6 ms·

Can't wait to see that hot takes from the free speech absolutists who have never experienced that first-hand on a platform they frequent regularly. We already k

Can't wait to see that hot takes from the free speech absolutists who have never experienced that first-hand on a platform they frequent regularly. We already know what that looks like, it's 4chan/8kun/etc and surprise, it's absolute shit.

Spivak 4y ago
And if you want a more direct analogue if you assume that the problem with 4chan is the culture and not the moderation that the absolute worst most vile Mastadon servers are no moderation to the point where major servers had to just completely blacklist them. If you want to lose all faith in humanity peruse the Gab database dump. No moderation is a loosing game because any platform that offers better moderation will be attractive to the masses leaving the people whose decorum is so abhorrent that the "free speech" servers are the only ones that will take them.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  Yep, I used to be a free speech absolutist when I was younger, back when I thought the world was black and white and that simple ideas could "solve everything". Then I participated in forums/groups that had zero moderation and it was hell. Even then I didn't recognize the issues fully. It wasn't until I moderated a community myself that it finally clicked. I tried to be unbiased as possible but that lead to me silencing people who stepped over the line who I agreed with and me giving people I didn't agree with a ton of leeway to avoid seeming biased, it nearly killed the community. Once I started trying to enforce right down the center I got to experience the backlash of the people who I had given leeway to (not the same people, same group of people). Death threats, attacks, etc. It was not fun. I didn't want to be seen as a "dictator" but that experience taught me that if you want to have a good environment for discussion/community you have to crack down hard on the people who keep pushing the line. Short-term bans resulted in lots of complaining with zero change in behavior for 99% of the offenders. Permanent bans were the only useful tool, even then they'd still sometimes come back under new accounts but eventually get bored. People complain about reddit moderation but I totally get it in most cases. If you let people push the line they will just keep going until it gets really bad, much better to nip it in the bud. Especially when we are talking about unpaid moderators. Moderation is not an easy or fun job.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > It wasn't until I moderated a community myself that it finally clicked. The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things. I can't think of any solution for the toxic communities other than to cut themoff and let them fester. The youtube/facebook/etc strategy of 'all engagement is good, show them more' is incredibly harmful.
    - mikkergp 4y ago
      It does seem like the problem with twitter is it is one big open subreddit, but that's sort of the vision too. The solution may be to find ways to segment twitter more, but does that fly in the face of the public square goal.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      > The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things. Do you have any examples of this in practice? I'm not saying I for "1 person has all the power" but I'm not aware of any community that doesn't require 1+ moderators who have the power to hide/remove/block/etc, even HN has that.
      - klyrs 4y ago
        Add to that, dang also has the power to unhide, unflag, etc. when he notices brigading. Giving the reins entirely to the community totally works for a very small community. Not the whole internet.
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        In traditional fora/irc/whatever or even reddit to some extent (subreddit moderators follow the pattern, admins do not) the moderators are the founders of the community or are selected by then community via social processes. The structure resembles a village. Mastodon is the most clear example. Mostof the small servers are their own community with a common interest, usually funded by its members directly or by someone doing it to henefit the members. 'If you don't like it, leave' is a valid sentiment because the moderators are not holding your social network hostage and don't get to choose which other communities you can see or participate in. In the facebook/tiktok/google/etc model, moderators are minimum wage workers with moderation objectives set by people who own the platform to satisfy advertisers or other central authorities. The structure resembles a mall or maybe a state. The penalty for non-compliance is isolation, and in many cases for facebook and google restriction of access to real services in the real world. HN fits neither neatly, but is slightly more towards the first.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Pretty much. If you don't eject the extremist elements from your community, your community will be represented by them to outside world. I do wonder what would happen with social media that had only the up/downvote system as soft moderation but without actual moderators smacking people around
