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There is no way to moderate the entire world. The sooner everyone alive accepts this, the better off we will be. The values of a Black lesbian female software

There is no way to moderate the entire world. The sooner everyone alive accepts this, the better off we will be. The values of a Black lesbian female software developer who grew up in San Francisco and went to Stanford will never be compatible with the values of a Hispanic straight male Marine officer who grew up in San Antonio and went to Texas Christian University and has been deployed to 17 different countries. However, they can and do exist on the same platforms. They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another, even though their existences are completely incompatible and utterly different. There's no technology on Earth powerful enough to solve for the human condition. We have to evolve our ways of thinking and interacting.

BaseS4 6y ago
The banning has to continue because if we stop now, we'd have to admit the bans we did between 2016 and 2020 were equally ridiculous and arbitrary. No, we must ramp up the bans so that we never acknowledge past mistakes. This is the way.
erikpukinskis 6y ago
I am not sure I understand your claim... there are many global-scale companies that do moderate their entire site... Google, Reddit, Amazon. Are you trying to make a more specific claim than your post lets on? Maybe that it’s impossible to moderate without making some concession you don’t prefer? Or it’s impossible to moderate away certain kinds of things?
- pixl97 6y ago
  And said companies are quite often on HN for screwing up said moderation.
- obscoth 6y ago
  They aren’t actually making a claim. It’s an emotional appeal to “free speech” absolutism, whatever that means.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  You're going to use Reddit as an example, where the people least deserving of power are given it, freely, and end up banning people for merely having different opinions? I would not have used that in my list. It doesn't boil down to a "concession I don't prefer". The only thing you moderate are those things deemed illegal by the Federal government, anything else is fair game, which brings us a pretty large umbrella of discussion in which to engage. Some people don't want to engage in those discussions because they're hard and/or unpleasant. They not required to, and can freely leave them and ignore them. Allowing whiners who can't stand that people may have a controversial opinion that's at odds with their beliefs to have any power whatsoever is a fast track to failure on multiple levels. People have block tools; they need to learn to use them.
  - verall 6y ago
    > The only thing you moderate are those things deemed illegal by the Federal government, anything else is fair game Why? It is certainly legal in the USA to be a KKK member as long as you aren't participating in the domestic terrorism. Yet I have no interest in conversation with KKK members and would will choose to freely leave websites where they hang out. So many people agree with me that a website owner decides he needs the traffic of anti-KKK people and starts banning legal Klan members. Why must the website owner keep Klan members who have not broken any laws? Why should everything besides what is deemed illegal by the federal government be fair game?
  - theamk 6y ago
    > Some people don't want to engage in those discussions because they're hard and/or unpleasant. They not required to, and can freely leave them and ignore them. They did leave, and then they made the new space where those discussion are not tolerated. We are talking inside one of such places. Some people don't want to understand that there are discussion places which limit certain topics. They are not required to, and can freely leave and ignore them. They have plenty of other places where uncensored discussions can occur.
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      > Some people don't want to understand that there are discussion places which limit certain topics. Twitter and Facebook aren't such spaces. They're both based on models of unlimited growth, which means you're going to have unlimited viewpoints, which means you're going to have to #DealWithIt. What you want, can be done on Hacker News because we're a focused community and most of us all have similar jobs, come from similar backgrounds, etc., or at least, there's enough of us that work in tech and enough of us that went to good schools that we're a more or less cohesive community with fairly similar values. You don't have that with 5 billion users, sorry.
onion2k 6y ago
However, they can and do exist on the same platforms. They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another, even though their existences are completely incompatible and utterly different. How are those two people's lives on social media incompatible? There's a million things they could have in common - a love of tacos, a band to talk about, a shared joke about a dumb celebrity, etc etc.99.9999% of the time different people can and do coexist in the same spaces. The idea that two wildly different people with different points of view can't even exist in the same social network is nonsense. The only time incompatible points of view are a problem is when one or other person decides to try to invalidate the existence of the other. That's what moderation is there to stop. If people are just tweeting about their life there's nothing to moderate.
- robswc 6y ago
  >The idea that two wildly different people with different points of view can't even exist in the same social network is nonsense I agree. However I do see this happening. Its kinda crazy. I remember being on the internet as a kid (probably on sites I had no business being on lol) and people would get into heated arguments but I don't think it ever resulted in "I hate you, I'm going to try to get you banned via politics". I was around animation and creative type forums and people would go at each others throats but then like you say, bond over talking about a new software tool or animation lol.
- refenestrator 6y ago
  "invalidate existence" can do a lot of work though if you're sufficiently motivated. There are a lot of 40-60% popular views that invalidate someone's existence according to certain parts of twitter.
- xwolfi 6y ago
  I think you put a strong word on something very common. Invalidating existence is not always call to murder :D If you say gun owners dont deserve to live or that the world would be better without white people, there are way to let it be said and discuss it without heavy moderation. People are just mad at mad people. That s why it s a frigging jungle online. But if you stay patient with mad people or ignore them if you re not sure, then moderation stays on important things like doxxing
rospaya 6y ago
That's a very American way of thinking, just the kind of reasoning that allowed Facebook to almost destroy your democracy. I'm aware that discussing free speech on any platform is a fool's errand, but at some point somebody has to say that making people angry is profitable and facilitated through the US concept of giving anyone a platform to say anything with very little consequences. And the last four years really showed how far it can go. > They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another People never ever learn. Wearing a mask has become a political struggle, people literally rather died than wore a piece of cloth just because they looked at it emotionally and not rationally, like you software dev and Marine officer would.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  > people literally rather died than wore a piece of cloth just because they looked at it emotionally and not rationally And that's fine. If you're going to live in a so-called "free" society, part of that "freedom" means people have to be "free" to make stupid choices, even if those stupid choices kill them.
