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I am puzzled. The zeitgeist of HN is white hot outrage that this content can be found on Facebook/Google/etc, yet also to champion decentralized sharing systems

I am puzzled. The zeitgeist of HN is white hot outrage that this content can be found on Facebook/Google/etc, yet also to champion decentralized sharing systems which would make this sort of content uncensorable. Can someone explain this to me? I ask this genuinely.

dylan604 5y ago
I would also be interested in honest answers here, but would not expect anyone to be willing to have this conversation. Facebook == bad/evil, so easy reaction. Censorship == bad/evil, so easy reaction. Fixing some of FB's bad requires censorship. uh-oh. This one might require some thought vs reaction.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  We are looking the externalities. Until we start examining the root cause of what is causing people to behave this way on these platforms, and start addressing those issues, which is arguably much harder, everything is going to be lipstick on a pig IMO.
  - travisgriggs 5y ago
    Agreed 100%. But oh the irony. You took time (and I’m taking more time) to put comments about the issue on an obscure forum of geeky people. As you’re pointing out, the roots of these problems (human trafficking) is not an internet problem. So internet censorship is not a real solution. And then we use the very internet (and our time) to diagnose this very issue. Maybe we should all spend more time in the real world doing real things that make the world a better place so these evils happen less collectively. I’m going to do just that. I’ve just got a few more threads I need to comment on first…
  - jensensbutton 5y ago
    > Until we start examining the root cause of what is causing people to behave this way on these platforms... People were just outraged at facebook last week for researching just that (how insta affects teens). I don't have much optimism in our ability to go beyond the surface.
    - mdm_ 5y ago
      I don't think most people were outraged at FB for _researching_ how Instagram affects teens. What people were outraged about was that upon finding that Instagram appears to have deleterious effects on teen girls, FB a) didn't share these findings with the public or consumers of Instagram, and b) doesn't appear to have done anything to correct or mitigate the negative effect their product appears to have on these people.
- lbotos 5y ago
  I think it's also interesting here because really this is about Apple vs. Facebook (Instagram). Apple is saying Facebook you need to moderate your content. Which the question becomes "Is Instagram more than a glorified web browser?"
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Instagram controls what is uploaded to its servers — a web browser does not do that.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Are you suggesting the app does local qualifications of what is uploaded vs processing on the server? Does it really matter which side the qualifing is done?
    - lbotos 5y ago
      You aren't wrong, but as far as I'm aware, the majority of content on the Instagram app is accessible via an instagram.com URL. That's what I mean by glorified browser. If apple is "banning" that app because of the content but that content is still available on the device via apple's own Safari, did they really ban anything? ---- The question is "when legally is apple responsible for UGC on instagram's servers?" That's the real question. Otherwise this would be moral grandstanding by Apple. I'm pretty sure if anyone tried to sue Apple for "distributing objectionable content" they'd run to "we aren't responsible for what's on Instagram's servers." How responsible SHOULD Apple be for data hosted on instagram's servers?
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Are people incapable of nuance? Blocking slave adverts != Censorship I have no problem with that.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Please explain how it is not censorship.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      Are slave adverts protected speech? Again, I don't think the nuance is subtle at all.
      - paxys 5y ago
        Censorship applies to everything, not just "protected speech" (whatever that is)
    - Grustaf 5y ago
      Why would you not want to block slave adverts? Absolutist approach to freedom of speech?
      - dylan604 5y ago
        I'm not stating that I am for or against anything. I'm asking how the blocking is not censorship. Why would you need to speculate anything further? Just answer the question rather than deflecting and redirecting to another question. (yes, i'm aware you're not the original person)
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    How do you block slave adverts across an entire federated protocol that is designed to be censorship resistant?
    - the_optimist 5y ago
randomdata 5y ago
Different people have different opinions.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Sure, but sometimes, individual people hold contradictory opinions that should be occasionally examined.
  - randomdata 5y ago
    Perhaps, but HN incentivizes comments that will produce a reaction (votes, replies). You cannot read too much into what someone wrote here. "Facebook must censor all the things!" and "We need a decentralized Facebook so that censorship is impossible!" are not at odds with each other when the goal is to receive a reaction in return, assuming the author has found that those comments produce the reaction they seek. When someone is being truly genuine, I do not believe you will find that contradiction. It is possible that you may not have entirely understood what they have written, and looking for clarification may be worthwhile. Still, given the above, it is not likely worth your time. In places where there is incentive to be genuine, more exploration can be worth it.
    - Y_Y 5y ago
      FWIW I try to avoid working like that. Shouting into the void seems perverse to me, and I definitely enjoy having some signal of engagement and approval when I post something. That said, I try to suspend my disbelief regarding the impossibility of fighting the current and so try to be a good citizen in order to maintain a good city. I'm sure Plato or Kant or has written extensively about this, and dang seemed to approve when I discussed it with him in a separate venue. So now that I've spent lots of years lurking, some more years posting and plenty of time screaming into the darkness elsewhere, I can feel satisfied if I post something that I know is interesting or helpful, even if I don't get any external feedback. (I'm reminded of the whole descent-to-madness that certain areas have academia have undergone for the sake of bibliometrics. See e.g. Peter Higgs' comments: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-... )
