sometimes it's even looking down their noses at the obviously primitive American culture that is the problem. Of course porn won't disappear from the world, and of course people that like porn will be disappointed, but it won't be that company's brand.
- thu2111 6y ago
  The reality is if YouTube was committed to free speech this wouldn't even come up at all. People would 'brand' YouTube this way about as much as they do Chrome for letting you browse websites claiming the election was stolen, or web search for letting you find it, or your ISP for letting you download the HTML. Nobody would give a crap, they'd just argue about other platforms where the owners were engaging in censorship. Political censorship isn't just morally wrong, it's bad for business and bad for your brand too. The moment you allow that camel to put its nose under the tent, you're inviting in a whole world of pain. Suddenly every zealot out there will be demanding you silence the people who disagree with them, because they know that maybe if they make enough noise you will. They'll attack your brand hard because they know if they do you might cave. A hard core libertarian "everyone is served on principle" attitude keeps the fighting at bay because people know it's not worth putting in the energy.
tripzilch 6y ago
The disconcerting part is that right here in this thread the Americans are still arguing as if this is a battle with two teams, one of which wins, the other loses. So here's the thing. The US [social media] corporations have to lose. Simply because we already found out years ago, that ethics doesn't scale. UNLESS they solve this problem, this simply means that they OUGHT not to exist, at that scale. The American people are of course inevitably coming out as the losers too, because of the gigantic inequalities, and the corporate capitalist culture grazing on the weak. So it's lose/lose. Everything's broken. GLHF
mrighele 6y ago
> I find it really disconcerting how many people on Hacker News want a corporate entity to decide what information is deemed acceptable to know. It's up to a corporate entity to decide what should be in its platform though. The issue in the case of Youtube (and other social platform) is that there are a few players that get much of the cake, so their decisions have wide effect. It is this last point that should be addressed in my opinion
MrMan 6y ago
Whats more disconcerting is sectarian violence fomenting by propaganda, even to the point of the breakup of a nuclear armed state, the US. That is disconcerting to me. Preventing it is of the highest priority.
bo1024 6y ago
The problem is YouTube's algorithm -- recommendations. If we accept the algorithm, then there is no middle ground: either you ban this content from the platform entirely, or watch misinformation spread wildly. But there could be a middle ground in which the platform changes how its algorithm works. I think neither YouTube nor its detractors are considering this as a serious possibility, for some reason.
- davidhalter 6y ago
  They don't consider alternatives, because the algorithm is optimized for view counts. Sensationalism has always brought more views than "good" content. Youtube would need to forgo a lot of ad revenue to change the algorithm.
tekknik 6y ago
> I find it really disconcerting how many people on Hacker News want a corporate entity to decide what information is deemed acceptable to know. Do you even know where that word came from? The irony is almost overwhelming. But I digress... Many on HN are the ones implementing these features, therefore have a bit of power over the rest of us. Further, judging from cancel culture, the left seems to want to force their opinions on others that have different ones. So this makes pretty clear sense to me.
togs 6y ago
China bans topics all the time, and they're on a trajectory to become the strongest nation in the world.

tim333 6y ago

It's a free market. YouTube can host videos it wants to or not. Likewise you can get a $5 server and host what videos you want to or not. That's different from "decide what information is deemed acceptable to know."

andrewprock 6y ago
It's not just different, it's very different. The weirdest thing about this whole discussion is the number of people that want to impose more regulation on private entities, but who are trying to couch this as some kind of anti-censorship crusade.

kill-procrustes 6y ago

This is a really underrated point. This whole site is really "tech industry news" with some hacking sprinkled in, but its name at least is based on the idea of the hacker ethos. That whole thing about decentralization, distrusting authority, information being free? A curiosity for how things work and logical investigation rather than letting someone else do your thinking for you? Disinformation is a huge problem and I understand the impulse to grab for the easiest available solution, but this is fool's gold and anathema to what hackers and Western democracies claim are the foundations of their belief system.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ceilingcorner 6y ago
I really can’t think of anything more alien to the hacker ethos than, “A group of unknown people at a technology corporation should be the ultimate authority on what I’m allowed to say, read, or share with my friends.” Disinformation is indeed a difficult problem, but there are enough smart people in the world to figure it out without resorting to authoritarianism. We can do better.
- twentydollars 6y ago
  > “A group of unknown people at a technology corporation should be the ultimate authority on what I’m allowed to say, read, or share with my friends.” Literally nobody is suggesting this. It's about freedom of Reach, not freedom of speech.
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    Right now, at this very moment, Facebook and Twitter prevent you from sending certain links via private message.
    - twentydollars 6y ago
      They're private platforms. You can send those links via many other routes which would be legally protected speech.
      - dorkwood 6y ago
        As someone not familiar with what those routes are -- what are they? Is email sent through Gmail protected, or is that also a private platform?
        Reelin 6y ago

