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And the next paragraph from that: "But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have

And the next paragraph from that: "But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down." They didn't want to block anyone, so they deleted it. That's why we can't have nice things.

krapp 5y ago
It's unfortunate they chose to engage in mass self-deplatforming rather than simply engage in vigorous debate or attempt to open a dialog and empathize with the views of those they considered guilty of thoughtcrime. Did no one tell them that free speech means nothing if it doesn't apply to the speech we find most objectionable? That sunlight, not censorship, is the best disinfectant? First they came for the shitposters...
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  You're complaining that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars weren't spent arguing with 15 year-old trolls on the internet?
  - krapp 5y ago
    Freedom of speech is the fundamental right from which all other rights derive and upon which all liberty depends. What right does anyone have to deny the right to speech simply because the speaker happens to be "15?" What if the next Einstein or Shakespeare or Galileo are being silenced and their genius blotted out forever in the name of ageism? What is a "troll?" Who gets to define that term? By what basis is a "troll" differentiated from a "non-troll?" Was Diogenes a "troll?" Was John Locke? Galileo? Jesus Christ? A "troll" is simply anyone who offends the status quo - and all necessary advancement in justice, science, philosophy and enlightenment come from offending the status quo. The "troll" is the "unreasonable man" upon whom all progress depends. The "troll" is the enlightened mind looking beyond the shadows of Plato's cave. In today's world, where all art and culture are manufactured by corporations and manipulated by vast, mind-controlling algorithms, the troll participates in the last pure form of human culture that still exists. Who appointed the admins of a BBS the Ministry of Truth, with unassailable power to determine what speech is or isn't worth publishing? Why do they get to decide what people can and cannot say, what right do they have to dictate what people can say or do, or who is or is not a "troll?" Surely a few dollars is a small price to pay to maintain the very lifeblood and ideals of civilization itself. Perhaps if they had stuck to their principles, as Voltaire eloquently put it - "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - the entire world wouldn't now be suffering under the iron boot of cancel culture, where even the leaders of sovereign governments can be erased from history for the slightest thoughtcrime by pitchfork wielding internet mobs and the Marxist ideologues controlling the few centralized platforms on which the majority of all human communication now occurs. We shouldn't be casting the trolls aside, we shouldn't be making them pariahs, we should be on our hands and knees thanking them for holding aloft the bright flame of the Enlightenment's ideals in a world full of blissful ignorance and soulless mediocrity.
    - quacked 5y ago
      Voltaire didn't say "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", and in fact I've only ever seen that quote used to make fun of people who naively believe in the "principle of free speech", or by people who believe in centrist talking points about "cancel culture". That means that your comment, too, must some kind of meta-commentary on trolling, delivered via trolling. Assuming the purpose of "trolling" is to incite other people to waste time by responding, you are brilliant- I wrote a long and involved response to your message before realizing that you are probably just pulling my and anyone else who reads your message's leg.
    - egypturnash 5y ago
