All moderation is censorship, to some degree. Even a voting system like HN's has censorship-like qualities: it is specifically designed to make unpopular comments less visible than popular ones. And that is fine, I wouldn't want to only have forums or social media with zero moderation.

Censorship only becomes a problem when it is _unavoidable_, that is, you cannot choose to live outside of some entity's censorship influence. This is where things get complicated when you have giant entities like Facebook or Twitter, which are for many people difficult to avoid (and there certainly isn't an alternative to them).

The problem arises when these entities need to choose which messages to show you. Even without putting any conscious bias in this algorithm, there is a system there which prioritizes some messages over others in a completely opaque way, which is often game-able (bad-faith actors can abuse the system to spread their propaganda, for instance). So moderation is not merely necessary but _unavoidable_, simply because there is more content than you can be presented with, and unfortunately the huge power of moderating large social media networks rests in the hands of a handful of engineers.

Decentralization is an interesting solution here because it would make the social graph and the recommender system separate entities, with clients being able to choose which recommender/moderation system they subscribe to. The need for censorship wouldn't be gone, but with people being able to choose their own censor, the massive power imbalance is not quite as bad.

I think censorship is no longer censorship when it happens purely on the client side, it’s just filtering. As long as the tweets all continue to exist out there somewhere, someone can write a client to display them.

This will, I predict, make a lot of people unhappy because “omg there are Nazi tweets on my blockchain” but personally I’m happy with it.

i think there is a difference between suppression of minority opinions and censorship, which completely bans them. it depends on definition of course, but in its most common use, the word censorship is not subject to gradation

>I m surprised every time i see people here asking for the evil that is censorship.

I'm sadly not surprised. While HN does attract hobbyists like me interested in technology and how it affects society, it also attracts a lot of those who dream of building and controlling the next big data silo for personal profit. Permanently liberating an entire mode of communication into an uncensorable distributed system that can't be easily replaced due to the network effect (such as your example of email) precludes that path to profit.

> It makes sense business-wise and it's a win-win for humanity.

Does it make sense business-wise? What business will want to be on a system that has no moderation? It's just asking for your brand to be accidentally or intentionally associated with undesirable things.

google is in the email business

tons of businesses send promotional emails , even though they know the protocol is also used for sending porjn

And the only reason businesses still use email is Google's development of advanced and almost effective content moderation.

The difference between Google's moderation and Twitter's moderation is, in the Google case, that the user is in control of what is "spam" and what is not (and can still consult the "spam" if any).

you mean spam filtering, which is different from moderation. google won't censor "hateful emails"

>I m surprised every time i see people here asking for the evil that is censorship.

You're posting this in a place (HN) that itself is not averse to deleting posts, shadow banning, manipulating the rank of articles, etc. Some have argued that HN is a good discussion environment precisely because of those things, though I don't necessarily agree. What I'm getting at is that you have reason to not expect sympathy for your position here.

On HN, everyone sees the same things - the same front page, the same comments, and so on. On sites like Twitter and Facebook, this is not the case. What's good for a site like HN isn't necessarily what's good for a site like Twitter.

It's stupid to be 100% against censorship. Some things should be censored. Like child abuse imagery, for example.

The questions are where do you draw the line, and who gets to decide where the line is drawn?

This seems more like an appeal to emotion to justify the creation of censorship infrastructure than an actual solution to a problem.

I haven't heard of unsolicited CP being a common spam issue. And those who exchange CP intentionally can and do use encryption which makes such filters pointless.

Then you are not familiar with the Fediverse's patterns of establishing various levels of tolerance on different networks of instances for loli content (blah blah it's fiction blah blah) because otherwise it federates onto people's timelines and they're revolted. CWs do a lot to soften this.

The original argument seemed about illegal content. If you're just talking about unwanted porn, well, that's an argument for better local content filters, which is different from eradicating content at the source.

> Like child abuse imagery

you would call that a filter, like spam, and of course it's essential and can be deployed in multiple points (before sending, between servers, at the client). Both users and server instance owners can have control of what they allow. There is little disagreement that these filters should exist, so i expect all server to implement them.

Censorship is about allowing e.g. governments to request takedowns globally. most servers will reject such lists.