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Big tech censorship will not solved without addressing the other half of a problem with two sides. Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanc

Big tech censorship will not solved without addressing the other half of a problem with two sides. Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation. If we are to avoid this dilemma we need systems that organically promote constructive, tolerant and inclusive communication, and original, nuanced, intelligent, non-ideological ideas, instead of the opposite. This cannot be done by organizations whose profit incentive is aligned with user attention instead of user satisfaction. Those organizations benefit from degraded communication until strong moderation is both continually demanded and decried. --- On a side note, I am so disappointed in the constant framing of ideas as right or left. It dumbs society down incredibly to view so much through the filter of two (often arbitrarily correlated, historically shifting) clusters of supposedly disjoint options. In the real world, communes work well sometimes, markets often work better at scale but not for everything, markets require "social solutions" like non-commercial criminal and civil justice systems, education and health could be explicitly tested and then managed as investments with a pay off of lower taxes (including for the rich) instead of as charities forced on the rich, etc. The Right/Left and associated ideologies are all self-defeating when believed in isolation and the nuances of their ragged edges, their limitations, and constructive combinations ignored.

prawn 5y ago
I like your comment and think it could potentially approach the broader problem in a roundabout way, but it does feel like a separate thing. But ignoring that, I run a forum and so think a lot about ways of encouraging decent conversation. I think Reddit mostly does pretty well in that (in my experience) the junk is hidden and requires effort to read. Hacker News pushes it down the page, but it's trivial to scroll down and see who's in the naughty corner out of curiosity. I mostly read r/NBA and find the quality very decent. I'm sure there are trolls and racist rants and so on, but unless I expand comment branches, I don't see any of them. I find that the branches being pruned/hidden helps manage how much time I spend on a discussion too. On HN, I often feel like I want to read or skim every comment in a discussion which is rarely a great use of time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
semitones 5y ago
"Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation." - it is impossible to measure the qualifiers "quality", "nuanced", "tolerant", "original", "non-ideological" while still being objective. Thus, whatever implementation for enforcing these qualifiers you choose, it will inevitably lean towards some ideology. Hence, contradiction.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cutemonster 5y ago
  What you wrote sounds to me a bit like claiming that it's impossible to qualify paintings as beautiful or not, so therefore there cannot be any art museums
  - ddvvff 5y ago
    Well, objectively, you can't have an art museum that has only beautiful art in it, since beauty in art is subjective and non quantifiable, so yes there can not be an art museum that has only beautiful paintings, and the beautiful paintings that supposedly are there might only beautiful to the eye of the curator. Either way, the point is not wether or not you can have a place with discourse with the all good qualities described, it is more so that because those qualities are not quantifiable, it is impossible to know for sure.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- Nevermark 5y ago
  I disagree. It is not impossible to measure quality, once you accept that quality has many definitions and therefore requires many contexts incentivizing different versions of it for different purposes and audiances. And that diversity would be a very good thing.
- 5y ago
buu700 5y ago
Agreed. I think it's a major issue in political discourse when people begin to identify with labels and slogans, and treat them as prescriptive (ideals to be adhered to) rather than descriptive (approximate reflections of one's current general beliefs). Surveys consistently show that most of us agree on far more than we disagree when questions are phrased in politically neutral terms. People quickly realize when they actually talk to other people that most are fairly reasonable and relatable, even if they have good faith disagreements on particular points, but social media being optimized for maximum engagement with shallow/short-form discussion just results in seeing the most extreme elements of society talk over each other and largely fail to come to a common understanding.
- ddingus 5y ago
  I put this to a test over a couple years of business travel. While bringing up a field service group, I had a period of high travel taking me all over the US. I enjoy politics, culture and people and am frequently frustrated with the left - right, very tribal political discourse myself. So, what I did was find coffee shops and any other events where people might gather and enjoy conversation and had a bunch of chats avoiding labels while also conveying a strong, no judgement, just interested in perspective from different parts of the nation... Those looked kind of like a two way interview. Many of those ended up being long, gratifying conversations too. Based on these, I would submit the following: People fear judgement. People fear "that other tribe" An awful lot of discourse is fear, blame and shame. eg: teaching "those other people" a lesson How could anyone tolerate "that other tribe" You get the idea. Outside of those conversations, which all told me the US has poor class awareness and with that, equally poor ability to see others as just peers, instead it is all colored in various ways that amplify differences despite the reality being we are all people who run the same basic way, have the same basic needs, struggles.
