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>The online world should not be a wild west where bots and bigots and trolls and others are anonymously going around and can harm people I can't express how mu

• ggm 5y ago
  The Wild West lasted 30 years. Significant amounts of land damage, violence against women and indigenous people happened. Cowboys were overwhelmingly Spanish speaking. It wasn't America's finest libertarian dream, cattle barons exploited everyone, consumers included. Chicago was a nightmare of meat packing. Mass immigration was in full swing. No part of the world is away from government reach, you espouse a fantasy.
  • macdaknife 5y ago
    Your answer not true. In fact, the "Wild West" is still in fact a reality. 1. Land damage as in the largest public lands system in the world? 2. Violence against women who were among the first in the world given the right to vote? 3. Violence against people that were plenty violent? 4. Cowboys spoke many languages. Your point is what? 5. Chicago is the "Wild West", huh? 6. Immigration is good, depending. Leave the internet out of your politics, please.
    • aaplok 5y ago
      > Leave the internet out of your politics, please. Your comment would have a lot more value without this cheap attack. The article and all the comments are about the politics of the internet. OP has the right to express their opinion, however wrong they might feel to you.
      • ggm 5y ago
        The wild west is a really bad metaphor for internet governance at any time. Firstly by sheer weight of numbers it's China and India who carry the users. Secondly it never had a deregulated state, ever, since before ARPAnet telecommunications were fully regulated state or post monopolised regulated by the outcomes of the RBOC lawsuits. This "we need more wild west" is a fantasy. It ignores pretty much all current governance and community consensus processes everywhere. Not even John Perry Barlow believed his own quote applied to all things all the time. The IETF is not the wild west. IANA is not the wild west. BGP speaking is not the wild west.
    • ggm 5y ago
      Why do you think the cows existed? Chicago is where the wild west cows wound up. Cowboys existed because barons of beef on the hoof wanted cheap Mexican (Spanish speaking) vaccero labour to move cattle, trampling down sheep and other farming fences, to exploit prairie grasses without paying land damage costs, to ship meat to Chicago to feed the exploding eastern state population. Cowboy culture and wild West was exploitative bullshit, both literally and figuratively. What was happening was a fight between expansion for cows, other farming, and the sweep westward. It lasted 30 years before it was legalised into normality. Dodge city cowboys are a myth based on thin facts and nothing about the wild west is good regarding internet governance
      • Eelongate 5y ago
        > Dodge city cowboys are a myth based on thin facts and nothing about the wild west is good regarding internet governance Nothing about the real wild west as you describe it has anything to do with the internet. Where are the analogous internet cows or commercial exploitation of internet prairies, or sweeps westward? This is all nonsensical. The literal reality of the wild west has nothing to do with regulating "trolls" (criticism of politicians) online.
  • ohCh6zos 5y ago
    If no part of the world is away from government reach we still have a lot of work to do. "The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It".
    • ggm 5y ago
      How does this enhance the argument regarding Australian anti trolling laws? Read one way it says "they'll fail" so why care...
      • ohCh6zos 5y ago
        Oh, I always interpreted as as a guiding principle for system design.
• version_five 5y ago
  Yes agreed. All the more so because it's a voluntary, pretend environment. There is a sibling post grasping to explain why the wild west was not as romantic as it seems and pretending the analogy holds for the internet. The post is silly, but at least the west was a real place that people had to live in. Acting like we need to monitor and regulate every corner of the internet is absurd, but then again, this is Australia isnt it.
  • sofixa 5y ago
    No, it isn't voluntary or pretend. For most people today it's a natural extension of their lives, which they use daily, if not hourly. Where two decades ago you'd call a friend to talk, or send physical mail to communicate or physically go to a store or send mail to pay your taxes,today all of those are online. Most young people grow up with all of those things online and have never known anything else. For them, and those who grew up while things were changing, being offline is a option like going in exile in Siberia. Heck, many people make their self worth based on Instagram or whatever, and many make their livelihoods online. The Internet is not what it was two decades ago, and pretending otherwise is foolish. It simply cannot remain the Wild West, like the real Wild West couldn't and didn't. Real life people are impacted, up to and including death (radicalisation and joining a terrorist group, or driven to suicide through harassmwnt, to name two "fun" ones)
    • teakettle42 5y ago
      > many people make their self worth based on Instagram or whatever That’s unhealthy; why should promoting unhealthy social media adoption be our policy priority? > Real life people are impacted, up to and including death (radicalisation and joining a terrorist group, This occurred before the Internet, too. The answer is more speech, education, and enabling people — not censorship. > or driven to suicide through harassmwnt, to name two "fun" ones) Then we need to focus on individual resiliency - not building a hug-box.