      Bravo, sir, madam, or other-gendered person. Bravo. You have successfully parodied the slippery slope of free-speech absolutism by equating fifteen year old children running around saying curse words to the Inquisition hassling Galileo for challenging geocentrism at the tender age of fifty-one. I bow to a true master troll; I have not seen effort like this put into a parody argument since the glorious excesses of talk.bizarre.
    - TheGigaChad 5y ago
      Go suck dick you braindamaged retard.
- loopz 5y ago
  idiot nya-nya-nya-nya
  - function_seven 5y ago
    Perfect reply to parent comment. Seriously.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I look forward to hearing Krapp debate this point.
- bena 5y ago
  The problem is that the shitposters have one thing a lot of people doing work don't: time. There's no time to engage all of them in "vigorous debate" or to "open dialogs". Especially people who aren't interested in listening. At some point, you realize that you have more important things to do and you just stop engaging.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bawolff 5y ago
  Debate is what you do to someone you disagree with over a matter that has a right and wrong answer. If i want to talk about quantum physics, and someone else wants to talk about cute cat pictures - there is no right or wrong answers; you can't debate it. The two people want different things. Neither is more right, but its best for everyone if they find a group of people who want to do the same activity instead of pissing each other off.
  - esyir 5y ago
    I think where I'd like to draw the line would be on platforms and domain restrictions, and possibly decorum as well. Essentially, the smaller and more specialised the community, the more leeway they have for moderation /censorship. Conversely, the larger platforms, especially those that host enormous proportions of the population, should have less control over their users, lest they gain too much control over the speech of their users. Some might argue that this violates the rights of the corporation, but I weight the rights of millions of users far higher than the rights of a few corporations. This goes double for the publishers masquerading as platforms.
  - scollet 5y ago
    > quantum physics > cute cat > neither is more right There's an awesome joke in here but I can't see it.
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
  Hang yourself, idiot!
whatshisface 5y ago
Rather than block anyone or shut the site down they should have put all of the highschoolers in the Highschool section and then threatened to block them if they posted highschool stuff in the regular areas. Then nobody has to sit out except for people who are specifically motivated by the fact they've been told to not post fart jokes in the group theory folder.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  This is a pattern that I have seen happen many times before and what you usually end up with is one area that is The Raging, Unmoderated Shit-Show. Which can end up sprawling outside of the site it lives on and become a base for organizing mass attacks elsewhere. Seem for example, whichever board was decreed the Unmoderated Shit-Show of Something Awful, or whichever one 4channers will tell you was the Unmoderated Shit-Show of that site while insisting the rest of it was perfectly fine and ethical. And since that is the sub-board that mostly interacts with the outside world, this is the one that will come to define your site in the eyes of everyone else: the place that bunch of assholes comes from. Once you get one of those, if you shut it down, it has a good chance of having someone invested enough in this splinter community to start hosting it somewhere. See for instance LJDrama: kicked off of LJ, it became its own site and kept on being a great place to go if you wanted to join in on piling on top of whoever was today's target.

