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Remember: Parler tried “making their own X”. They were taken offline by a concerted effort at every level, despite the fact that a large portion of the capitol

Remember: Parler tried “making their own X”. They were taken offline by a concerted effort at every level, despite the fact that a large portion of the capitol protests were organized on Facebook and YouTube. Anyone who’s ever been an activist for long enough knows that the censorship that silenced your enemies will eventually silence you. Corporate policing of speech needs to stop.

chrissnell 6y ago
Social media is about to take the same trajectory that MP3s once did. Just as we saw the evolution of Napster and IRC trading, the RIAA takedowns, the rise of BitTorrent, and the eventual emergence of streaming services, I believe we will see a similar trajectory with social media and free speech: 1. Technology enables new social phenomena that subvert the status quo. 2. Corporations move to combat these phenomena <--- we are here now 3. New technology to subvert these controls 4. Industry faces reckoning and embraces the new technology, losing some profit but avoiding a complete loss of control.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  Its the last part of #4 that we have to prevent. > but avoiding a complete loss of control We need the complete loss of control. Corporations control entirely too much of American, and really, worldwide, life as it is. We can't give this one to them. Its too important. The ability to freely communicate ideas, even in vulgar, poorly considered ways, is too important and too fundamental to humanity to be allowed to be controlled. To quote Picard, "The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!"
  - space_fountain 6y ago
    I was once like you, but. Doesn't it seem to you like something is fundamentally worse about politics now than it was 20 years ago? Isn't it true that people are more disconnected now than they have been in the past 50 years and institutions like clubs and political organizations reduced to merely a place to send money. Obviously the causes of this are varied (for one thing social media is way newer than 20 years), but doesn't it seem likely to you that social media and maybe particularly recommender systems are part of the problem. Society seems like a much more fragile thing than I'd imagined 5 years ago. I'm not ready to throw out all the gatekeepers, they've been part of what kept this boat floating up to now
    - zaptheimpaler 6y ago
      Social media opened people's eyes to just how many different points of views there are on any given issue in the world. In the 90s or 00's, there was only 1-2 consensus views pushed by media. Obviously its going to be a bumpy ride as the whole of society suddenly has to learn to cope with so many views, learn the critical thinking it takes to grapple with false information, learn who is trustworthy and who is not etc. but in the long run we will be much much better off for it. This is merely what society wide growth looks like - its not going to be a straight line up. Pulling the plug on that is deeply, deeply wrong no matter how scary it seems. Some of the other issues like disconnection are amplified by existing institutions. In the 60s or 70s, a single working person could provide for an entire family. Now, most households have both parents working to provide barely the same standard of living or lower. When the vast majority of your time is directed into work by economic necessity, of course there is little time left for socializing or anything else. Don't believe the bullshit that it is somehow social media's fault. The trend of disconnection goes longer, and it has just as much to do (or much more IMO) with no free time, no money, stress and insular urban planning. The institutions are dying because they are ineffective or do not serve the public and have been for far too long. How is it that we had almost a year to prepare for a plan to distribute vaccines but we found out there is none now? How is is that corporations lobby for and routinely pass laws that hurt people? How is it that the health insurance industry still exists and causes millions of deaths when most other countries have lower costs AND better outcomes with socialized healthcare? How is that the central banks are now printing so much money that it will devalue all peoples personal savings by 10-20% over the years without really explaining thats what they are doing, without any approval? How can you keep desperately clinging to some illusion that institutions safeguard society when every institution is failing so badly? Social media is just the evil boogieman media loves to blame for every modern problem, when in fact it only surfaces the problems that have always existed but been completely ignored by traditional media. Heck even the problem of people being easily fooled by fake news is a reflection of how education completely fails to teach critical thinking. The institutions have failed us all for FAR too long - they cannot be reformed. Burn them down and build new ones.
      - cbozeman 6y ago
aeturnum 6y ago
I'm of two minds. It's absolutely true that unpopular minorities (of whatever kind) should be able to talk. It's also absolutely true that virality can create dangerous situations which are difficult to control. Instead of banning, which I agree has problems, I favor putting questionable communities in a 'slow mode' where people need to wait to join them (and maybe communications within the community are delayed). Then, in 5 or 10 or 15 days, you can see if the community is still 'a problem' (whatever that means in this situation) and if greater moderation is required. The idea is to preserve communities that build over time, give admins time to make decisions, and highlight the hard questions that need to be answered by platforms.
- boogies 6y ago
  Isn’t the point of democracy that oligarchies lose control to the hoi polloi?
  - space_fountain 6y ago