qzx_pierri 5y ago
HN is not one person. Some commenters want strict censorship to "protect the children" - That's the virtuous opinion to have in 2021 right? Some want a free and open internet with no censorship. One crowd is more annoyingly vocal than the other, so sometimes it seems like everyone here feels the same on certain topics.
- serverholic 5y ago
  Yep. Personally, I want a free and open internet. Mainly because I've noticed a trend where social media sites have started censoring anything except far-left opinions.
  - stronglikedan 5y ago
    You're being downvoted, but what you say is objectively and demonstrably true. Unfortunately, the people it doesn't directly effect rarely hear about it from their news sources, so they rarely believe it to be true. Even more unfortunate is that it may indirectly effect them one day, because first they came for the conservatives...
    - serverholic 5y ago
      It’s true. I’m centrist and I’ve noticed it.
    - PpEY4fu85hkQpn 5y ago
      You have been successfully propagandized. Extreme right wing outlets dominate Facebook interactions almost every day. How is it possible to have a victim complex about something so obviously not true? https://twitter.com/facebookstop10 https://twitter.com/facebookstop10
    - weeblewobble 5y ago
      What you're describing is a mainstream political position. Our last president talked about it constantly. Googling "big tech censorship" brings up tons of articles from mainstream media. Just a random sample: WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-tech-twitter-facebook-google-youtube-sec-230-common-carrier-11627656722 https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-tech-twitter-facebook-googl... EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-shou...
Nextgrid 5y ago
I guess the difference that on one side you have an entity that can censor and does censor things where it's convenient for itself, but then turns a blind eye to other awful content that should be censored. On the other side you've got a system where nothing can be censored, and while the lack of censorship of awful content is a drawback at least you have the advantage that nothing can be censored (even if it goes against corporate interests) to counter-balance it. In short, one side only has drawbacks, while the other side at least brings some advantages to counter-balance those drawbacks.
- lexapro 5y ago
  >at least you have the advantage that nothing can be censored You can still censor by lowering visibility (flooding it with opposing content for example).
  - fouric 5y ago
    That's not censorship, either in theory or in practice. "In theory" should be pretty obvious. "In practice" might require some explanation, because there seems to be a meme going around about trying to have another discussion with a person in a room where there are a bunch of people screaming at you to drown out your words. While that might be considered censorship in that exact scenario, that effect does not translate over into the internet - you simply block noisy sources on whatever platform you're on and keep reading the content that you're interested in. For instance, even though Matrix and Mastodon are federated, you can block users (and even entire servers) from either local visibility or even federation with your particular instance. Similarly, nobody says that highly biased sites like the Verge, Vox, and the NYT are "censoring" opposing viewpoints because when you Google an issue all of the top results are from those sites with the same political bent - you can still craft Google queries that exclude those sites, one at a time.
    - Y_Y 5y ago
      You make a good argument. To me it still feels like you can "effectively" censor something by flooding its channel with crap. Maybe there is a technical way to filter away the the "noise", but it's unlikely that the audience will bother. If you DNS-block a site is that still not censorship, because you can still reach the site by IP (if you can find it out)? I'm genuinely asking here, I think this is an interesting case and I'm not able to make my mind up.
milesskorpen 5y ago
I agree there is a tension — similar to how regulation to protect privacy also tends to reinforce monopolies. However, in this case, sometimes it seems like Facebook wants to both be highly centralized and very powerful ("Just LOOK at how effective we are at convincing people to do things! Buy ads on Facebook!") and to also cede responsibility for some pretty abhorrent things that happen on its platform. If you centralize, you own the platform - the good & the bad. It feels unjust to reap massive profits and then hand-off all the social ills you cause. I think this is more of a philosophic POV rather than a legally enforceable one (at least in the US today), but probably gets at some of the frustration people have with Facebook.
- jjkaczor 5y ago
  ...unjust to reap massive profits and then hand-off all the social ills you cause... That is my take on AI/auto content moderation and the enforcement - they can't have it both ways; centralized platform, with no responsibilities. So - hire people. Actual human beings - train them and hire large numbers from many demographic and geographic locations. But - this would cut into profits.
  - sgregnt 5y ago
    If more people would automatically solve the problem, it would already be solved. Facebook hires like crazy, and it's integrity org is massive...
    - jjkaczor 5y ago
      Ah, ok - but - then, do employees actually have the mandate to change anything? I have seen a few articles that basically seem to indicate the only way that things change are because of whistleblowers or investigations. Doesn't sound very proactive.
      - sgregnt 5y ago
        It is very well known within the industry that facebook employees have a lot of power to change things: "Move fast and break things", "be bold" etc.. It is very open and democratic company. I'd guess that employees at facebook have much more power than say in google, let alone in apple.
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PontifexMinimus 5y ago
>The zeitgeist of HN is white hot outrage that this content can be found on Facebook/Google/etc, yet also to champion decentralized sharing systems which would make this sort of content uncensorable. >Can someone explain this to me? I don't think there's any contradiction. People on HN think slavery is bad because the enslaved person is forced to do work they don't want to; they don't have a Right To Walk Away[1] from their job. This means their pay and conditions are a lot worse than they would be if they could walk away form being enslaved. And people on HN think Big Social Media is bad for roughly the same reason: in practical terms, there is no Right To Walk Away. Sure, you could build your own Facebook or Twitter (and many people on HN certainly have the skill to do so), but because of network effects it'll get nowhere. That's why decentralisation/interoperability with things like ActivityPub is attractive, and why it would be even better if the government mandated that all websites with user-generated content allowed such interoperability. 1: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/the-right-to-walk-away https://pontifex.substack.com/p/the-right-to-walk-away