krapp 5y ago

It's unfortunate they chose to engage in mass self-deplatforming rather than simply engage in vigorous debate or attempt to open a dialog and empathize with the views of those they considered guilty of thoughtcrime. Did no one tell them that free speech means nothing if it doesn't apply to the speech we find most objectionable? That sunlight, not censorship, is the best disinfectant? First they came for the shitposters...

AussieWog93 5y ago
You're complaining that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars weren't spent arguing with 15 year-old trolls on the internet?
- krapp 5y ago
  Freedom of speech is the fundamental right from which all other rights derive and upon which all liberty depends. What right does anyone have to deny the right to speech simply because the speaker happens to be "15?" What if the next Einstein or Shakespeare or Galileo are being silenced and their genius blotted out forever in the name of ageism? What is a "troll?" Who gets to define that term? By what basis is a "troll" differentiated from a "non-troll?" Was Diogenes a "troll?" Was John Locke? Galileo? Jesus Christ? A "troll" is simply anyone who offends the status quo - and all necessary advancement in justice, science, philosophy and enlightenment come from offending the status quo. The "troll" is the "unreasonable man" upon whom all progress depends. The "troll" is the enlightened mind looking beyond the shadows of Plato's cave. In today's world, where all art and culture are manufactured by corporations and manipulated by vast, mind-controlling algorithms, the troll participates in the last pure form of human culture that still exists. Who appointed the admins of a BBS the Ministry of Truth, with unassailable power to determine what speech is or isn't worth publishing? Why do they get to decide what people can and cannot say, what right do they have to dictate what people can say or do, or who is or is not a "troll?" Surely a few dollars is a small price to pay to maintain the very lifeblood and ideals of civilization itself. Perhaps if they had stuck to their principles, as Voltaire eloquently put it - "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - the entire world wouldn't now be suffering under the iron boot of cancel culture, where even the leaders of sovereign governments can be erased from history for the slightest thoughtcrime by pitchfork wielding internet mobs and the Marxist ideologues controlling the few centralized platforms on which the majority of all human communication now occurs. We shouldn't be casting the trolls aside, we shouldn't be making them pariahs, we should be on our hands and knees thanking them for holding aloft the bright flame of the Enlightenment's ideals in a world full of blissful ignorance and soulless mediocrity.
  - quacked 5y ago
    Voltaire didn't say "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", and in fact I've only ever seen that quote used to make fun of people who naively believe in the "principle of free speech", or by people who believe in centrist talking points about "cancel culture". That means that your comment, too, must some kind of meta-commentary on trolling, delivered via trolling. Assuming the purpose of "trolling" is to incite other people to waste time by responding, you are brilliant- I wrote a long and involved response to your message before realizing that you are probably just pulling my and anyone else who reads your message's leg.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Bravo, sir, madam, or other-gendered person. Bravo. You have successfully parodied the slippery slope of free-speech absolutism by equating fifteen year old children running around saying curse words to the Inquisition hassling Galileo for challenging geocentrism at the tender age of fifty-one. I bow to a true master troll; I have not seen effort like this put into a parody argument since the glorious excesses of talk.bizarre.
  - TheGigaChad 5y ago
    Go suck dick you braindamaged retard.
loopz 5y ago
idiot nya-nya-nya-nya
- function_seven 5y ago
  Perfect reply to parent comment. Seriously.
- bawolff 5y ago
  I look forward to hearing Krapp debate this point.
bena 5y ago
The problem is that the shitposters have one thing a lot of people doing work don't: time. There's no time to engage all of them in "vigorous debate" or to "open dialogs". Especially people who aren't interested in listening. At some point, you realize that you have more important things to do and you just stop engaging.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bawolff 5y ago
Debate is what you do to someone you disagree with over a matter that has a right and wrong answer. If i want to talk about quantum physics, and someone else wants to talk about cute cat pictures - there is no right or wrong answers; you can't debate it. The two people want different things. Neither is more right, but its best for everyone if they find a group of people who want to do the same activity instead of pissing each other off.
- esyir 5y ago
  I think where I'd like to draw the line would be on platforms and domain restrictions, and possibly decorum as well. Essentially, the smaller and more specialised the community, the more leeway they have for moderation /censorship. Conversely, the larger platforms, especially those that host enormous proportions of the population, should have less control over their users, lest they gain too much control over the speech of their users. Some might argue that this violates the rights of the corporation, but I weight the rights of millions of users far higher than the rights of a few corporations. This goes double for the publishers masquerading as platforms.
- scollet 5y ago
  > quantum physics > cute cat > neither is more right There's an awesome joke in here but I can't see it.
TheGigaChad 5y ago
Hang yourself, idiot!

whatshisface 5y ago

Rather than block anyone or shut the site down they should have put all of the highschoolers in the Highschool section and then threatened to block them if they posted highschool stuff in the regular areas. Then nobody has to sit out except for people who are specifically motivated by the fact they've been told to not post fart jokes in the group theory folder.

egypturnash 5y ago
This is a pattern that I have seen happen many times before and what you usually end up with is one area that is The Raging, Unmoderated Shit-Show. Which can end up sprawling outside of the site it lives on and become a base for organizing mass attacks elsewhere. Seem for example, whichever board was decreed the Unmoderated Shit-Show of Something Awful, or whichever one 4channers will tell you was the Unmoderated Shit-Show of that site while insisting the rest of it was perfectly fine and ethical. And since that is the sub-board that mostly interacts with the outside world, this is the one that will come to define your site in the eyes of everyone else: the place that bunch of assholes comes from. Once you get one of those, if you shut it down, it has a good chance of having someone invested enough in this splinter community to start hosting it somewhere. See for instance LJDrama: kicked off of LJ, it became its own site and kept on being a great place to go if you wanted to join in on piling on top of whoever was today's target.