If you don't want democracy, your options are monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy or tyranny. There are two sides to every coin.
He did accurately described dynamic on youtube and some forums I used to read too. As in, that is literally how it played out.
Just because someone 2500 years ago said something that could be framed as something sort of similar does not make his argument false. Besides, ancient societies did a lot of social controll too.
It seems having a relatively small user base with specialized knowledge on selective topics on a site designed for balanced discussion (i.e. not twitter) is far more important to quality of discussion than moderators.
Trying to discuss important things over Twitter and Youtube comments seems like trying to have a logical conversation in a riot/mob -- there's too much noise, too many people, and it was never designed for that in the first place.
This is false... There is tons of high quality content on YouTube. PBS digital studios, for example, has several fantastic channels. The comments on those videos are generally pretty good as well.
That's not too say that much of YouTube isn't just utter crap or even sometimes harmful. But there is good content if you look in the right places and get the algorithms churning down the right paths.
charlesism, you are blatantly promoting an agenda of censorship. One should not behave well due to the threat of punishment but by virtue of virtue.
You appear to stand against everything of value in the West. There are corporations and special interest groups trying to influence the narrative in reddit and even here in order to further reduce online freedoms and to establish the official list of forbidden thoughts.
Furthermore, The Atlantic has a long number of articles promoting globalism and the destruction of nation-states. A true free market of ideas requires anonymity. Who is going to help you when rampant corruption emerges in organizations such as the United Nations (a known harbor for individuals involved in child traffic scandals)? Remember the gamergate fiasco?
People all over the world are angry, and it is not their fault entirely - overpopulation and resource depletion need to be dealt with. But why doesn't anyone seem care about raising the bar on education, not just in terms of skill sets but also morality and long-term thinking?
> you are blatantly promoting an agenda of censorship.
> You appear to stand against everything of value in the West
> The Atlantic has a long number of articles promoting globalism
> and the destruction of nation-states.
> People all over the world are angry, and it is not their fault entirely
And by the way, are you familiar with the writings of Richard Coudenhove Kalergi, Practical Idealism ?
http://balder.org/judea/Richard-Coudenhove-Kalergi-Practical...
EDIT: care to explain the downvotes?
The greatest feature of the United States of America is that it was never a nation state.
Our problems aren't created by uneducated people, they're created by educated people who are taking advantage of uneducated people. Removing that step from the equation makes their job easier, not harder.
One problem wit the United States is that the technical professions have let themselves be so marginalized. The Deep Water Horizon disaster would not have happened if the engineers had as much power as the managers.
This is my point, the technical class in the United States doesn't realize it should have more political power. Scientists get kicked around too much.
Any new country should see what happened in the United States and give more power to its technical class. This would be more of a meritocracy.
This cuts both ways. See what happens in states where the border does not respect these local realities, for example where you have sunni led by shia or the other way around. Or look at Africa where Western powers drew lines on maps without respecting ethnicity.
Nation state is one form of decentralization, letting people govern themselves how they want.
Though experiment: imagine that there was a single global state, with one set of laws and institutions. How do you think that would work out?
An overreaching organization without a face for accountability is prone to disaster, as recent decades have shown. As a curiosity, the United Nations have had a former Nazi at its head. This situation was only rectified thanks to the United States.
https://unbrigandage.wordpress.com/2013/12/16/nazi-at-the-un...
The internet and Usenet did OK without moderation until Eternal September and the invention of SPAM, when internet culture started to die. RIP. Before that a new arrival was expected to figure out netiquette, and everyone else would behave accordingly.
Ever since then there has been an fairly steady slide. The arrival of astroturfing corporate and special interest groups, trolls, and platforms that assist the amplification of effect by actively seeking to avoid any moderation has just intensified things. Those places without moderation deviate to lowest common denominator with astounding speed. We've seen it time and time again, and as a result many sites have closed down their discussion areas entirely. See reddit subs with and without active heavy moderation. Moderating does not rule out anonymity, nor should it.
Without moderation commercial interests, political groups and trolls will ultimately ruin all locations that attempt to allow reasonable discussion as it is not in those group's interests to see a virtue in being virtuous.
The few places left where you can have reasonable discussions, including on controversial topics, are those that moderate hard. They don't censor.
Moderation is keeping people on topic of the forum, killing spam, trolls and sockpuppets, removing abuse and so forth, and trying to keep things on the rails and civil. Including banning trouble makers. Rather like dang does around here. That's not censorship, it's attempting to avoid anarchy. Neither is limiting the range of topics the forum or platform wants. Standards and extent will vary depending on the aims of the site.
Censorship is suppressing a view, even if it follows the standards and allowed topics of the forum. Legal censorship is a little more complex as standards vary between countries.
Having a post removed because it's spam, abusive or is off-topic is not censorship, which was the point the GP was erroneously trying to make.
Soft-censorship and derailing is done on purpose to censor certain topics which go against the establishment status quo. Reddit is fertile with such examples. If someone is making a comment which does not bode well to those in power, it is common for the thread to be sunken with low-class behavior and baits in order to shut down valid discussion by forcing an emergence of rule-breaking content.
That is a far more greater threat.
How do you propose to mitigate that?
That's exactly what censors say
Any site today that doesn't have iron-clad moderation (like this one!) devolves into an inhumane freak show.