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You’re touching on a wider huge problem for society now: people make assumptions that ascribe malice when there is none (and/or vastly misunderstand something),

You’re touching on a wider huge problem for society now: people make assumptions that ascribe malice when there is none (and/or vastly misunderstand something), and the internet lets this amplify and morph into bigger issues than should exist. When social networking was nascent, there was this assumption that decentralized voices would help get truth out faster than could ever happen, and the principals of democracy would flourish. While that sometimes happens, it seems more often than not public opinion falls victim to conspiracy theories aided by cognitive biases (especially confirmation bias) and those who purposefully wish to distort. What’s saddest to me is that I’ve come to the conclusion that the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. We cannot expect that technology will go backwards, and the only viable option is the China one of absolute information control, which itself is scary. Those who do not adopt this will be vulnerable to outside control and inside dark forces, and those who do will create a censorship authoritarian state.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> We cannot expect that technology will go backwards, and the only viable option is the China one of absolute information control, which itself is scary. There is an obviously better alternative, which is non-centralized moderation. This is HN. It's moderated. It's not moderated by a government or Mark Zuckerberg and it has no monopoly on the dissemination of information, so if you don't like the moderation here you can go somewhere else and there are in actual fact other places to go. That works. The real problem right now is that the biggest platforms are too big/centralized, which means you get chokepoints that attract hamfisted bureaucratic censorship instead of vigorous competition for high quality moderation.
- azinman2 5y ago
  Except it doesn’t. It falls victim to all the same things. I’ve seen things posted with all kinds of conspiracy theories that I happen to have intimate knowledge of from where I’ve worked, and those theories are dead wrong. They’re a combination of not knowing about public information, not being able to understand it (outside of skill set), not bothering to do research before stating opinions and amplifying (upvoting) things that sound right but are in fact not, incorrectly connecting dots that are unrelated, bringing in false “facts”, stating opinions as facts that others assume are then facts, and a host of other issues. If all you’re depending on is others to upvote and downvote, then you information bubbles are easy to form. Facebook is notoriously bad for exactly this reason, as are forums that attract certain demographics / ideologies.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > They’re a combination of not knowing about public information, not being able to understand it (outside of skill set), not bothering to do research before stating opinions and amplifying (upvoting) things that sound right but are in fact not, incorrectly connecting dots that are unrelated, bringing in false “facts”, stating opinions as facts that others assume are then facts, and a host of other issues. "The China one of absolute information control" doesn't fix any of that, because the censors have no better information than anyone else about what is actually true. And bad incentives to suppress things they know are true but don't want to get out. The answer is, again, decentralized moderation. Subject matter specific discussion forums where the moderators are steeped in the subject matter and know better than the average man in the street or government bureaucrat what is and isn't malarkey. This is emphatically not what Facebook does which is why Facebook is a dung fire.
- _benedict 5y ago
  Why do you suppose people will select sites with good moderation? Is there any more reason to expect this, than that they would join a non-conspiracy Facebook group today?
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    People do join non-conspiracy Facebook groups today. Most Facebook groups are actually non-conspiracy Facebook groups. People don't want to be spammed with balderdash all the time. The problem with Facebook is that they do what amounts to inverse moderation, site-wide. They promote inflammatory nonsense because it builds engagement. Ordinarily this would cause people to leave, but the site is so large that the network effect locks people in and enables the company to survive abusing its users like that. If there was a larger number of smaller sites, or a federated network in which individual subgroups handled their own moderation, people would abandon the ones that operated like Facebook because they're severely unpleasant and the network effect wouldn't be strong enough to lock them in.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> We cannot expect that technology will go backwards, and the only viable option is the China one of absolute information control, which itself is scary. There is an obviously better alternative, which is non-centralized moderation. This is HN. It's moderated. It's not moderated by a government or Mark Zuckerberg and it has no monopoly on the dissemination of information, so if you don't like the moderation here you can go somewhere else and there are in actual fact other places to go. That works. The real problem right now is that the biggest platforms are too big/centralized, which means you get chokepoints that attract hamfisted bureaucratic censorship instead of vigorous competition for high quality moderation.

azinman2 5y ago
Except it doesn’t. It falls victim to all the same things. I’ve seen things posted with all kinds of conspiracy theories that I happen to have intimate knowledge of from where I’ve worked, and those theories are dead wrong. They’re a combination of not knowing about public information, not being able to understand it (outside of skill set), not bothering to do research before stating opinions and amplifying (upvoting) things that sound right but are in fact not, incorrectly connecting dots that are unrelated, bringing in false “facts”, stating opinions as facts that others assume are then facts, and a host of other issues. If all you’re depending on is others to upvote and downvote, then you information bubbles are easy to form. Facebook is notoriously bad for exactly this reason, as are forums that attract certain demographics / ideologies.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > They’re a combination of not knowing about public information, not being able to understand it (outside of skill set), not bothering to do research before stating opinions and amplifying (upvoting) things that sound right but are in fact not, incorrectly connecting dots that are unrelated, bringing in false “facts”, stating opinions as facts that others assume are then facts, and a host of other issues. "The China one of absolute information control" doesn't fix any of that, because the censors have no better information than anyone else about what is actually true. And bad incentives to suppress things they know are true but don't want to get out. The answer is, again, decentralized moderation. Subject matter specific discussion forums where the moderators are steeped in the subject matter and know better than the average man in the street or government bureaucrat what is and isn't malarkey. This is emphatically not what Facebook does which is why Facebook is a dung fire.
_benedict 5y ago
Why do you suppose people will select sites with good moderation? Is there any more reason to expect this, than that they would join a non-conspiracy Facebook group today?
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  People do join non-conspiracy Facebook groups today. Most Facebook groups are actually non-conspiracy Facebook groups. People don't want to be spammed with balderdash all the time. The problem with Facebook is that they do what amounts to inverse moderation, site-wide. They promote inflammatory nonsense because it builds engagement. Ordinarily this would cause people to leave, but the site is so large that the network effect locks people in and enables the company to survive abusing its users like that. If there was a larger number of smaller sites, or a federated network in which individual subgroups handled their own moderation, people would abandon the ones that operated like Facebook because they're severely unpleasant and the network effect wouldn't be strong enough to lock them in.