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From what I've noticed, free speech advocacy isn't really about "allowing everything" but more about not applying more censorship than what is necessary and not

From what I've noticed, free speech advocacy isn't really about "allowing everything" but more about not applying more censorship than what is necessary and not doing it arbitrarily. HN does quite well in this regard - there are principles in running the site which are adhered to and which are required to keep the community from deteriorating into social media-quality discourse. For example, banning someone only for not liking their views is obviously legal and permitted almost everywhere, but a site/forum doing that doesn't adhere to the principles of free speech then. Which they don't necessarily have to do, but that's what free speech advocates are fighting for - for more places to adopt the conduct of not doing that.

joshstrange 3y ago
> From what I've noticed, free speech advocacy isn't really about "allowing everything" but more about not applying more censorship than what is necessary and not doing it arbitrarily. That's a nice phrasing but it doesn't hold up to what I've seen at all. Everyone has a different definition of what is "necessary" and anyone that gets (shadow-)banned is going to scream "Censorship!". I've moderated communities and watched this happen enough times to know. There simply is no objective way to handle it, it's always going to subjective and there will always be false positives. The alternative is a hellscape. HN has rules it adheres to but if someone finds a loophole or continues to walk "right up to the line" they probably aren't going to be around for long. I tried moderating a community once completely to the "letter of the law" and it turned out horribly. People abused that and drove off people who were kind and had interesting things to contribute. What was left was a few people who stuck it out and a bunch of trolls who knew they could get away with it.
- g42gregory 3y ago
  I think the alternative is not a hellscape. The alternative is a clear, specific, transparent, rule-based moderation. In particular, I think that it's best to control the "temperature" of the discussion (even if subjectively), but keep the topics of the discussion completely open. Why would people not be allowed to discuss certain things, if these things gain enough traction? Instead, you could just control the temperature: banning the usage of bad words, personal attacks, etc...
  - pixl97 3y ago
    The first rule of creating any system is remember that 'everyone' is smarter than you. The problem with rule based moderation quickly boils down to the Sortie's Paradox. Everyone that is smarter than you will quickly find logical contradictions in your system based on the uncertainty of language and your system collapses in the meta argument. When defining a rule based system, remember the problem space is enormous, potentially even unbounded. As your number of rules grow the number of conflicting rules will increase. Then there are some things like politics that low temperature conversations are near impossible in already...
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Everyone, combined, is smarter then Godel but no one has disproved his theory yet after close to a hundred years. Why is it automatically impossible for a set of moderation rules to be as rigorous and logically correct?
      - pixl97 3y ago
        Language is not rigorous and logically correct. Unless you're planning to demand your users only use one particular language only a well defined subset of it. Using a theory as a comparison is generally a pretty poor example as we have no universal theory that defines everything, instead they are targeted at only a small slice of 'something'. Language has a larger scope than that.
        MichaelZuo 3y ago
        > Language is not rigorous and logically correct. Unless you're planning to demand your users only use one particular language only a well defined subset of it. Can you demonstrate why this is the case?
        pixl97 3y ago
        Good = Good Bad = Bad Bad = Good There you go, language is logically inconsistent.
