On occasion I have the impression that all my recent comments have been downvoted by 1 in a short span of time.

Not that HN karma matters, but it's very well possible that that is already going on.

Yep. There are a lot of HNers who abuse the voting system and leave no traces (no arguments, no reasons). It's quite a childish behavior.

The only civic discussion forum I know of is the extropy chat email list.

For the topics it covers, the discussion at SlateStarCodex.com and its matching reddit are of extremely high quality, both in terms of the thought that goes into comments, as well as the civility of participants.

HN users have to accrue a certain amount of karma and age before they can downvote comments. Thankfully.

Hacker News is no better than Reddit, it's just less noticeable because there's less transparency here.

Edit: Can't even post now. Saying this place is "no better than Reddit" may actually be a little insulting to Reddit.

Here's my comment from the Cloudflare thread, sitting at -4.

> But what's the end game? Do service providers have to morally support those who they provide service to? Because that's how things are looking.

And what do you know. That's exactly what's happening.

Someone in that thread, unironically, said that Google etc. had to allow Nazi's to use their services. And then immediately said "Whatever happened to "Don't be evil"?".

Apparently the concept that providing your services to Nazi's could be thought of as evil totally escaped their thoughts.

It seems like quite a lot of people have deeply internalized the opinion that "Free Speech" is an unalloyed good, and are confused by anyone who sees this as a matter of shades of gray.

I'd argue, the people looking at things in black and white are the ones' being ridiculous here. Is child porn free speech? Is a direct threat free speech? Is copyright infringment? etc. No matter how hardcore a free speech advocate you find, there's going to be a line for them. But apparently anyone who draws their line one step to the side of that is evil and/or stupid because that is the point where the slippery slope starts, conveniently just to the side of their own line, which is on firm and solid ground.

And would you draw that line so far toward censorship that you would ban a platform merely for not practicing censorship? (Gab)

Unless the platform that hosts it, has made the same uncompromising decision, then of course. It would be like hosting an app that freely declares it will host viruses on your platform that scans for viruses. They're telling you upfront that they have no intention of following your platform rules.

Not accidentally letting a few slip through, not being overwhelmed by scale and doing a crappy job, but as a point of principle not following the rules you are trying to enforce.

What about links to archive.org? Surely they're not an extremist organization.

the difficulty with shades of gray wrt to free speech is that what is intolerable is a matter of opinion and I don't trust ANYONE to make that decision for me.

free speech must be absolute, so yes, in this case it is black and white, sorry you don't see it that way.

um, why is this being downvoted? does anyone seriously want to live in a censored world? seriously? man, we're more doomed than I thought :(

Certainly, a lot of people want to live in a censored world, as long as they agree with the censors.

because... they can't handle being offended? are people really that delicate?

Not necessarily evil, but attempting to abridge their rights.

I don’t think that service providers have to suppport them. Just not find them morally entirely repugnant. There's quite a lot of ground between those two points.