Re:Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
by repolfx on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @01:57PM
(#21465760)
It's easy to write laws such that totally blocking automation is allowed, totally blocking human written content is 'censorship', and categorising/hiding by default/ranking content is allowed.
Yes, this doesn't deal with things like "is YouTube ranking biased" but it's a start. You posit that sites would be obliged to publish onslaughts, but many spam filters are pretty good at filtering such attacks. For instance that's where CAPTCHAs came from (there are better technical solutions than CAPTCHAs but you get the idea).
Re:Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
by jerf on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @03:05PM
(#21466572)
I don't see any point in engaging with someone working so hard to turn everything I say into something as absurd as possible. If you can't understand the basics of something like "scale matters" without immediately twisting it into "but why are you ignoring scale so hard?", there's no meeting of the minds to be had here.
Though for the benefits of others, I'd point out that a careful reading of my post reveals that I did write something that implied strongly that small forums have more freedom in their spam blocking than large ones do. The idea that I'm obligating websites to never filter anything is some bizarre idea klyrs has gotten a hold of and apparently doesn't plan on letting go of.
I listed examples including "wikis" and "social media sites" which categorically contain the largest websites in the world. You'll find websites of all orders of magnitude from tens to millions of users -- where do you draw that line? But more importantly, are you under the impression that large-scale sites are somehow immune spammers?
> As a pragmatist on this matter, I believe the solution here is scale. The control I have over a phpBB forum is that if I don't like their spam policy, I can leave, and either join another or form my own.
I'm not understanding something here. You think that it's okay for spammers to implement a "heckler's veto" by de-facto shutting down every single niche website that (by law, presumably) accepts/rebroadcasts any and all submitted content -- that you'll be able to "vote with your feet" and move/create a site or forum that will somehow be immune to this onslaught? At what point is "scale" the answer? Bigger is better?
> As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced that something the size of Facebook can actually work in the long term [1].
I'm suffering whiplash. You gotta help me here. You're happy to feed small websites to the spamwolves, yes? But you're not convinced that big websites are good either. Do we just cancel the entire internet?
I'll grant that I'd probably get more work done.