- tomjen3 4y ago
  Even heavy moderation cannot do anything, as evidenced by the Facebook message requests that I get that all say I am a bitch in bed. Seriously, if it was up to me to design my own spam filter I could do a better job than they do. Really I wouldn't mind there being no moderation on Twitter, but then have every user blacklist what they want from themselves.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
can't wait to see the people advocating against fundamental freedoms to finally get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  Who is advocating against fundamental freedoms and how do you think they'll get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick?
  - ilyt 4y ago
    > how do you think they'll get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick? The companies they defended by going "it's private company, they can do what they want" (which I've seen a lot every time someone is criticizing what the big social media company is doing, especially on Reddit) will do what doesn't benefit the group that defends them.
    - mikkergp 4y ago
      Which companies were defended and for what? Those companies are going to seek retribution towards their defenders, why? I see a lot of Conservatives defending twitter right now, you think Musk is going to go after them?
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  You don't want people to learn what a truly open forum looks like instead? More important to hurt?
  - throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
    oh, no, that's not what I meant. I want Musk to exercise his corporate sovereignity and make Twitter an open forum.
- orwin 4y ago
b0sk 4y ago
Right. It's going to fester with dark elements of the society and he's going to hire back all the content moderators he fired and then pen another open letter to advertisers.
wooque 4y ago
>4chan/8kun/etc and surprise, it's absolute shit ...for you, 4chan is one of the last places on the internet that feel like the old internet, organic, unfiltered, raw. If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you.
- BossHogg 4y ago
  As someone on the internet in the early 90s, that is absolutely not the case.
  - chimineycricket 4y ago
    What's another website that feels more like the old internet than 4chan?
    - endemic 4y ago
      https://dataswamp.org/~john/ https://dataswamp.org/~john/
      - sixstringtheory 4y ago
        Has a guestbook, old internet confirmed.
- Volundr 4y ago
  > If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you. And Twitter. Similarly if you don't like the filtered environment of these communities there is 4chan/8kun/etc. So then this is a solved problem and all the hand-wringing around the moderation on these platforms is unnecessary?
noxer 4y ago
>it's absolute shit. So is twitter. At least in the last years it turned to absolute s*it. In mid 2021 I resurrected my old long not used account. I made maybe 20 comments in 3 month before I got "banned". I'm probably not really banned I would just have to remove my last comment but I cant do that because I can not login anymore (which may or may not be related to the "banning"). The post in question was an obvious sarcastic wordplay/pun that even if interpreted literally would have meant something along the lines of "dead people wont complain" which is not only factually true its also rather soft dark humor. As expected they lump everything together in their ToS so they can give you a paragraph of things as a reason and you dont know which rule you actually broke.
- spacemadness 4y ago
  No offense, but I see this a lot from folks claiming they got banned but they never say exactly why and keep it as vague as possible while claiming innocence.
  - noxer 4y ago