wpietri 5y ago
I think it's two groups, or at least two ideologies. There's a very large streak of what I think of as hyperindividualism: I do what I want. It's not stated, but in practice it implies that any downstream negative consequences to others are negligible or even morally necessary. This predominates especially when the bulk of the audience sees themselves in the powerful person in the story. There's also a strong streak of what I'd call compassionate individualism, where people identify with the less powerful person in the story. This can involve moral outrage on their behalf, and generally includes a more nuanced balancing of the individual rights of different people. A good example is how HN talks about rising tech companies versus very dominant ones. On the way up, we tend to identify with the entrepreneur-CEOs in charge. But once they're large enough to harm either the HN audience or the tech ecosystem, the narrative tends to switch. E.g., Microsoft as the evil empire, or the way Google, Apple, and Facebook get a lot more skepticism. Often it's the same people and the same behaviors, it's just that we're at the sharp end of the stick. So here it's Facebook and slavery. Given that most of us don't intend to keep slaves and we've become suspicious of FB's power, it's easy to identify with the slaves. But phrase it as an abstract issue in distributed systems and censorship resistance, and people will identify with the engineer/rebel character.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  I roughly agree with your classification. Although last year it seemed to be quite mixed as any threat mentioning black people protesting seemed to almost invariably yield some looting based retort as if there is no possibility the two are done by different groups of people over different time periods.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    For sure. I think that's also frequently operates through who the speaker identifies with in the story.
travisgriggs 5y ago
We are humans. We want to keep our cake, but eat it too. As long as we can talk in isolation about just one issue, we don’t have to face the paradox. /insert satire tag here/ Now if we could just coordinate this better. On even days we can do liberal thinking, and odd days socially conscious thinking. /close satire/
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Maybe you can use monopace/code formatting for sarcasm? In any case most code I read here seems to be intended sarcastically.
  - deleted 5y ago
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globular-toast 5y ago
This confusion comes from people trying to fit Facebook/Google etc. (I'll just say Facebook from now on) into "old world" concepts. There seem to be two different views of what Facebook is: some see it as a public square, others see it as a publication. But these are both wrong. Facebook clearly isn't a public square. It's a platform with a dictator/censor/moderator who controls what is and isn't allowed on the platform. It also seems to be much more susceptible to groupthink, misinformation and extreme viewpoints than a real public square. But Facebook isn't a publication either. When arguing against free speech on Facebook, some people compare it to newspapers and you'll hear arguments like "the New York Times isn't obliged to publish your article". But that's not what's happening here. Facebook operates more of a blacklist than a whitelist. Nobody thinks of the NYT as explicitly rejecting all but a select few people's writings, but they do think of Facebook as explicitly allowing whatever thing currently offends them. So what is it? What should it be? These are questions we have to answer for ourselves. Applying rules from constitutions written 400 years ago might not be wise. But moving public discourse on to privately owned platforms is probably not wise either. I think the only thing that's clear right now is something is wrong.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
> The zeitgeist of HN is white hot outrage that this content can be found on Facebook/Google/etc Here's hoping that the white hot outrage is shared by most everyone on the planet and is independent of where it can be found. That is not really an answer to your question.
root_axis 5y ago
> champion decentralized sharing systems which would make this sort of content uncensorable. Decentralization does not make illegal content uncensorable, in fact the opposite is true, because regular citizens and small organizations hosting individual nodes are exposed to a lot more risk and legal liability than a massive tech giant. These gigantic centralized networks allow this type of content to hide in plain sight because something like Facebook is "too big to fail" and won't ever be shutdown regardless of how many times illegal content is re-uploaded to the platform.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Cunningham's Law dictates that I must mention, there are many decentralized systems in which content cannot simply said to be hosted on one node or another. If I use the Chinese Remainder theorem to distribute data to five hosts, such that you need to get the data from three of them to reconstruct the file, which one is hosting it? And what if it's encrypted so that the host couldn't read the data anyway?
  - root_axis 5y ago
    > If I use the Chinese Remainder theorem to distribute data to five hosts, such that you need to get the data from three of them to reconstruct the file, which one is hosting it? This kind of technical obfuscation won't stymie a judge, the owners of all five nodes would be held liable if they were instrumental in facilitating access to the illegal material. > And what if it's encrypted so that the host couldn't read the data anyway? This isn't really a practical setup for a social media website. If the host can't decrypt the data then the social media users won't be able to do so either. People could share illegal content in some kind of private E2EE group chat like Signal, but in such a scenario decentralization is of no relevance since the buck stops at E2EE either way.
    - Y_Y 5y ago