  - cageface 6y ago
    What if their stupid choices kill other people too?
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      We already have laws for those things - second, third degree murder; involuntary manslaughter, etc.
      - cageface 6y ago
        So can people out in public without masks on be charged with any of these things?
        j16sdiz 6y ago
tom_mellior 6y ago
> They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another You're assuming good faith from both parties. Harassers and trolls don't act in good faith.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  And now with gpt3 we can create an endlessly creative bots of harassers!
- nine_k 6y ago
  There is a well-known recipe against trolls: do not feed them. Block and ignore them. If you visit a bathroom, you normally don't bloviate about the kind of crap you had just to flush, you rather avoid the topic; the same applies to trolls. Bring zero attention to them. Trolls' game is all about drawing attention, in the form of ire, offense, and and panic. Deprive them this, and they'll cease to bother you much. This is, of course, easier to do if you are a statue of buddha made of reinforced concrete, but even us living beings can learn and engage in some best practices of communication online.
  - nyanpasu64 6y ago
    What happens if the trolls decide to bring explosives to blow up your Buddha statue?
    - nine_k 6y ago
      I think it stretches the metaphor outside its charted range. OTOH using explosives is outright violence, and would likely be illegal by US federal laws.
    - smsm42 6y ago
      We've witnessed hundreds of statues destroyed last year, from Abraham Lincoln to Cervantes. So we know the answer - if it's the right people doing blowing up, nothing happens, you have one statue left and you are forced to apologize for putting it up in the first place.
jojobas 6y ago
The Valley's position on who of the two needs to disappear from the social media landscape has crystallized already.
offtop5 6y ago
What if these two hypothetical people are friends who share cooking tips ? What if neither uses Twitter , but meet at a bar. I've dated liberals and conservatives. People are nicer in real life. Very rarely do people walk up to me hurling insults. Happened constantly online though.
SilverRed 6y ago
The better solution is they both use their own mastodon instances with different rules and the instances block each other.
monksy 6y ago
Speaking of that.. What I find interesting is that the more you travel for leasure and meet people from other countries. The more that you learn about different view points. Also the more gross that identity politics and shamming practices over viewpoints becomes. I'm not saying that you should support people you don't agree with. But, there's a heck of a lot of other cultures that are at odds with what's going on.
theamk 6y ago
What's wrong with the good old method, "separate communities"? A group of people talking about sports will reject (or moderate) people who want to talk about latest programming languages. A group of people talking about computer-related stuff will downvote and flag non-computer news about latest sport game. The global discussion forum without any moderation does not live long. We can moderate the entire world if we split it into many small parts and give member power to do so.
- marvinvz 6y ago
  That was pretty normal until not long ago, but there seems to be a push to "everything is political". This provides the excuse to go after people who might contibute to a community, but stated somewhere else opinions that are not in line with somebody in said community.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  I'm fine with that... but these platforms aren't. These platforms are driven by what Eric Weinstein, correctly I think, calls E.G.O.s, or Embedded Growth Obligations. You can't convince a venture capitalist to fund something like Twitter without the promise of enormous user growth, because the model only works if you have an enormous userbase on the platform. I actually think Zuckerberg's dumbass tag line, "It's free, and always will be." is stupid. Facebook is worth about jack shit to everyone except advertisers, because it doesn't cost anything. Putting up a monthly fee is how you separate people who are willing to shit all over something from people who are willing to build something. World of Warcraft is, I think, a fine example of this, especially versus a game like League of Legends. WoW's userbase, will still filled with the occasional troll and troublemaker, has far fewer than League. Why? Because you have to buy the game itself just to get started. Then you have to spend $15 a month to play it. You're invested from the word "go". For League, you play the entire game, from start to "finish" for free, only paying if you want to. Hence you see a ton more trolling and shitty behavior, because the vast, vast majority of players aren't invested - its just a way for them to while away their lives with no investment. I guarantee you, if you had to pay $5 a month for Twitter and $5 a month for Facebook, you'd see a lot more reasonable behavior, because after the first few months, only people who really got "value" from the platform would keep spending the money to use it. And the sad part is, even 100,000,000 users at $5 a month would be an enormous moneymaking enterprise - with almost guaranteed higher quality interactions.
SergeAx 6y ago
Your reply kinda implies that "entire world" is spanned from SF to Texas. Anecdotally, I just returned from Egypt vacation trip. Go figure how to moderate black 14 years orthodox christian sugarcane worker, who is writing in Arabic script.
- SergeAx 6y ago
  And yes, I am Russian, so for me Memphis is a former capital of Egypt)
smsm42 6y ago
You assume this is the only way, and it is true if you take as an axiom that everybody is equal and has equal right to be represented, to access the platforms and to participate in a public discussion. This is not however what leftist culture warriors think, and unfortunately for people who disagree with them, they now are controlling most of the Big Tech platforms and most of the corporate press. As the result, the values which they disagree with are and going to be suppressed, and they are absolutely OK with it - moreover, they consider it vital and necessary. They do not want to learn to engage anybody they disagree with, and as long as they control most of the platforms, along with the academia, the education sector, the entertainment sector, serious part of the government institutions and significant part of the corporate boards - there is no reason for them to engage anyone, as soon as they can just suppress and deplatform whoever they like. Might makes right, at least for them. Of course, there's no technology on Earth - at least not yet - to make dissenting voices completely silent. But that's not the point. The point is to make them orders of magnitude weaker, so they would not be able to influence anything. You can talk to your friends in your kitchen, if you want, while your opponents will have an access to billions strong audience. You can set up your puny webserver (provided your ISP and your DNS provider do not deplatform you, and your bank does not deny you access to payment systems) - and you'll be competing with the combined powers of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and such. Do you think they would feel compelled to "engage" you, to evolve and change their ways to account for your existence - or would they just crush you like a tiny insect, and not even notice it?