      • sofixa 5y ago
        > That’s unhealthy; why should promoting unhealthy social media adoption be our policy priority? Nobody should promote it, people should fight against it, but until that changes, it should be taken into account. > This occurred before the Internet, too. The answer is more speech, education, and enabling people — not censorship. Before the Internet the potential reach was much more limited. Recruitment for ISIS online, for instance on Twitter, was highly successful where before they would have struggled to reach disillusioned youth in France or Indonesia for instance. More education, ideally secular, is needed, but how do you force that to happen in Indonesia for instance? > Then we need to focus on individual resiliency - not building a hug-box. How ? How do you make it so everyone is immune from, for instance, rape threats or personalised ( e.g. racial) harassment online ?
• _-david-_ 5y ago
  >The online world SHOULD be a wild west, away from government reach, in my opinion. I would agree to an extent, but I think there are a few examples where the government should step in. Child porn being the biggest.
  • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    All of the things where this legitimately applies are things that aren't really happening on the internet. They're happening in some specific place. Are there pedophiles abusing children in your country? Then go arrest them. They won't be posting anything on the internet while they're in prison. Are there pedophiles abusing children in some other country? That is that country's problem, not yours. Nothing about the internet has to change in order to do this.
    • vermilingua 5y ago
      > That is that country's problem, not yours. I agree in principle. However (China nonwithstanding) the internet knows no borders. Any one country not policing and arresting CP provides material for paedophiles in any other country. If consuming online CP increases the likelihood that paedophiles will go on to abuse children (as I suspect it would) then child abuse in another country is your problem.
      • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        > If consuming online CP increases the likelihood that paedophiles will go on to abuse children (as I suspect it would) then child abuse in another country is your problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_pornography_and_child_sexual_abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_por... TLDR: All we have are correlational studies that conflict with each other, and correlational studies are inherently dogshit regardless, so that hasn't been established at all. This seems identical to the argument that we need to do something about violent video games from other countries because they could cause someone to commit an act of violence in your country. It hasn't been established that this actually happens, but if someone does the bad thing in your country then they still go to prison. People are responsible for their own actions.
• Barrin92 5y ago
  this might have been a popular idea among some libertarian hackers in the 90s but I'm not sure how many people you're going to get on board with the notion that the internet should be ungovernable and out of the reach of law enforcement. I'm in favor of having robust freedoms both online and offline don't get me wrong but I don't see the internet as some sort of mystical realm and I don't want anarchy on the internet for the same reason I don't want it in the neighborhood I live. The 'online world' is not some space any more that is solely a refuge for people who felt maligned in the 'normal' world, it's part of the fabric of everyday life and that means it can't be a playground without rules.
  • swader999 5y ago
    I'd settle for free speech and no censorship .
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    On the internet there is no separation between private and public. There will be no laws telling you not to be a troll in your bedroom. The question is if people are allowed to be private in the place where they spend increasingly more of their time, the internet
• stirfish 5y ago
  There are definitely state-sponsored bots, bigots, and trolls on the internet. States tend to want a monopoly on harming people.
• vmception 5y ago
  I actually like this. The companies can be forced and the users can learn to shield themselves. I obviously see the threat that perhaps my own currently benign opinions can be civilly and criminally sanctionable in the future. But I think this isn't an absurd predictable use of state power: regulate the intermediaries. Let individuals know there are consequences. Maybe people don't actually believe the things they are saying, reduce it.
  • hellojesus 5y ago
    What could possibly be the consequence for lying?
    • vmception 5y ago
      Believe it or not, jail.
      • hellojesus 5y ago
        Yes, but what charges could someone possibly levy against someone else for lying? Unless they're breaking some other law which already exists on the books, making this mostly a redundant constraint.
• qwerty456127 5y ago
  There should be both. There should be wild free parts for grownups who can't easily be traumatized, manipulated or tricked and also fenced gardens for those vulnerable (kids, grannies, religious etc whoever is easily trollable). Places where every non-techie goes nowadays (i.e. Facebook) should be censored and guarded strictly, the rest should be free and wild.