      But they aren't instrumental! Maybe only four actually sent the file, and even a judge can be made to understand that one of those was superfluous. If you want to make it even less clear, then imagine that the client is told they can download chunks from ten peers, of which five have relevant data, if which any three are sufficient. So someone comes along and downloads eight random chunks and reconstructs the bad file. If you are required to prove that a particular peer infringed a copyright by distributing a protected work, or a work derived therefrom I think you could have a hard time. I'm not sure I understand your second objection. Suppose I publish a "status" including some copyrighted work and I encrypt it such that you need a private key corresponding to the private key of anyone on my friends list to decrypt. Then it's distributed among a thousand peers (who are not my friends), such that one of my friends can download from a random twenty, receive garbage from ten, and they'll have a 30% change of being able to reconstruct the encrypted file. Can you now prove that on the balance of probabilities a peer has violated the copyright?
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Can someone explain this to me? Sure. Start with this: your perception of the “zeitgeist on HN” is based on the loudest commenters, but on different issues those are different sets of commenters. So, yeah, the zeitgeist of the subset of HN engaged by icky posts on Instagram is different than the zeitgeist of the subset engaged by decentralized sharing systems. Second, where there is overlap, tribalism plays a role, and “anti-big-corp” alignment fits both stances you point to.
gdsdfe 5y ago
well this is like saying we're gonna ban chemistry because people are gonna make meth (or whatever drug)
Y_Y 5y ago
Outrage creeps in, but it's not really a good fit for here and I wish we'd get a bit better about posting and biting ragebait. I think there are several different ideological clusters on in regarding "information freedom"-type ideas. Having just one would be no fun, and a bad reflection of the community. I'm no libertarian, but I think that that trying to censor away the problem is inevitably not going to stop the problems described. It will make them less visible though, and maybe push them to other platforms. It's more of a "moving the homeless on" solution, and similarly it's good for the individual service providers, but bad for the society as a whole. Hence I think you can be unhappy that the content exists, but still not approve of online censorship.
hindsightbias 5y ago
Many forums are dominated by absolutists of one bent or the other. The world is black and white, no shades of gray. For those who are teachers or parents, you notice a lot of that in the <12 age group. For those who are older, you notice that a lot in the elderly. It’s simply a cognitive thing that most kids eventually develop and perhaps old folks lose, but it may just be that older folks lose interest in complicated issues after a life of complicated things.
ldehaan 5y ago
It should be obvious. Just like most of social media, people do it for kudos and to show they are good people who definitely don't need to be looked into, they promise, they're super good people, please don't look into them. "Look a bad guy, ooohh I'm so mad, why aren't you mad?! Why aren't you mad!?! You're a bad guy. Look everyone it's a bad guy!" (please don't look at me though.) Freedom of choice/movement/religion/opinion as long as you're not violating others freedom. War on X <whatever it is> will never work, it never has, never will. We need better tools, and more love for our brothers and sisters in life.
rastafang 5y ago
> yet also to champion decentralized sharing systems which would make this sort of content uncensorable. Because it is decentralized doesn't mean that the content can't be filtered by the user... it depends how you build the system...
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shadowgovt 5y ago
Wanting to eat one's cake while still having the cake is a time-honored tradition in human thought patterns. HN posters are no exception.
mountainb 5y ago
If it's decentralized, it's harder to rank, sort, discover, and promote such content. Every gangster in the world has an email account, but you have to know their address to contact them. The centralized systems host the content, sort, filter, and promote such illegal content. It's the difference between a vault of snuff VHS tapes hidden underground in a locked vault and a streaming snuff r' us channel that is promoted actively to people looking for snuff content, with the content mirrored globally for accessibility for all localities.
corobo 5y ago
Different people pipe up based on different input
turtlebits 5y ago
My best guess is that Facebook/Google is making money off the content (via ads), where a decentralized system wouldn't.
shkkmo 5y ago
Decentralized/federated sharing doesn't eliminate censorship, it democratizes it. This relates to the censorship / moderation distinction. When it is your community making the choices about what is considered acceptable, that sort of community moderation is essential to a well functioning online community. When an external entity is imposing standards on your community, that is considered censorship. The line between these two can be super fuzzy and arbitrary, but that doesn't mean that this distinction doesn't have real value to those who make that distinction. The impetus towards federation is because people want their communities to be able to set their own standards rather than having to abide by whatever decisions Facebook/Apple/Google/Twitter et al make. Edit: For example, HN is has some significant moderation. I believe the vast majority of the HN community think that this moderation is not only beneficial but crucial to the community. If the HN moderators lost the respect/buy-in/consent of their community then this would start to be viewed as censorship.
angelzen 5y ago
Facebook/Google/etc displace previous iterations of the same services at a much larger scale. Their techno-optimist hope is that the scale can be managed by ever smarter algorithms. In practice, it turns out that in-person iterated human interactions have important moderation properties and can't be scaled out without losing something essential. The decentralization impulse is yet another misguided techno-optimist hope of returning to smaller communities and thus somehow restoring the moderation effects of such settings. Which won't work, as the world of organic communities tied by kin relations (aka 'village') is completely different than the world of ever diverging echo chambers the Internet produces. The Global Village is intrinsically dysfunctional. Facebook/Google cannot possibly perform healthy moderation at global scale, but fixing that can't be done short of banning the TCP/IP protocol.

