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It sounds like you're advocating for pushing censorship responsibility to the user. I agree this would be nice — in fact you could consider uBlock Origin a form
by TechBro8615 5y ago
It sounds like you're advocating for pushing censorship responsibility to the user. I agree this would be nice — in fact you could consider uBlock Origin a form of client-side censorship that already exists. In practice, I'm not sure how much adoption such a system would get, if used for censorship purposes. The main problem is the underlying truth that most censorship proponents are not actually pro-censorship of the information _they_ consume — they're pro-censorship of the information _other_ people consume.
Even if you _could_ find a user who wants their client to hide information from them, that user probably doesn't want to filter their own spam, too. By default, the client already expects the server to fulfill a gatekeeping role in filtering (censoring!) spam. In fact, this is how we got here in the first place – we delegated filtering mechanisms to service providers, and now they're simply expanding the filter.
Personally, I'm in favor of a simple but likely effective regulation: Any service that renders a feed of third-party content to the user must default to sorting the feed in reverse chronological order, and must reset all current users to this default on the day the legislation goes into effect. Of course, this only mitigates the feed-based, mostly social-media problem — it doesn't solve the issues with search results (or auto-complete suggestions, for that matter). For search results, a client-based model wouldn't scale, as client preferences need to be evaluated at time of indexing, not when returning results.
- tomc1985 5y ago> It sounds like you're advocating for pushing censorship responsibility to the user. It is really irresponsible to be phrasing censorship as a "responsibility". Censorship is a tool of the weak and simple-minded so that they can maintain the illusions of a shared reality promulgated by whoever is in charge. The only responsibility should be towards the free and unadulterated flow of information, and yes, it is the individual's responsibility to make sense of that in a civilized fashion. My only exception to this rule is for things that are irrelevant to seeker's intent to acquire more information, advertising falls into this bucket.
- santoshalper 5y ago"My only exception is things I don't like" How is blocking spam and advertisement materially different than blocking a foreign actor's propaganda?
- tomc1985 5y agoThat is an extremely uncharitable reading of my words
- Clubber 5y agoBlocking spam is done by the consumer of information, blocking a foreign (and domestic) actor's propaganda is done by the entity with the power of dissemination of information. You don't see Google censoring ads much.
- rdw 5y agoGoogle spends most of their time blocking ads. "Spam" is ads.
- tomnipotent 5y ago> You don't see Google censoring ads much. There's nothing in their business they censor more.
- Clubber 5y agoIn search results?
- tonguez 5y agoStopped reading at “censorship responsibility”.
- TechBro8615 5y agoMaybe keep reading then (or configure your censorship software to truncate comments from TechBro8615).
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago>... feed of third-party content to the user must default to sorting the feed in reverse chronological order, and must reset all current users to this default on the day the legislation goes into effect. All this does is sort is allow gamification of search results based on the time of creation for the content. The quality of search instantly will go into the dumpster.
- csande17 5y ago> By default, the client already expects the server to fulfill a gatekeeping role in filtering (censoring!) spam. This is how a lot of email clients currently work, but it is not a fundamental law of the universe. Back in the day, you could run programs on your computer that would filter spam automatically based on criteria and examples you specified. For example, see https://daringfireball.net/2003/09/interview_michael_tsai https://daringfireball.net/2003/09/interview_michael_tsai The fact that people would pay money for such a program highlights the difference between spam filtering and censorship: spam filtering hides things that I don't want to see, while censorship hides things that other people don't want me to see.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoAnd this is a good reason that cries of censorship on tech platforms often sound naive. Most of us don’t want to be served known disinformation.