    Did you read the post? I dont know why, they wont tell me. Its just a generic "you violated our rules about offensive content/abuse/self-harm and suicide" or something like that. Then a link to where you can get help if you have some kind of mental breakdown. They actually twisted this as If I was suicidal so they can ban me for my own protection. But I would bet a monthly salary some triggered long time twitter user with high reputation who just didn't understand the joke or does not have a compatible humor reported my tweet and the twitter admins just cater to these people and not to their own rules.
    - spacemadness 4y ago
      I read your post and it’s still vague as written so it’s not very convincing as an indictment against their policy. I’m not making a claim you are lying, it’s simply not enough to come to reach a conclusion it was all a big misunderstanding.
hn2017 4y ago
Yup. It's a new 4chan as of now. Musk just ruined a decent service worse than mediocre. https://twitter.com/ncri_io/status/1586007698910646272?s=20&t=WnJumZ4IvOur97K6g9ffXw https://twitter.com/ncri_io/status/1586007698910646272?s=20&...
- ilyt 4y ago
  When twitter was "decent" It was always a cesspool Also, lol for twitter having n-word graph in their metrics
CodeSgt 4y ago
I think most people that are happy about Elon taking over aren't free speech absolutists in the sense of the term you're using it. Rather they're just tired of blatant censorship some individuals face when expressing an opinion that goes against popular politics of the time. There's a middle ground between allowing literal nazi's to do whatever they want and blatantly influencing discussion on a mass scale by silencing those you disagree with.
- britch 4y ago
  Who's being silenced on a mass scale?
  - soco 4y ago
    Literal nazis? /s
- joshstrange 4y ago
  Maybe they aren't but they are very vague and hand-wavy about the "blatant censorship". Without specific examples of what is being "censored" it's incredibly difficult to have a good-faith discussion on this. I'm much more forgiving of a handful of on-the-line or even "decent" content being removed if it's the exception not the rule. Like it or not a ton of moderation is fully or nearly fully automated since there isn't a viable alternative (You can argue that these companies should be allowed to exist if they can't accomplish human review/moderation, I'm speaking to the current reality). I'll also be the first to say that Twitter (and most) moderation isn't 100% evenly handled. Just look at world leaders/political figures and what they can say that others cannot, I fully agree this is not ok and should not be allowed. My issue is that it's to the point that I can't hear "blatant censorship" in connection with social media without hearing the dog whistle. Those people who are so up in arms about FB/Twitter/etc "censorship" seem to be absolutely silent about the Gab/Parlor/Truth Socials of the world.
  - roamerz 4y ago
    Unless you live in a cave you cannot possibly be ignorant of the multiple accounts of Twitter censoring people’s discussions. Examples? A quick search on Fox News: https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-double-standard-hunter-biden-claims-censor https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-double-standard-hunter... https://www.foxnews.com/us/critics-twitter-censorship-obituary-vaccines-coronavirus https://www.foxnews.com/us/critics-twitter-censorship-obitua... https://www.foxnews.com/tech/media-company-grabien-suspended-twitter-quoting-congressman https://www.foxnews.com/tech/media-company-grabien-suspended... https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-suspends-jordan-peterson-tweeted-elliot-page https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-suspends-jordan-peters... https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-facebook-censor-trump-coronavirus-flu https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-facebook-censor-trump-...
uni_rule 4y ago
Some people will try to push the idea of individualized user-end moderation but that idea has not been successfully implemented since Usenet's Alt heirarchy faded from the internet's popular consciousness. It simply isn't practical and doesn't address that sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead. The lunatic-proof glasses put on by some users won't help the fact that people new to the site will be scared off by all the diarrhea mixed with the slowly disappearing amount of actual content to the point where the people being awful are the only ones left. Eventually they'll entrench their bullshit until that becomes the character of the whole site. Normal people are repulsed by it at first glance and those left only descend deeper and deeper into their own mad echo chamber.
- ilyt 4y ago