erichocean 6y ago

> The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work. The goal is not to make it disappear, it's to make the knowledge have a social cost. Normal people won't touch it, and they provide the 80M votes you need to win control of the government. It's a strategy that works exceedingly well.

balls187 6y ago

> a corporate entity to decide what information An AI algorithm.

bussierem 6y ago
An algorithm doesn't write or tune itself. This is unnecessary pedantry.
- VyperCard 6y ago
  In YouTube’s case it may do in part. If you give it the wrong objective like „make people look at more Videos“ it will optimize its suggestions for this
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    It would be useful to give it a different objective, say, to "suggest content that disproves what you just saw using verifiable facts", but that'd be too hard without curating lists of such proofs and sources.
- Reelin 6y ago
  Actually, in the age of ML it more or less does. You wire up the model, specify the metrics to optimize for, and then feed it lots of data. The algorithm figures out the details of how to achieve the specified goal on it's own. Have a look at (https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs).
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Who chooses the model, metrics and data?
    - Reelin 6y ago
      I suspect you're being rhetorical, but the algorithm and specific metrics to use are selected by the developer. The data is entirely user generated - it's the result of collecting the metrics over some period of time. The trained model is the result of feeding the collected data into the chosen algorithm. The point is that the algorithm is, for all practical purposes, tuning itself. The developer has essentially selected a black box to feed the data into, told it what to optimize for, and given it the ability to wiggle a bunch of unlabeled knobs. Which knobs it should tweak and in precisely what way is never specified by the developer. Instead of "show the following things to the following users", the developer just says "maximize number of videos viewed per visit" and the algorithm tweaks whatever parameters have been made available to it until it finds something that works. Unfortunately, "something that works" is often not what we might have liked. ML is a bit like a Djinn, fulfilling wishes in an unpredictable and borderline malicious manner.

hackyhacky 6y ago

It's not about banning disagreement. It's not even about opinions. It's about combating weaponized misinformation. It's strange for Americans to be on the business side of a propaganda weapon, as we're more used to using against our enemies. Technology has finally made it feasible for malicious actors to cheaply and effectively manipulate people with lies, here in the US. If you don't believe it's a weapon, you're wrong. If you don't believe weaponized misinformation is dangerous, look at the regimes it's toppled. And if you think the "American spirit," or somesuch nonsense, makes us immune, I hope we won't have to find out.

leovingi 6y ago
"weaponized misinformation" scary buzzwords are scary
- CyberRabbi 6y ago
  When you can’t call something a lie but you still want to invalidate its legitimacy, you say “misinformation”
ceilingcorner 6y ago
You are assuming that the regular media is the default, the truth, and that propaganda didn’t exist prior to 2016. Read Manufacturing Consent for a brief overview of this history of widespread weaponization of information by innumerable actors. Weaponized misinformation has existed as long as human speech has existed. What is new is the democratization of it, hence the establishment’s hostility.
- hackyhacky 6y ago
  This is the kinds of "both-sides-ism" that gives centrists a bad reputation. You're basically saying: "everyone uses media to achieve their goals, therefore all sides are equally bad." No. Using misinformation to intentionally disrupt a democratic election is demonstrably dangerous to society. Say what you will about the "establishment," but traditional media still bear some semblance of the truth. Now we're seeing that anyone with enough money and Twitter followers and completely ignore the truth. We have to draw the line somewhere.

autocorr 6y ago

Well, on the flip-side the previous thread from the announcement blog received the most comments I have ever seen on a HN post. About 3000? And most of those were displeased reactions. A lot of people are talking past each other in these posts or arguing against straw-men. In my view, many of the seemingly "pro censorship" posts are hacker-spirits, just arguing from the point: "look, this is a natural outcome of unrestricted, powerful BigCo's". I don't think a monolith like YouTube was as ever an acceptable solution for the Hacker. We should build technical, distributed systems for sharing videos that can't be controlled as easily and then fight for the right to use them at the ballot box.

