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> would you want to work for such a company, or have it on your resume in the future? Does top talent only work for giant ad networks that thrive through under

> would you want to work for such a company, or have it on your resume in the future? Does top talent only work for giant ad networks that thrive through undermining privacy (and hence, free speech) while manipulating public discourse to the point where these companies hardly have any defenders left? I suppose so, money will easily trump other considerations, especially among the naive, ignorant or just plain venal. The sad fact is your comment exposes how difficult it is for anyone in the tech industry to hold a sincere conviction that free speech is a good thing, which until recently would've been astounding. It's a giant backwards step.

rob74 6y ago
Free speech is one thing, building an echo chamber for lunatics is something completely different, at least in my book. In principle, we probably also agree that all people should be equal, but if you follow that principle to the end, you get Communism. That's why there is a need for supreme courts to interpret each country's constitution, which are basically just a list of simple principles that are acceptable to everyone, but the devil's always in the details...
- brigandish 6y ago
  > building an echo chamber for lunatics is something completely different, Perhaps it would've been better for Twitter to support free speech then and they'd (the Parler users in question) have remained a fringe voice completely overwhelmed by opposition on a mainstream platform. Even then, the main problem I see driving all of this is the lack of competition, so I fully support building "echo chambers" if that means competition for platforms like Twitter that are actively working to create echo chambers that they control. Edit: clarity
- webmaven 6y ago
  > In principle, we probably also agree that all people should be equal, but if you follow that principle to the end, you get Communism. That's a caricature. The actual principle is "equal justice before the law" (there are variations). Justice is an important part of the principle since otherwise "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread". Not to mention such evils as selective enforcement and prosecutorial discretion. Few people these days would insist that equality of outcomes is a legitimate goal, though the extent to which disparity of outcomes is treated as a "code smell" at least potentially indicating a societal problem worth examining does vary fairly predictably across the US political spectrum. The appetite for instituting solutions when a systemic problem is demonstrably found also varies fairly predictably.
amanaplanacanal 6y ago
I think we have all unfortunately seen what unbridled free speech on the internet looks like. I think we have reached a good balance (for now). Government has to be hands off, and platforms can censor as they wish. It’s hard to say whether this will work long term, though.
- brigandish 6y ago
  Have you compared the unbridled free speech on the internet, which is (or was) available to US citizens, with that of bridled speech available to citizens of other places around the world? Which place has more violence as a result?
  - mike00632 6y ago
    Have you used an email with no spam filter?
    - brigandish 6y ago
      I still get to see what's in my spam folder.
      - mike00632 6y ago
        And you can still go to dark corners of the internet and view all sorts of hate speech.
        brigandish 6y ago
        You're stepping well outside the bounds of your analogy. Incoming email is like a social media feed, hence the comparison. It fails when you compare things like shadowbanning with spam, as I pointed out. Going out onto the "dark corners" of the internet though, that would be equivalent, perhaps, to signing up for an equivalent email provider without a spam filter? Nope, that doesn't work. Hard to tell what you could mean other than "my initial analogy didn't work so I'm going to move the goalposts".
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
> The sad fact is your comment exposes how difficult it is for anyone in the tech industry to hold a sincere conviction that free speech is a good thing Twitter occasionally labels disputed/debunked political claims as such (but still lets them be published) and, after literally years of doing little more than that, finally took actions to ban a half-dozen high-profile accounts that kept pushing such claims after they arguably literally lead to an armed insurrection. Parler was literally designed with suppression of political viewpoints they disagree with in mind from the start. It should be crystal clear which of those networks "values free speech" to a higher degree. So, no, your implicit claim that it's sad that top talent wouldn't work for Parler because that would demonstrate their commitment to free speech is silly at best and disingenuous at worst. Parler has demonstrably less commitment to free speech than Twitter does. I'll be blunt: my sincere conviction is that "if you moderate anything it means you are not for free speech" is not a viable operational principle. It's a rhetorical device. Trolls -- alt-right or otherwise -- have always claimed that moderation suppresses their free speech. If you listen to them, you are running a forum for trolls, whether or not that is your intent. It is not Parler's publicly claimed intent to be doing so, but -- even based on the content on their site, let alone their ideologically-driven moderation which, again, goes far beyond anything Twitter, Facebook, et. al, have actually done -- it is painfully obvious it is their actual intent.
