6 ms·

I think censorship actually could help us in a huge way back to cultural health; start censoring big data, rage cycle algorithms, sexploitation, advertising. Th

I think censorship actually could help us in a huge way back to cultural health; start censoring big data, rage cycle algorithms, sexploitation, advertising. Then on top of that giving people independent, client-based, advanced AI powered tools en masse, and making sure they know how to use them and why, for accurate elected censorship on their own devices of things they personally find detrimental to their mental health. Basically, do what you can to allow for the censorship of the influence of the people with money, onto the people without it. Unfortunately, it's unrealistic to expect this to happen on a big enough scale to overturn the profitability of the effects we've already seen. So it's still centralized censorship by the people with power, onto the people without it, which badly damages everyone's mental health and in particular the general societal trust, especially on the part of anyone hit by it.

zozbot234 5y ago
It might easily happen via antitrust intervention. The big internet companies might be forced to adopt federated standards and "open up" their big walled-garden platforms to enable free interaction among users across different "social" service providers. Then the service providers would start to compete and differentiate by adopting things like user-facing AI scores for content. The feasibility of this varies by platform; it seems especially hard for some platforms like YouTube or TikTok, which are doing the "core" work of hosting video content and providing recommendations. Others though might be easier.
- JetAlone 5y ago
  It will never be perfect, there'll always be someone trying to exploit a power vacuum, but we'll see how things go. There's a possibility some changes could make our situations improve more than they deteriorate. It's worth being a little optimistic...
- sdenton4 5y ago
  To play devil's advocate: Won't a thousand small operators be encouraged to maximize engagement to maintain their tenuous existence, and thus keep up or even accelerate the outrage cycle? This is exactly what we've seen with a thousand small content providers; why will having a thousand aggregators fix it? There's similar questions for privacy and security. Why would smaller operators - under less scrutiny - resist the temptation to sell or exploit detailed user data? This was the Uber model, after all: Give every employee full access to the DB until the company is big enough that anyone cares. How many small companies have terrible privacy practices that we've just never heard about?
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    Maximizing engagement is a result of ad-supported businesses because profit-maximization is from showing you more ads, which means you spending more time on the platform. Splitting up the network doesn't inherently make it better or worse. If you're paying a monthly fee or buying hardware, they don't care how much time you spend using it as long as they get your money, so that's a different incentive. The ad-supported model is more profitable specifically because of the network effect -- you get more users when you don't charge money and the bigger network is more network effect. But then the users don't have a real choice; the biggest network with everybody on it is the one funded by ads. In a federated network, you choose the provider who makes the algorithm and can choose one whose business model isn't selling your attention to advertisers, and you're still a part of the same network as people who choose differently. Then people aren't locked in, and when they realize that the algorithm whose purpose is to suck up all their time and spam them with ads is costing them way more than e.g. $10/month, which business model becomes more popular?
BobbyJo 5y ago
> Then on top of that giving people independent, client-based, advanced AI powered tools en masse, and making sure they know how to use them and why, for accurate elected censorship on their own devices of things they personally find detrimental to their mental health. Basically, do what you can to allow for the censorship of the influence of the people with money, onto the people without it. I lay blame for a lot of the bipolarism of modern discourse on the ability of people to filter the ideas to which they are exposed to a great degree. Combine that with the ability to create larger audiences than ever before, and that's exactly how the us/them dualism takes root. Echo-chamber was a big buzz word not that long ago.
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago
  I wonder if this is true. Is there any guide to finding these ideas that I might be sheltering myself from, that I should not be sheltering myself from?
  - JetAlone 5y ago
    I believe we have a responsibility to find and trust guides on our own, and make or revise them... I experience, visible in my recent post history on here, many times in recent memory, where I get driven by rage cycles to a point where I'm not who I know I ought to be and could have been. I laugh about it to myself, but I know I love a good verbal joust, which if not handled carefully can be very bad for me and the other person. Some of those "censorship" tools are in my own mind, or accessible to it where I can ignore what riles me up. I'm not omnipotent in that way, but there's work that can be done, and helped, to be appropriately dispassionate.
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    Human content moderators pretty regularly develop PTSD from dealing with the absolute worst humanity finds to put on the internet. So, you could go get one of those jobs for a while. But I don't recommend it.
  - mLuby 5y ago
    Figure out who your tribe considers "the enemy" and then sneak over to the "enemy's camp" to see what they're talking about. 3 tactics, from trivial to dangerous: 1) Use a private or different browser, VPN, or Tor to exit your personal filter bubble, then search for news or trends and see what the algorithms serve to fresh faces. 2) US-specific example: If you're a Democrat/Republican, read the Fox News/NY Times politics or opinion section. If you know some big names on the "enemy side" go consume some of their content. It'd also be a good idea to read some news stories from outside the US; they don't have much stake in the fight and have some distance, so it's good for perspective. 3) Ask that family member (the one your other family members proudly blocked on Facebook) what their news sources are. Just a word of warning: they may take this as a sign you're "defecting" and talk your ear off, so try to come up with a way to time-limit it, like "it's for a school paper."
s5300 5y ago
What do you mean by sexploitation?
wincy 5y ago
I would love to be able to censor anything about rogue AIs, simulation theory, outer space and extraterrestrials beyond our solar system in general, and anything related to consciousness and qualia. Also end of life care, cancer research, and every single post on Hacker News that says “such and such has died”. That stuff triggers me and I click the “hide” button. My wife thinks I’m a nutcase. I once had a panic attack after someone on Hacker News made some joke about Oumuamua or whatever that thing was named being a swarm of nano bots that are going to destroy the earth. Thanks, random person! I dunno maybe I’m mentally unwell. If so I’ve been this way for years. Just hate to dwell on certain topics because there’s no “happy” scenario for them. Then again I don’t know if I’d actually be better off if I was literally never exposed to any of that through some virtual personal assistant keeping me in my safe zone, instead of brushing by it on occasion.
- influx 5y ago
  If I could offer a book suggestion for you: The Power of Now but Eckhardt Tolle.
vorpalhex 5y ago
I'm a big freedom of speech person, and actually I agree with the basics of your point. Client based tools - that the client actually controls - are the best way to fight spam but not engage in censorship. Let people tune to their preferences.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> Then on top of that giving people independent, client-based, advanced AI powered tools en masse, and making sure they know how to use them and why, for accurate elected censorship on their own devices of things they personally find detrimental to their mental health. Naming this "elected censorship" is a bad idea. Choosing not to listen to something isn't censorship because censorship is without consent -- the recipient wants the information and someone is denying it to them. Voluntary filtering is something else entirely.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I believe big data can be disarmed best by strong privacy protections. Facebook already threatened to withdraw from Europe and it would be a shame to do away with free speech because of companies abuse some freedoms while speaking out against the freedom of others.