parsimo2010 6y ago

“You’ll only create further echo chambers, both on your own platform and on the (new) platforms inevitably created by the exiled.” In case anyone is wondering, this isn’t just hypothetical. The website full30.com was created specifically because YouTube decided that talking about guns wasn’t advertiser-friendly. There weren’t that many gun-related videos that YouTube actually removed, but they started to de-monetize just about any video that focused on guns. So the affected creators didn’t stop making videos, they just made their own content delivery solution. So it’s not just a hypothetical, it has already happened and the other echo chambers are out there with a warm embrace for the affected content creators. The only thing YouTube is effectively doing is making its bubble more insular, so that Californians can act more surprised the next time the country elects someone like Trump.

rayiner 6y ago
Wait, YouTube censored guns?
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  Demonetized.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Censorship by definition includes not only banning and deletion, but “suppression,” which fits denying monetization to particular content on a site otherwise designed for it. For example, it wouldn’t get around the first amendment for the government to say “we’re not banning this book, you just can’t charge money for it.” (I understand that Google as a private actor is permitted to engage in censorship while the government is not. My point is that demonetization is clearly censorship because of the government did it it would be illegal.)
    - nickysielicki 6y ago
      Demonetization is not censorship, imho. They support YouTube through their advertisers, and their advertisers don't want to be affiliated with guns. It makes sense that they won't pay you for videos that they can't monetize -- they're just passing on the loss to the video producer. Beyond demonetization, YouTube did categorically ban videos demonstrating how to install and/or fabricate an autosear. In practice, this also extends to purely educational videos explaining how an autosear works.

forgingahead 6y ago

It's similar to any other corporate/institutionalised group - imagine the "<College_name> Anarchists", or "<College_name> Communists", or so on. "Hacker" News, run by one of the most institutionalized Venture Capital companies out there, is simply marketing at this point. Luckily, the quality of discussion for tech matters, and the players in the industry that participate, still make this place one of the best ones on the internet for technical discussion. But don't expect the political/historical/cultural/non-technical discussions to be any more insightful than any other group of people having opinions on those subjects.

nucleardog 6y ago
Yeah, it's kind of weird. The technical (and many other discussions) are often quite insightful here. It's always fascinating to get into some obscure topic and have a world-renowned subject-matter-expert suddenly drop in to give their two cents or clarify what they meant in some quoted piece. I'm quickly learning to just steer clear of the political discussions though. They're usually a very jarring reminder that intelligence in one or several areas does not preclude intellectual dishonesty and intentional ignorance in another.
- Reelin 6y ago
  This mirrors my experience perfectly. Conduct on HN is uncommonly civil (for the internet) across the board - props to Dang and whoever else moderates things. Insightful discussion, however, is almost entirely limited to the extremely technical submissions. From biochemistry to compilers to machine learning, they consistently attract participation at a truly impressive caliber. Sometimes I wonder what HN would be like if it were somehow possible to preemptively block the majority of the "fluff" articles that make it to the front page. I guess there's no way to automate such a determination though, and even if there were any such action would probably anger the majority of the user base.

rayiner 6y ago

> The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work. A cursory reading of history should make this clear. You cannot turn the entire world into West Coast USA by banning everyone that disagrees with you. You’ll only create further echo chambers, both on your own platform and on the (new) platforms inevitably created by the exiled. And in the process you’ll create a system that will eventually alienate enough people in the middle to undermine you. Banning discussion of this—instead of letting the courts do their work—will alienate the half of the country that voted for Trump. It’ll alienate traditional liberals for whom free speech (not in the narrow legal sense but the larger social sense) is a core value. And eventually the system you’ve created will do something to overreach. The desire to censor the other side won’t end here. And at that point, the majority of people will find themselves on the other side and you’ll have a problem. Traditional liberal values were a good thing and we should hesitate to abandon them. Liberals defended nazis marching through American cities in the name of free speech. If we can handle that we can have handle baseless claims of election fraud that are being swiftly dealt with by the courts.

hackyhacky 6y ago
The half of the country that voted for Trump is already alienated. They're fully prepared to destroy every American institution, simply because Trump them that they should. As we've already seen countless times, there is no amount of rational discussion or documented evidence that will persuade them otherwise. The question is, do the rest of us have to go along with it, or are allowed to fight back?
- tomcam 6y ago
  > They're fully prepared to destroy every American institution, simply because Trump them that they should. Reading minds is not your strong point.
- yew 6y ago
  Speaking as an American who didn't vote for Trump, either time, you've certainly alienated me. You'd (collectively) best hope you're making more friends than enemies. Hope's all any of us have at this point.