BaseS4 6y ago

The banning has to continue because if we stop now, we'd have to admit the bans we did between 2016 and 2020 were equally ridiculous and arbitrary. No, we must ramp up the bans so that we never acknowledge past mistakes. This is the way.

erikpukinskis 6y ago

I am not sure I understand your claim... there are many global-scale companies that do moderate their entire site... Google, Reddit, Amazon. Are you trying to make a more specific claim than your post lets on? Maybe that it’s impossible to moderate without making some concession you don’t prefer? Or it’s impossible to moderate away certain kinds of things?

pixl97 6y ago
And said companies are quite often on HN for screwing up said moderation.
obscoth 6y ago
They aren’t actually making a claim. It’s an emotional appeal to “free speech” absolutism, whatever that means.
cbozeman 6y ago
You're going to use Reddit as an example, where the people least deserving of power are given it, freely, and end up banning people for merely having different opinions? I would not have used that in my list. It doesn't boil down to a "concession I don't prefer". The only thing you moderate are those things deemed illegal by the Federal government, anything else is fair game, which brings us a pretty large umbrella of discussion in which to engage. Some people don't want to engage in those discussions because they're hard and/or unpleasant. They not required to, and can freely leave them and ignore them. Allowing whiners who can't stand that people may have a controversial opinion that's at odds with their beliefs to have any power whatsoever is a fast track to failure on multiple levels. People have block tools; they need to learn to use them.
- verall 6y ago
  > The only thing you moderate are those things deemed illegal by the Federal government, anything else is fair game Why? It is certainly legal in the USA to be a KKK member as long as you aren't participating in the domestic terrorism. Yet I have no interest in conversation with KKK members and would will choose to freely leave websites where they hang out. So many people agree with me that a website owner decides he needs the traffic of anti-KKK people and starts banning legal Klan members. Why must the website owner keep Klan members who have not broken any laws? Why should everything besides what is deemed illegal by the federal government be fair game?
- theamk 6y ago
  > Some people don't want to engage in those discussions because they're hard and/or unpleasant. They not required to, and can freely leave them and ignore them. They did leave, and then they made the new space where those discussion are not tolerated. We are talking inside one of such places. Some people don't want to understand that there are discussion places which limit certain topics. They are not required to, and can freely leave and ignore them. They have plenty of other places where uncensored discussions can occur.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    > Some people don't want to understand that there are discussion places which limit certain topics. Twitter and Facebook aren't such spaces. They're both based on models of unlimited growth, which means you're going to have unlimited viewpoints, which means you're going to have to #DealWithIt. What you want, can be done on Hacker News because we're a focused community and most of us all have similar jobs, come from similar backgrounds, etc., or at least, there's enough of us that work in tech and enough of us that went to good schools that we're a more or less cohesive community with fairly similar values. You don't have that with 5 billion users, sorry.