dylan604 5y ago

I would also be interested in honest answers here, but would not expect anyone to be willing to have this conversation. Facebook == bad/evil, so easy reaction. Censorship == bad/evil, so easy reaction. Fixing some of FB's bad requires censorship. uh-oh. This one might require some thought vs reaction.

dimitrios1 5y ago
We are looking the externalities. Until we start examining the root cause of what is causing people to behave this way on these platforms, and start addressing those issues, which is arguably much harder, everything is going to be lipstick on a pig IMO.
- travisgriggs 5y ago
  Agreed 100%. But oh the irony. You took time (and I’m taking more time) to put comments about the issue on an obscure forum of geeky people. As you’re pointing out, the roots of these problems (human trafficking) is not an internet problem. So internet censorship is not a real solution. And then we use the very internet (and our time) to diagnose this very issue. Maybe we should all spend more time in the real world doing real things that make the world a better place so these evils happen less collectively. I’m going to do just that. I’ve just got a few more threads I need to comment on first…
- jensensbutton 5y ago
  > Until we start examining the root cause of what is causing people to behave this way on these platforms... People were just outraged at facebook last week for researching just that (how insta affects teens). I don't have much optimism in our ability to go beyond the surface.
  - mdm_ 5y ago
    I don't think most people were outraged at FB for _researching_ how Instagram affects teens. What people were outraged about was that upon finding that Instagram appears to have deleterious effects on teen girls, FB a) didn't share these findings with the public or consumers of Instagram, and b) doesn't appear to have done anything to correct or mitigate the negative effect their product appears to have on these people.
lbotos 5y ago
I think it's also interesting here because really this is about Apple vs. Facebook (Instagram). Apple is saying Facebook you need to moderate your content. Which the question becomes "Is Instagram more than a glorified web browser?"
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Instagram controls what is uploaded to its servers — a web browser does not do that.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Are you suggesting the app does local qualifications of what is uploaded vs processing on the server? Does it really matter which side the qualifing is done?
  - lbotos 5y ago
    You aren't wrong, but as far as I'm aware, the majority of content on the Instagram app is accessible via an instagram.com URL. That's what I mean by glorified browser. If apple is "banning" that app because of the content but that content is still available on the device via apple's own Safari, did they really ban anything? ---- The question is "when legally is apple responsible for UGC on instagram's servers?" That's the real question. Otherwise this would be moral grandstanding by Apple. I'm pretty sure if anyone tried to sue Apple for "distributing objectionable content" they'd run to "we aren't responsible for what's on Instagram's servers." How responsible SHOULD Apple be for data hosted on instagram's servers?
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Are people incapable of nuance? Blocking slave adverts != Censorship I have no problem with that.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Please explain how it is not censorship.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Are slave adverts protected speech? Again, I don't think the nuance is subtle at all.
    - paxys 5y ago
      Censorship applies to everything, not just "protected speech" (whatever that is)
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    Why would you not want to block slave adverts? Absolutist approach to freedom of speech?
    - dylan604 5y ago
      I'm not stating that I am for or against anything. I'm asking how the blocking is not censorship. Why would you need to speculate anything further? Just answer the question rather than deflecting and redirecting to another question. (yes, i'm aware you're not the original person)
- shkkmo 5y ago
  How do you block slave adverts across an entire federated protocol that is designed to be censorship resistant?
  - the_optimist 5y ago

randomdata 5y ago

Different people have different opinions.

ceejayoz 5y ago
Sure, but sometimes, individual people hold contradictory opinions that should be occasionally examined.
- randomdata 5y ago
  Perhaps, but HN incentivizes comments that will produce a reaction (votes, replies). You cannot read too much into what someone wrote here. "Facebook must censor all the things!" and "We need a decentralized Facebook so that censorship is impossible!" are not at odds with each other when the goal is to receive a reaction in return, assuming the author has found that those comments produce the reaction they seek. When someone is being truly genuine, I do not believe you will find that contradiction. It is possible that you may not have entirely understood what they have written, and looking for clarification may be worthwhile. Still, given the above, it is not likely worth your time. In places where there is incentive to be genuine, more exploration can be worth it.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    FWIW I try to avoid working like that. Shouting into the void seems perverse to me, and I definitely enjoy having some signal of engagement and approval when I post something. That said, I try to suspend my disbelief regarding the impossibility of fighting the current and so try to be a good citizen in order to maintain a good city. I'm sure Plato or Kant or has written extensively about this, and dang seemed to approve when I discussed it with him in a separate venue. So now that I've spent lots of years lurking, some more years posting and plenty of time screaming into the darkness elsewhere, I can feel satisfied if I post something that I know is interesting or helpful, even if I don't get any external feedback. (I'm reminded of the whole descent-to-madness that certain areas have academia have undergone for the sake of bibliometrics. See e.g. Peter Higgs' comments: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-... )

qzx_pierri 5y ago

HN is not one person. Some commenters want strict censorship to "protect the children" - That's the virtuous opinion to have in 2021 right? Some want a free and open internet with no censorship. One crowd is more annoyingly vocal than the other, so sometimes it seems like everyone here feels the same on certain topics.