  • sneedenheimer 5y ago
    Isn't Facebook already censored and guarded strictly? And you won't have wild free parts for grownups if you let the government legislate against "trolls" and "bigots" on the internet. Today they'll just force Facebook into removing "harmful" content but you are incredibly naive if you think they'll stop there.
    • qwerty456127 5y ago
      They won't stop themselves. We have to invite them to police specific parts and stop them when they want to expand their control further. We generally like police to patrol the city and guard kindergartens etc but don't invite them to station in our bedrooms. Isn't Facebook already censored and guarded strictly? Not sufficiently apparently. There still are a lot of weirdos, bullshitters and political trolls there AFAIK (but I admit I didn't really check - I just read about that a lot, incl. here on HN). I.e. fact-checking should be enforced, whoever is caught on repeated intentional lying with purpose to manipulate audience should be banned.
  • devtul 5y ago
    I think about this approach every two weeks, when I hear that somewhere in the world there's a new initiative to treat the internet like a kindergarten. Sure why not, but I would like to sign up for the wild west, the easily offended and gullible can live happily on the safe side, thanks.
    • qwerty456127 5y ago
      Exactly. I used yo be a total Internet freedom proponent and that's what I want for myself but now as everybody (of whom the majority is mentally unprepared) is on Facebook I admit it makes no sense - Internet kindergartens have to be there for the people who need them (and most of these people just naturally go to places like Facebook and Instagram).
• sneedenheimer 5y ago
  >trolls I hate their usage of 'troll' too. To me, 'troll' means a guy who argues about 0.9 bar not equaling 1 in a math forum. I have no idea what the hell these people mean when they say 'troll'.
  • questiondev 5y ago
    i am afraid that what they mean by troll is code for anyone who disagrees with their narrative
  • stirfish 5y ago
    But 0.9 bar isn't equal to 1. Oh! I see what you did there! I think they are using it to mean something closer to "cyberbully", maybe.
    • mewse 5y ago
      > But 0.9 bar isn't equal to 1. Oh! I see what you did there! This is a foundational problem in our anthropogenic decimal system of math (which we only use because of the evolutionary accident of a modal (n.b.: not average) human happening to have ten fingers); the whole issue doesn't even exist in the only correct representation of numbers, ternary (base-3). For example, let's multiply 1 / 3 * 3: In decimal `1.0 / 3.0 == 0.3 bar * 3 == 0.9 bar` and we've proven that 1 equals 0.9 bar, which is clearly nonsense and falsifies the whole concept of decimal representation of numbers. In ternary, though, `1.0 / 10.0 == 0.1 * 10 == 1.0` -- see? no contradiction. Maths just work properly if you use the true numeric base. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I will not be taking any blasphemous questions from unbelievers about dividing and multiplying by two.
      • Eelongate 5y ago
        In a ternary system, wouldn't 1.222... equal 2?
        • WantonQuantum 5y ago
          The last paragraph indicates the whole comment is in jest.
• xafnuaetrf8764 5y ago
  And away from govporate-owned telecom cables and ISPs, right? It's like coming to a MacDonalds and demanding that all the personnel gets their asses out for a walk while we have a party there with other 5y-olds.
• sto_hristo 5y ago
  You approach a problem with your emotions and that has never given any result. The online world has been, from its inception, a foundation for creativity, knowledge, entertainment, communication, and so much more. When a malicious party recognizes the power of the online world and starts to abuse it for their own gain, if you TRULY support all that is the online world, you shouldn't allow such parties to exist. In other words, it's pathologically stupid to allow freedom of expression to be exploited against freedom of expression. If you're not flexible, you break at the slightest bent.
• thunkshift1 5y ago
  Nonsense. The wild west led to gunslingers and bounty hunters and true progress was achieved after it was reined in. Just because you are able to insulate yourself from all the shit that goes on ‘out there’ does not mean everyone else has to be okay with it. Some of that online trolling and hating has affected a lot of people more personally than others. Think about them too.
• NoPicklez 5y ago
  You say that, but are you then against the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)? A regulation set out to protect the information rights of the individual.
• specialist 5y ago
  Wildcatting and privateering are better analogies. The entire ecosystem is motivated more by wealth transfer than societal good.