8 ms·

I'm probably mis-understanding the implications but, IIUC, as it is, HN is moderated by dang (and others?) but still falls under 230 meaning HN is not responsib

by nox101 2y ago

I'm probably mis-understanding the implications but, IIUC, as it is, HN is moderated by dang (and others?) but still falls under 230 meaning HN is not responsible for what other users post here. With this ruling, HN is suddenly responsibly for all posts here specifically because of the moderation. So they have 2 options. (1) Stop the moderation so they can be safe under 230. Result, HN turns to 4chan. (2) enforce the moderation to a much higher degree by say, requiring non-anon accounts and TOS that make each poster responsible for their own content and/or manually approve every comment. I'm not even sure how you'd run a website with user content if you wanted to moderate that content and still avoid being liable for illegal content.

jtriangle 2y ago
(1) 4chin is too dumb to use HN, and there's no image posting so, I doubt they'd even be interested in raiding us (2) I've never seen anything illegal here, I'm sure it happens, and it gets dealt with quickly enough that it's not really ever going to be a problem if things continue as they have been. They may lose 230 protection, sure, but probably not really a problem here. For Facebook et al, it's going to be an issue, no doubt. I suppose they could drop their algos and bring back the chronological feeds, but, my guess is that wouldn't be profitable given that ad-tech and content feeds are one in the same at this point. I'd also assume that "curation" is the sticking point here, if a platform can claim that they do not curate content, they probably keep 230 protection.
- wredue 2y ago
  Certain boards most definitely raid various HN threads. Specifically, every political or science thread that makes it, is raided by 4chan. 4chan also regularly pushes anti/science and anti-education agenda threads to the top here, along with posts from various alt-right figures on occasion.
  - jtriangle 2y ago
    search: site:4chan.org news.ycombinator.com Seems pretty sparse to me, and from a casual perusal, I haven't seen any actual calls to raiding anything here, it's more of a reference where articles/posts have happened, and people talking about them. Remember, not everyone who you disagree with comes from 4chan, some of them probably work with you, you might even be friends with them, and they're perfectly serviceable people with lives, hopes, dreams, same as yours, they simply think differently than you.
    - wredue 2y ago
      lol dude. Nobody said that 4chan links are posted to HN, just that 4chan definitely raids HN. 4chan is very well known for brigading. It is also well known that using 4chan as well as a number of other locations, such as discord, to post links for brigades are an extremely common thing that the alt-right does to try to raise the “validity” of their statements. I also did not claim that only these opinions come from 4chan. Nice strawman bro. Also, my friends do not believe these things. I do not make a habit of being friends with people that believe in genociding others purely because of sexual orientation or identity.
      - jtriangle 2y ago
        Go ahead and type that search query into google and see what happens. Also the alt-right is a giant threat, if you categorize everyone right of you as alt-right, which seems to be the standard definition. That's not how I've chosen to live, and I find that it's peaceful to choose something more reasonable. The body politic is cancer on the individual, and on the list of things that are important in life, it's not truly important. With enough introspection you'll find that the tendency to latch onto politics, or anything politics-adjacent, comes from an overall lack of agency over the other aspects of life you truly care about. It's a vicious cycle. You have a finite amount of mental energy, and the more you spend on worthless things, the less you have to spend on things that matter, which leads to you latching further on to the worthless things, and having even less to spend on things that matter. It's a race to the bottom that has only losers. If you're looking for genocide, that's the genocide of the modern mind, and you're one foot in the grave already. You can choose to step out now and probably be ok, but it's going to be uncomfortable to do so. That's all not to say there aren't horrid, problem-causing individuals out in the world, there certainly are, it's just that the less you fixate on them, the more you realize that they're such an extreme minority that you feel silly fixating on them in the first place. That goes for anyone that anyone deems 'horrid and problem-causing' mind you, not just whatever idea you have of that class of person.
- Dr_Incelheimer 2y ago
  >4chin is too dumb to use HN I don't frequent 4cuck, I use soyjak.party which I guess from your perspective is even worse, but there are of plenty of smart people on the 'cuck thoughbeit, like the gemmy /lit/ schizo. I think you would feel right at home in /sci/.