- brigandish 6y ago
  > Parler was literally designed with suppression of political viewpoints they disagree with in mind from the start. "We're a community town square, an open town square, with no censorship... If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler." That's a quote from the CEO I just grabbed from CNBC[1] and there are others floating around about the lack of censorship. How does that lead to suppression of opposing political viewpoints? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/27/parler-ceo-wants-liberal-to-join-the-pro-trump-crowd-on-the-app.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/27/parler-ceo-wants-liberal-to-...
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    This is just talk. You can scroll up to the head of the thread and see how the platform was designed to censor in order to maintain a certain ideology.
webmaven 6y ago
> The sad fact is your comment exposes how difficult it is for anyone in the tech industry to hold a sincere conviction that free speech is a good thing, which until recently would've been astounding. It's a giant backwards step. Free speech is a good thing. And if algorithmic ranking weren't involved, I would probably still hold to the notion that the appropriate cure for bad speech is usually more speech. But I've come to understand that even when some of a thing is good, more of it is not always better. By all means we need vigorous debate and principled stances arguing about where the line should be drawn, and what are the appropriate consequences for stepping over it, but "fire in a crowded theater" is just the obvious case when we have people nattering on about how it's stupid to prevent people from walking around with spare cans of cans of gasoline, just in case and ... "hey, did you know that if the fuel-to-air mixture is rich enough, gasoline actually won't catch fire? Here is your complimentary box of matches BTW." We desperately need better models and mechanisms for regulating speech that don't require heavy handed censorship by the government or outright bans by private parties, and it would be great if these mechanisms can be meaningfully exercised at the edge of the network (or social graph) rather than centrally deployed, but I'm not sure how to get there from here without the various failure modes bringing everything crashing down around us anyway.
- brigandish 6y ago
  Speech is not gasoline, and ignoring the fact that "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" is not the correct quote (it's falsely shouting it, and I only know one case of it happening[1]), you've placed the cause of this on algorithmic ranking as much as speech itself. Great, let's stop interfering with speech, it leads to bad things. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Hg-Y7MugU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Hg-Y7MugU
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > Speech is not gasoline It's a metaphor. Let me extend it a bit: Speech is the drought of repeated lies about the illegitimacy of an unwelcome outcome drying out the underbrush of widespread discontent. Speech gathers the tinder of a crowd committed to "stop the steal". Speech is the accelerant convincing those so predisposed that violence or the threat of violence is acceptable and even to be admired. And speech is the match tossed offhandedly aiming the mob you primed and egged on at the target you want to intimidate (and that's the most charitable interpretation). > you've placed the cause of this on algorithmic ranking as much as speech itself. To be clear, I find algorithmic ranking to largely be the cause of mostly the 'widespread discontent based on repeated lies' part, although there are clearly also various 'automated radicalization' effects happening as well. > Great, let's stop interfering with speech, it leads to bad things. I don't think we get to unring that particular bell (especially since such ranking efforts predate both Twitter and Facebook). Applying ranking techniques to the prioritization and selection of a subset of items from a variety of sources is one of those ideas that was inevitable because it was obvious to a sufficiently large number of people, whether the result is a live feed, an automatically arranged 'front page', a playlist, or some other format. It doesn't even matter which specific techniques happened to be used, they were all going to be tried by a lot of folks until somebody got the results they wanted (more engagement / time on screen). Tech companies like Twitter and Facebook are going to continue to try to mitigate the toxic side effects on public discourse, but I don't think there is a way for them to back away from algorithmic ranking unless government regulation simply forbids it outright (which isn't too likely). For that matter, I'm not sure how useful HN itself would be if the front page wasn't being automatically ranked based on engagement+recency with editorial decisions being made to nuke certain types of posts/topics for being attractive nuisances.

