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> but they do need to be done. They do not need to be done. Facebook needs them to be done for its business model to work. You may have meant (surely did mea

> but they do need to be done. They do not need to be done. Facebook needs them to be done for its business model to work. You may have meant (surely did mean?) the latter, but I think the distinction is important. None of these people need to be subjected to psychologically harmful material on an industrial scale. We could always just not let Facebook do that, and they'd have to live or die as a company without doing those things. Possibly it would mean broadcast-type social media couldn't exist anymore. If so, then the cost of keeping that seems to be hurting people with this kind of work. But it is something we could stop doing if we wanted to.

celtain 5y ago
If regular people are allowed to share media with the world, and some kinds of content remain illegal, content moderation will need to exist. Unless you're suggesting that we return to an era in which the only way to publish content is with the approval of someone like a newspaper editor or book publisher, these jobs will need to be done.
- brimble 5y ago
  Send messages directly to people you know, or become a publisher (on your own website). If social media as we know it dropped off the face of the Earth tomorrow, it'd still be easier than ever before in history to get one's message out, by a long shot. It'd be significantly tougher for advertisers and PR agencies, however.
  - specialist 5y ago
    Yes and: Before Facebook and Twitter, we had blogs. And before that zines and pamphlets. It's so weird that defenders of algorithmic hate machines accept them as some sort of natural law, forgetting that humanity somehow muddled along for millennial without the benefit of dopamine hijacking.
  - hn_version_0023 5y ago
    > It'd be significantly tougher for advertisers and PR agencies, however. Good. We shouldn’t allow habitual liars to determine what’s possible, or make their lives easier. I’d happily grind the social media, advertising, and public relations “industries” into dust for the good of us all.
  - kleinsch 5y ago
    You write on a many-to-many social media website kept up by active content moderation...
    - brimble 5y ago
      Twice in one thread! I'll just recycle this from my other post: "Yet you participate in society. Curious!"
      - bhelkey 5y ago
        This doesn't apply here. One-to-one platforms exist and are popular. Also, I very much doubt that this conversation is required or in any way helps your career. There are alternatives, you chose to come on this site and participate in the comments. Your stated view isn't that many-to-many moderated social media website should do better, it is that many-to-many moderated social media websites shouldn't exist. Because this is a recreational activity, and because the alternatives you suggested are massively popular, 'Yet you participate in society. Curious!' does not apply.
        brimble 5y ago
        It is not possible to use popular forms of communication to criticize popular forms of communication, in good faith. Message received loud and clear. It's not a good message, to put it about as nicely as I possibly can, but I've received it.
        yunohn 5y ago
        That’s not what everyone else is saying, necessarily - it’s just that you think getting rid of FB et all will remove the need for content moderation, by forcing only one-to-one communication alternatives. None of that is reasonable or desirable by most humans.
        brimble 5y ago
        > it’s just that you think getting rid of FB et all will remove the need for content moderation, Nooooo. I mean, yes, content moderation in the modern sense of "trying to mitigate the insanity that is randos posting a firehose of crap that's by-default instantly published to the world and which our stupid algorithms may well choose to shove in lots of people's faces" but no in the sense of selecting what one chooses to publish from among some submissions, which pre-dates the Internet sense of "content moderation" and doesn't seem to be a problem unless you have a publish-by-default-without-review policy that lets some amount of the crap get through, and barely vet your submitters at all. > None of that is reasonable or desirable by most humans. OK. So we choose—choose—to have a job category that will cause significant, lasting harm to some percentage of the workers doing it. But let's stop also insulting them by claiming we're doing it because we "have to".
  - mannerheim 5y ago
    If tomorrow everyone switched to email for all their communication needs, the day after tomorrow we would hear moral panic over CSAM in emails, and the day after that, every email provider that doesn't already do so will implement content moderation.
- iakov 5y ago
  To be honest I loved it more back in the "old days". The barrier of entry to sharing your mind with the world was so much higher - you had to be on the TV, radio or at least a newspaper or a book to do that. Even with the advent of the Internet the barrier was still high - you had to set up your website or blog page, which was a fairly technical endeavor for some time. Now every god damn idiot can have a Twitter page or a Facebook echo chamber group and easily spread their bullshit there. Yeah, I wouldn't mind going back to that era you mention.
  - DaltonCoffee 5y ago
    You might have liked it even better in the "older old days" when only the enlightened aristocracy had free speech, and speaking out against them was a crime.
  - riffraff 5y ago
    > you had to set up your website or blog page, which was a fairly technical endeavor for some time. usenet and web forums have existed for a very long time before blogs. It didn't take much to spam newsgroups or online bulletin pages.