    Maybe, but this isn't exactly a new fear. Right or wrong a lot of how for example the US constitution was setup was explicitly about limiting the power of a populist. But also these discussions aren't really about the government. Full stop the government shouldn't be able to shut sites like parlor down, but part of how society works is by consensus forming and in my opinion social networks really have messed this up. FB and the other big players seem to be realizing this and trying to do better (not sure if they're succeeding), but if other players want to make it harder for this breakdown to happen I say all power to them.
shp0ngle 6y ago
Parler is back online, isn’t it? edit: oh ok only the domain is, with some random content, not the network. all right gab seems to be still on
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
> Remember: Parler tried “making their own X”. Making their own X, which they didn't even host on their own servers? yea...ok.
- kevinpet 6y ago
  Next up, "making their own X, without even building their own parallel internet"
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    It's not impossible or difficult to self host. To build your own ISP is. Not a fair comparison. Yes believe it or not there was a world where you could host your own hardware! But you sold out then, and now you're mad about it. Womp womp. We warned you.
    - bitstan 6y ago
      Your single blade on a rack isn't going to stand up against non-stop ddos attacks. That requires ISP level infrastructure. That's why companies like Cloudflare are publicly listed. From the wiki "Cloudflare was created in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn.[2] It received media attention in June 2011 for providing security services to the website of LulzSec, a black hat hacking group.[3]" > Womp womp. We warned you. Your multiple personalities are seeking vengeance on free speech because.. you wanted self hosted hardware??
      - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
        If you endlessly come up with more and more excuses I'm sure you'll eventually land on needing another earth. What can you do if a meteor hits? What then! Clearly it is oppressive because there is no other earth for me to back up my beliefs and oppress others! Ultimately you can only do what you can. But let's be honest, if you can't lift a finger to install server hardware and networking switches, how on earth can you possibly advocate for change in our society? > Your multiple personalities are seeking vengeance on free speech because.. you wanted self hosted hardware?? Please remember HN etiquette. You say you want free speech yet people can't even invest in your own hardware. Parlor complained but removed left wing content 24/7 - no one complained about "free speech" then. Make it make sense instead of being obvious political pandering.
btmiller 6y ago
Parler was explicitly unmoderated by choice and hate speech was its selling point. You’ll have a hard time finding a) a service provider willing to tolerate that and b) much public sympathy for the service promoting hate. Yet it called into question freedom of speech. Same thing today with WSB, but the focus is clearly not hate speech (even if Discord says so). I find today’s bans way more objectionable than Parler, yet I still cannot reason why people truly believe that any service providers owes it to us a 1st Amendment platform. Discord and Reddit are free to select whatever content they find palatable. It sucks because I found WSB entertaining, but no one here should be mixing up Big Tech with the 1st Amendment.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  And if you intentionally want to have content that is objectionable, putting it on AWS seems like an awful idea. That's how Sci-Hub and TPB have managed to stick around for decades, and they've shown censorship on the internet isn't really a thing. God knows how many powerful forces have tried to censor them, to no avail. While I agree that in some ways this is worse than the Parler case, it also is a free service that costs Discord a ton of money, especially with the hundreds of people constantly hanging out in voice chat [0]. A ventrilo server of that size would probably cost upwards of $100 a month [1]. So I'm not surprised with Discord wanting to enforce their ToS more readily than AWS who was actually making good money out of Parler. [0] https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1354532238524874753 https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1354532238524874753 [1] https://www.ventrilo4.com/ventrilo-server-hosting-prices.php https://www.ventrilo4.com/ventrilo-server-hosting-prices.php
  - ammple 6y ago
    The Discord server in question claims "we got over 1,000 server boosts" [0]. That's Discord's monetization scheme, a sort of server-specific patreon subscription that users opt into, to collectively unlock features for that server specifically. Judging by the going rate for "server boosts", Discord would have easily had $5,000 a month in revenue tied to that server [1]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/where_do_we_go_from_here_and_who_is_going_to_step/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/wher... [1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-Server-Boosting-#h_9dfb44db-c394-4339-863b-e6d1e3fb0469 https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...
meekrohprocess 6y ago
The revolution always devours its children. One of my favorite aphorisms is: >Don't put your faith in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. What happened to Georges Danton, the thunderous voice of the early French Revolution? How about Toussaint L'ouverture, avenger of the New World? Even Simon Bolivar and Manuela Saenz left behind a fractious group of nation-states. The US is kind of an aberration in that regard, but even Ben Franklin cautioned that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." The funny thing is, if you extend that metaphor to big tech companies like FAANGs, then they would be the early revolutionaries who are about to get devoured. And that metaphor would fall apart quickly, because those companies have never professed to be revolutionary harbingers of a new and improved world.
fastball 6y ago
Luckily someone else has already "made your own Discord" for us, and it's called Matrix. It's E2EE and self-hosted, so unless you got snitches in your community that tattle to your hosting provider and then they go above-and-beyond and take action, you should be golden.