serverholic 5y ago
Yep. Personally, I want a free and open internet. Mainly because I've noticed a trend where social media sites have started censoring anything except far-left opinions.
- stronglikedan 5y ago
  You're being downvoted, but what you say is objectively and demonstrably true. Unfortunately, the people it doesn't directly effect rarely hear about it from their news sources, so they rarely believe it to be true. Even more unfortunate is that it may indirectly effect them one day, because first they came for the conservatives...
  - serverholic 5y ago
    It’s true. I’m centrist and I’ve noticed it.
  - PpEY4fu85hkQpn 5y ago
    You have been successfully propagandized. Extreme right wing outlets dominate Facebook interactions almost every day. How is it possible to have a victim complex about something so obviously not true? https://twitter.com/facebookstop10 https://twitter.com/facebookstop10
  - weeblewobble 5y ago
    What you're describing is a mainstream political position. Our last president talked about it constantly. Googling "big tech censorship" brings up tons of articles from mainstream media. Just a random sample: WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-tech-twitter-facebook-google-youtube-sec-230-common-carrier-11627656722 https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-tech-twitter-facebook-googl... EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-shou...

Nextgrid 5y ago

I guess the difference that on one side you have an entity that can censor and does censor things where it's convenient for itself, but then turns a blind eye to other awful content that should be censored. On the other side you've got a system where nothing can be censored, and while the lack of censorship of awful content is a drawback at least you have the advantage that nothing can be censored (even if it goes against corporate interests) to counter-balance it. In short, one side only has drawbacks, while the other side at least brings some advantages to counter-balance those drawbacks.

lexapro 5y ago
>at least you have the advantage that nothing can be censored You can still censor by lowering visibility (flooding it with opposing content for example).
- fouric 5y ago
  That's not censorship, either in theory or in practice. "In theory" should be pretty obvious. "In practice" might require some explanation, because there seems to be a meme going around about trying to have another discussion with a person in a room where there are a bunch of people screaming at you to drown out your words. While that might be considered censorship in that exact scenario, that effect does not translate over into the internet - you simply block noisy sources on whatever platform you're on and keep reading the content that you're interested in. For instance, even though Matrix and Mastodon are federated, you can block users (and even entire servers) from either local visibility or even federation with your particular instance. Similarly, nobody says that highly biased sites like the Verge, Vox, and the NYT are "censoring" opposing viewpoints because when you Google an issue all of the top results are from those sites with the same political bent - you can still craft Google queries that exclude those sites, one at a time.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    You make a good argument. To me it still feels like you can "effectively" censor something by flooding its channel with crap. Maybe there is a technical way to filter away the the "noise", but it's unlikely that the audience will bother. If you DNS-block a site is that still not censorship, because you can still reach the site by IP (if you can find it out)? I'm genuinely asking here, I think this is an interesting case and I'm not able to make my mind up.

milesskorpen 5y ago

I agree there is a tension — similar to how regulation to protect privacy also tends to reinforce monopolies. However, in this case, sometimes it seems like Facebook wants to both be highly centralized and very powerful ("Just LOOK at how effective we are at convincing people to do things! Buy ads on Facebook!") and to also cede responsibility for some pretty abhorrent things that happen on its platform. If you centralize, you own the platform - the good & the bad. It feels unjust to reap massive profits and then hand-off all the social ills you cause. I think this is more of a philosophic POV rather than a legally enforceable one (at least in the US today), but probably gets at some of the frustration people have with Facebook.

jjkaczor 5y ago
...unjust to reap massive profits and then hand-off all the social ills you cause... That is my take on AI/auto content moderation and the enforcement - they can't have it both ways; centralized platform, with no responsibilities. So - hire people. Actual human beings - train them and hire large numbers from many demographic and geographic locations. But - this would cut into profits.
- sgregnt 5y ago
  If more people would automatically solve the problem, it would already be solved. Facebook hires like crazy, and it's integrity org is massive...
  - jjkaczor 5y ago
    Ah, ok - but - then, do employees actually have the mandate to change anything? I have seen a few articles that basically seem to indicate the only way that things change are because of whistleblowers or investigations. Doesn't sound very proactive.
    - sgregnt 5y ago
      It is very well known within the industry that facebook employees have a lot of power to change things: "Move fast and break things", "be bold" etc.. It is very open and democratic company. I'd guess that employees at facebook have much more power than say in google, let alone in apple.