gd1 6y ago

>The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work Maybe it didn't work in the old days. But now maybe the CEO of Cloudflare will wake up one morning, decide he doesn't like your politics and block your DNS. Now you might wake up one morning and find that Mailchimp have terminated your account because they don't like your politics (Molyneux). Now your social media twitter clone might be banned by the Apple/Google store because they don't like what people are posting on it (Gab). As if you're a publisher... which you're not under section 230... Now your GoFundme gets pulled if whatever leftist running GoFundme decides they don't like you. Now the payment companies won't process your payments (too many examples to name). Now, despite being the fourth largest newspaper in the country, your twitter account will be disabled indefinitely for posting "hacked" "russian disinformation" that turns out to be neither hacked nor disinformation. And we find out after the election that the Attorney General of Delaware has been investigating this matter for over a year. Now some dipshit moderator on Hacker News will shadowban you permanently on a whim. Your google docs will be blocked for violating the terms of service. Youtube will demonetize you. There is nowhere to hide from the dystopia that every fucking retarded left-winger here is so eager to embrace. It's like being in the middle of the red scare, but everyone says they're ok with telephone companies listening to the bad people's conversations and disconnecting their phone lines if they mention communism. Because, you know, they're "private companies" or something. The only cold comfort is that it will surely be used against them one day. AnD wHy dId PeOpLe vOtE fOr a RacIst??!!

southeastern 6y ago
>Because, you know, they're "private companies" or something. Wait so are you for them being able to do whatever they want, where you can be banned from their service? Or do you want them under the arm of the government where they could be regulated? I think you're just mad at the culture. Trump isn't gonna fix that
- gd1 6y ago
  I want them to, of their own volition, uphold the principles that a liberal democracy is meant to hold dear. No one has a monopoly on the truth. Things like this have really happened: https://twitter.com/JeremyVineOn5/status/1239512626134224896 https://twitter.com/JeremyVineOn5/status/1239512626134224896 And you've all just memory-holed it.

onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago

I think the idea is making things harder to access. The failed idea behind making drugs illegal is that they'd be harder to access and less people would do them. There's evidence this didn't work. I think the idea here is the same - if the big platforms ban certain types of egregious and harmful misinformation (that gets recommended to people susceptible to conspiracies) - these companies are hoping less people overall will watch this content, and probably more importantly, if anything bad comes of this, they won't have their brands tarnished because of it. Will it work? Who knows. They're companies. Why can't they do what they please as long as it's within the law? Does the law require YouTube to keep up all content? YouTube has a Terms of Service and has censored lots of content for a long time. Why is there such a big distinction between beheadings, child porn, anti-vax, hate speech, and election misinformation? These companies already have a history of censoring "political" content for foreign countries. What is new here?

dasil003 6y ago
I don't disagree, but the difference with drugs is that people specifically seek them out and there is a lot of effort and involved to make it happen through the whole supply chain. The problems with social media are largely around removing all friction from the process, and adding a huge dose of virality and highly specific targeting. The former means people get a vast amount of information with minimal effort, and the latter enables targeted propaganda which then gets magnified in echo chamber bubbles by the algo. The individual elements all existed before, but the combination creates pretty unique effects. I'm also skeptical these companies can effectively address the problem since these properties are what has fueled their growth.
- southeastern 6y ago
  Take qanon. I don't it naturally spreads as virulently as drugs. But when you add Facebook into the mix, people are able to disseminate this information instantly to people who just don't understand how to vet sources. The comparison to drugs just doesn't work.
- inglor_cz 6y ago

lifeformed 6y ago

It's not about making information disappear, it's about recognizing that humans are very susceptible to mass manipulation (see cults, mass hysteria), and it is becoming an increasingly powerful strategy and weapon in our age of rapidly growing new communications technologies. How to combat this is debatable for sure - I don't think this Youtube stuff is the most effective solution - but I don't think we can just apply old principles to new problems without first acknowledging the real challenges it's meant to address.