  - jfengel 5y ago
    I associate coffee shops with certain kinds of people. Not universally, of course, but enough to wonder if you were seeing a restricted set of people with whom you were better able to hold those conversations. You mention other events, so perhaps I'm totally wrong here. But I'm curious about the ways that the events you picked may have shaped the conclusions that you drew.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Ha, I was going to add basically the same sidenote, even calling it a sidenote and using the word framing. All I was going to state was that the title could have been "right, left or center" but instead he chose "left or right". WTF. We could almost imagine the author himself is vying for attention by pushing the hot buttons known to work. Either that or he is incapable of recognising his own foibles.
PicassoCTs 5y ago
Right and Left are basically ideologies carrying to the different ideas of society depending upon gender. On average for females a more redistributing, moderating society is more attractive. For men a society that allows them to display "provider" status seems more attractive. To frame the whole thing as a ideological debate, in a society with massive change of roles and influence is intellectual dishonest. Some transcend these "stereotypes" and are for a more redistribution society based upon the insight that these transformations require a reform of policy. They are sadly in the minority - in both ideologies.
- xerox13ster 5y ago
  Bro what the hell are you on about? Have you read anything on Left v Right wing ideologies? What? Left v Right is about proletariat vs bourgeoise and it originates from French politic during the revolution where the left side of the assembly favored moving power towards the people and the right were Monarchists that wanted King Louis' continued reign. To equate this to gender is unbelievably ignorant bordering on intellectual dishonesty.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- shoemakersteve 5y ago
  This has to be one of the strangest takes I've come across...
ngc248 5y ago
Exactly ... We need to be "liberal" in some things and "conservative" for others.
- Nevermark 5y ago
  And dispose of those terms completely, except for exceptionally rarified discussions where attention is paid to very clear definitions of which versions of "liberal" and "conservative" are even being discussed. Effective policy isn't found using that false Rorschach compass.
TheTester 5y ago
"Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation." Hey you might not have the actual same definition of ideology I have but I think that most people would find "non-ideological" debate basically an impossibility, we can hide ideology with a certain kind of "politeness" if you might but considering what we know about language and how words themselves are loaded I dont even think it is possible to have that kind of debate. I am trying to think the last couple debates I have had both casually and on a more direct setting, and it is impossible for me to see those debates as something that could have been non ideological
utbabya 5y ago
> Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation. I disagree tying big tech censorship to this. Yes what you describe is nice and what the audience here (including me) prefer, that's why we're here. Such places with such rules are paradises. However, I for one accept the risk of freedom over "safety". I acknowledge we humans are "good" and "evil" at the same time, maybe we'll "actualize" at some point in the future as a whole (I doubt it) but we're not there yet. Even if that's a goal, I strongly believe allowing cancel-candidate speech is vital to the progress. Producing questionable speech has its cost already, I actually think the cost is too high already given the mob nature of social media. Yeah there are "misinformed" people, but isn't that the value of democracy? We disagree but we compromise. Even for the anti-vaxx case, when the ones who refuse to vaccinate can screw up the whole population, I still don't think you should ban the speech, the law or executive order should be based on action instead. Even for the GAB case, I don't think the platform should be banned, nor private conversation being snooped on. So how do we protect ourselves against such attacks? I'd say these are just extra protections that I don't want given the tradeoff, the law is there to punish the actions. I'll take that safety risk that's been there since before tech is a thing any day. Guess the nuance here is the right to speech versus the right to publish given the nature of social media moving the forth pillar of democracy to the public. My take is that the same applies even for publishing. If nonsense sounds more attractive than scientific facts, maybe we educated people should work on our PR skills, or fix the root of the problem, education. Now that's progress.
- Nevermark 5y ago
  There is more to the problem than a tradeoff between freedom and safety. The problem isn't created simply by allowing people the freedom to express themselves. It's created by highly manipulative middlemen choosing what to promote and what to suppress (in a relative not absolute sense) via algorithms designed to maximize attention to ads. That is nothing like a simple free speech situation. I have no problem with free speech, and free speech forums, even if they do sometimes become cess pools. I have a real problem with the most widely used glorified scrapbook sharing software (Facebook), biasing all our feeds toward content that is likely to pull us into comment flame wars or using provoked anger and tribal identity reinforcement as a user addiction strategies. Note that Facebook didn't start behaving this way until after the network effect of their social graph had created tremendous lock-in/switching-costs for their users.

