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Silicon valley has a history of producing things that initially don't have a lot of restrictions that get a lot of traction that then turn all corporate and ste

Silicon valley has a history of producing things that initially don't have a lot of restrictions that get a lot of traction that then turn all corporate and sterile as soon as big money gets involved. Lack of fun is one reason. User generated content is risky. It needs moderation. Somebody might express themselves in ways that are inappropriate for the widest possible meaning of that word. And that might lead to legal consequences. Which adds cost. Fun and edgy things are typically bordering on inappropriate; or flat out inappropriate if you have no sense of humor. The difference is not relevant. If somebody might get offended, it's risky. Which makes the lawyers nervous. Another reason is the obsession with building walled gardens and claiming full ownership of everything inside those walls. It leads to locked down experiences where creativity is basically not welcome unless sanctioned from the top down. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. used to have APIs and an ecosystem of people building stuff on top of that. As they grew, all of that went away. Facebook is a good example as something that started out to enable some wildly inappropriate and immature behavior. Mark Zuckerberg actually started out building a platform for rating girls called facemash. Controversial, even at the time and it got him in trouble. Facebook is what he did next.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
The first point isn’t an argument for fun but for individualism, almost to an extremist extent. If you want to publish your thoughts for others to see you’re going to have to accept the fact that some people are just going to take it differently because it human experiences are diverse, and you must be mature enough to be accountable for what you say. It’s people’s problem that they see conflict with others as an inherent negative when the disagreement with others is what itself brews creativity, because it challenges your point of view. People criticize the media for being “biased” but then crave echo chambers of their own.
- pjc50 3y ago
  On Twitter it's not merely that you get a "different" interpretation, you have to deal with the most hostile interpretation possible of both your words and what you "didn't say". A little bit of disagreement is interesting; constant spurious repetitive negativity is exhausting and un-fun. Which is why people are leaving Twitter.
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
    Those are not very clear parameters as to what is allowable disagreement and what is not, and easily lends to supporting echo chambers.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Echo chambers are unavoidable. The particular problem the internet has (though other mediums quite often have also) is people arguing in bad faith. Lets say I'm against X which could be any number of things (religion, race, politics, sexual orientation, etc). Actually, lets say I hate any one of the people involved in the aforementioned categories, not just against. Do you think I'm going to have a rational disagreement on this in a manner where my mind could be changed by new information? Doesn't seem likely. Is my constant stream of bad faith arguments going to ruin the experience for everyone else? Seems very likely. This falls under the paradox of tolerance. Let the intolerant take over and you'll push out the tolerant that don't want to put up with their shit. The hard part, no I say the impossible part, is the demarcation between figuring out who is there just to be an asshole against the group and who is really having a discussion. Every person in the group will have a different definition and tolerance level.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        > The hard part, no I say the impossible part, is the demarcation between figuring out who is there just to be an asshole against the group and who is really having a discussion. E This is an illusion. All are there to have discussions. They, like you, have some expectations about how the conversation will go, and like you, they preemptively position themselves to avoid being humiliated with the fallacies the other will undoubtedly attack with. Someone from either side could break the cycle. But an outsider doing that only does so that he might be inducted into the group (he doesn't want this though, already has one), and an insider doing so would be a traitor to the group. Thus no one can speak honestly. But both engage, at least initially, in the hopes that something will happen to break the cycle for them, and become frustrated when the miracle doesn't occur.
- somedude895 3y ago
  > you must be mature enough to be accountable for what you say OP isn't talking about personal accountability but about platforms being afraid to lose advertising dollars or being sued and thus restricting the platforms.
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
    You’d lose advertising dollars just the same by establishing an ill reputation because of what you say, even without getting and losing a lawsuit.
- Fricken 3y ago