supriyo-biswas 2y ago
Not sure about the downvotes on this comment; but what parent says has precedent in Cubby Inc. vs Compuserve Inc.[1] and this is one of the reasons Section 230 came about to be in the first place. HN is also heavily moderated with moderators actively trying to promote thoughtful comments over other, less thoughtful or incendiary contributions by downranking them (which is entirely separate from flagging or voting; and unlike what people like to believe, this place relies more on moderator actions as opposed to voting patterns to maintain its vibe.) I couldn't possibly see this working with the removal of Section 230. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.
- singleshot_ 2y ago
  If I upvote something illegal, my liability was the same before, during, and after 230 exists, right?
  - hn_acker 2y ago
    Theoretically, your liability is the same because the First Amendment is what absolves you of liability for someone else's speech. Section 230 provides an avenue for early dismissal in such a case if you get sued; without Section 230, you'll risk having to fight the lawsuit on the merits, which will require spending more time (more fees).
  - robbiewxyz 2y ago
    I'd probably like the upvote itself to be considered "speech". The practical effect of upvoting is to endorse, together with the site's moderators and algorithm-curators, the comment to be shown to a wider audience. Along those lines then then an upvote i.e. endorsement would be protected, up to any point where it violated one of the free speech exceptions, e.g. incitement.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
> With this ruling, HN is suddenly responsibly for all posts here specifically because of the moderation. I think this is a mistaken understanding of the ruling. In this case, TikTok decided, with no other context, to make a personalized recommendation to a user who visited their recommendation page. On HN, your front page is not different from my front page. (Indeed, there is no personalized recommendation page on HN, as far as I'm aware.)
- crummy 2y ago
  > The Court held that a platform’s algorithm that reflects “editorial judgments” about “compiling the third-party speech it wants in the way it wants” is the platform’s own “expressive product” and is therefore protected by the First Amendment. I don't see how this is about personalization. HN has an algorithm that shows what it wants in the way it wants.
  - wk_end 2y ago
    It’d be interesting to know what constitutes an “algorithm”. Does a message board sorting by “most recent” count as one?
    - saratogacx 2y ago
      > algorithm that reflects “editorial judgments” I don't think timestamps are, in any way, construed editorial judgement. They are a content agnostic related attribute.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - srj 2y ago
        What about filtering spam? Or showing the local weather / news headlines?
        2y ago
spamizbad 2y ago
I feel like the end result of path #1 is that your site just becomes overrun with spams and scams. See also: mail, telephones.
- aftbit 2y ago
  Yeah, no moderation leads to spams, scams, rampant hate, and CSAM. I spent all of an hour on Voat when it was in its heyday and it mostly literal Nazis calling for the extermination of undesirables. The normies just stayed on moderated Reddit.
  - redeeman 2y ago
    voat wasnt exactly a single place, any more than reddit is
    - snapcaster 2y ago
      Were there non KKK/nazi/qanon whatever subvoats (or whatever they call them?) the one time i visited the site every single post on the frontpage was alt right nonsense
      - tzs 2y ago
        Yes. There were a ton of them for various categories of sex drawings, mostly in the style common in Japanese comics and cartoons.
      - autoexec 2y ago
        It was the people who were chased out of other websites that drove much of their traffic so it's no surprise that their content got the front page. It's a shame that they scared so many other people away and downvoted other perspectives because it made diversity difficult.
      - redeeman 2y ago
        there was a whole lot of stuff that very judgemental people just never got to see, blinded by rage of wrongthink that they would gladly sweep all the others away to get some victory over something that will still just be somewhere else. I enjoyed the communities around farming, homesteading, homeschooling of kids, classic litterature etc... but oh no, someone said some naughty words? lets shut it down.
wredue 2y ago
Nah. HN is not the same as these others. TikTok. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. All of these have their algorithms specifically curated to try to keep you angry. YouTube outright ignores your blocks every couple months, and no matter how many people dropping n-bombs you report and block, it never endingly pushes more and more. These company know that their algorithms are harmful and they push them anyway. They absolutely should have liability for what their algorithm pushes.