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  The objective way of doing it is free speech is only if government[1]. Anything else goes. I do think that companies which are essentially infrastructure/utilitity providers (cloudflare, aws, etc.) should also be considered government in this case. [1]: https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    an ISP is a utility. they're just, like, the phone company, man. i don't need them telling me what i can see, or say, and to them its all mostly the same anyway. HN is not, and they can certainly ban what they want.
  - Pannoniae 3y ago
    I kind of agree, but at the same time, this line of thinking falls a bit flat IMO. There used to be certain social norms in the past, which are debatable to be helpful or not, but which used to define what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. Today, those norms are disappearing/being deconstructed (which is generally a good thing), but there is no replacement! In theory it is fine that everyone has the rights to express everything / boycott anything / not associate with anyone, but on a societal level, this doesn't work very well if not kept within bounds. This is noticeable in the level of polarisation - there are no norms to be respectful or try to listen to the other person - so people don't. Same with the right of association - it's fine that the law is that you can disassociate with/discriminate against anyone who doesn't belong to a specific protected group, but this means that if a significant part of powerful entities collude to suppress something, then that thing will be suppressed without any legal or social remedy. This has a destabilising effect on society as people are more and more drawn into their 'camp' where they preach to the choir and actively root out-group or non-conformist behaviour out. I think this kind of reads like a rant, so I apologise for the wording and the formatting. My thoughts are not entirely clear and structured on the topic so I can't do any better right now.
nvy 3y ago
>[...] not doing it arbitrarily. HN does quite well in this regard [...] Hard disagree on the arbitrary part. What's considered "intellectual" or "curious conversation" depends entirely on dang's personal preference. For example every time a Steve Jobs thread is posted, there inevitably are two major themes: 1. People fawning over how great a leader Steve allegedly was, despite his flaws 2. People going on about how Steve was a massive douchebag, in spite of his success with Apple Neither of those topics are interesting, novel, or intellectually gratifying but only #2 is reliably censored by dang. CEO worship is on-topic here but criticism of those CEOs is apparently "not interesting".
- Volundr 3y ago
  > #2 is reliably censored by dang How are you determining dang is taking action rather than user downvotes and flags? Can you provide some examples?
- pixl97 3y ago
  While I've not done it, I'd suggest building a histogram of comments/articles about Steve and see where the numbers fall. Especially in relation to comments that are deemed inflammatory. If you've ever ran a site of any size you will eventually find out there are some discussions that lead to a plethora of moderative actions because the user base (or trolls in it) cannot behave and disrupt the community. And while this may be unfair to you, a completely reasonable person capable of handling polite online discussion, the unreasonable discussions are unfair to those who do not want a flame war ever 3 post, and unfair to the administrative burden the moderators must shoulder.
  - nvy 3y ago
    Well I have run a few sizeable communities (albeit smaller than HN) in my day and it seems to me the correct approach is "no posting about Steve Jobs at all" rather than "only Steve Jobs worship is allowed".
Timon3 3y ago
> From what I've noticed, free speech advocacy isn't really about "allowing everything" but more about not applying more censorship than what is necessary and not doing it arbitrarily. That is what I kept reading from "free speech advocates", especially regarding Twitter etc. - those same people are now largely either silent or actively cheering on the same happening in regards to the other side right now. This is the fatal flaw with this definition: "not applying more censorship than what is necessary and not doing it arbitrarily" does not mean the same thing to all people, and it seems that the counter-mainstream doesn't give the mainstream more leeway. So is there some way this could be done without the pendulum just swinging fully the opposite way?

