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Why though? Early internet nerds may feel like they have a hegemony over this domain, but it belongs to the public at large, made up of all types of people with

Why though? Early internet nerds may feel like they have a hegemony over this domain, but it belongs to the public at large, made up of all types of people with varying levels of risk and criteria for what they deem is acceptable public discourse. Not to mention the fact that one person's grimy is another's milquetoast, so what do you do about that? Moderation is the organic balance that resulted from years of trial and error. I miss the old internet as well, but I know the internet is not just for the weirdos and nerds (anymore). Every road in the world does not need to be the Autobahn. What would really be saying something is if people stopped using platforms they don't like. But that's like taking a drug user away from his dealer--they both need each other in a perverse, symbiotic relationship. It's not that hard to leave platforms anyways, teens have already mostly stopped using FB. The most uncharitable bone in my body thinks that people who don't migrate off Twitter etc. like being the "cool" guy who doesn't like that stuff and having others around to read that. But I suppose that's just my opinion.

2h 3y ago
> Every road in the world does not need to be the Autobahn. the point is, currently NO ROAD is the Autobahn. thats not a balance, thats censorship.
- lukevp 3y ago
  Reddit has tons of NSFW stuff. There are plenty of less-moderated platforms available if you choose to engage with them.
  - catiopatio 3y ago
    Reddit has porn, but that’s not a convincing argument —- porn isn’t inimical to their ideological strictures. Meanwhile, they absolutely forbid expressing common, mainstream political viewpoints that are inimical to their ideology.
    - bigfudge 3y ago
      Can you give an example of a mainstream view that is banned? I’m genuinely curious. I wonder if we will have different definitions of mainstream? It seems like a global audience of 5,000 might be mainstream and warrant a home according to some of the accounts here, whereas I would argue that this is still incredibly niche and these people might not expect to find anywhere in real life that would tolerate their speech either.
      - catiopatio 3y ago
        https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/america... For example, “Six-in-ten U.S. adults say that whether a person is a man or a woman is determined by their sex assigned at birth.”
      - briangol 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - lmm 3y ago
    Reddit is heavily moderated. The likes of Gab get banned from app stores and hosting providers; KiwiFarms shows that even if you self-host (at a level beyond most regular people's ability and resources), if you offend the wrong people then you'll be cut off the internet.
    - defrost 3y ago
      The KiwiFarms issue is less what was said online in a club like forum context and more what was done in the real world by members and coordinated from KiwiFarms.
      - lmm 3y ago
        As far as I can see that was a smear campaign if not an outright false flag. The specific post that was mentioned as grounds for cutting it off was removed by moderators in less than 15 minutes, and was posted by an account that hadn't posted anything else.
        defrost 3y ago
        You're talking about a final straw after being moved on from one "we'll host anyone" provider to another. If I can paraphrase Ian Fleming; * Once is happenstance, * Twice is circumstance, * Nth time is a sign of deeply nested anti social malcontents that seek to inflict life theatening scenarios upon others for the Lulz.
        lmm 3y ago
        There's no need to paraphrase; "enemy action" is a very plausible and adequate explanation.
        hanselot 3y ago
        But once you reach 109 times it rolls back to being coincidental right? Those qui know, know. In any case, lets not be deemed offensive for harboring thoughts of rebellion against the overlords lest we be yeested from the platform for attempting to pique the curiosity of those not entirely lobotomized by the oppression machine yet. Such fallacious behaviours shall be left without scrutiny while we all dance together under a rainbow of landmines, minimum wage and proxy wars funded by alphabet companies ever-seeking to exercise greater and greater control of the human mind at scale. Yes, let's strive not to offend others, for that way we will surely make the most progress, ignoring all prior knowledge and our very evolutionary mechanisms so we don't make lines on a page that induce rage in the untrained mind. Those that can't hold a thought without judgment, can't think critically, yet they are the ones we decide to put in charge of our social narrative? I wonder WHO decided that was a good idea.
- Loocid 3y ago
  >the point is, currently NO ROAD is the Autobahn. thats not a balance, thats censorship. If you think this is true, you're not looking very hard.
MrStonedOne 3y ago
More and more of the digital world, from the internet to what applications our devices allow us to install, is about filing off the edges and rounding all corners to make the world safer for the common denominator and i don't have to like it. And as the digital world increasingly invades and influences our realities and experiences the importance of not only serving the common denominator gets more important, not less.
- gary_0 3y ago
  That sounds a lot like "telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it," to paraphrase Mark Twain.
- bigger_cheese 3y ago
  > is about filing off the edges and rounding all corners to make the world safer for the common denominator and i don't have to like it. In my opinion it is about making the online world safer for advertisers. The advertisers are the real customers of the internet - users are just the product. The evolution of the internet is being increasingly driven by profit seeking and most common way people try to monetize the internet is through advertising. That is primarily what drives censorship and moderation - a need to protect the advertiser's brands. The old internet that so many people are pining for in this thread comes from a time before big ad-tech. All the old schools forums, newsgroups etc didn't care about making a buck - heck most of them probably ran at a loss. All of that was eaten by social media, there was a transition away from internet communities, to for profit businesses instead.
  - georgeplusplus 3y ago
    Strangely enough, the more you regulate the internet, the more you empower the advertisers and the more users become just the product. If you are a parent weary of an internet riddled with porn, traffickers, drugs, or other dangerous things. I believe it is on the parent to filter whats acceptable content for their kid to watch and not the website administrators to moderate whats acceptable. Its baffling to me that people see it the other way around. The latter is certainly easier and the parent can come up with all sorts of excuse why they cant find the time to do that given how hard life is and how it gets in the way, but at the end of the day. Who knows what's best for you or your family than yourself?
r3trohack3r 3y ago
