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> The whole point of the marketplace of ideas is that some ideas in a community win, and that other ideas become unpopular. And the English Internet includes a

by gary_0 5y ago

> The whole point of the marketplace of ideas is that some ideas in a community win, and that other ideas become unpopular. And the English Internet includes a large number of users from Europe/Canada in addition to the users from liberal US cities. Sites like HN with a long-form discussion format are also going to skew the demographics further along those lines. It's not a marketplace that's going to value right-wing ideas; a majority of users will have a cultural background that finds them distasteful.

danShumway 5y ago
Exactly. And even if there are worldwide users, it's still a community, it's still its own insulated market of ideas. I don't think there's anything about free speech that says that only Americans should be able to form communities with each other, or that communities should be restricted to a single continent. This would be a problem if HN dominated the entire industry and it was the only place to talk about tech, but... it's not. It's just not the same concern as talking about something like Youtube, where not only is Youtube extremely dominant, it's also hard to integrate with and hard to replicate because of high hosting costs. Heck, HN is one of the best places to build organic direct contacts with people. It's one of the few places online where if you have a popular site, you will get asked about direct RSS feeds, you will occasionally get direct emails from people. So I just don't get the analogy people draw between HN and, say, Facebook. I can't even read most business listings on FB without an account, it's entirely different beast to compete with. I don't see any problem with a community of tech people worldwide having a site where they talk about tech, and part of that is always going to be that the people who use HN end up skewing in certain directions. There's no such thing as a neutral community, there are always predominant ideas, and there are always ideas that the community will find distasteful. You can argue whether HN's specific biases are good, I think some of them are quite harmful, and I'm sometimes upset at the way this community skews on multiple issues. But I don't think it's a risk to free speech that those biases exist.
- gary_0 5y ago
  I agree that biases in communities aren't inherently a free speech issue. I was just making an observation. It's human nature to assume your cultural assumptions are the norm, and it can be jarring when you're a part of a community that doesn't share some of them. But that by itself doesn't mean there's systematic oppression.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    Yeah, sorry. I'm not correcting anything you said, I agree with you. Just expanding. I think the way I wrote this it sounded more like an argument than I meant it to. There are spaces I'm a part of that consider HN to be basically Right-wing, and there are a few spaces I encounter that consider it to be Left-wing. It just comes down to what those communities consider to be normal, it's expected that different communities have different standards of what is and isn't objectionable to say.

by gary_0 5y ago

danShumway 5y ago

Exactly. And even if there are worldwide users, it's still a community, it's still its own insulated market of ideas. I don't think there's anything about free speech that says that only Americans should be able to form communities with each other, or that communities should be restricted to a single continent. This would be a problem if HN dominated the entire industry and it was the only place to talk about tech, but... it's not. It's just not the same concern as talking about something like Youtube, where not only is Youtube extremely dominant, it's also hard to integrate with and hard to replicate because of high hosting costs. Heck, HN is one of the best places to build organic direct contacts with people. It's one of the few places online where if you have a popular site, you will get asked about direct RSS feeds, you will occasionally get direct emails from people. So I just don't get the analogy people draw between HN and, say, Facebook. I can't even read most business listings on FB without an account, it's entirely different beast to compete with. I don't see any problem with a community of tech people worldwide having a site where they talk about tech, and part of that is always going to be that the people who use HN end up skewing in certain directions. There's no such thing as a neutral community, there are always predominant ideas, and there are always ideas that the community will find distasteful. You can argue whether HN's specific biases are good, I think some of them are quite harmful, and I'm sometimes upset at the way this community skews on multiple issues. But I don't think it's a risk to free speech that those biases exist.

gary_0 5y ago
I agree that biases in communities aren't inherently a free speech issue. I was just making an observation. It's human nature to assume your cultural assumptions are the norm, and it can be jarring when you're a part of a community that doesn't share some of them. But that by itself doesn't mean there's systematic oppression.
- danShumway 5y ago
  Yeah, sorry. I'm not correcting anything you said, I agree with you. Just expanding. I think the way I wrote this it sounded more like an argument than I meant it to. There are spaces I'm a part of that consider HN to be basically Right-wing, and there are a few spaces I encounter that consider it to be Left-wing. It just comes down to what those communities consider to be normal, it's expected that different communities have different standards of what is and isn't objectionable to say.