akira2501 2y ago
There's moderation to manage disruption to a service. There's editorial control to manage the actual content on a service. HN engages in the former but not the latter. The big three engage in the latter.
- closeparen 2y ago
  HN engages in the latter. For example, user votes are weighted based on their alignment with the moderation team's view of good content.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    I don't understand your explanation. Do you mean just voting itself? That's not controlled or managed by HN. That's just more "user generated content." That posts get hidden or flagged due to thresholding is non-discriminatory and not _individually_ controlled by the staff here. Or.. are you suggesting there's more to how this works? Is dang watching votes and then making decisions based on those votes? "Editorial control" is more of a term of art and has a narrower definition then you're allowing for.
    - empressplay 2y ago
      There's things like 'second chance' where the editorial team can re-up posts they feel didn't get a fair shake the first time around, sometimes if a post gets too 'hot' they will cool it down -- all of this is understandable but unfortunately does mean they are actively moderating content and thus are responsible for all of it.
    - krapp 2y ago
      Dang has been open about voting being only one part of the way HN works, and that manual moderator intervention does occur. They will downweigh the votes of "problem" accounts, manually adjust the order of the frontpage, and do whatever they feel necessary to maintain a high signal to noise ratio.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
tboyd47 2y ago
Under Judge Matey's interpretation of Section 230, I don't even think option 1 would remain on the table. He includes every act except mere "hosting" as part of publisher liability.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
itishappy 2y ago
4chan is actually moderated too.
pointnatu 2y ago
Freedom of speech, not reach of their personal curation preferences, narrative shaping due to confirmation bias and survivorship bias. Tech is in the put them on scales to increase their signal, decrease others based upon some hokey story of academic and free market genius. The pro-science crowd (which includes me fwiw) seems incapable of providing a proof any given scientist is that important. Same old social politics norms inflate some deflate others and we confirm our survival means we special. Ones education is vacuous prestige given physics applies equally; oh you did the math! Yeah I just tell the computer to do it. Oh you memorized the circumlocutions and dialectic of some long dead physicist. Outstanding. There’s a lot of ego driven banal classist nonsense in tech and science. At the end of the day just meat suits with the same general human condition.
coryrc 2y ago
2) Require confirmation you are a real person (check ID) and attach accounts per person. The commercial Internet has to follow the laws they're currently ignoring and the non-commercial Internet can do what they choose (because of being untraceable).
jojobas 2y ago
> Result, HN turns to 4chan. As if it was something bad. 4chan has /g and it's absolutely awesome.
- 71bw 2y ago
  Nuff said. Underneath the ever-lasting political cesspool from /pol/ and... _specific_ atmosphere, it's still one of the best places to visit for tech-based discussion.
pdpi 2y ago
Section 230 hasn't changed or been revoked or anything, so, from what I understand, manual moderation is perfectly fine, as long as that is what it is: moderation. What the ruling says is that "recommended" content and personalised "for you" pages are themselves speech by the platform, rather than moderation, and are therefore not under the purview of Section 230. For HN, Dang's efforts at keeping civility don't interfere with Section 230. The part relevant to this ruling is whatever system takes recency and upvotes, and ranks the front page posts and comments within each post.
doikor 2y ago
4chan is moderated and the moderation is different on each board with the only real global moderation rule being "no illegal stuff". In addition to that the site does curate the content it shows you using an algorithm even though it is a very basic one (the thread with last reply goes to the top of the page and threads older then X are removed automatically.) For example the qanon conspiracy nuts got moderated out of /pol/ for arguing in bad faith/just being too crazy to actually have any kind of conversation with and they fled to another board (8chan and later 8kun) that has even less moderation.
- commandlinefan 2y ago
  > 4chan is moderated Yep, 4chan isn't bad because "people I disagree with can talk there", it's bad because the interface is awful and they can't attract enough advertisers to meet their hosting demands.