> Moderation is the organic balance To me, it seems very inorganic outside of specific platform niches that allow for self moderation of subsets of the network (Reddit somewhat, IRC, discord, Mastadon, etc.). A single globally shared moderation policy with local deviances to accommodate local customs and laws does not seem “organic” as much as forced. Compare this to the real world. If I go to my local business networking group, there is one set of moderation policies that is strictly enforced. If I go to my local pub, there is a very different set of moderation policies that is loosely enforced. If I went to my business networking group and behaved as if I was under the moderation policies of my local pub the contrast in behavior would be stark. Church has one set, school another, the local swingers club another, the gentleman’s club another, etc. Compare this to many social media platforms where it seems like the moderation policies attempt to moderate a baseline of behavior consistently across all communities regardless of whether they are pubs, business groups, or otherwise. I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard.
- antigonemerlin 3y ago
  You're absolutely right. I think the problem is that connecting everyone to everyone is a mistake. As John Oliver (I think, I can't find the source of the original quote now), puts it, "Facebook is the Walmart of social media." Yes, everyone and your mom is on there... but that means every post is going to be seen by your mother. That is frankly, terrifying. Building on your analogy, it'd be like if in the real world your local pub mates and your business friends met. These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum. >I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard. I think this is exactly what you're seeing. Of all the different social media models, personally, it's reddit and discord that won out for me, along with a smattering of more niche like Hacker News and the discussions page on Github. You can't and shouldn't build a community that satisfies everybody.
  - 3y ago
j45 3y ago
> Early internet nerds may feel like they have a hegemony over this domain, but it belongs to the public at large, made up of all types of people with varying levels of risk and criteria for what they deem is acceptable public discourse. Today will feel early too in 100 years. It might not be what you meant but this comment comes across on its own as a bit of sour grapes. It’s less about a hegemony, and more about what was a shared experience for an actually small group of people. They weren’t pioneers or visionaries, just curious explorers. The web having that small of a user base probably won’t happen again. It’s moot a bad thing either because look at how we can ask connect now. Still, the first time trying cable/adsl, or wifi when there was none, or mobile data that was so slow it left lots of time to dream was a seminal moment that this group didn’t see coming or pick, but it is theirs. Maybe they were 10-20 years early and today you are in a better position. There’s a lot of firsts still to be experienced together on this journey. Similar to how we’re all soaking in LLMs together. When something like the web was underground, counter cukture and mainstream it’s a different formation period. Tech wasn’t cool and certainly didn’t impress many. Still it was chosen. The promises to be around a keyboard were limited and it took going to great lengths for many. It’s really good it’s not as hard anymore. Todays web is much better and more accessible. It’s mushy what we access that we will learn to pay attention to and become more discerning about as our digital palette evolves. As an observation, Facebook was the first thing the broadest group of people did on a computer or the web. It really lived off mainstream technology adoption. This might be Fb’s greatest contribution to society. Still, if we don't like where a platform is going, the next curve of connecting awaits for you to make something you and others want. Stopping people from using a platform they don’t like might be harder than just building the next thing. The internet will get more personal. And that’s good.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I think what you're hearing is people mourning a loss of something they had and valued. I think feeling that loss, and expressing it, is valid. > Todays web is much better and more accessible. Whether or not it's better depends on what you found valuable about it. It is worse for some, and better for others. Disclaimer: it's much, much worse for me. But I acknowledge that it's better for others. Such is life. > The internet will get more personal. And that’s good. Whether that's good or not depends on what you mean by "get more personal". If what you mean is "more personalized", then I think that's the opposite of good. But, again, that's just me and I'm mourning that the web is most of the way toward becoming a thing that no longer meets my needs or desires. That it meets the needs and desires of others is fine, and I don't want to deny others from being able to derive value from it. But, nonetheless, the loss to me, personally, is real and I don't see why I shouldn't be able to talk about that.
ta8903 3y ago
Because what a lot of people think of as the deep, dark, grimy internet is how people talk in real life. The phenomena of the internet being a clean place where you don't say slurs only happened as a result of advertising on social media platforms. The argument about what way should we let the internet "be" is completely orthogonal to the matter, no one is suggesting people to go out of their way to be dirty, just let people have conversations the way they do outside the internet.
- taccicardia 3y ago
  this is interesting to me. more than ever people are socializing on the internet, and not just in sequestered areas like discord servers. there still are ostensibly "public" places like twitter. to me this is similar to in real life as you describe it. and in real life i don't use slurs. none of my friends do either. in fact, i'd wager if you ever used a slur against against the wrong person in real life you'd quickly regret it. it's just very, very interesting to me to see a comment like this which supposes everyone is just as eager as you are to use slurs in any context.
sublinear 3y ago
> Every road in the world does not need to be the Autobahn. Great quote
stubybubs 3y ago
> I miss the old internet as well, but I know the internet is not just for the weirdos and nerds (anymore). This is what I found bizarre about Jack Dorsey pining for the old days of the internet (usenet, irc) and the lack of discovery, and blaming centralization for it. There are still decentralized places that exist, and anyone is free to set up their own host, and they would get mountains more traffic than was even possible in the 90s or early 2000s. The problem is that that isn't good enough anymore. It has to make a mark on the internet or something. Not satisfied with 10,000 people viewing your page or your post, gotta be 10M+. The other thing is that "old internet" was largely about the type of people on it. Mostly university students, most of those engineers, most of those male and from the same socioeconomic background. Fast forward to now when everybody is online, and the callout culture and seeming animosity towards viewpoints favored by early internet people is because opposing viewpoints exist.