prawn 5y ago

I like your comment and think it could potentially approach the broader problem in a roundabout way, but it does feel like a separate thing. But ignoring that, I run a forum and so think a lot about ways of encouraging decent conversation. I think Reddit mostly does pretty well in that (in my experience) the junk is hidden and requires effort to read. Hacker News pushes it down the page, but it's trivial to scroll down and see who's in the naughty corner out of curiosity. I mostly read r/NBA and find the quality very decent. I'm sure there are trolls and racist rants and so on, but unless I expand comment branches, I don't see any of them. I find that the branches being pruned/hidden helps manage how much time I spend on a discussion too. On HN, I often feel like I want to read or skim every comment in a discussion which is rarely a great use of time.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

semitones 5y ago

"Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation." - it is impossible to measure the qualifiers "quality", "nuanced", "tolerant", "original", "non-ideological" while still being objective. Thus, whatever implementation for enforcing these qualifiers you choose, it will inevitably lean towards some ideology. Hence, contradiction.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cutemonster 5y ago
What you wrote sounds to me a bit like claiming that it's impossible to qualify paintings as beautiful or not, so therefore there cannot be any art museums
- ddvvff 5y ago
  Well, objectively, you can't have an art museum that has only beautiful art in it, since beauty in art is subjective and non quantifiable, so yes there can not be an art museum that has only beautiful paintings, and the beautiful paintings that supposedly are there might only beautiful to the eye of the curator. Either way, the point is not wether or not you can have a place with discourse with the all good qualities described, it is more so that because those qualities are not quantifiable, it is impossible to know for sure.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Nevermark 5y ago
I disagree. It is not impossible to measure quality, once you accept that quality has many definitions and therefore requires many contexts incentivizing different versions of it for different purposes and audiances. And that diversity would be a very good thing.
5y ago

buu700 5y ago

Agreed. I think it's a major issue in political discourse when people begin to identify with labels and slogans, and treat them as prescriptive (ideals to be adhered to) rather than descriptive (approximate reflections of one's current general beliefs). Surveys consistently show that most of us agree on far more than we disagree when questions are phrased in politically neutral terms. People quickly realize when they actually talk to other people that most are fairly reasonable and relatable, even if they have good faith disagreements on particular points, but social media being optimized for maximum engagement with shallow/short-form discussion just results in seeing the most extreme elements of society talk over each other and largely fail to come to a common understanding.

ddingus 5y ago
I put this to a test over a couple years of business travel. While bringing up a field service group, I had a period of high travel taking me all over the US. I enjoy politics, culture and people and am frequently frustrated with the left - right, very tribal political discourse myself. So, what I did was find coffee shops and any other events where people might gather and enjoy conversation and had a bunch of chats avoiding labels while also conveying a strong, no judgement, just interested in perspective from different parts of the nation... Those looked kind of like a two way interview. Many of those ended up being long, gratifying conversations too. Based on these, I would submit the following: People fear judgement. People fear "that other tribe" An awful lot of discourse is fear, blame and shame. eg: teaching "those other people" a lesson How could anyone tolerate "that other tribe" You get the idea. Outside of those conversations, which all told me the US has poor class awareness and with that, equally poor ability to see others as just peers, instead it is all colored in various ways that amplify differences despite the reality being we are all people who run the same basic way, have the same basic needs, struggles.
- jfengel 5y ago
  I associate coffee shops with certain kinds of people. Not universally, of course, but enough to wonder if you were seeing a restricted set of people with whom you were better able to hold those conversations. You mention other events, so perhaps I'm totally wrong here. But I'm curious about the ways that the events you picked may have shaped the conclusions that you drew.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Ha, I was going to add basically the same sidenote, even calling it a sidenote and using the word framing. All I was going to state was that the title could have been "right, left or center" but instead he chose "left or right". WTF. We could almost imagine the author himself is vying for attention by pushing the hot buttons known to work. Either that or he is incapable of recognising his own foibles.