joshstrange 3y ago

> From what I've noticed, free speech advocacy isn't really about "allowing everything" but more about not applying more censorship than what is necessary and not doing it arbitrarily. That's a nice phrasing but it doesn't hold up to what I've seen at all. Everyone has a different definition of what is "necessary" and anyone that gets (shadow-)banned is going to scream "Censorship!". I've moderated communities and watched this happen enough times to know. There simply is no objective way to handle it, it's always going to subjective and there will always be false positives. The alternative is a hellscape. HN has rules it adheres to but if someone finds a loophole or continues to walk "right up to the line" they probably aren't going to be around for long. I tried moderating a community once completely to the "letter of the law" and it turned out horribly. People abused that and drove off people who were kind and had interesting things to contribute. What was left was a few people who stuck it out and a bunch of trolls who knew they could get away with it.

g42gregory 3y ago
I think the alternative is not a hellscape. The alternative is a clear, specific, transparent, rule-based moderation. In particular, I think that it's best to control the "temperature" of the discussion (even if subjectively), but keep the topics of the discussion completely open. Why would people not be allowed to discuss certain things, if these things gain enough traction? Instead, you could just control the temperature: banning the usage of bad words, personal attacks, etc...
- pixl97 3y ago
  The first rule of creating any system is remember that 'everyone' is smarter than you. The problem with rule based moderation quickly boils down to the Sortie's Paradox. Everyone that is smarter than you will quickly find logical contradictions in your system based on the uncertainty of language and your system collapses in the meta argument. When defining a rule based system, remember the problem space is enormous, potentially even unbounded. As your number of rules grow the number of conflicting rules will increase. Then there are some things like politics that low temperature conversations are near impossible in already...
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Everyone, combined, is smarter then Godel but no one has disproved his theory yet after close to a hundred years. Why is it automatically impossible for a set of moderation rules to be as rigorous and logically correct?
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Language is not rigorous and logically correct. Unless you're planning to demand your users only use one particular language only a well defined subset of it. Using a theory as a comparison is generally a pretty poor example as we have no universal theory that defines everything, instead they are targeted at only a small slice of 'something'. Language has a larger scope than that.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        > Language is not rigorous and logically correct. Unless you're planning to demand your users only use one particular language only a well defined subset of it. Can you demonstrate why this is the case?
        pixl97 3y ago
        Good = Good Bad = Bad Bad = Good There you go, language is logically inconsistent.
_Algernon_ 3y ago
The objective way of doing it is free speech is only if government[1]. Anything else goes. I do think that companies which are essentially infrastructure/utilitity providers (cloudflare, aws, etc.) should also be considered government in this case. [1]: https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  an ISP is a utility. they're just, like, the phone company, man. i don't need them telling me what i can see, or say, and to them its all mostly the same anyway. HN is not, and they can certainly ban what they want.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  I kind of agree, but at the same time, this line of thinking falls a bit flat IMO. There used to be certain social norms in the past, which are debatable to be helpful or not, but which used to define what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. Today, those norms are disappearing/being deconstructed (which is generally a good thing), but there is no replacement! In theory it is fine that everyone has the rights to express everything / boycott anything / not associate with anyone, but on a societal level, this doesn't work very well if not kept within bounds. This is noticeable in the level of polarisation - there are no norms to be respectful or try to listen to the other person - so people don't. Same with the right of association - it's fine that the law is that you can disassociate with/discriminate against anyone who doesn't belong to a specific protected group, but this means that if a significant part of powerful entities collude to suppress something, then that thing will be suppressed without any legal or social remedy. This has a destabilising effect on society as people are more and more drawn into their 'camp' where they preach to the choir and actively root out-group or non-conformist behaviour out. I think this kind of reads like a rant, so I apologise for the wording and the formatting. My thoughts are not entirely clear and structured on the topic so I can't do any better right now.

nvy 3y ago

>[...] not doing it arbitrarily. HN does quite well in this regard [...] Hard disagree on the arbitrary part. What's considered "intellectual" or "curious conversation" depends entirely on dang's personal preference. For example every time a Steve Jobs thread is posted, there inevitably are two major themes: 1. People fawning over how great a leader Steve allegedly was, despite his flaws 2. People going on about how Steve was a massive douchebag, in spite of his success with Apple Neither of those topics are interesting, novel, or intellectually gratifying but only #2 is reliably censored by dang. CEO worship is on-topic here but criticism of those CEOs is apparently "not interesting".

Volundr 3y ago
> #2 is reliably censored by dang How are you determining dang is taking action rather than user downvotes and flags? Can you provide some examples?
pixl97 3y ago
While I've not done it, I'd suggest building a histogram of comments/articles about Steve and see where the numbers fall. Especially in relation to comments that are deemed inflammatory. If you've ever ran a site of any size you will eventually find out there are some discussions that lead to a plethora of moderative actions because the user base (or trolls in it) cannot behave and disrupt the community. And while this may be unfair to you, a completely reasonable person capable of handling polite online discussion, the unreasonable discussions are unfair to those who do not want a flame war ever 3 post, and unfair to the administrative burden the moderators must shoulder.
- nvy 3y ago
  Well I have run a few sizeable communities (albeit smaller than HN) in my day and it seems to me the correct approach is "no posting about Steve Jobs at all" rather than "only Steve Jobs worship is allowed".

Timon3 3y ago

> From what I've noticed, free speech advocacy isn't really about "allowing everything" but more about not applying more censorship than what is necessary and not doing it arbitrarily. That is what I kept reading from "free speech advocates", especially regarding Twitter etc. - those same people are now largely either silent or actively cheering on the same happening in regards to the other side right now. This is the fatal flaw with this definition: "not applying more censorship than what is necessary and not doing it arbitrarily" does not mean the same thing to all people, and it seems that the counter-mainstream doesn't give the mainstream more leeway. So is there some way this could be done without the pendulum just swinging fully the opposite way?