2h 3y ago

> Every road in the world does not need to be the Autobahn. the point is, currently NO ROAD is the Autobahn. thats not a balance, thats censorship.

lukevp 3y ago
Reddit has tons of NSFW stuff. There are plenty of less-moderated platforms available if you choose to engage with them.
- catiopatio 3y ago
  Reddit has porn, but that’s not a convincing argument —- porn isn’t inimical to their ideological strictures. Meanwhile, they absolutely forbid expressing common, mainstream political viewpoints that are inimical to their ideology.
  - bigfudge 3y ago
    Can you give an example of a mainstream view that is banned? I’m genuinely curious. I wonder if we will have different definitions of mainstream? It seems like a global audience of 5,000 might be mainstream and warrant a home according to some of the accounts here, whereas I would argue that this is still incredibly niche and these people might not expect to find anywhere in real life that would tolerate their speech either.
    - catiopatio 3y ago
      https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/america... For example, “Six-in-ten U.S. adults say that whether a person is a man or a woman is determined by their sex assigned at birth.”
    - briangol 3y ago
      [flagged]
- lmm 3y ago
  Reddit is heavily moderated. The likes of Gab get banned from app stores and hosting providers; KiwiFarms shows that even if you self-host (at a level beyond most regular people's ability and resources), if you offend the wrong people then you'll be cut off the internet.
  - defrost 3y ago
    The KiwiFarms issue is less what was said online in a club like forum context and more what was done in the real world by members and coordinated from KiwiFarms.
    - lmm 3y ago
      As far as I can see that was a smear campaign if not an outright false flag. The specific post that was mentioned as grounds for cutting it off was removed by moderators in less than 15 minutes, and was posted by an account that hadn't posted anything else.
      - defrost 3y ago
        You're talking about a final straw after being moved on from one "we'll host anyone" provider to another. If I can paraphrase Ian Fleming; * Once is happenstance, * Twice is circumstance, * Nth time is a sign of deeply nested anti social malcontents that seek to inflict life theatening scenarios upon others for the Lulz.
        lmm 3y ago
        There's no need to paraphrase; "enemy action" is a very plausible and adequate explanation.
        hanselot 3y ago
        But once you reach 109 times it rolls back to being coincidental right? Those qui know, know. In any case, lets not be deemed offensive for harboring thoughts of rebellion against the overlords lest we be yeested from the platform for attempting to pique the curiosity of those not entirely lobotomized by the oppression machine yet. Such fallacious behaviours shall be left without scrutiny while we all dance together under a rainbow of landmines, minimum wage and proxy wars funded by alphabet companies ever-seeking to exercise greater and greater control of the human mind at scale. Yes, let's strive not to offend others, for that way we will surely make the most progress, ignoring all prior knowledge and our very evolutionary mechanisms so we don't make lines on a page that induce rage in the untrained mind. Those that can't hold a thought without judgment, can't think critically, yet they are the ones we decide to put in charge of our social narrative? I wonder WHO decided that was a good idea.
Loocid 3y ago
>the point is, currently NO ROAD is the Autobahn. thats not a balance, thats censorship. If you think this is true, you're not looking very hard.