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PontifexMinimus 5y ago

>The zeitgeist of HN is white hot outrage that this content can be found on Facebook/Google/etc, yet also to champion decentralized sharing systems which would make this sort of content uncensorable. >Can someone explain this to me? I don't think there's any contradiction. People on HN think slavery is bad because the enslaved person is forced to do work they don't want to; they don't have a Right To Walk Away[1] from their job. This means their pay and conditions are a lot worse than they would be if they could walk away form being enslaved. And people on HN think Big Social Media is bad for roughly the same reason: in practical terms, there is no Right To Walk Away. Sure, you could build your own Facebook or Twitter (and many people on HN certainly have the skill to do so), but because of network effects it'll get nowhere. That's why decentralisation/interoperability with things like ActivityPub is attractive, and why it would be even better if the government mandated that all websites with user-generated content allowed such interoperability. 1: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/the-right-to-walk-away https://pontifex.substack.com/p/the-right-to-walk-away

wpietri 5y ago

I think it's two groups, or at least two ideologies. There's a very large streak of what I think of as hyperindividualism: I do what I want. It's not stated, but in practice it implies that any downstream negative consequences to others are negligible or even morally necessary. This predominates especially when the bulk of the audience sees themselves in the powerful person in the story. There's also a strong streak of what I'd call compassionate individualism, where people identify with the less powerful person in the story. This can involve moral outrage on their behalf, and generally includes a more nuanced balancing of the individual rights of different people. A good example is how HN talks about rising tech companies versus very dominant ones. On the way up, we tend to identify with the entrepreneur-CEOs in charge. But once they're large enough to harm either the HN audience or the tech ecosystem, the narrative tends to switch. E.g., Microsoft as the evil empire, or the way Google, Apple, and Facebook get a lot more skepticism. Often it's the same people and the same behaviors, it's just that we're at the sharp end of the stick. So here it's Facebook and slavery. Given that most of us don't intend to keep slaves and we've become suspicious of FB's power, it's easy to identify with the slaves. But phrase it as an abstract issue in distributed systems and censorship resistance, and people will identify with the engineer/rebel character.

mhh__ 5y ago
I roughly agree with your classification. Although last year it seemed to be quite mixed as any threat mentioning black people protesting seemed to almost invariably yield some looting based retort as if there is no possibility the two are done by different groups of people over different time periods.
- wpietri 5y ago
  For sure. I think that's also frequently operates through who the speaker identifies with in the story.

travisgriggs 5y ago

We are humans. We want to keep our cake, but eat it too. As long as we can talk in isolation about just one issue, we don’t have to face the paradox. /insert satire tag here/ Now if we could just coordinate this better. On even days we can do liberal thinking, and odd days socially conscious thinking. /close satire/

Y_Y 5y ago
Maybe you can use monopace/code formatting for sarcasm? In any case most code I read here seems to be intended sarcastically.
- deleted 5y ago
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globular-toast 5y ago

This confusion comes from people trying to fit Facebook/Google etc. (I'll just say Facebook from now on) into "old world" concepts. There seem to be two different views of what Facebook is: some see it as a public square, others see it as a publication. But these are both wrong. Facebook clearly isn't a public square. It's a platform with a dictator/censor/moderator who controls what is and isn't allowed on the platform. It also seems to be much more susceptible to groupthink, misinformation and extreme viewpoints than a real public square. But Facebook isn't a publication either. When arguing against free speech on Facebook, some people compare it to newspapers and you'll hear arguments like "the New York Times isn't obliged to publish your article". But that's not what's happening here. Facebook operates more of a blacklist than a whitelist. Nobody thinks of the NYT as explicitly rejecting all but a select few people's writings, but they do think of Facebook as explicitly allowing whatever thing currently offends them. So what is it? What should it be? These are questions we have to answer for ourselves. Applying rules from constitutions written 400 years ago might not be wise. But moving public discourse on to privately owned platforms is probably not wise either. I think the only thing that's clear right now is something is wrong.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

> The zeitgeist of HN is white hot outrage that this content can be found on Facebook/Google/etc Here's hoping that the white hot outrage is shared by most everyone on the planet and is independent of where it can be found. That is not really an answer to your question.

root_axis 5y ago

> champion decentralized sharing systems which would make this sort of content uncensorable. Decentralization does not make illegal content uncensorable, in fact the opposite is true, because regular citizens and small organizations hosting individual nodes are exposed to a lot more risk and legal liability than a massive tech giant. These gigantic centralized networks allow this type of content to hide in plain sight because something like Facebook is "too big to fail" and won't ever be shutdown regardless of how many times illegal content is re-uploaded to the platform.

Y_Y 5y ago
Cunningham's Law dictates that I must mention, there are many decentralized systems in which content cannot simply said to be hosted on one node or another. If I use the Chinese Remainder theorem to distribute data to five hosts, such that you need to get the data from three of them to reconstruct the file, which one is hosting it? And what if it's encrypted so that the host couldn't read the data anyway?
- root_axis 5y ago
  > If I use the Chinese Remainder theorem to distribute data to five hosts, such that you need to get the data from three of them to reconstruct the file, which one is hosting it? This kind of technical obfuscation won't stymie a judge, the owners of all five nodes would be held liable if they were instrumental in facilitating access to the illegal material. > And what if it's encrypted so that the host couldn't read the data anyway? This isn't really a practical setup for a social media website. If the host can't decrypt the data then the social media users won't be able to do so either. People could share illegal content in some kind of private E2EE group chat like Signal, but in such a scenario decentralization is of no relevance since the buck stops at E2EE either way.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    But they aren't instrumental! Maybe only four actually sent the file, and even a judge can be made to understand that one of those was superfluous. If you want to make it even less clear, then imagine that the client is told they can download chunks from ten peers, of which five have relevant data, if which any three are sufficient. So someone comes along and downloads eight random chunks and reconstructs the bad file. If you are required to prove that a particular peer infringed a copyright by distributing a protected work, or a work derived therefrom I think you could have a hard time. I'm not sure I understand your second objection. Suppose I publish a "status" including some copyrighted work and I encrypt it such that you need a private key corresponding to the private key of anyone on my friends list to decrypt. Then it's distributed among a thousand peers (who are not my friends), such that one of my friends can download from a random twenty, receive garbage from ten, and they'll have a 30% change of being able to reconstruct the encrypted file. Can you now prove that on the balance of probabilities a peer has violated the copyright?

