14 ms·
We live in a distopia where one of the last search engines that returns real results related to anything the western mainstream "hidden forces" do not want you
by kikokikokiko 4y ago
We live in a distopia where one of the last search engines that returns real results related to anything the western mainstream "hidden forces" do not want you to be able to see is Yandex, a company located under a dictatorship. In 2022, the only way for a regular citizen to approximate what is reality, what is the "truth", is to look for information provided from the opposite side of any argument you're trying to understand more of. Everything is fake or hidden from you. It's the stable diffusion distopia.
- ajross 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Cyberdog 4y ago> How about this: try posting an URL for kiwifarms or stormfront or whatever right here, in this thread. See if it stays up. See who's willing to tolerate it. Man, I almost did. But people just get so irrationally angry about words on the internet nowadays that I decided against tempting fate. I don't need people trying to destroy my career because I don't irrationally hate the right people right now. Yes, Kiwi Farms exists and has information and opinions you might not like. It certainly has ones that I don't like. But at the end of the day, it's just words on the internet; the stuff about "organized harassment campaigns" and all that is a media lie. I really wish people would just visit the place and realize that it's just a bunch of shitposters with a clear "look, laugh, but don't touch" mentality and not the demonic bogeyman the press has made it out be. But I realize that irrational hatred is faster and easier, so…
- dale_glass 4y ago> I don't need people trying to destroy my career because I don't irrationally hate the right people right now. You don't "irrationally" hate them probably because you happen not to fit the target profile. EDIT: And are you serious? You truly think that KiwiFarms is a quirky, harmless place that just collects info to do nothing with it, and at the same time believe that on HN you'd be targeted by people who'd try to ruin your life? What force keeps such nasty people off kiwifarms but allows their presence here, I wonder? > Yes, Kiwi Farms exists and has information and opinions you might not like. It certainly has ones that I don't like. But at the end of the day, it's just words on the internet; There's no such thing as "just words on the internet". Words express beliefs and intent. I take them seriously. > the stuff about "organized harassment campaigns" and all that is a media lie. Of course. The sort of people that compile elaborate profiles on people including personal information are some sort of enlightened beings that despite obsessively tracking down and compiling every embarrassing or weird thing about another person would never actually use that information for anything at all.
- haroldp 4y ago> There's no such thing as "just words on the internet". Words express beliefs and intent. I take them seriously. How do you decide which words people should be allowed to read, and which words they should not be allowed to read?
- dale_glass 4y agoI wasn't talking about that, but since you asked: My personal views and morals, just like everyone else. If you're on something I host, then I make the rules on my property.
- haroldp 4y agoSo immoral things should be excised from wikipedia?
- dale_glass 4y agoThat's for Wikipedia to decide. I'm not a member.
- haroldp 4y agoBut if you owned wikipedia, you feel it would be best to remove immoral things from it?
- dale_glass 4y agoDepends on what you mean. If you mean documenting its existence, then no, because we have to learn from history. So I wouldn't have an issue with an article on antisemitism or the like. But if I found out that something I own actually helps Nazis, then yes, I'd do my best to stop that from happening. If I suddenly ended up owning Stormfront or Kiwifarms, I would absolutely pull the plug and burn it all to the ground with no warning.
- LastTrain 4y agoHey when you think that everyone else is being irrational guess what?
- haroldp 4y ago> YES, we as a society have decided that some forms of discourse are to be shunned. "We as the cultural elite have decided what you may read." > No one is confused about what kiwifarms stands for. This is demonstrably false. You have invented or swallowed a narrative about kiwifarms and are working to prevent anyone else from discovering the truth for themselves. A different narrative is that Kiwifarms operated within the law. False accusations were made against it. CloudFlair believed those accusations and stopped protecting it from illegal network attacks. Illegal network attacks knocked it offline for a while. Which of these narratives is true, and how could we find out?
- staringback 4y ago> How about this: try posting an URL for kiwifarms or stormfront or whatever right here, in this thread. See if it stays up. See who's willing to tolerate it. https://kiwifarms.net https://kiwifarms.net
- Gigachad 4y agoUp for 7 hours. Guess that proves HN is better than Wikipedia.
- babypuncher 4y agoAbsolutely, even the so-called "free speech" platforms like Truth Social will ban you for saying the wrong things. Moral absolutism never really works out.
- voxic11 4y agoHackernews almost never actually deletes things (afaik they only do if there is a legal requirement or in exceptional circumstances after human review). Instead of being deleted comments/posts get marked as dead and hidden by default. You can enable viewing dead posts in your profile. Basically they implement the strategy discussed here https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-differen... Its the best of both worlds. People who get offended easily or just don't want to deal with low quality content can view the moderated content only. But if the moderation gets taken too far they can opt in to viewing the unmoderated content as well. Also I'll bite on your challenge https://kiwifarms.net/ https://kiwifarms.net/ is the current URL.
- g_hn_liaison 4y agoEveryone's already taken the bait, but I'm an awful fish, so I'll post their secret .onion url: kiwifarmsaaf4t2h7gc3dfc5ojhmqruw2nit3uejrpiagrxeuxiyxcyd.onion It's not really something I'd be comfortable with either, so I get it, but everyone in this thread should at least understand that the average kiwi farms thread is roughly as offensive as the conversations at every job site that constructed all your houses, every field that grew your vegetables, and every rig that pumped the oil for your car. I'm not saying it's okay, but you have to accept it to some extent. Those people are out there offline, too. While you're at it, check out their "Christmas Art" thread and think of the average Nazi spending most of their time being a perfectly polite and non-hateful person: https://archive.ph/TffRs https://archive.ph/TffRs
- dbcurtis 4y ago> is roughly as offensive as the conversations at every job site that constructed all your houses, every field that grew your vegetables, and every rig that pumped the oil for your car. .... Those people are out there... I'm trying to understand what you are saying with that. What are you implying? Please be more specific. Because it sounds like you are painting with a very broad brush and making a lot of assumptions about great swaths of society.