MrStonedOne 3y ago

More and more of the digital world, from the internet to what applications our devices allow us to install, is about filing off the edges and rounding all corners to make the world safer for the common denominator and i don't have to like it. And as the digital world increasingly invades and influences our realities and experiences the importance of not only serving the common denominator gets more important, not less.

gary_0 3y ago
That sounds a lot like "telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it," to paraphrase Mark Twain.
bigger_cheese 3y ago
> is about filing off the edges and rounding all corners to make the world safer for the common denominator and i don't have to like it. In my opinion it is about making the online world safer for advertisers. The advertisers are the real customers of the internet - users are just the product. The evolution of the internet is being increasingly driven by profit seeking and most common way people try to monetize the internet is through advertising. That is primarily what drives censorship and moderation - a need to protect the advertiser's brands. The old internet that so many people are pining for in this thread comes from a time before big ad-tech. All the old schools forums, newsgroups etc didn't care about making a buck - heck most of them probably ran at a loss. All of that was eaten by social media, there was a transition away from internet communities, to for profit businesses instead.
- georgeplusplus 3y ago
  Strangely enough, the more you regulate the internet, the more you empower the advertisers and the more users become just the product. If you are a parent weary of an internet riddled with porn, traffickers, drugs, or other dangerous things. I believe it is on the parent to filter whats acceptable content for their kid to watch and not the website administrators to moderate whats acceptable. Its baffling to me that people see it the other way around. The latter is certainly easier and the parent can come up with all sorts of excuse why they cant find the time to do that given how hard life is and how it gets in the way, but at the end of the day. Who knows what's best for you or your family than yourself?

r3trohack3r 3y ago

> Moderation is the organic balance To me, it seems very inorganic outside of specific platform niches that allow for self moderation of subsets of the network (Reddit somewhat, IRC, discord, Mastadon, etc.). A single globally shared moderation policy with local deviances to accommodate local customs and laws does not seem “organic” as much as forced. Compare this to the real world. If I go to my local business networking group, there is one set of moderation policies that is strictly enforced. If I go to my local pub, there is a very different set of moderation policies that is loosely enforced. If I went to my business networking group and behaved as if I was under the moderation policies of my local pub the contrast in behavior would be stark. Church has one set, school another, the local swingers club another, the gentleman’s club another, etc. Compare this to many social media platforms where it seems like the moderation policies attempt to moderate a baseline of behavior consistently across all communities regardless of whether they are pubs, business groups, or otherwise. I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard.