  The medium is the message. We are no longer in the literary age. The power is in the hands of the mob. You can make some carefully thought out post and try to be accountable for what you say. I can show up in your comment forum, shit all over everything and leave. In the old days you would've had to publish a book to get your message out, and if I saw it a bookstore it wouldn't register, I wouldn't pay money for it, and I wouldn't bother writing an angry letter to send to in the mail because it would have zero capacity to take you down a notch in a public forum. You're talking about old ideas from a more civilized age. Tribalism is back and in charge. The internet isn't here so that we can all get along and better understand one another's point of view. It's here so that we can take turns bashing one another.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    That’s not been my experience on HN, out of thousands of comments and interactions with hundreds of different users, maybe a total of a dozen turned out to be random ‘bashers’.
    - Fricken 3y ago
      That's how you know you're in an echo chamber. We're all here to pretend like it's still the early days of the internet, before it had come into it's own as a medium, when it was still a skeuomorphic throwback to the literary era.
      - avbanks 3y ago
        I completely disagree with your comment but I have no need to bash you.
      - hiatus 3y ago
        Why is the positive experience the echo chamber but the negative experience is a result of the inherent nature of the medium?
        Fricken 3y ago
- rockskon 3y ago
  The issue here, as it always is when censors argue that their methods are simply the will of the masses, is that individuals aren't being given the freedom to decide for themselves if they like content or not. It's always the censor that determines what content others are allowed to see. The censor makes the decision on behalf of everyone else and claims their views represent everyone's views and their tastes represent everyone's tastes.
jboggan 3y ago
Yik Yak was one of the funnest things to come out in the last decade but it was too wild and dangerous to be allowed to thrive.
- idontwantthis 3y ago
  You just reminded me of the time my house party made it onto Yik Yak in college. That was a wild night.
- Loughla 3y ago
  Oh holy shit, I forgot about that. I work in higher education. You cannot genuinely imagine the heartburn that app gave college administrators across the country. It was amazing. Like a wave of anxiety washed across the country as Deans and Vp's all saw the statistics for bullying and suicide wash across their consciousness.
- Aromasin 3y ago
  Damn, that's a memory unlocked there. I forgot it existed completely. It was huge during my university days, and led to some very entertaining posts about things happening around the campus. In hindsight though, a huge amount of the posts on there were misogynistic. I keenly remember "slut-spotting" being a trend, with people commenting on girls walking home still dressed up from the night before, telling people to look out for them. Led to a lot of jeering out of windows and the like. Plenty of racist threads also. Targeted cyberbullying too; calling out various people by name and publicly insulting them under anonymity. I distinctly remember having to console a friend who was in hysterics because someone posted a thread about something relatively harmless that she had done, and she was publicly shamed. It was an entertaining way to spend a few minutes at it's best, but at it's worst was a social weapon for a lot of people who shouldn't have had that level of reach nor anonymity.
  - avandekleut 3y ago
    Yep, that about sums up my experience with the app too. You could also remove any post automatically once it hit -5 points, so me and some friends got together and downvoted every new yak off the platform. People were big mad.
aCoreyJ 3y ago
At the end of the day they all have a profit motive and the most profitable thing they have found is ads. The type of advertisers allowed to advertise on social media, aka to lots of children, don't want to be next to anything controversial. But they have all done a terrible job of this, banning algorithmically people who have done nothing wrong (or in the case of X saying something that makes Elon mad) while allowing widespread truly harmful misinformation
jandrese 3y ago
Ultimately, there are always a few assholes that will ruin it for everybody else. This is why we can not have nice things. Every time there is a platform that touts its love of freedom and hatred of censorship it is flooded with neo-nazis and pedophiles.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  It’s not that the nazis are some outside group “invading” the platform—they are the existing, initial audience. Whenever someone decides they are tired of getting censored on Platform X and creates their own “Free speech alternative to Platform X”, who is the audience? Cast-offs from Platform X. In other words, everyone who got kicked off for being racist, sexist, homophonic nazis. These free speech alternatives will never have a wholesome membership list.
  - mikrl 3y ago
    >These free speech alternatives will never have a wholesome membership list Indeed, I’ve noticed with ‘rights’, that the very people fighting for them are invariably going to be on the side of some repugnant individuals. After all, the boundary of your right to do/say X will never be touched by average and inoffensive people. They will not push the limits. The people that do push the limits will be pushed back on by society, and then they lawyer up and take the fight to the legal system, and ultimately a Supreme Court who judges that “yea/nay you have the right to do/say X, and here are the clear demarcations”

rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago

The first point isn’t an argument for fun but for individualism, almost to an extremist extent. If you want to publish your thoughts for others to see you’re going to have to accept the fact that some people are just going to take it differently because it human experiences are diverse, and you must be mature enough to be accountable for what you say. It’s people’s problem that they see conflict with others as an inherent negative when the disagreement with others is what itself brews creativity, because it challenges your point of view. People criticize the media for being “biased” but then crave echo chambers of their own.

pjc50 3y ago
On Twitter it's not merely that you get a "different" interpretation, you have to deal with the most hostile interpretation possible of both your words and what you "didn't say". A little bit of disagreement is interesting; constant spurious repetitive negativity is exhausting and un-fun. Which is why people are leaving Twitter.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
  Those are not very clear parameters as to what is allowable disagreement and what is not, and easily lends to supporting echo chambers.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Echo chambers are unavoidable. The particular problem the internet has (though other mediums quite often have also) is people arguing in bad faith. Lets say I'm against X which could be any number of things (religion, race, politics, sexual orientation, etc). Actually, lets say I hate any one of the people involved in the aforementioned categories, not just against. Do you think I'm going to have a rational disagreement on this in a manner where my mind could be changed by new information? Doesn't seem likely. Is my constant stream of bad faith arguments going to ruin the experience for everyone else? Seems very likely. This falls under the paradox of tolerance. Let the intolerant take over and you'll push out the tolerant that don't want to put up with their shit. The hard part, no I say the impossible part, is the demarcation between figuring out who is there just to be an asshole against the group and who is really having a discussion. Every person in the group will have a different definition and tolerance level.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      > The hard part, no I say the impossible part, is the demarcation between figuring out who is there just to be an asshole against the group and who is really having a discussion. E This is an illusion. All are there to have discussions. They, like you, have some expectations about how the conversation will go, and like you, they preemptively position themselves to avoid being humiliated with the fallacies the other will undoubtedly attack with. Someone from either side could break the cycle. But an outsider doing that only does so that he might be inducted into the group (he doesn't want this though, already has one), and an insider doing so would be a traitor to the group. Thus no one can speak honestly. But both engage, at least initially, in the hopes that something will happen to break the cycle for them, and become frustrated when the miracle doesn't occur.
somedude895 3y ago
> you must be mature enough to be accountable for what you say OP isn't talking about personal accountability but about platforms being afraid to lose advertising dollars or being sued and thus restricting the platforms.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
  You’d lose advertising dollars just the same by establishing an ill reputation because of what you say, even without getting and losing a lawsuit.
Fricken 3y ago
The medium is the message. We are no longer in the literary age. The power is in the hands of the mob. You can make some carefully thought out post and try to be accountable for what you say. I can show up in your comment forum, shit all over everything and leave. In the old days you would've had to publish a book to get your message out, and if I saw it a bookstore it wouldn't register, I wouldn't pay money for it, and I wouldn't bother writing an angry letter to send to in the mail because it would have zero capacity to take you down a notch in a public forum. You're talking about old ideas from a more civilized age. Tribalism is back and in charge. The internet isn't here so that we can all get along and better understand one another's point of view. It's here so that we can take turns bashing one another.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  That’s not been my experience on HN, out of thousands of comments and interactions with hundreds of different users, maybe a total of a dozen turned out to be random ‘bashers’.
  - Fricken 3y ago
    That's how you know you're in an echo chamber. We're all here to pretend like it's still the early days of the internet, before it had come into it's own as a medium, when it was still a skeuomorphic throwback to the literary era.
    - avbanks 3y ago
      I completely disagree with your comment but I have no need to bash you.
    - hiatus 3y ago
      Why is the positive experience the echo chamber but the negative experience is a result of the inherent nature of the medium?
      - Fricken 3y ago
rockskon 3y ago
The issue here, as it always is when censors argue that their methods are simply the will of the masses, is that individuals aren't being given the freedom to decide for themselves if they like content or not. It's always the censor that determines what content others are allowed to see. The censor makes the decision on behalf of everyone else and claims their views represent everyone's views and their tastes represent everyone's tastes.

jboggan 3y ago

Yik Yak was one of the funnest things to come out in the last decade but it was too wild and dangerous to be allowed to thrive.

idontwantthis 3y ago
You just reminded me of the time my house party made it onto Yik Yak in college. That was a wild night.
Loughla 3y ago
Oh holy shit, I forgot about that. I work in higher education. You cannot genuinely imagine the heartburn that app gave college administrators across the country. It was amazing. Like a wave of anxiety washed across the country as Deans and Vp's all saw the statistics for bullying and suicide wash across their consciousness.
Aromasin 3y ago
Damn, that's a memory unlocked there. I forgot it existed completely. It was huge during my university days, and led to some very entertaining posts about things happening around the campus. In hindsight though, a huge amount of the posts on there were misogynistic. I keenly remember "slut-spotting" being a trend, with people commenting on girls walking home still dressed up from the night before, telling people to look out for them. Led to a lot of jeering out of windows and the like. Plenty of racist threads also. Targeted cyberbullying too; calling out various people by name and publicly insulting them under anonymity. I distinctly remember having to console a friend who was in hysterics because someone posted a thread about something relatively harmless that she had done, and she was publicly shamed. It was an entertaining way to spend a few minutes at it's best, but at it's worst was a social weapon for a lot of people who shouldn't have had that level of reach nor anonymity.
- avandekleut 3y ago
  Yep, that about sums up my experience with the app too. You could also remove any post automatically once it hit -5 points, so me and some friends got together and downvoted every new yak off the platform. People were big mad.

aCoreyJ 3y ago

At the end of the day they all have a profit motive and the most profitable thing they have found is ads. The type of advertisers allowed to advertise on social media, aka to lots of children, don't want to be next to anything controversial. But they have all done a terrible job of this, banning algorithmically people who have done nothing wrong (or in the case of X saying something that makes Elon mad) while allowing widespread truly harmful misinformation

jandrese 3y ago

Ultimately, there are always a few assholes that will ruin it for everybody else. This is why we can not have nice things. Every time there is a platform that touts its love of freedom and hatred of censorship it is flooded with neo-nazis and pedophiles.

ryandrake 3y ago
It’s not that the nazis are some outside group “invading” the platform—they are the existing, initial audience. Whenever someone decides they are tired of getting censored on Platform X and creates their own “Free speech alternative to Platform X”, who is the audience? Cast-offs from Platform X. In other words, everyone who got kicked off for being racist, sexist, homophonic nazis. These free speech alternatives will never have a wholesome membership list.
- mikrl 3y ago
  >These free speech alternatives will never have a wholesome membership list Indeed, I’ve noticed with ‘rights’, that the very people fighting for them are invariably going to be on the side of some repugnant individuals. After all, the boundary of your right to do/say X will never be touched by average and inoffensive people. They will not push the limits. The people that do push the limits will be pushed back on by society, and then they lawyer up and take the fight to the legal system, and ultimately a Supreme Court who judges that “yea/nay you have the right to do/say X, and here are the clear demarcations”