  > Some people will try to push the idea of individualized user-end moderation but that idea has not been successfully implemented since Usenet's Alt heirarchy faded from the internet's popular consciousness. It simply isn't practical and doesn't address that sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead I mean you still need some moderation to push the community the right direction but give people ability to downvote toxic shithole to oblivion and block users and a lot of it is already done. The biggest problem is probably brigading and spamming the space with low effort content but first one is rare and second one don't need that much moderation work compared to trying to moderate every comment.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead. This isn't what people are moderated for on twitter. You can pick a random woman on twitter, and identically reply after every tweet she makes that she's just saying that because she's ugly. You can get your friends to join in and organize under a hashtag. Twitter is not interested in moderating that. I blame it on the hundreds of celebrity reply guys who just wait for a Trump or an Ilhan Omar to tweet, and reply with abusive non-sequiturs. It really should have been nipped at the relatively-benign bud when Zuckerberg's posts on facebook would be accompanied with thousands of comments filled with friend-me spam, or even way back when "Tom's" posts started the same thing on Myspace. Internet moderation has become fixated on silencing enemies, when it really should have been focused on removing the irrelevant and facetious. Instead of ever censoring the stupid and the spam, the targets became the naysayers and the contrarians. This is nothing but a boon for government and corporate covert interference, because their aim is to disrupt conversations, not to participate in them.
_blz2 4y ago
There are numerous examples of tweets which aren't remotely vulgar or crude which were removed from twitter. There is no need to resort to speech like in the platforms you mentioned to bring twitter closer to a true free speech platform.
agumonkey 4y ago
Somehow I don't feel bad about 4chan .. it's all just complete absurd mayhem but there's no agenda.. Whereas any twitter storm feels a lot heavier. Super strange. ps: also I don't follow 4chan much, so maybe there were grave events on there
ryandvm 4y ago
There's a rich and beautiful irony in seeing a bunch of armchair libertarians gushing about the glories of unfettered speech on HN - a web forum that employs some of the most heavy-handed moderation in the biz. Not sure how long Alex Jones or Mike Lindell would last in here...
- jabthedang 4y ago
amadeuspagel 4y ago
4chan is a forum. Everyone who browses a 4chan board sees the same posts. For that reason, these boards are moderated, but apparently not heavily enough for the tastes of some people, to whom for 4chan is the epitome of horror. Twitter is a platform. Everyone who uses twitter decides who to follow and who to block. Everyone sees different tweets. Twitter for a long time had almost complete freedom of speech. It described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party[1]. In that time, it had fewer rules then 4chan. But to use twitter did not feel like using 4chan, unless you decided to follow the kind of people who post on 4chan. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-w...
- tekstar 4y ago
  This is simply not true, because Twitter algorithmically pushes content you did not subscribe to in order to drive engagement. You do not have control over what you see, and are subject to the controversial subject of the day regardless of who you follow.
pessimizer 4y ago
Reddit became wildly successful as a clone of 4chan's textboards using digg's "comment section of the internet" idea of bare links as threadstarters, and barely moderated anything until a few years ago. For that matter, twitter itself barely moderated either until the lead-up to the 2020 election. I won't energetically argue with you that 4chan and Reddit aren't shit, but plenty of people would. They've both been massively influential on world culture. I would argue that twitter moderation has been almost strictly political and along culture war lines. Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.
- manholio 4y ago
  > Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation. Not a redditor, I see? Reddit crushed almost all right wing related subs, most famously r/The_Donald, and the entire gender critical / TERF / radical-feminist / LGB-non-T space. Among others, transgenderism is not a valid topic of discussion on Reddit.
wdr1 4y ago
Usenet?