antigonemerlin 3y ago
You're absolutely right. I think the problem is that connecting everyone to everyone is a mistake. As John Oliver (I think, I can't find the source of the original quote now), puts it, "Facebook is the Walmart of social media." Yes, everyone and your mom is on there... but that means every post is going to be seen by your mother. That is frankly, terrifying. Building on your analogy, it'd be like if in the real world your local pub mates and your business friends met. These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum. >I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard. I think this is exactly what you're seeing. Of all the different social media models, personally, it's reddit and discord that won out for me, along with a smattering of more niche like Hacker News and the discussions page on Github. You can't and shouldn't build a community that satisfies everybody.
- 3y ago

j45 3y ago

> Early internet nerds may feel like they have a hegemony over this domain, but it belongs to the public at large, made up of all types of people with varying levels of risk and criteria for what they deem is acceptable public discourse. Today will feel early too in 100 years. It might not be what you meant but this comment comes across on its own as a bit of sour grapes. It’s less about a hegemony, and more about what was a shared experience for an actually small group of people. They weren’t pioneers or visionaries, just curious explorers. The web having that small of a user base probably won’t happen again. It’s moot a bad thing either because look at how we can ask connect now. Still, the first time trying cable/adsl, or wifi when there was none, or mobile data that was so slow it left lots of time to dream was a seminal moment that this group didn’t see coming or pick, but it is theirs. Maybe they were 10-20 years early and today you are in a better position. There’s a lot of firsts still to be experienced together on this journey. Similar to how we’re all soaking in LLMs together. When something like the web was underground, counter cukture and mainstream it’s a different formation period. Tech wasn’t cool and certainly didn’t impress many. Still it was chosen. The promises to be around a keyboard were limited and it took going to great lengths for many. It’s really good it’s not as hard anymore. Todays web is much better and more accessible. It’s mushy what we access that we will learn to pay attention to and become more discerning about as our digital palette evolves. As an observation, Facebook was the first thing the broadest group of people did on a computer or the web. It really lived off mainstream technology adoption. This might be Fb’s greatest contribution to society. Still, if we don't like where a platform is going, the next curve of connecting awaits for you to make something you and others want. Stopping people from using a platform they don’t like might be harder than just building the next thing. The internet will get more personal. And that’s good.

JohnFen 3y ago
I think what you're hearing is people mourning a loss of something they had and valued. I think feeling that loss, and expressing it, is valid. > Todays web is much better and more accessible. Whether or not it's better depends on what you found valuable about it. It is worse for some, and better for others. Disclaimer: it's much, much worse for me. But I acknowledge that it's better for others. Such is life. > The internet will get more personal. And that’s good. Whether that's good or not depends on what you mean by "get more personal". If what you mean is "more personalized", then I think that's the opposite of good. But, again, that's just me and I'm mourning that the web is most of the way toward becoming a thing that no longer meets my needs or desires. That it meets the needs and desires of others is fine, and I don't want to deny others from being able to derive value from it. But, nonetheless, the loss to me, personally, is real and I don't see why I shouldn't be able to talk about that.

ta8903 3y ago

Because what a lot of people think of as the deep, dark, grimy internet is how people talk in real life. The phenomena of the internet being a clean place where you don't say slurs only happened as a result of advertising on social media platforms. The argument about what way should we let the internet "be" is completely orthogonal to the matter, no one is suggesting people to go out of their way to be dirty, just let people have conversations the way they do outside the internet.

taccicardia 3y ago
this is interesting to me. more than ever people are socializing on the internet, and not just in sequestered areas like discord servers. there still are ostensibly "public" places like twitter. to me this is similar to in real life as you describe it. and in real life i don't use slurs. none of my friends do either. in fact, i'd wager if you ever used a slur against against the wrong person in real life you'd quickly regret it. it's just very, very interesting to me to see a comment like this which supposes everyone is just as eager as you are to use slurs in any context.

sublinear 3y ago

> Every road in the world does not need to be the Autobahn. Great quote

stubybubs 3y ago

> I miss the old internet as well, but I know the internet is not just for the weirdos and nerds (anymore). This is what I found bizarre about Jack Dorsey pining for the old days of the internet (usenet, irc) and the lack of discovery, and blaming centralization for it. There are still decentralized places that exist, and anyone is free to set up their own host, and they would get mountains more traffic than was even possible in the 90s or early 2000s. The problem is that that isn't good enough anymore. It has to make a mark on the internet or something. Not satisfied with 10,000 people viewing your page or your post, gotta be 10M+. The other thing is that "old internet" was largely about the type of people on it. Mostly university students, most of those engineers, most of those male and from the same socioeconomic background. Fast forward to now when everybody is online, and the callout culture and seeming animosity towards viewpoints favored by early internet people is because opposing viewpoints exist.