yholio 5y ago
> They do not need to be done. You have surely never operated a website that publishes user generated content. Every available textbox and file uploader will be filled with garbage so revolting that, without moderation, will quickly kill any chance of respectability for your site.
- brimble 5y ago
  You're missing the point. Yes, if you let randos upload publicly-visible media to your site you'll need to check it for illegal material (or, if you're a bigco, pay hundreds or thousands of other people to do it, because god knows the CEO, president, board, et c., won't subject themselves to that). If you have advertisers (or just standards) you'll also need to check it for horrible stuff that's not illegal. And by "you'll", in the case of a place like Facebook, I mean "some other people'll". But you could... not do that.
  - Edman274 5y ago
    If you're arguing in good faith you should probably explicitly acknowledge that you recognize that you're using hacker news to argue that a website like hacker news shouldn't exist. Do you think that no one is paid to moderate this site? Do you think that no one has tried to spam illegal content here before?
    - toqy 5y ago
      Are you arguing in good faith? Do you think moderating text on this site is equivalent to what is described in the article?
      - Edman274 5y ago
        Brimble said "If you have advertisers (or just standards) you'll also need to check it for horrible stuff that's not illegal. And by "you'll", in the case of a place like Facebook, I mean "some other people'll". But you could... not do that." Hacker news and Facebook: 1. Have advertisers (and just standards) 2. Check it for horrible stuff that's "not illegal" 3. Using "some other people'll" that are paid with money. Now, here's the thing. Facebook and Hacker news are not equivalent in quality or quantity when it comes to how much illegal or horrible content is uploaded to them. But they both have advertisers, a risk of bad content, and use at least one paid moderator to prevent bad content from existing. Brimble is saying that Facebook and other hypothetical services could "not do that", which either means that: 1. The website / service will not exist or 2. Paid moderation on that service will not exist or 3. Moderation on that service will not exist or 4. User created content on that service will not exist. That would affect Facebook and hacker news. No, I do not believe that hacker news is exposed to as much illegal and horrible content as Facebook. However, it is exposed to some, and it seems like the remedy in both cases is for the website to not exist. I'm pretty sure that if someone asked dang whether they had ever, in their years of moderating this site, seen something that disturbed them, he'd answer yes. I'm certain of it.
stickfigure 5y ago
Who is this "we"? If you pulverized Facebook et al to dust, people like me would recreate something equivalent. Human beings enjoy many <-> many communications and will invent something to fill that void. That passive-voice "social media couldn't exist anymore" implies an Orwellian bureaucracy that meticulously controls who is allowed to talk to whom. Someone has to enforce it.
- prmoustache 5y ago
  The problem is not to have a place where to put content, the problem is to have place so big where anyone can just create a new account in a few click without validation. I managed a web forum dedicated to one particular hobby. It was quite popular. Yet simply from spam management we disallowed auto activation of new account. We asked people to reply to a few questions in order to know a bit more about them and their intents. Yes we probably lost a large number of potential users but we actually got the users that were really motivated and not thousands of shadow accounts waiting for activations by bots as before. I guess it wouldn't be out of question for a platform that allow anyone to put content to ask for a mandatory copy of the ID of the user as well as a receipt for a electrical bill or something proving where they live in order to be able to report them to their local authorities if they post bad content. All these measures can be defeated but the amount of content to moderate would be in a much lower scale than when you allow accounts with random names and no validation.
- brimble 5y ago
  I don't think it's anywhere near being a stretch that having an entire job that consists of psychologically harmful activity would fall under current or non-radical future workplace safety laws. At which point doing it just because your business model doesn't work without causing that harm, would be illegal. No one is forcing Facebook to harm people like this. They choose to, in order to make money. We choose to allow the creation of jobs that are guaranteed to cause that kind of harm. My objection is to framing this as work that "has" to be done, as if there's no choice. > Human beings enjoy many <-> many communications and will invent something to fill that void. Right. We have Email and messaging apps. Websites would still exist and are dirt-cheap to start up, if someone wants to write for the public. Possibly social media could survive somehow, IDK, but they're (and their supporters) the ones saying they "have to" work this way. If so, maybe they should "have to" stop being in business.
daniel-cussen 5y ago