by nox101 2y ago

jtriangle 2y ago

(1) 4chin is too dumb to use HN, and there's no image posting so, I doubt they'd even be interested in raiding us (2) I've never seen anything illegal here, I'm sure it happens, and it gets dealt with quickly enough that it's not really ever going to be a problem if things continue as they have been. They may lose 230 protection, sure, but probably not really a problem here. For Facebook et al, it's going to be an issue, no doubt. I suppose they could drop their algos and bring back the chronological feeds, but, my guess is that wouldn't be profitable given that ad-tech and content feeds are one in the same at this point. I'd also assume that "curation" is the sticking point here, if a platform can claim that they do not curate content, they probably keep 230 protection.

wredue 2y ago
Certain boards most definitely raid various HN threads. Specifically, every political or science thread that makes it, is raided by 4chan. 4chan also regularly pushes anti/science and anti-education agenda threads to the top here, along with posts from various alt-right figures on occasion.
- jtriangle 2y ago
  search: site:4chan.org news.ycombinator.com Seems pretty sparse to me, and from a casual perusal, I haven't seen any actual calls to raiding anything here, it's more of a reference where articles/posts have happened, and people talking about them. Remember, not everyone who you disagree with comes from 4chan, some of them probably work with you, you might even be friends with them, and they're perfectly serviceable people with lives, hopes, dreams, same as yours, they simply think differently than you.
  - wredue 2y ago
    lol dude. Nobody said that 4chan links are posted to HN, just that 4chan definitely raids HN. 4chan is very well known for brigading. It is also well known that using 4chan as well as a number of other locations, such as discord, to post links for brigades are an extremely common thing that the alt-right does to try to raise the “validity” of their statements. I also did not claim that only these opinions come from 4chan. Nice strawman bro. Also, my friends do not believe these things. I do not make a habit of being friends with people that believe in genociding others purely because of sexual orientation or identity.
    - jtriangle 2y ago
      Go ahead and type that search query into google and see what happens. Also the alt-right is a giant threat, if you categorize everyone right of you as alt-right, which seems to be the standard definition. That's not how I've chosen to live, and I find that it's peaceful to choose something more reasonable. The body politic is cancer on the individual, and on the list of things that are important in life, it's not truly important. With enough introspection you'll find that the tendency to latch onto politics, or anything politics-adjacent, comes from an overall lack of agency over the other aspects of life you truly care about. It's a vicious cycle. You have a finite amount of mental energy, and the more you spend on worthless things, the less you have to spend on things that matter, which leads to you latching further on to the worthless things, and having even less to spend on things that matter. It's a race to the bottom that has only losers. If you're looking for genocide, that's the genocide of the modern mind, and you're one foot in the grave already. You can choose to step out now and probably be ok, but it's going to be uncomfortable to do so. That's all not to say there aren't horrid, problem-causing individuals out in the world, there certainly are, it's just that the less you fixate on them, the more you realize that they're such an extreme minority that you feel silly fixating on them in the first place. That goes for anyone that anyone deems 'horrid and problem-causing' mind you, not just whatever idea you have of that class of person.
Dr_Incelheimer 2y ago
>4chin is too dumb to use HN I don't frequent 4cuck, I use soyjak.party which I guess from your perspective is even worse, but there are of plenty of smart people on the 'cuck thoughbeit, like the gemmy /lit/ schizo. I think you would feel right at home in /sci/.