Spivak 4y ago

And if you want a more direct analogue if you assume that the problem with 4chan is the culture and not the moderation that the absolute worst most vile Mastadon servers are no moderation to the point where major servers had to just completely blacklist them. If you want to lose all faith in humanity peruse the Gab database dump. No moderation is a loosing game because any platform that offers better moderation will be attractive to the masses leaving the people whose decorum is so abhorrent that the "free speech" servers are the only ones that will take them.

joshstrange 4y ago
Yep, I used to be a free speech absolutist when I was younger, back when I thought the world was black and white and that simple ideas could "solve everything". Then I participated in forums/groups that had zero moderation and it was hell. Even then I didn't recognize the issues fully. It wasn't until I moderated a community myself that it finally clicked. I tried to be unbiased as possible but that lead to me silencing people who stepped over the line who I agreed with and me giving people I didn't agree with a ton of leeway to avoid seeming biased, it nearly killed the community. Once I started trying to enforce right down the center I got to experience the backlash of the people who I had given leeway to (not the same people, same group of people). Death threats, attacks, etc. It was not fun. I didn't want to be seen as a "dictator" but that experience taught me that if you want to have a good environment for discussion/community you have to crack down hard on the people who keep pushing the line. Short-term bans resulted in lots of complaining with zero change in behavior for 99% of the offenders. Permanent bans were the only useful tool, even then they'd still sometimes come back under new accounts but eventually get bored. People complain about reddit moderation but I totally get it in most cases. If you let people push the line they will just keep going until it gets really bad, much better to nip it in the bud. Especially when we are talking about unpaid moderators. Moderation is not an easy or fun job.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > It wasn't until I moderated a community myself that it finally clicked. The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things. I can't think of any solution for the toxic communities other than to cut themoff and let them fester. The youtube/facebook/etc strategy of 'all engagement is good, show them more' is incredibly harmful.
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    It does seem like the problem with twitter is it is one big open subreddit, but that's sort of the vision too. The solution may be to find ways to segment twitter more, but does that fly in the face of the public square goal.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    > The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things. Do you have any examples of this in practice? I'm not saying I for "1 person has all the power" but I'm not aware of any community that doesn't require 1+ moderators who have the power to hide/remove/block/etc, even HN has that.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      Add to that, dang also has the power to unhide, unflag, etc. when he notices brigading. Giving the reins entirely to the community totally works for a very small community. Not the whole internet.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      In traditional fora/irc/whatever or even reddit to some extent (subreddit moderators follow the pattern, admins do not) the moderators are the founders of the community or are selected by then community via social processes. The structure resembles a village. Mastodon is the most clear example. Mostof the small servers are their own community with a common interest, usually funded by its members directly or by someone doing it to henefit the members. 'If you don't like it, leave' is a valid sentiment because the moderators are not holding your social network hostage and don't get to choose which other communities you can see or participate in. In the facebook/tiktok/google/etc model, moderators are minimum wage workers with moderation objectives set by people who own the platform to satisfy advertisers or other central authorities. The structure resembles a mall or maybe a state. The penalty for non-compliance is isolation, and in many cases for facebook and google restriction of access to real services in the real world. HN fits neither neatly, but is slightly more towards the first.
ilyt 4y ago
Pretty much. If you don't eject the extremist elements from your community, your community will be represented by them to outside world. I do wonder what would happen with social media that had only the up/downvote system as soft moderation but without actual moderators smacking people around
tomjen3 4y ago
Even heavy moderation cannot do anything, as evidenced by the Facebook message requests that I get that all say I am a bitch in bed. Seriously, if it was up to me to design my own spam filter I could do a better job than they do. Really I wouldn't mind there being no moderation on Twitter, but then have every user blacklist what they want from themselves.

throwaway0x7E6 4y ago

can't wait to see the people advocating against fundamental freedoms to finally get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick.

mikkergp 4y ago
Who is advocating against fundamental freedoms and how do you think they'll get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick?
- ilyt 4y ago
  > how do you think they'll get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick? The companies they defended by going "it's private company, they can do what they want" (which I've seen a lot every time someone is criticizing what the big social media company is doing, especially on Reddit) will do what doesn't benefit the group that defends them.
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    Which companies were defended and for what? Those companies are going to seek retribution towards their defenders, why? I see a lot of Conservatives defending twitter right now, you think Musk is going to go after them?
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
You don't want people to learn what a truly open forum looks like instead? More important to hurt?
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  oh, no, that's not what I meant. I want Musk to exercise his corporate sovereignity and make Twitter an open forum.
orwin 4y ago

b0sk 4y ago

Right. It's going to fester with dark elements of the society and he's going to hire back all the content moderators he fired and then pen another open letter to advertisers.

wooque 4y ago

>4chan/8kun/etc and surprise, it's absolute shit ...for you, 4chan is one of the last places on the internet that feel like the old internet, organic, unfiltered, raw. If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you.

BossHogg 4y ago
As someone on the internet in the early 90s, that is absolutely not the case.
- chimineycricket 4y ago
  What's another website that feels more like the old internet than 4chan?
  - endemic 4y ago
    https://dataswamp.org/~john/ https://dataswamp.org/~john/
    - sixstringtheory 4y ago
      Has a guestbook, old internet confirmed.
Volundr 4y ago
> If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you. And Twitter. Similarly if you don't like the filtered environment of these communities there is 4chan/8kun/etc. So then this is a solved problem and all the hand-wringing around the moderation on these platforms is unnecessary?

noxer 4y ago

>it's absolute shit. So is twitter. At least in the last years it turned to absolute s*it. In mid 2021 I resurrected my old long not used account. I made maybe 20 comments in 3 month before I got "banned". I'm probably not really banned I would just have to remove my last comment but I cant do that because I can not login anymore (which may or may not be related to the "banning"). The post in question was an obvious sarcastic wordplay/pun that even if interpreted literally would have meant something along the lines of "dead people wont complain" which is not only factually true its also rather soft dark humor. As expected they lump everything together in their ToS so they can give you a paragraph of things as a reason and you dont know which rule you actually broke.