chrissnell 6y ago

Social media is about to take the same trajectory that MP3s once did. Just as we saw the evolution of Napster and IRC trading, the RIAA takedowns, the rise of BitTorrent, and the eventual emergence of streaming services, I believe we will see a similar trajectory with social media and free speech: 1. Technology enables new social phenomena that subvert the status quo. 2. Corporations move to combat these phenomena <--- we are here now 3. New technology to subvert these controls 4. Industry faces reckoning and embraces the new technology, losing some profit but avoiding a complete loss of control.

cbozeman 6y ago
Its the last part of #4 that we have to prevent. > but avoiding a complete loss of control We need the complete loss of control. Corporations control entirely too much of American, and really, worldwide, life as it is. We can't give this one to them. Its too important. The ability to freely communicate ideas, even in vulgar, poorly considered ways, is too important and too fundamental to humanity to be allowed to be controlled. To quote Picard, "The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!"
- space_fountain 6y ago
  I was once like you, but. Doesn't it seem to you like something is fundamentally worse about politics now than it was 20 years ago? Isn't it true that people are more disconnected now than they have been in the past 50 years and institutions like clubs and political organizations reduced to merely a place to send money. Obviously the causes of this are varied (for one thing social media is way newer than 20 years), but doesn't it seem likely to you that social media and maybe particularly recommender systems are part of the problem. Society seems like a much more fragile thing than I'd imagined 5 years ago. I'm not ready to throw out all the gatekeepers, they've been part of what kept this boat floating up to now
  - zaptheimpaler 6y ago
    Social media opened people's eyes to just how many different points of views there are on any given issue in the world. In the 90s or 00's, there was only 1-2 consensus views pushed by media. Obviously its going to be a bumpy ride as the whole of society suddenly has to learn to cope with so many views, learn the critical thinking it takes to grapple with false information, learn who is trustworthy and who is not etc. but in the long run we will be much much better off for it. This is merely what society wide growth looks like - its not going to be a straight line up. Pulling the plug on that is deeply, deeply wrong no matter how scary it seems. Some of the other issues like disconnection are amplified by existing institutions. In the 60s or 70s, a single working person could provide for an entire family. Now, most households have both parents working to provide barely the same standard of living or lower. When the vast majority of your time is directed into work by economic necessity, of course there is little time left for socializing or anything else. Don't believe the bullshit that it is somehow social media's fault. The trend of disconnection goes longer, and it has just as much to do (or much more IMO) with no free time, no money, stress and insular urban planning. The institutions are dying because they are ineffective or do not serve the public and have been for far too long. How is it that we had almost a year to prepare for a plan to distribute vaccines but we found out there is none now? How is is that corporations lobby for and routinely pass laws that hurt people? How is it that the health insurance industry still exists and causes millions of deaths when most other countries have lower costs AND better outcomes with socialized healthcare? How is that the central banks are now printing so much money that it will devalue all peoples personal savings by 10-20% over the years without really explaining thats what they are doing, without any approval? How can you keep desperately clinging to some illusion that institutions safeguard society when every institution is failing so badly? Social media is just the evil boogieman media loves to blame for every modern problem, when in fact it only surfaces the problems that have always existed but been completely ignored by traditional media. Heck even the problem of people being easily fooled by fake news is a reflection of how education completely fails to teach critical thinking. The institutions have failed us all for FAR too long - they cannot be reformed. Burn them down and build new ones.
    - cbozeman 6y ago

aeturnum 6y ago

I'm of two minds. It's absolutely true that unpopular minorities (of whatever kind) should be able to talk. It's also absolutely true that virality can create dangerous situations which are difficult to control. Instead of banning, which I agree has problems, I favor putting questionable communities in a 'slow mode' where people need to wait to join them (and maybe communications within the community are delayed). Then, in 5 or 10 or 15 days, you can see if the community is still 'a problem' (whatever that means in this situation) and if greater moderation is required. The idea is to preserve communities that build over time, give admins time to make decisions, and highlight the hard questions that need to be answered by platforms.

boogies 6y ago
Isn’t the point of democracy that oligarchies lose control to the hoi polloi?
- space_fountain 6y ago
  Maybe, but this isn't exactly a new fear. Right or wrong a lot of how for example the US constitution was setup was explicitly about limiting the power of a populist. But also these discussions aren't really about the government. Full stop the government shouldn't be able to shut sites like parlor down, but part of how society works is by consensus forming and in my opinion social networks really have messed this up. FB and the other big players seem to be realizing this and trying to do better (not sure if they're succeeding), but if other players want to make it harder for this breakdown to happen I say all power to them.