supriyo-biswas 2y ago

Not sure about the downvotes on this comment; but what parent says has precedent in Cubby Inc. vs Compuserve Inc.[1] and this is one of the reasons Section 230 came about to be in the first place. HN is also heavily moderated with moderators actively trying to promote thoughtful comments over other, less thoughtful or incendiary contributions by downranking them (which is entirely separate from flagging or voting; and unlike what people like to believe, this place relies more on moderator actions as opposed to voting patterns to maintain its vibe.) I couldn't possibly see this working with the removal of Section 230. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.

singleshot_ 2y ago
If I upvote something illegal, my liability was the same before, during, and after 230 exists, right?
- hn_acker 2y ago
  Theoretically, your liability is the same because the First Amendment is what absolves you of liability for someone else's speech. Section 230 provides an avenue for early dismissal in such a case if you get sued; without Section 230, you'll risk having to fight the lawsuit on the merits, which will require spending more time (more fees).
- robbiewxyz 2y ago
  I'd probably like the upvote itself to be considered "speech". The practical effect of upvoting is to endorse, together with the site's moderators and algorithm-curators, the comment to be shown to a wider audience. Along those lines then then an upvote i.e. endorsement would be protected, up to any point where it violated one of the free speech exceptions, e.g. incitement.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago

> With this ruling, HN is suddenly responsibly for all posts here specifically because of the moderation. I think this is a mistaken understanding of the ruling. In this case, TikTok decided, with no other context, to make a personalized recommendation to a user who visited their recommendation page. On HN, your front page is not different from my front page. (Indeed, there is no personalized recommendation page on HN, as far as I'm aware.)

crummy 2y ago
> The Court held that a platform’s algorithm that reflects “editorial judgments” about “compiling the third-party speech it wants in the way it wants” is the platform’s own “expressive product” and is therefore protected by the First Amendment. I don't see how this is about personalization. HN has an algorithm that shows what it wants in the way it wants.
- wk_end 2y ago
  It’d be interesting to know what constitutes an “algorithm”. Does a message board sorting by “most recent” count as one?
  - saratogacx 2y ago
    > algorithm that reflects “editorial judgments” I don't think timestamps are, in any way, construed editorial judgement. They are a content agnostic related attribute.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - srj 2y ago
      What about filtering spam? Or showing the local weather / news headlines?
      - 2y ago

spamizbad 2y ago

I feel like the end result of path #1 is that your site just becomes overrun with spams and scams. See also: mail, telephones.

aftbit 2y ago
Yeah, no moderation leads to spams, scams, rampant hate, and CSAM. I spent all of an hour on Voat when it was in its heyday and it mostly literal Nazis calling for the extermination of undesirables. The normies just stayed on moderated Reddit.
- redeeman 2y ago
  voat wasnt exactly a single place, any more than reddit is
  - snapcaster 2y ago
    Were there non KKK/nazi/qanon whatever subvoats (or whatever they call them?) the one time i visited the site every single post on the frontpage was alt right nonsense
    - tzs 2y ago
      Yes. There were a ton of them for various categories of sex drawings, mostly in the style common in Japanese comics and cartoons.
    - autoexec 2y ago
      It was the people who were chased out of other websites that drove much of their traffic so it's no surprise that their content got the front page. It's a shame that they scared so many other people away and downvoted other perspectives because it made diversity difficult.
    - redeeman 2y ago
      there was a whole lot of stuff that very judgemental people just never got to see, blinded by rage of wrongthink that they would gladly sweep all the others away to get some victory over something that will still just be somewhere else. I enjoyed the communities around farming, homesteading, homeschooling of kids, classic litterature etc... but oh no, someone said some naughty words? lets shut it down.

wredue 2y ago

Nah. HN is not the same as these others. TikTok. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. All of these have their algorithms specifically curated to try to keep you angry. YouTube outright ignores your blocks every couple months, and no matter how many people dropping n-bombs you report and block, it never endingly pushes more and more. These company know that their algorithms are harmful and they push them anyway. They absolutely should have liability for what their algorithm pushes.