spacemadness 4y ago
No offense, but I see this a lot from folks claiming they got banned but they never say exactly why and keep it as vague as possible while claiming innocence.
- noxer 4y ago
  Did you read the post? I dont know why, they wont tell me. Its just a generic "you violated our rules about offensive content/abuse/self-harm and suicide" or something like that. Then a link to where you can get help if you have some kind of mental breakdown. They actually twisted this as If I was suicidal so they can ban me for my own protection. But I would bet a monthly salary some triggered long time twitter user with high reputation who just didn't understand the joke or does not have a compatible humor reported my tweet and the twitter admins just cater to these people and not to their own rules.
  - spacemadness 4y ago
    I read your post and it’s still vague as written so it’s not very convincing as an indictment against their policy. I’m not making a claim you are lying, it’s simply not enough to come to reach a conclusion it was all a big misunderstanding.

hn2017 4y ago

Yup. It's a new 4chan as of now. Musk just ruined a decent service worse than mediocre. https://twitter.com/ncri_io/status/1586007698910646272?s=20&t=WnJumZ4IvOur97K6g9ffXw https://twitter.com/ncri_io/status/1586007698910646272?s=20&...

ilyt 4y ago
When twitter was "decent" It was always a cesspool Also, lol for twitter having n-word graph in their metrics

CodeSgt 4y ago

I think most people that are happy about Elon taking over aren't free speech absolutists in the sense of the term you're using it. Rather they're just tired of blatant censorship some individuals face when expressing an opinion that goes against popular politics of the time. There's a middle ground between allowing literal nazi's to do whatever they want and blatantly influencing discussion on a mass scale by silencing those you disagree with.

britch 4y ago
Who's being silenced on a mass scale?
- soco 4y ago
  Literal nazis? /s
joshstrange 4y ago
Maybe they aren't but they are very vague and hand-wavy about the "blatant censorship". Without specific examples of what is being "censored" it's incredibly difficult to have a good-faith discussion on this. I'm much more forgiving of a handful of on-the-line or even "decent" content being removed if it's the exception not the rule. Like it or not a ton of moderation is fully or nearly fully automated since there isn't a viable alternative (You can argue that these companies should be allowed to exist if they can't accomplish human review/moderation, I'm speaking to the current reality). I'll also be the first to say that Twitter (and most) moderation isn't 100% evenly handled. Just look at world leaders/political figures and what they can say that others cannot, I fully agree this is not ok and should not be allowed. My issue is that it's to the point that I can't hear "blatant censorship" in connection with social media without hearing the dog whistle. Those people who are so up in arms about FB/Twitter/etc "censorship" seem to be absolutely silent about the Gab/Parlor/Truth Socials of the world.
- roamerz 4y ago
  Unless you live in a cave you cannot possibly be ignorant of the multiple accounts of Twitter censoring people’s discussions. Examples? A quick search on Fox News: https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-double-standard-hunter-biden-claims-censor https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-double-standard-hunter... https://www.foxnews.com/us/critics-twitter-censorship-obituary-vaccines-coronavirus https://www.foxnews.com/us/critics-twitter-censorship-obitua... https://www.foxnews.com/tech/media-company-grabien-suspended-twitter-quoting-congressman https://www.foxnews.com/tech/media-company-grabien-suspended... https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-suspends-jordan-peterson-tweeted-elliot-page https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-suspends-jordan-peters... https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-facebook-censor-trump-coronavirus-flu https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-facebook-censor-trump-...