No, they do need to be done. After years of self-description as, what was it, some term, but in practice "the new new thing," a social network, and comparing itself to a door...or a chair? Which one was the satire? Well after all that self-presentation as a mysterious fundamental, ineffable thing, Mark Zuckerberg recently claimed it was "between a newspaper and a telecom." So, as something somewhere between a newspaper and a telecom. I suppose it could have been carried out in the late 80s through the telephone system if people left messages by calling 1-800-FACE-BOOK, and maybe touch-tone dialed text for the title, and then to check what your friends wrote you called 1-800-FACE-BOOK again, and after combining your friends' submissions it would call you back. It would let you select which you wanted to play by operating on the digital titles, again by dialing, and when you found one you wanted to hear it would play you the recording your friend wrote. And not only would it be less viable, in the 80s it would cost money to use, and have no advertising. Just not viable. These days, it's viable, and there has just been too much in capitalist subsidies to return to a time before images. There was a time when condensing the sight before your eyes into two dimensions meant buying rolls of photos, taking a dedicated device that could imprint on them the light of reality, giving it time to use the material well until there was enough to justify a trip to get it developed--first dropping it off, writing down in a paper agenda to return in a few days, then returning and paying--and only then would you witness what the camera witnessed. And then cataloging the photographs in an album, and keeping that album on a shelf with all the other books--there were all sorts of different books for all sorts of things--and finally, years in the future, reviewing the photographs to relive the past. But so much has been spent into making this process trivial. I would estimate trillions in R&D and subsidizing the semiconductors that made all the machinery that came before it a thing of the past. Not to mention bandwidth, without which sharing images on the web was still possible over the course of hours. On the other hand, you're doing the right thing, right now, in choosing a social network that doesn't use images in almost any sense, has two moderators, and is broadcast-based nonetheless. Your post was just broadcast, brimble.
- brimble 5y ago
  No-one's making anyone else default to publishing any ol' thing people send them. That's what's new and, I think, not obviously a reasonable thing to do. If there'd been a magazine publisher in the '80s that defaulted to automatically publishing whatever people mailed in, unless a human happened to catch that it shouldn't go out, the obviously correct solution to folks at the time would be for them to stop doing that. Not hire offices full of people to look at terrible material all day to catch some fraction of the worst stuff (while still letting a lot through). Mine is an argument against "it's different because it's on the Internet", which as far as I can tell is the whole of the argument for this practice. Put it in the real world and it's instantly clear that they should just stop. > On the other hand, you're doing the right thing, right now, in choosing a social network that doesn't use images in almost any sense, has two moderators, and is broadcast-based nonetheless. Your post was just broadcast, brimble. "Yet you participate in society. Curious!" :-)
KaiserPro 5y ago
How else do you arbitrate and stop stuff of this kind? Any kind of large scale communications platform that allows file/photo sharing will need to do something like this. In fact the requirement to do it is about to get stronger if the UK has it's way. The alternative isn't particularly fun, letting bad actors monopolise a communications channel to broadcast literal shit at me, my children and friends.
- prmoustache 5y ago
  By knowing who your users are, where they live and be able to report them to their local authorities if they post bad content. There would still be things to moderate, and people beating the validation system but the traffic of content to moderate would be much lower.
- brimble 5y ago
  > Any kind of large scale communications platform that allows file/photo sharing will need to do something like this. In fact the requirement to do it is about to get stronger if the UK has it's way. Possibly, accepting submissions from anyone on Earth and then publishing most of them automatically is fundamentally a bad idea and should not be done. > The alternative isn't particularly fun, letting bad actors monopolise a communications channel to broadcast literal shit at me, my children and friends. I don't see how this follows. If anything, the centralization of attention driven by the current system is what does that.
coryrc 5y ago
You're so on the money and it's so far out the Overton window the sibling replies can't even comprehend what you clearly wrote. It's wild.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  1000% agreed. I see this all the time on HN. Tunnel vision is real.
- brimble 5y ago
  Yeah. Been a roller coaster in the fake Internet points like no other post I've ever made. I dunno, one day (years ago, now?) I was yet again reading a post like "well it's a shame these workers suffer horribly and maybe we can do some stuff to help, but the work has to be done" and it occurred to me that I was reading someone defending billions-of-dollars corporations with exactly the same reasoning that a kid uses when they say another kid "made them" punch them, and then we were all hand-wringing over which color of medical tape to put on the victim's nose (I mean, clearly the kid had to get punched, everyone agrees on that and you must be crazy if you don't, but we should try to help!) instead of stepping back and going "what if the problem is that there's punching happening in the first place?" The whole framing of the problem, as it's most commonly expressed, is myopic and deflects from whole categories of solutions (that are very inconvenient to a few Internet giants that dominate the attention economy).