zozbot234 5y ago

It might easily happen via antitrust intervention. The big internet companies might be forced to adopt federated standards and "open up" their big walled-garden platforms to enable free interaction among users across different "social" service providers. Then the service providers would start to compete and differentiate by adopting things like user-facing AI scores for content. The feasibility of this varies by platform; it seems especially hard for some platforms like YouTube or TikTok, which are doing the "core" work of hosting video content and providing recommendations. Others though might be easier.

JetAlone 5y ago
It will never be perfect, there'll always be someone trying to exploit a power vacuum, but we'll see how things go. There's a possibility some changes could make our situations improve more than they deteriorate. It's worth being a little optimistic...
sdenton4 5y ago
To play devil's advocate: Won't a thousand small operators be encouraged to maximize engagement to maintain their tenuous existence, and thus keep up or even accelerate the outrage cycle? This is exactly what we've seen with a thousand small content providers; why will having a thousand aggregators fix it? There's similar questions for privacy and security. Why would smaller operators - under less scrutiny - resist the temptation to sell or exploit detailed user data? This was the Uber model, after all: Give every employee full access to the DB until the company is big enough that anyone cares. How many small companies have terrible privacy practices that we've just never heard about?
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  Maximizing engagement is a result of ad-supported businesses because profit-maximization is from showing you more ads, which means you spending more time on the platform. Splitting up the network doesn't inherently make it better or worse. If you're paying a monthly fee or buying hardware, they don't care how much time you spend using it as long as they get your money, so that's a different incentive. The ad-supported model is more profitable specifically because of the network effect -- you get more users when you don't charge money and the bigger network is more network effect. But then the users don't have a real choice; the biggest network with everybody on it is the one funded by ads. In a federated network, you choose the provider who makes the algorithm and can choose one whose business model isn't selling your attention to advertisers, and you're still a part of the same network as people who choose differently. Then people aren't locked in, and when they realize that the algorithm whose purpose is to suck up all their time and spam them with ads is costing them way more than e.g. $10/month, which business model becomes more popular?