uni_rule 4y ago

Some people will try to push the idea of individualized user-end moderation but that idea has not been successfully implemented since Usenet's Alt heirarchy faded from the internet's popular consciousness. It simply isn't practical and doesn't address that sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead. The lunatic-proof glasses put on by some users won't help the fact that people new to the site will be scared off by all the diarrhea mixed with the slowly disappearing amount of actual content to the point where the people being awful are the only ones left. Eventually they'll entrench their bullshit until that becomes the character of the whole site. Normal people are repulsed by it at first glance and those left only descend deeper and deeper into their own mad echo chamber.

ilyt 4y ago
> Some people will try to push the idea of individualized user-end moderation but that idea has not been successfully implemented since Usenet's Alt heirarchy faded from the internet's popular consciousness. It simply isn't practical and doesn't address that sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead I mean you still need some moderation to push the community the right direction but give people ability to downvote toxic shithole to oblivion and block users and a lot of it is already done. The biggest problem is probably brigading and spamming the space with low effort content but first one is rare and second one don't need that much moderation work compared to trying to moderate every comment.
pessimizer 4y ago
> sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead. This isn't what people are moderated for on twitter. You can pick a random woman on twitter, and identically reply after every tweet she makes that she's just saying that because she's ugly. You can get your friends to join in and organize under a hashtag. Twitter is not interested in moderating that. I blame it on the hundreds of celebrity reply guys who just wait for a Trump or an Ilhan Omar to tweet, and reply with abusive non-sequiturs. It really should have been nipped at the relatively-benign bud when Zuckerberg's posts on facebook would be accompanied with thousands of comments filled with friend-me spam, or even way back when "Tom's" posts started the same thing on Myspace. Internet moderation has become fixated on silencing enemies, when it really should have been focused on removing the irrelevant and facetious. Instead of ever censoring the stupid and the spam, the targets became the naysayers and the contrarians. This is nothing but a boon for government and corporate covert interference, because their aim is to disrupt conversations, not to participate in them.

_blz2 4y ago

There are numerous examples of tweets which aren't remotely vulgar or crude which were removed from twitter. There is no need to resort to speech like in the platforms you mentioned to bring twitter closer to a true free speech platform.

agumonkey 4y ago

Somehow I don't feel bad about 4chan .. it's all just complete absurd mayhem but there's no agenda.. Whereas any twitter storm feels a lot heavier. Super strange. ps: also I don't follow 4chan much, so maybe there were grave events on there

ryandvm 4y ago

There's a rich and beautiful irony in seeing a bunch of armchair libertarians gushing about the glories of unfettered speech on HN - a web forum that employs some of the most heavy-handed moderation in the biz. Not sure how long Alex Jones or Mike Lindell would last in here...

jabthedang 4y ago

amadeuspagel 4y ago

4chan is a forum. Everyone who browses a 4chan board sees the same posts. For that reason, these boards are moderated, but apparently not heavily enough for the tastes of some people, to whom for 4chan is the epitome of horror. Twitter is a platform. Everyone who uses twitter decides who to follow and who to block. Everyone sees different tweets. Twitter for a long time had almost complete freedom of speech. It described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party[1]. In that time, it had fewer rules then 4chan. But to use twitter did not feel like using 4chan, unless you decided to follow the kind of people who post on 4chan. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-w...

tekstar 4y ago
This is simply not true, because Twitter algorithmically pushes content you did not subscribe to in order to drive engagement. You do not have control over what you see, and are subject to the controversial subject of the day regardless of who you follow.

pessimizer 4y ago

Reddit became wildly successful as a clone of 4chan's textboards using digg's "comment section of the internet" idea of bare links as threadstarters, and barely moderated anything until a few years ago. For that matter, twitter itself barely moderated either until the lead-up to the 2020 election. I won't energetically argue with you that 4chan and Reddit aren't shit, but plenty of people would. They've both been massively influential on world culture. I would argue that twitter moderation has been almost strictly political and along culture war lines. Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.

manholio 4y ago
> Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation. Not a redditor, I see? Reddit crushed almost all right wing related subs, most famously r/The_Donald, and the entire gender critical / TERF / radical-feminist / LGB-non-T space. Among others, transgenderism is not a valid topic of discussion on Reddit.

wdr1 4y ago

Usenet?