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The main issue for me is the size of our platforms. If the owner of a platform tries to enforce a set of virtues, it will always be seen as censorship by a fra
by biophysboy 11mo ago
The main issue for me is the size of our platforms.
If the owner of a platform tries to enforce a set of virtues, it will always be seen as censorship by a fraction of its users. That fraction will increase as the user base increases, as the alternatives diminish, and as the owners govern with more impunity.
I personally think these loud users are immature, disrespectful, anonymous cowards, but my opinions are irrelevant — the important thing is that large platforms are politically unstable.
The solution to this is to fragment the internet. Unfortunately, this is incompatible with the information economies of scale that underpin the US economy. In my opinion, our insanity is an externality of the information sector, much like obesity for staple goods or carbon dioxide for energy.
I don’t agree with these individualized how-to guides. I can turn my phone off and go outside, but I still have to live in a world informed by social-media sentiment.
- baxuz 11mo agoNah, the solution is deanonymization. People with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies should not be given a safe space.
- EdgeExplorer 11mo agoFacebook has a real name policy and is a prime example of internet-fueled insanity. Why does deanonymization not help Facebook be a more positive place?
- piker 11mo agoBecause Facebook monetizes the engagement of its formerly reasonable users by selling that engagement to spam bot farms?
- biophysboy 11mo agoTo tie it to my own view, I don’t think deanonymization has any effect if the name is meaningless to 99.9% of the community. For every person fired for posts, there are 10000 others who are not.
- jimt1234 11mo agoFor every person fired for posts, there's a lucrative Fox News commentator gig.
- array_key_first 11mo agoIf companies really wanted to fire people for posts, they would start with firing people for vaguely anti-capital sentiment. Not saying racist things or whatever. We need to be careful what we ask for. Who is effectively doing the censorship matters. Powerful people are probably not going to be censoring based on 'good morals' - because they themselves do not have good morals.
- bandofthehawk 11mo agoDoes that also apply to people living under oppressive governments? Anonymity can be a useful tool for sharing information that those in power don't want released, for example whistle blowing.
- ryandv 11mo ago[flagged]
- cindyllm 11mo ago[dead]
- dartharva 11mo agoA woman wearing anything but a burqa in an extremist Islamic society would be popularly categorized as one of the "people with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies". So according to you liberal women in Iran, Pakistan, Sudan etc should not be given a safe space, is it?
- cowboylowrez 11mo agofreedom gets messy, authoritarian governments that rule with an iron fist seem to have things all sorted out and are very reassuring to certain types of people.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- elcapitan 11mo agoSo that people with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies who are in power can come back at the de-anonymized people. Yeah, thanks.
- stronglikedan 11mo agoIf anyone should be given a safe space, then everyone should be given a safe space.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- anonbgone 11mo agoYou said it brother! We should make everyone who disagrees with baxuz where name tags on their chest in the real world too. So we can know who they are. We can even put the names on a bright yellow six sided star. That way everyone can see them clearly.
- hat_monger 11mo ago[dead]
- hexator 11mo ago"enforce a set of virtues" is a weird way of saying "enforcing basic decency". Let's be clear here, people who are rightfully banned are always going to complain. Our opinions as the majority who DO want decent conversations online are not irrelevant. We should not give those people equal weight to those facing actual censorship. Fragmenting the internet will never get rid of the problem that moderation needs to happen.
- biophysboy 11mo agoTo be clear, if I were in charge, there would be significantly more banning and moderation on all platforms. I am arguing moderation is more politically feasible in small communities, not that is any more or less ethical.
- hexator 11mo ago"virtues" is just a loaded word now unfortunately.
- biophysboy 11mo agoLet’s bring it back! I think being honest is good!
- nradov 11mo agoWhat is basic decency? Is it indecent to advocate for atheism or if a women posts a picture of herself not wearing a burka? Many people in certain countries would say so. Personally I think those people are insane, and that maximal freedom of expression is the most important human right, but the fundamental problem is that there is no consensus on what constitutes basic decency.
- hexator 11mo agoI'm not talking about cultural differences. I'm talking about people simply being assholes online. You will always have a group of people complaining about the rules, that is inevitable.
- nradov 11mo agoA better solution to this would be to fragment within social media platforms. Allow users to post any content that's legal within their local jurisdiction. And give other users easy tools to create their own "filter bubbles" so that they don't see content which they personally consider insane or offensive. This would allow the social media platforms to sidestep political debates about censorship.
- biophysboy 11mo agoI have wondered if the long term trajectory of social media is as a locally governed utility, similar to energy or water. I would love a boring page landlocked to my neighborhood. Obviously there would the NextDoor "Karen" issue, that would need to be addressed somehow...
- hedgeho 11mo agoSounds like bluesky
- Karrot_Kream 11mo agoThen you get the other side of this problem, the echo chamber effect. If people self sort they'll eventually end up in social circles that are completely illegible from the realm of physical politics, which leads to a political instability of a different kind. It's a hard problem. I think multi armed bandit based algorithms can help. Bluesky is a sort of "live" example of self filtering and it ends up creating a lot of fractional purity politics over which filter bubble is the just/moral filter bubble.