PicassoCTs 5y ago

Right and Left are basically ideologies carrying to the different ideas of society depending upon gender. On average for females a more redistributing, moderating society is more attractive. For men a society that allows them to display "provider" status seems more attractive. To frame the whole thing as a ideological debate, in a society with massive change of roles and influence is intellectual dishonest. Some transcend these "stereotypes" and are for a more redistribution society based upon the insight that these transformations require a reform of policy. They are sadly in the minority - in both ideologies.

xerox13ster 5y ago
Bro what the hell are you on about? Have you read anything on Left v Right wing ideologies? What? Left v Right is about proletariat vs bourgeoise and it originates from French politic during the revolution where the left side of the assembly favored moving power towards the people and the right were Monarchists that wanted King Louis' continued reign. To equate this to gender is unbelievably ignorant bordering on intellectual dishonesty.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
shoemakersteve 5y ago
This has to be one of the strangest takes I've come across...

ngc248 5y ago

Exactly ... We need to be "liberal" in some things and "conservative" for others.

Nevermark 5y ago
And dispose of those terms completely, except for exceptionally rarified discussions where attention is paid to very clear definitions of which versions of "liberal" and "conservative" are even being discussed. Effective policy isn't found using that false Rorschach compass.

TheTester 5y ago

"Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation." Hey you might not have the actual same definition of ideology I have but I think that most people would find "non-ideological" debate basically an impossibility, we can hide ideology with a certain kind of "politeness" if you might but considering what we know about language and how words themselves are loaded I dont even think it is possible to have that kind of debate. I am trying to think the last couple debates I have had both casually and on a more direct setting, and it is impossible for me to see those debates as something that could have been non ideological

utbabya 5y ago

> Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation. I disagree tying big tech censorship to this. Yes what you describe is nice and what the audience here (including me) prefer, that's why we're here. Such places with such rules are paradises. However, I for one accept the risk of freedom over "safety". I acknowledge we humans are "good" and "evil" at the same time, maybe we'll "actualize" at some point in the future as a whole (I doubt it) but we're not there yet. Even if that's a goal, I strongly believe allowing cancel-candidate speech is vital to the progress. Producing questionable speech has its cost already, I actually think the cost is too high already given the mob nature of social media. Yeah there are "misinformed" people, but isn't that the value of democracy? We disagree but we compromise. Even for the anti-vaxx case, when the ones who refuse to vaccinate can screw up the whole population, I still don't think you should ban the speech, the law or executive order should be based on action instead. Even for the GAB case, I don't think the platform should be banned, nor private conversation being snooped on. So how do we protect ourselves against such attacks? I'd say these are just extra protections that I don't want given the tradeoff, the law is there to punish the actions. I'll take that safety risk that's been there since before tech is a thing any day. Guess the nuance here is the right to speech versus the right to publish given the nature of social media moving the forth pillar of democracy to the public. My take is that the same applies even for publishing. If nonsense sounds more attractive than scientific facts, maybe we educated people should work on our PR skills, or fix the root of the problem, education. Now that's progress.

Nevermark 5y ago
There is more to the problem than a tradeoff between freedom and safety. The problem isn't created simply by allowing people the freedom to express themselves. It's created by highly manipulative middlemen choosing what to promote and what to suppress (in a relative not absolute sense) via algorithms designed to maximize attention to ads. That is nothing like a simple free speech situation. I have no problem with free speech, and free speech forums, even if they do sometimes become cess pools. I have a real problem with the most widely used glorified scrapbook sharing software (Facebook), biasing all our feeds toward content that is likely to pull us into comment flame wars or using provoked anger and tribal identity reinforcement as a user addiction strategies. Note that Facebook didn't start behaving this way until after the network effect of their social graph had created tremendous lock-in/switching-costs for their users.