onion2k 6y ago

However, they can and do exist on the same platforms. They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another, even though their existences are completely incompatible and utterly different. How are those two people's lives on social media incompatible? There's a million things they could have in common - a love of tacos, a band to talk about, a shared joke about a dumb celebrity, etc etc.99.9999% of the time different people can and do coexist in the same spaces. The idea that two wildly different people with different points of view can't even exist in the same social network is nonsense. The only time incompatible points of view are a problem is when one or other person decides to try to invalidate the existence of the other. That's what moderation is there to stop. If people are just tweeting about their life there's nothing to moderate.

robswc 6y ago
>The idea that two wildly different people with different points of view can't even exist in the same social network is nonsense I agree. However I do see this happening. Its kinda crazy. I remember being on the internet as a kid (probably on sites I had no business being on lol) and people would get into heated arguments but I don't think it ever resulted in "I hate you, I'm going to try to get you banned via politics". I was around animation and creative type forums and people would go at each others throats but then like you say, bond over talking about a new software tool or animation lol.
refenestrator 6y ago
"invalidate existence" can do a lot of work though if you're sufficiently motivated. There are a lot of 40-60% popular views that invalidate someone's existence according to certain parts of twitter.
xwolfi 6y ago
I think you put a strong word on something very common. Invalidating existence is not always call to murder :D If you say gun owners dont deserve to live or that the world would be better without white people, there are way to let it be said and discuss it without heavy moderation. People are just mad at mad people. That s why it s a frigging jungle online. But if you stay patient with mad people or ignore them if you re not sure, then moderation stays on important things like doxxing

rospaya 6y ago

That's a very American way of thinking, just the kind of reasoning that allowed Facebook to almost destroy your democracy. I'm aware that discussing free speech on any platform is a fool's errand, but at some point somebody has to say that making people angry is profitable and facilitated through the US concept of giving anyone a platform to say anything with very little consequences. And the last four years really showed how far it can go. > They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another People never ever learn. Wearing a mask has become a political struggle, people literally rather died than wore a piece of cloth just because they looked at it emotionally and not rationally, like you software dev and Marine officer would.

cbozeman 6y ago
> people literally rather died than wore a piece of cloth just because they looked at it emotionally and not rationally And that's fine. If you're going to live in a so-called "free" society, part of that "freedom" means people have to be "free" to make stupid choices, even if those stupid choices kill them.
- cageface 6y ago
  What if their stupid choices kill other people too?
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    We already have laws for those things - second, third degree murder; involuntary manslaughter, etc.
    - cageface 6y ago
      So can people out in public without masks on be charged with any of these things?
      - j16sdiz 6y ago

tom_mellior 6y ago

> They can exist because both of them are going to HAVE to learn how to engage with one another You're assuming good faith from both parties. Harassers and trolls don't act in good faith.

aaomidi 6y ago
And now with gpt3 we can create an endlessly creative bots of harassers!
nine_k 6y ago
There is a well-known recipe against trolls: do not feed them. Block and ignore them. If you visit a bathroom, you normally don't bloviate about the kind of crap you had just to flush, you rather avoid the topic; the same applies to trolls. Bring zero attention to them. Trolls' game is all about drawing attention, in the form of ire, offense, and and panic. Deprive them this, and they'll cease to bother you much. This is, of course, easier to do if you are a statue of buddha made of reinforced concrete, but even us living beings can learn and engage in some best practices of communication online.
- nyanpasu64 6y ago
  What happens if the trolls decide to bring explosives to blow up your Buddha statue?
  - nine_k 6y ago
    I think it stretches the metaphor outside its charted range. OTOH using explosives is outright violence, and would likely be illegal by US federal laws.
  - smsm42 6y ago
    We've witnessed hundreds of statues destroyed last year, from Abraham Lincoln to Cervantes. So we know the answer - if it's the right people doing blowing up, nothing happens, you have one statue left and you are forced to apologize for putting it up in the first place.

jojobas 6y ago

The Valley's position on who of the two needs to disappear from the social media landscape has crystallized already.

offtop5 6y ago

What if these two hypothetical people are friends who share cooking tips ? What if neither uses Twitter , but meet at a bar. I've dated liberals and conservatives. People are nicer in real life. Very rarely do people walk up to me hurling insults. Happened constantly online though.