celtain 5y ago

If regular people are allowed to share media with the world, and some kinds of content remain illegal, content moderation will need to exist. Unless you're suggesting that we return to an era in which the only way to publish content is with the approval of someone like a newspaper editor or book publisher, these jobs will need to be done.

brimble 5y ago
Send messages directly to people you know, or become a publisher (on your own website). If social media as we know it dropped off the face of the Earth tomorrow, it'd still be easier than ever before in history to get one's message out, by a long shot. It'd be significantly tougher for advertisers and PR agencies, however.
- specialist 5y ago
  Yes and: Before Facebook and Twitter, we had blogs. And before that zines and pamphlets. It's so weird that defenders of algorithmic hate machines accept them as some sort of natural law, forgetting that humanity somehow muddled along for millennial without the benefit of dopamine hijacking.
- hn_version_0023 5y ago
  > It'd be significantly tougher for advertisers and PR agencies, however. Good. We shouldn’t allow habitual liars to determine what’s possible, or make their lives easier. I’d happily grind the social media, advertising, and public relations “industries” into dust for the good of us all.
- kleinsch 5y ago
  You write on a many-to-many social media website kept up by active content moderation...
  - brimble 5y ago
    Twice in one thread! I'll just recycle this from my other post: "Yet you participate in society. Curious!"
    - bhelkey 5y ago
      This doesn't apply here. One-to-one platforms exist and are popular. Also, I very much doubt that this conversation is required or in any way helps your career. There are alternatives, you chose to come on this site and participate in the comments. Your stated view isn't that many-to-many moderated social media website should do better, it is that many-to-many moderated social media websites shouldn't exist. Because this is a recreational activity, and because the alternatives you suggested are massively popular, 'Yet you participate in society. Curious!' does not apply.
      - brimble 5y ago
        It is not possible to use popular forms of communication to criticize popular forms of communication, in good faith. Message received loud and clear. It's not a good message, to put it about as nicely as I possibly can, but I've received it.
        yunohn 5y ago
        That’s not what everyone else is saying, necessarily - it’s just that you think getting rid of FB et all will remove the need for content moderation, by forcing only one-to-one communication alternatives. None of that is reasonable or desirable by most humans.
        brimble 5y ago
        > it’s just that you think getting rid of FB et all will remove the need for content moderation, Nooooo. I mean, yes, content moderation in the modern sense of "trying to mitigate the insanity that is randos posting a firehose of crap that's by-default instantly published to the world and which our stupid algorithms may well choose to shove in lots of people's faces" but no in the sense of selecting what one chooses to publish from among some submissions, which pre-dates the Internet sense of "content moderation" and doesn't seem to be a problem unless you have a publish-by-default-without-review policy that lets some amount of the crap get through, and barely vet your submitters at all. > None of that is reasonable or desirable by most humans. OK. So we choose—choose—to have a job category that will cause significant, lasting harm to some percentage of the workers doing it. But let's stop also insulting them by claiming we're doing it because we "have to".
- mannerheim 5y ago
  If tomorrow everyone switched to email for all their communication needs, the day after tomorrow we would hear moral panic over CSAM in emails, and the day after that, every email provider that doesn't already do so will implement content moderation.
iakov 5y ago
To be honest I loved it more back in the "old days". The barrier of entry to sharing your mind with the world was so much higher - you had to be on the TV, radio or at least a newspaper or a book to do that. Even with the advent of the Internet the barrier was still high - you had to set up your website or blog page, which was a fairly technical endeavor for some time. Now every god damn idiot can have a Twitter page or a Facebook echo chamber group and easily spread their bullshit there. Yeah, I wouldn't mind going back to that era you mention.
- DaltonCoffee 5y ago
  You might have liked it even better in the "older old days" when only the enlightened aristocracy had free speech, and speaking out against them was a crime.
- riffraff 5y ago
  > you had to set up your website or blog page, which was a fairly technical endeavor for some time. usenet and web forums have existed for a very long time before blogs. It didn't take much to spam newsgroups or online bulletin pages.