rob74 6y ago

Free speech is one thing, building an echo chamber for lunatics is something completely different, at least in my book. In principle, we probably also agree that all people should be equal, but if you follow that principle to the end, you get Communism. That's why there is a need for supreme courts to interpret each country's constitution, which are basically just a list of simple principles that are acceptable to everyone, but the devil's always in the details...

brigandish 6y ago
> building an echo chamber for lunatics is something completely different, Perhaps it would've been better for Twitter to support free speech then and they'd (the Parler users in question) have remained a fringe voice completely overwhelmed by opposition on a mainstream platform. Even then, the main problem I see driving all of this is the lack of competition, so I fully support building "echo chambers" if that means competition for platforms like Twitter that are actively working to create echo chambers that they control. Edit: clarity
webmaven 6y ago
> In principle, we probably also agree that all people should be equal, but if you follow that principle to the end, you get Communism. That's a caricature. The actual principle is "equal justice before the law" (there are variations). Justice is an important part of the principle since otherwise "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread". Not to mention such evils as selective enforcement and prosecutorial discretion. Few people these days would insist that equality of outcomes is a legitimate goal, though the extent to which disparity of outcomes is treated as a "code smell" at least potentially indicating a societal problem worth examining does vary fairly predictably across the US political spectrum. The appetite for instituting solutions when a systemic problem is demonstrably found also varies fairly predictably.

amanaplanacanal 6y ago

I think we have all unfortunately seen what unbridled free speech on the internet looks like. I think we have reached a good balance (for now). Government has to be hands off, and platforms can censor as they wish. It’s hard to say whether this will work long term, though.

brigandish 6y ago
Have you compared the unbridled free speech on the internet, which is (or was) available to US citizens, with that of bridled speech available to citizens of other places around the world? Which place has more violence as a result?
- mike00632 6y ago
  Have you used an email with no spam filter?
  - brigandish 6y ago
    I still get to see what's in my spam folder.
    - mike00632 6y ago
      And you can still go to dark corners of the internet and view all sorts of hate speech.
      - brigandish 6y ago
        You're stepping well outside the bounds of your analogy. Incoming email is like a social media feed, hence the comparison. It fails when you compare things like shadowbanning with spam, as I pointed out. Going out onto the "dark corners" of the internet though, that would be equivalent, perhaps, to signing up for an equivalent email provider without a spam filter? Nope, that doesn't work. Hard to tell what you could mean other than "my initial analogy didn't work so I'm going to move the goalposts".

chipotle_coyote 6y ago

> The sad fact is your comment exposes how difficult it is for anyone in the tech industry to hold a sincere conviction that free speech is a good thing Twitter occasionally labels disputed/debunked political claims as such (but still lets them be published) and, after literally years of doing little more than that, finally took actions to ban a half-dozen high-profile accounts that kept pushing such claims after they arguably literally lead to an armed insurrection. Parler was literally designed with suppression of political viewpoints they disagree with in mind from the start. It should be crystal clear which of those networks "values free speech" to a higher degree. So, no, your implicit claim that it's sad that top talent wouldn't work for Parler because that would demonstrate their commitment to free speech is silly at best and disingenuous at worst. Parler has demonstrably less commitment to free speech than Twitter does. I'll be blunt: my sincere conviction is that "if you moderate anything it means you are not for free speech" is not a viable operational principle. It's a rhetorical device. Trolls -- alt-right or otherwise -- have always claimed that moderation suppresses their free speech. If you listen to them, you are running a forum for trolls, whether or not that is your intent. It is not Parler's publicly claimed intent to be doing so, but -- even based on the content on their site, let alone their ideologically-driven moderation which, again, goes far beyond anything Twitter, Facebook, et. al, have actually done -- it is painfully obvious it is their actual intent.