BobbyJo 5y ago

> Then on top of that giving people independent, client-based, advanced AI powered tools en masse, and making sure they know how to use them and why, for accurate elected censorship on their own devices of things they personally find detrimental to their mental health. Basically, do what you can to allow for the censorship of the influence of the people with money, onto the people without it. I lay blame for a lot of the bipolarism of modern discourse on the ability of people to filter the ideas to which they are exposed to a great degree. Combine that with the ability to create larger audiences than ever before, and that's exactly how the us/them dualism takes root. Echo-chamber was a big buzz word not that long ago.

ReactiveJelly 5y ago
I wonder if this is true. Is there any guide to finding these ideas that I might be sheltering myself from, that I should not be sheltering myself from?
- JetAlone 5y ago
  I believe we have a responsibility to find and trust guides on our own, and make or revise them... I experience, visible in my recent post history on here, many times in recent memory, where I get driven by rage cycles to a point where I'm not who I know I ought to be and could have been. I laugh about it to myself, but I know I love a good verbal joust, which if not handled carefully can be very bad for me and the other person. Some of those "censorship" tools are in my own mind, or accessible to it where I can ignore what riles me up. I'm not omnipotent in that way, but there's work that can be done, and helped, to be appropriately dispassionate.
- sdenton4 5y ago
  Human content moderators pretty regularly develop PTSD from dealing with the absolute worst humanity finds to put on the internet. So, you could go get one of those jobs for a while. But I don't recommend it.
- mLuby 5y ago
  Figure out who your tribe considers "the enemy" and then sneak over to the "enemy's camp" to see what they're talking about. 3 tactics, from trivial to dangerous: 1) Use a private or different browser, VPN, or Tor to exit your personal filter bubble, then search for news or trends and see what the algorithms serve to fresh faces. 2) US-specific example: If you're a Democrat/Republican, read the Fox News/NY Times politics or opinion section. If you know some big names on the "enemy side" go consume some of their content. It'd also be a good idea to read some news stories from outside the US; they don't have much stake in the fight and have some distance, so it's good for perspective. 3) Ask that family member (the one your other family members proudly blocked on Facebook) what their news sources are. Just a word of warning: they may take this as a sign you're "defecting" and talk your ear off, so try to come up with a way to time-limit it, like "it's for a school paper."

s5300 5y ago

What do you mean by sexploitation?

wincy 5y ago

I would love to be able to censor anything about rogue AIs, simulation theory, outer space and extraterrestrials beyond our solar system in general, and anything related to consciousness and qualia. Also end of life care, cancer research, and every single post on Hacker News that says “such and such has died”. That stuff triggers me and I click the “hide” button. My wife thinks I’m a nutcase. I once had a panic attack after someone on Hacker News made some joke about Oumuamua or whatever that thing was named being a swarm of nano bots that are going to destroy the earth. Thanks, random person! I dunno maybe I’m mentally unwell. If so I’ve been this way for years. Just hate to dwell on certain topics because there’s no “happy” scenario for them. Then again I don’t know if I’d actually be better off if I was literally never exposed to any of that through some virtual personal assistant keeping me in my safe zone, instead of brushing by it on occasion.

influx 5y ago
If I could offer a book suggestion for you: The Power of Now but Eckhardt Tolle.

vorpalhex 5y ago

I'm a big freedom of speech person, and actually I agree with the basics of your point. Client based tools - that the client actually controls - are the best way to fight spam but not engage in censorship. Let people tune to their preferences.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> Then on top of that giving people independent, client-based, advanced AI powered tools en masse, and making sure they know how to use them and why, for accurate elected censorship on their own devices of things they personally find detrimental to their mental health. Naming this "elected censorship" is a bad idea. Choosing not to listen to something isn't censorship because censorship is without consent -- the recipient wants the information and someone is denying it to them. Voluntary filtering is something else entirely.

raxxorrax 5y ago

I believe big data can be disarmed best by strong privacy protections. Facebook already threatened to withdraw from Europe and it would be a shame to do away with free speech because of companies abuse some freedoms while speaking out against the freedom of others.