yholio 5y ago

> They do not need to be done. You have surely never operated a website that publishes user generated content. Every available textbox and file uploader will be filled with garbage so revolting that, without moderation, will quickly kill any chance of respectability for your site.

brimble 5y ago
You're missing the point. Yes, if you let randos upload publicly-visible media to your site you'll need to check it for illegal material (or, if you're a bigco, pay hundreds or thousands of other people to do it, because god knows the CEO, president, board, et c., won't subject themselves to that). If you have advertisers (or just standards) you'll also need to check it for horrible stuff that's not illegal. And by "you'll", in the case of a place like Facebook, I mean "some other people'll". But you could... not do that.
- Edman274 5y ago
  If you're arguing in good faith you should probably explicitly acknowledge that you recognize that you're using hacker news to argue that a website like hacker news shouldn't exist. Do you think that no one is paid to moderate this site? Do you think that no one has tried to spam illegal content here before?
  - toqy 5y ago
    Are you arguing in good faith? Do you think moderating text on this site is equivalent to what is described in the article?
    - Edman274 5y ago
      Brimble said "If you have advertisers (or just standards) you'll also need to check it for horrible stuff that's not illegal. And by "you'll", in the case of a place like Facebook, I mean "some other people'll". But you could... not do that." Hacker news and Facebook: 1. Have advertisers (and just standards) 2. Check it for horrible stuff that's "not illegal" 3. Using "some other people'll" that are paid with money. Now, here's the thing. Facebook and Hacker news are not equivalent in quality or quantity when it comes to how much illegal or horrible content is uploaded to them. But they both have advertisers, a risk of bad content, and use at least one paid moderator to prevent bad content from existing. Brimble is saying that Facebook and other hypothetical services could "not do that", which either means that: 1. The website / service will not exist or 2. Paid moderation on that service will not exist or 3. Moderation on that service will not exist or 4. User created content on that service will not exist. That would affect Facebook and hacker news. No, I do not believe that hacker news is exposed to as much illegal and horrible content as Facebook. However, it is exposed to some, and it seems like the remedy in both cases is for the website to not exist. I'm pretty sure that if someone asked dang whether they had ever, in their years of moderating this site, seen something that disturbed them, he'd answer yes. I'm certain of it.

stickfigure 5y ago

Who is this "we"? If you pulverized Facebook et al to dust, people like me would recreate something equivalent. Human beings enjoy many <-> many communications and will invent something to fill that void. That passive-voice "social media couldn't exist anymore" implies an Orwellian bureaucracy that meticulously controls who is allowed to talk to whom. Someone has to enforce it.

prmoustache 5y ago
The problem is not to have a place where to put content, the problem is to have place so big where anyone can just create a new account in a few click without validation. I managed a web forum dedicated to one particular hobby. It was quite popular. Yet simply from spam management we disallowed auto activation of new account. We asked people to reply to a few questions in order to know a bit more about them and their intents. Yes we probably lost a large number of potential users but we actually got the users that were really motivated and not thousands of shadow accounts waiting for activations by bots as before. I guess it wouldn't be out of question for a platform that allow anyone to put content to ask for a mandatory copy of the ID of the user as well as a receipt for a electrical bill or something proving where they live in order to be able to report them to their local authorities if they post bad content. All these measures can be defeated but the amount of content to moderate would be in a much lower scale than when you allow accounts with random names and no validation.
brimble 5y ago
I don't think it's anywhere near being a stretch that having an entire job that consists of psychologically harmful activity would fall under current or non-radical future workplace safety laws. At which point doing it just because your business model doesn't work without causing that harm, would be illegal. No one is forcing Facebook to harm people like this. They choose to, in order to make money. We choose to allow the creation of jobs that are guaranteed to cause that kind of harm. My objection is to framing this as work that "has" to be done, as if there's no choice. > Human beings enjoy many <-> many communications and will invent something to fill that void. Right. We have Email and messaging apps. Websites would still exist and are dirt-cheap to start up, if someone wants to write for the public. Possibly social media could survive somehow, IDK, but they're (and their supporters) the ones saying they "have to" work this way. If so, maybe they should "have to" stop being in business.