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Can someone explain this to me? Sure. Start with this: your perception of the “zeitgeist on HN” is based on the loudest commenters, but on different issues those are different sets of commenters. So, yeah, the zeitgeist of the subset of HN engaged by icky posts on Instagram is different than the zeitgeist of the subset engaged by decentralized sharing systems. Second, where there is overlap, tribalism plays a role, and “anti-big-corp” alignment fits both stances you point to.

gdsdfe 5y ago

well this is like saying we're gonna ban chemistry because people are gonna make meth (or whatever drug)

Y_Y 5y ago

Outrage creeps in, but it's not really a good fit for here and I wish we'd get a bit better about posting and biting ragebait. I think there are several different ideological clusters on in regarding "information freedom"-type ideas. Having just one would be no fun, and a bad reflection of the community. I'm no libertarian, but I think that that trying to censor away the problem is inevitably not going to stop the problems described. It will make them less visible though, and maybe push them to other platforms. It's more of a "moving the homeless on" solution, and similarly it's good for the individual service providers, but bad for the society as a whole. Hence I think you can be unhappy that the content exists, but still not approve of online censorship.

hindsightbias 5y ago

Many forums are dominated by absolutists of one bent or the other. The world is black and white, no shades of gray. For those who are teachers or parents, you notice a lot of that in the <12 age group. For those who are older, you notice that a lot in the elderly. It’s simply a cognitive thing that most kids eventually develop and perhaps old folks lose, but it may just be that older folks lose interest in complicated issues after a life of complicated things.

ldehaan 5y ago

It should be obvious. Just like most of social media, people do it for kudos and to show they are good people who definitely don't need to be looked into, they promise, they're super good people, please don't look into them. "Look a bad guy, ooohh I'm so mad, why aren't you mad?! Why aren't you mad!?! You're a bad guy. Look everyone it's a bad guy!" (please don't look at me though.) Freedom of choice/movement/religion/opinion as long as you're not violating others freedom. War on X <whatever it is> will never work, it never has, never will. We need better tools, and more love for our brothers and sisters in life.

rastafang 5y ago

> yet also to champion decentralized sharing systems which would make this sort of content uncensorable. Because it is decentralized doesn't mean that the content can't be filtered by the user... it depends how you build the system...

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shadowgovt 5y ago

Wanting to eat one's cake while still having the cake is a time-honored tradition in human thought patterns. HN posters are no exception.

mountainb 5y ago

If it's decentralized, it's harder to rank, sort, discover, and promote such content. Every gangster in the world has an email account, but you have to know their address to contact them. The centralized systems host the content, sort, filter, and promote such illegal content. It's the difference between a vault of snuff VHS tapes hidden underground in a locked vault and a streaming snuff r' us channel that is promoted actively to people looking for snuff content, with the content mirrored globally for accessibility for all localities.

corobo 5y ago

Different people pipe up based on different input

turtlebits 5y ago

My best guess is that Facebook/Google is making money off the content (via ads), where a decentralized system wouldn't.

shkkmo 5y ago

Decentralized/federated sharing doesn't eliminate censorship, it democratizes it. This relates to the censorship / moderation distinction. When it is your community making the choices about what is considered acceptable, that sort of community moderation is essential to a well functioning online community. When an external entity is imposing standards on your community, that is considered censorship. The line between these two can be super fuzzy and arbitrary, but that doesn't mean that this distinction doesn't have real value to those who make that distinction. The impetus towards federation is because people want their communities to be able to set their own standards rather than having to abide by whatever decisions Facebook/Apple/Google/Twitter et al make. Edit: For example, HN is has some significant moderation. I believe the vast majority of the HN community think that this moderation is not only beneficial but crucial to the community. If the HN moderators lost the respect/buy-in/consent of their community then this would start to be viewed as censorship.

angelzen 5y ago

Facebook/Google/etc displace previous iterations of the same services at a much larger scale. Their techno-optimist hope is that the scale can be managed by ever smarter algorithms. In practice, it turns out that in-person iterated human interactions have important moderation properties and can't be scaled out without losing something essential. The decentralization impulse is yet another misguided techno-optimist hope of returning to smaller communities and thus somehow restoring the moderation effects of such settings. Which won't work, as the world of organic communities tied by kin relations (aka 'village') is completely different than the world of ever diverging echo chambers the Internet produces. The Global Village is intrinsically dysfunctional. Facebook/Google cannot possibly perform healthy moderation at global scale, but fixing that can't be done short of banning the TCP/IP protocol.