akira2501 2y ago

There's moderation to manage disruption to a service. There's editorial control to manage the actual content on a service. HN engages in the former but not the latter. The big three engage in the latter.

closeparen 2y ago
HN engages in the latter. For example, user votes are weighted based on their alignment with the moderation team's view of good content.
- akira2501 2y ago
  I don't understand your explanation. Do you mean just voting itself? That's not controlled or managed by HN. That's just more "user generated content." That posts get hidden or flagged due to thresholding is non-discriminatory and not _individually_ controlled by the staff here. Or.. are you suggesting there's more to how this works? Is dang watching votes and then making decisions based on those votes? "Editorial control" is more of a term of art and has a narrower definition then you're allowing for.
  - empressplay 2y ago
    There's things like 'second chance' where the editorial team can re-up posts they feel didn't get a fair shake the first time around, sometimes if a post gets too 'hot' they will cool it down -- all of this is understandable but unfortunately does mean they are actively moderating content and thus are responsible for all of it.
  - krapp 2y ago
    Dang has been open about voting being only one part of the way HN works, and that manual moderator intervention does occur. They will downweigh the votes of "problem" accounts, manually adjust the order of the frontpage, and do whatever they feel necessary to maintain a high signal to noise ratio.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago

tboyd47 2y ago

Under Judge Matey's interpretation of Section 230, I don't even think option 1 would remain on the table. He includes every act except mere "hosting" as part of publisher liability.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

itishappy 2y ago

4chan is actually moderated too.

pointnatu 2y ago

Freedom of speech, not reach of their personal curation preferences, narrative shaping due to confirmation bias and survivorship bias. Tech is in the put them on scales to increase their signal, decrease others based upon some hokey story of academic and free market genius. The pro-science crowd (which includes me fwiw) seems incapable of providing a proof any given scientist is that important. Same old social politics norms inflate some deflate others and we confirm our survival means we special. Ones education is vacuous prestige given physics applies equally; oh you did the math! Yeah I just tell the computer to do it. Oh you memorized the circumlocutions and dialectic of some long dead physicist. Outstanding. There’s a lot of ego driven banal classist nonsense in tech and science. At the end of the day just meat suits with the same general human condition.

coryrc 2y ago

2) Require confirmation you are a real person (check ID) and attach accounts per person. The commercial Internet has to follow the laws they're currently ignoring and the non-commercial Internet can do what they choose (because of being untraceable).

jojobas 2y ago

> Result, HN turns to 4chan. As if it was something bad. 4chan has /g and it's absolutely awesome.

71bw 2y ago
Nuff said. Underneath the ever-lasting political cesspool from /pol/ and... _specific_ atmosphere, it's still one of the best places to visit for tech-based discussion.

pdpi 2y ago

Section 230 hasn't changed or been revoked or anything, so, from what I understand, manual moderation is perfectly fine, as long as that is what it is: moderation. What the ruling says is that "recommended" content and personalised "for you" pages are themselves speech by the platform, rather than moderation, and are therefore not under the purview of Section 230. For HN, Dang's efforts at keeping civility don't interfere with Section 230. The part relevant to this ruling is whatever system takes recency and upvotes, and ranks the front page posts and comments within each post.

doikor 2y ago

4chan is moderated and the moderation is different on each board with the only real global moderation rule being "no illegal stuff". In addition to that the site does curate the content it shows you using an algorithm even though it is a very basic one (the thread with last reply goes to the top of the page and threads older then X are removed automatically.) For example the qanon conspiracy nuts got moderated out of /pol/ for arguing in bad faith/just being too crazy to actually have any kind of conversation with and they fled to another board (8chan and later 8kun) that has even less moderation.

commandlinefan 2y ago
> 4chan is moderated Yep, 4chan isn't bad because "people I disagree with can talk there", it's bad because the interface is awful and they can't attract enough advertisers to meet their hosting demands.