- psychphysic 4y agoWhat I don't know is, I see mainstream media become increasingly curated and clearly agenda driven. Is this a function of reality or me getting better at spotting it? I felt as though in the 90s CNN legitimately was a good news source. Early 21centuey VICE was legitimately good. Today there is next to nothing given anything other than a heavily biased view. I think the internet has made things worse, there's a new kind of bias. What do you set the headline to for the breaking alert? Because that's what people will see. Follow that up with a more subtle article and boom you've got a basically iron glad propaganda machine.
- p0pcult 4y agoI think it is a function of game theory akin to Prisoner's Dilemma. If all the news sources are rather centrist (i.e., they all "cooperate"), then no one gains or loses audiences because of bias. This is a good strategy when publishing is expensive. However, as the costs of publishing drop, it becomes profitable to shave off niche (smaller) audiences, with biased publication. This begins the defection phase of the PD game series. As defections accelerate, anyone who doesn't defect eventually suffers by continuing to not defect, leading to a new optimal state of all defections--i.e., publishers have to defect to maintain audience. I dunno, I just came up with that as I was writing it. There are also things to be said about the ability now to track engagement, which allowed humans to quantify (i.e., put a cost/value/ROI on) the extent to which bias/outrage drive engagement. But, this function would still play into the greater theoretical framework I proposed.
- psychphysic 4y agoI think that would make sense if these were new smaller news media but I see it mostly the bigger players. Even the BBC which is state funded. Okay, that might be a bad example as they are a state broadcaster and so propaganda is really their remit.
- nequo 4y agoThis makes a lot of sense. Here is a classic paper that tests a model like this on US data: https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/biasmeas.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/biasmeas.pdf We estimate a model of newspaper demand that incorporates slant explicitly, estimate the slant that would be chosen if newspapers independently maximized their own profits, and compare these profit-maximizing points with firms’ actual choices. We find that readers have an economically significant preference for like-minded news. Firms respond strongly to consumer preferences, which account for roughly 20 percent of the variation in measured slant in our sample.
- brookst 4y agoWe live in an imperfect society where extremists leverage the very real flaws to insist that everything is absolutely corrupt and that we should embrace the exact opposite of anything that’s imperfect. Vaccines don’t prevent 100% of all infections for everyone? They’re obviously complete frauds that do no good at all. The sad thing is that we have real problems, and this nihilistic insistence that everything is fake means that those problems will only get worse.
- leemelone 4y ago
- doctor_eval 4y agoRight? Whenever I get into a discussion about vaccines I say something along the line of: Of all the shitty things our governments do in our names, you’re choosing vaccines to fight against?!
- pessimizer 4y agoThis argument is 100% of the time used to silence people by telling them that they should be talking about anything other than the subject they are currently talking about. It's also a generic argument that can be used to dismiss any issue without changing the wording.
- protoman3000 4y agoI disagree. I find fringe information readily available, after a few more easy steps that is. Could it instead be that the environment (or, to speak in your words: “the western mainstream hidden forces”) has altered your perception? You can always exit the Matrix.
- linuxhansl 4y agoAs things stand Wikipedia is pretty good. Non-contentious topics are free to edit by everyone, contentious/political/hotbutton/etc topics have restricted editorship. I do not sense any specific bias. As usual, "freedom of speech" does not imply a right to be listened to. Also, I do not buy this dystopia claim. In 99.99% of all topics we know exactly what is true and what is not. The sky is blue, clouds are condensed water, the earth is a sphere, there is racism, there is poverty, wealth is unevenly distributed over the planet, hygiene helps prevent sickness, vaccinations have prevented a lot of suffering, social security is expensive, etc, etc. The facts are easy. We used to argue about consequences stemming from these facts and what do to about it. These days we tend to confuse our disagreements with "alternate facts". It's really not that hard to stay informed.
- Manuel_D 4y agoBias definitely exists but it's on a page by page, or perhaps topic by topic basis. It can be fun looking at the talk page - and better yet, the archives of the talk pages.
- rosmax_1337 4y agoI hate to break it to you, but the facts are not easy. To take something which is far enough away that it hopefully doesn't come across as inflammatory to you, consider the 9/11 attacks. And how the opinions about what happened are incredibly split all around the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls_about_9/11_conspiracy_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls_about_9/11_consp... Now, you can ofcourse dismiss all these opinions as "alternate facts". Probably similarly to how devoted christians dismissed theories about a heliocentric solar system as "alternative facts" only aspoused by lunatics.
- mistercheph 4y agoThis is the style of thinking that is drilled into children from a young age. No one has ever discovered anything, mankind has not continually rediscovered the world and then forged dogmas and killed dissenters and then burned the dogmas and killed the priests of the former dogma. There is Capital T Truth and Capital F Factx. No one is responsible for those factx, they just exist and are delivered by God into the minds of men. Looking out my window right now, the sky is grey.
- rosmax_1337 4y agoI agree with this post. Over the span of the last 20 years, and most certainly the last 7-5 years, the information wars have ramped up to an entirely new level. After 2018, large portions of dissident content mostly stemming from the right was completely banned on youtube, facebook, twitter. And it's being kept up in tiktok, instagram, and more recently even entities like cloudflare have begun participating. I understand, the truth is not comfortable. It is sometimes incredibly hurtful to know the other sides version of the truth. But even then truth is worth it. "All I'm offering is the truth, nothing more."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]