SilverRed 6y ago

The better solution is they both use their own mastodon instances with different rules and the instances block each other.

monksy 6y ago

Speaking of that.. What I find interesting is that the more you travel for leasure and meet people from other countries. The more that you learn about different view points. Also the more gross that identity politics and shamming practices over viewpoints becomes. I'm not saying that you should support people you don't agree with. But, there's a heck of a lot of other cultures that are at odds with what's going on.

theamk 6y ago

What's wrong with the good old method, "separate communities"? A group of people talking about sports will reject (or moderate) people who want to talk about latest programming languages. A group of people talking about computer-related stuff will downvote and flag non-computer news about latest sport game. The global discussion forum without any moderation does not live long. We can moderate the entire world if we split it into many small parts and give member power to do so.

marvinvz 6y ago
That was pretty normal until not long ago, but there seems to be a push to "everything is political". This provides the excuse to go after people who might contibute to a community, but stated somewhere else opinions that are not in line with somebody in said community.
cbozeman 6y ago
I'm fine with that... but these platforms aren't. These platforms are driven by what Eric Weinstein, correctly I think, calls E.G.O.s, or Embedded Growth Obligations. You can't convince a venture capitalist to fund something like Twitter without the promise of enormous user growth, because the model only works if you have an enormous userbase on the platform. I actually think Zuckerberg's dumbass tag line, "It's free, and always will be." is stupid. Facebook is worth about jack shit to everyone except advertisers, because it doesn't cost anything. Putting up a monthly fee is how you separate people who are willing to shit all over something from people who are willing to build something. World of Warcraft is, I think, a fine example of this, especially versus a game like League of Legends. WoW's userbase, will still filled with the occasional troll and troublemaker, has far fewer than League. Why? Because you have to buy the game itself just to get started. Then you have to spend $15 a month to play it. You're invested from the word "go". For League, you play the entire game, from start to "finish" for free, only paying if you want to. Hence you see a ton more trolling and shitty behavior, because the vast, vast majority of players aren't invested - its just a way for them to while away their lives with no investment. I guarantee you, if you had to pay $5 a month for Twitter and $5 a month for Facebook, you'd see a lot more reasonable behavior, because after the first few months, only people who really got "value" from the platform would keep spending the money to use it. And the sad part is, even 100,000,000 users at $5 a month would be an enormous moneymaking enterprise - with almost guaranteed higher quality interactions.

SergeAx 6y ago

Your reply kinda implies that "entire world" is spanned from SF to Texas. Anecdotally, I just returned from Egypt vacation trip. Go figure how to moderate black 14 years orthodox christian sugarcane worker, who is writing in Arabic script.

SergeAx 6y ago
And yes, I am Russian, so for me Memphis is a former capital of Egypt)

smsm42 6y ago

You assume this is the only way, and it is true if you take as an axiom that everybody is equal and has equal right to be represented, to access the platforms and to participate in a public discussion. This is not however what leftist culture warriors think, and unfortunately for people who disagree with them, they now are controlling most of the Big Tech platforms and most of the corporate press. As the result, the values which they disagree with are and going to be suppressed, and they are absolutely OK with it - moreover, they consider it vital and necessary. They do not want to learn to engage anybody they disagree with, and as long as they control most of the platforms, along with the academia, the education sector, the entertainment sector, serious part of the government institutions and significant part of the corporate boards - there is no reason for them to engage anyone, as soon as they can just suppress and deplatform whoever they like. Might makes right, at least for them. Of course, there's no technology on Earth - at least not yet - to make dissenting voices completely silent. But that's not the point. The point is to make them orders of magnitude weaker, so they would not be able to influence anything. You can talk to your friends in your kitchen, if you want, while your opponents will have an access to billions strong audience. You can set up your puny webserver (provided your ISP and your DNS provider do not deplatform you, and your bank does not deny you access to payment systems) - and you'll be competing with the combined powers of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and such. Do you think they would feel compelled to "engage" you, to evolve and change their ways to account for your existence - or would they just crush you like a tiny insect, and not even notice it?