shp0ngle 6y ago

Parler is back online, isn’t it? edit: oh ok only the domain is, with some random content, not the network. all right gab seems to be still on

ntsplnkv2 6y ago

> Remember: Parler tried “making their own X”. Making their own X, which they didn't even host on their own servers? yea...ok.

kevinpet 6y ago
Next up, "making their own X, without even building their own parallel internet"
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  It's not impossible or difficult to self host. To build your own ISP is. Not a fair comparison. Yes believe it or not there was a world where you could host your own hardware! But you sold out then, and now you're mad about it. Womp womp. We warned you.
  - bitstan 6y ago
    Your single blade on a rack isn't going to stand up against non-stop ddos attacks. That requires ISP level infrastructure. That's why companies like Cloudflare are publicly listed. From the wiki "Cloudflare was created in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn.[2] It received media attention in June 2011 for providing security services to the website of LulzSec, a black hat hacking group.[3]" > Womp womp. We warned you. Your multiple personalities are seeking vengeance on free speech because.. you wanted self hosted hardware??
    - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
      If you endlessly come up with more and more excuses I'm sure you'll eventually land on needing another earth. What can you do if a meteor hits? What then! Clearly it is oppressive because there is no other earth for me to back up my beliefs and oppress others! Ultimately you can only do what you can. But let's be honest, if you can't lift a finger to install server hardware and networking switches, how on earth can you possibly advocate for change in our society? > Your multiple personalities are seeking vengeance on free speech because.. you wanted self hosted hardware?? Please remember HN etiquette. You say you want free speech yet people can't even invest in your own hardware. Parlor complained but removed left wing content 24/7 - no one complained about "free speech" then. Make it make sense instead of being obvious political pandering.

btmiller 6y ago

Parler was explicitly unmoderated by choice and hate speech was its selling point. You’ll have a hard time finding a) a service provider willing to tolerate that and b) much public sympathy for the service promoting hate. Yet it called into question freedom of speech. Same thing today with WSB, but the focus is clearly not hate speech (even if Discord says so). I find today’s bans way more objectionable than Parler, yet I still cannot reason why people truly believe that any service providers owes it to us a 1st Amendment platform. Discord and Reddit are free to select whatever content they find palatable. It sucks because I found WSB entertaining, but no one here should be mixing up Big Tech with the 1st Amendment.

ehsankia 6y ago
And if you intentionally want to have content that is objectionable, putting it on AWS seems like an awful idea. That's how Sci-Hub and TPB have managed to stick around for decades, and they've shown censorship on the internet isn't really a thing. God knows how many powerful forces have tried to censor them, to no avail. While I agree that in some ways this is worse than the Parler case, it also is a free service that costs Discord a ton of money, especially with the hundreds of people constantly hanging out in voice chat [0]. A ventrilo server of that size would probably cost upwards of $100 a month [1]. So I'm not surprised with Discord wanting to enforce their ToS more readily than AWS who was actually making good money out of Parler. [0] https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1354532238524874753 https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1354532238524874753 [1] https://www.ventrilo4.com/ventrilo-server-hosting-prices.php https://www.ventrilo4.com/ventrilo-server-hosting-prices.php
- ammple 6y ago
  The Discord server in question claims "we got over 1,000 server boosts" [0]. That's Discord's monetization scheme, a sort of server-specific patreon subscription that users opt into, to collectively unlock features for that server specifically. Judging by the going rate for "server boosts", Discord would have easily had $5,000 a month in revenue tied to that server [1]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/where_do_we_go_from_here_and_who_is_going_to_step/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/wher... [1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-Server-Boosting-#h_9dfb44db-c394-4339-863b-e6d1e3fb0469 https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...

meekrohprocess 6y ago

The revolution always devours its children. One of my favorite aphorisms is: >Don't put your faith in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. What happened to Georges Danton, the thunderous voice of the early French Revolution? How about Toussaint L'ouverture, avenger of the New World? Even Simon Bolivar and Manuela Saenz left behind a fractious group of nation-states. The US is kind of an aberration in that regard, but even Ben Franklin cautioned that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." The funny thing is, if you extend that metaphor to big tech companies like FAANGs, then they would be the early revolutionaries who are about to get devoured. And that metaphor would fall apart quickly, because those companies have never professed to be revolutionary harbingers of a new and improved world.

fastball 6y ago

Luckily someone else has already "made your own Discord" for us, and it's called Matrix. It's E2EE and self-hosted, so unless you got snitches in your community that tattle to your hosting provider and then they go above-and-beyond and take action, you should be golden.