brigandish 6y ago
> Parler was literally designed with suppression of political viewpoints they disagree with in mind from the start. "We're a community town square, an open town square, with no censorship... If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler." That's a quote from the CEO I just grabbed from CNBC[1] and there are others floating around about the lack of censorship. How does that lead to suppression of opposing political viewpoints? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/27/parler-ceo-wants-liberal-to-join-the-pro-trump-crowd-on-the-app.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/27/parler-ceo-wants-liberal-to-...
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  This is just talk. You can scroll up to the head of the thread and see how the platform was designed to censor in order to maintain a certain ideology.

webmaven 6y ago

> The sad fact is your comment exposes how difficult it is for anyone in the tech industry to hold a sincere conviction that free speech is a good thing, which until recently would've been astounding. It's a giant backwards step. Free speech is a good thing. And if algorithmic ranking weren't involved, I would probably still hold to the notion that the appropriate cure for bad speech is usually more speech. But I've come to understand that even when some of a thing is good, more of it is not always better. By all means we need vigorous debate and principled stances arguing about where the line should be drawn, and what are the appropriate consequences for stepping over it, but "fire in a crowded theater" is just the obvious case when we have people nattering on about how it's stupid to prevent people from walking around with spare cans of cans of gasoline, just in case and ... "hey, did you know that if the fuel-to-air mixture is rich enough, gasoline actually won't catch fire? Here is your complimentary box of matches BTW." We desperately need better models and mechanisms for regulating speech that don't require heavy handed censorship by the government or outright bans by private parties, and it would be great if these mechanisms can be meaningfully exercised at the edge of the network (or social graph) rather than centrally deployed, but I'm not sure how to get there from here without the various failure modes bringing everything crashing down around us anyway.

brigandish 6y ago
Speech is not gasoline, and ignoring the fact that "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" is not the correct quote (it's falsely shouting it, and I only know one case of it happening[1]), you've placed the cause of this on algorithmic ranking as much as speech itself. Great, let's stop interfering with speech, it leads to bad things. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Hg-Y7MugU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Hg-Y7MugU
- webmaven 6y ago
  > Speech is not gasoline It's a metaphor. Let me extend it a bit: Speech is the drought of repeated lies about the illegitimacy of an unwelcome outcome drying out the underbrush of widespread discontent. Speech gathers the tinder of a crowd committed to "stop the steal". Speech is the accelerant convincing those so predisposed that violence or the threat of violence is acceptable and even to be admired. And speech is the match tossed offhandedly aiming the mob you primed and egged on at the target you want to intimidate (and that's the most charitable interpretation). > you've placed the cause of this on algorithmic ranking as much as speech itself. To be clear, I find algorithmic ranking to largely be the cause of mostly the 'widespread discontent based on repeated lies' part, although there are clearly also various 'automated radicalization' effects happening as well. > Great, let's stop interfering with speech, it leads to bad things. I don't think we get to unring that particular bell (especially since such ranking efforts predate both Twitter and Facebook). Applying ranking techniques to the prioritization and selection of a subset of items from a variety of sources is one of those ideas that was inevitable because it was obvious to a sufficiently large number of people, whether the result is a live feed, an automatically arranged 'front page', a playlist, or some other format. It doesn't even matter which specific techniques happened to be used, they were all going to be tried by a lot of folks until somebody got the results they wanted (more engagement / time on screen). Tech companies like Twitter and Facebook are going to continue to try to mitigate the toxic side effects on public discourse, but I don't think there is a way for them to back away from algorithmic ranking unless government regulation simply forbids it outright (which isn't too likely). For that matter, I'm not sure how useful HN itself would be if the front page wasn't being automatically ranked based on engagement+recency with editorial decisions being made to nuke certain types of posts/topics for being attractive nuisances.