cmdshiftf4 6y ago

>I find it really disconcerting how many people on Hacker News want a corporate entity to decide what information is deemed acceptable to know. You're saying the label on a forum for the shitshow that is corporate VC & the race for billions is incorrect? That it doesn't embody an authentic hacker spirit? Surely you jest? Anyway, know your audience. There's no shortage of corporate bootlickers who love their billionaire overlords and the antics their privacy/competition/small business/ethics/human rights crushing companies get up to posting on here all day every day. Some even feign giving a fuck about these things but unsurprisingly not enough to actually do something about it. Then you've the statists who, well, love the state although it often has the caveat of which side of the coin is currently pretending to run the place. Then you've got the union of the two who often rear their head and they're... well... fucked, but what are you going to do? Anyway, as I've said on here before as someone without skin in the game and who is at a safe distance, what seems like the final season of the hit reality TV show "USA" is most certainly an exciting one to be watching.

mjfl 6y ago

The culture has changed around here in the last 4 years to favor centralized regulation of communication, which is a dizzying reversal of what it was about every year before that.

bachmeier 6y ago

Your argument is unlikely to have anything to do with the reason for YouTube's decision. They're thinking about their brand. Do they want to be branded as the company that lets anyone post videos about the election being stolen without any evidence? They get to choose between "yes" and "no" and the choices lead to very different brands. The same point comes up again and again when porn is removed from [website]. "How dare they remove porn! I don't see anything wrong with it!" Sometimes it's even looking down their noses at the obviously primitive American culture that is the problem. Of course porn won't disappear from the world, and of course people that like porn will be disappointed, but it won't be that company's brand.

thu2111 6y ago
The reality is if YouTube was committed to free speech this wouldn't even come up at all. People would 'brand' YouTube this way about as much as they do Chrome for letting you browse websites claiming the election was stolen, or web search for letting you find it, or your ISP for letting you download the HTML. Nobody would give a crap, they'd just argue about other platforms where the owners were engaging in censorship. Political censorship isn't just morally wrong, it's bad for business and bad for your brand too. The moment you allow that camel to put its nose under the tent, you're inviting in a whole world of pain. Suddenly every zealot out there will be demanding you silence the people who disagree with them, because they know that maybe if they make enough noise you will. They'll attack your brand hard because they know if they do you might cave. A hard core libertarian "everyone is served on principle" attitude keeps the fighting at bay because people know it's not worth putting in the energy.

tripzilch 6y ago

The disconcerting part is that right here in this thread the Americans are still arguing as if this is a battle with two teams, one of which wins, the other loses. So here's the thing. The US [social media] corporations have to lose. Simply because we already found out years ago, that ethics doesn't scale. UNLESS they solve this problem, this simply means that they OUGHT not to exist, at that scale. The American people are of course inevitably coming out as the losers too, because of the gigantic inequalities, and the corporate capitalist culture grazing on the weak. So it's lose/lose. Everything's broken. GLHF

mrighele 6y ago

> I find it really disconcerting how many people on Hacker News want a corporate entity to decide what information is deemed acceptable to know. It's up to a corporate entity to decide what should be in its platform though. The issue in the case of Youtube (and other social platform) is that there are a few players that get much of the cake, so their decisions have wide effect. It is this last point that should be addressed in my opinion

MrMan 6y ago

Whats more disconcerting is sectarian violence fomenting by propaganda, even to the point of the breakup of a nuclear armed state, the US. That is disconcerting to me. Preventing it is of the highest priority.

bo1024 6y ago

The problem is YouTube's algorithm -- recommendations. If we accept the algorithm, then there is no middle ground: either you ban this content from the platform entirely, or watch misinformation spread wildly. But there could be a middle ground in which the platform changes how its algorithm works. I think neither YouTube nor its detractors are considering this as a serious possibility, for some reason.

davidhalter 6y ago
They don't consider alternatives, because the algorithm is optimized for view counts. Sensationalism has always brought more views than "good" content. Youtube would need to forgo a lot of ad revenue to change the algorithm.

tekknik 6y ago

> I find it really disconcerting how many people on Hacker News want a corporate entity to decide what information is deemed acceptable to know. Do you even know where that word came from? The irony is almost overwhelming. But I digress... Many on HN are the ones implementing these features, therefore have a bit of power over the rest of us. Further, judging from cancel culture, the left seems to want to force their opinions on others that have different ones. So this makes pretty clear sense to me.

togs 6y ago

China bans topics all the time, and they're on a trajectory to become the strongest nation in the world.