daniel-cussen 5y ago

No, they do need to be done. After years of self-description as, what was it, some term, but in practice "the new new thing," a social network, and comparing itself to a door...or a chair? Which one was the satire? Well after all that self-presentation as a mysterious fundamental, ineffable thing, Mark Zuckerberg recently claimed it was "between a newspaper and a telecom." So, as something somewhere between a newspaper and a telecom. I suppose it could have been carried out in the late 80s through the telephone system if people left messages by calling 1-800-FACE-BOOK, and maybe touch-tone dialed text for the title, and then to check what your friends wrote you called 1-800-FACE-BOOK again, and after combining your friends' submissions it would call you back. It would let you select which you wanted to play by operating on the digital titles, again by dialing, and when you found one you wanted to hear it would play you the recording your friend wrote. And not only would it be less viable, in the 80s it would cost money to use, and have no advertising. Just not viable. These days, it's viable, and there has just been too much in capitalist subsidies to return to a time before images. There was a time when condensing the sight before your eyes into two dimensions meant buying rolls of photos, taking a dedicated device that could imprint on them the light of reality, giving it time to use the material well until there was enough to justify a trip to get it developed--first dropping it off, writing down in a paper agenda to return in a few days, then returning and paying--and only then would you witness what the camera witnessed. And then cataloging the photographs in an album, and keeping that album on a shelf with all the other books--there were all sorts of different books for all sorts of things--and finally, years in the future, reviewing the photographs to relive the past. But so much has been spent into making this process trivial. I would estimate trillions in R&D and subsidizing the semiconductors that made all the machinery that came before it a thing of the past. Not to mention bandwidth, without which sharing images on the web was still possible over the course of hours. On the other hand, you're doing the right thing, right now, in choosing a social network that doesn't use images in almost any sense, has two moderators, and is broadcast-based nonetheless. Your post was just broadcast, brimble.

brimble 5y ago
No-one's making anyone else default to publishing any ol' thing people send them. That's what's new and, I think, not obviously a reasonable thing to do. If there'd been a magazine publisher in the '80s that defaulted to automatically publishing whatever people mailed in, unless a human happened to catch that it shouldn't go out, the obviously correct solution to folks at the time would be for them to stop doing that. Not hire offices full of people to look at terrible material all day to catch some fraction of the worst stuff (while still letting a lot through). Mine is an argument against "it's different because it's on the Internet", which as far as I can tell is the whole of the argument for this practice. Put it in the real world and it's instantly clear that they should just stop. > On the other hand, you're doing the right thing, right now, in choosing a social network that doesn't use images in almost any sense, has two moderators, and is broadcast-based nonetheless. Your post was just broadcast, brimble. "Yet you participate in society. Curious!" :-)

KaiserPro 5y ago

How else do you arbitrate and stop stuff of this kind? Any kind of large scale communications platform that allows file/photo sharing will need to do something like this. In fact the requirement to do it is about to get stronger if the UK has it's way. The alternative isn't particularly fun, letting bad actors monopolise a communications channel to broadcast literal shit at me, my children and friends.

prmoustache 5y ago
By knowing who your users are, where they live and be able to report them to their local authorities if they post bad content. There would still be things to moderate, and people beating the validation system but the traffic of content to moderate would be much lower.
brimble 5y ago
> Any kind of large scale communications platform that allows file/photo sharing will need to do something like this. In fact the requirement to do it is about to get stronger if the UK has it's way. Possibly, accepting submissions from anyone on Earth and then publishing most of them automatically is fundamentally a bad idea and should not be done. > The alternative isn't particularly fun, letting bad actors monopolise a communications channel to broadcast literal shit at me, my children and friends. I don't see how this follows. If anything, the centralization of attention driven by the current system is what does that.

coryrc 5y ago

You're so on the money and it's so far out the Overton window the sibling replies can't even comprehend what you clearly wrote. It's wild.

wildrhythms 5y ago
1000% agreed. I see this all the time on HN. Tunnel vision is real.
brimble 5y ago
Yeah. Been a roller coaster in the fake Internet points like no other post I've ever made. I dunno, one day (years ago, now?) I was yet again reading a post like "well it's a shame these workers suffer horribly and maybe we can do some stuff to help, but the work has to be done" and it occurred to me that I was reading someone defending billions-of-dollars corporations with exactly the same reasoning that a kid uses when they say another kid "made them" punch them, and then we were all hand-wringing over which color of medical tape to put on the victim's nose (I mean, clearly the kid had to get punched, everyone agrees on that and you must be crazy if you don't, but we should try to help!) instead of stepping back and going "what if the problem is that there's punching happening in the first place?" The whole framing of the problem, as it's most commonly expressed, is myopic and deflects from whole categories of solutions (that are very inconvenient to a few Internet giants that dominate the attention economy).