Meanwhile Twitter can block a trend on a whim. That's very different. That is direct, intentional manipulation of the conversation in the new (private) public square.
Anyone have a coat? I’m catching a cold from all these http://chillingeffects.com
The difference between being able to censor whatever unilaterally and having to get a legislator to do it for you could not be more massive.
Having to play the lobbying game adds a huge amount of time, expense and outside scrutiny making it much harder to do bad things.
Sure the fact that regulatory capture is possible and doable at a certain scale is bad but it's infinitly better than bigCos being able to act unilaterally.
It's like the difference between the cops being able to kick down your door on a whim and them having to get a warrant and at least look like idiots on the official record and make other people who share no upside condone their stupidity.
HN could benefit from user moderation and meta-moderation like Slashdot has. It’s a breath of fresh air (the implementation, not necessary Slashdot, sorry Slashdot), and I don’t know of any other platform, forum, product, or site that does it like that, but user moderation as an open source project would be a good place to start. Not sure if Slashdot’s source is open or not, now that I mention it. Oh wait, of course it is.
Do these meta-moderation concepts seem like they might be useful in other contexts? Kind of reminds me of oracles and multi-signature digital instruments. Maybe also analogous concepts in AI? I am not in that field. Like a decentralized distributed parity bit hash table? DHT for .sfv? Just spitballing.
> A meta-moderation system was implemented on September 7, 1999, to moderate the moderators [user mods with mod points, and maybe also the paid mods, with unlimited mod points, unclear in context if paid mod or admin actions were themselves subject to meta-mod] and help contain abuses in the moderation system. Meta-moderators are presented with a set of moderations that they may rate as either fair or unfair. For each moderation, the meta-moderator sees the original comment and the reason assigned by the moderator (e.g. troll, funny), and the meta-moderator can click to see the context of comments surrounding the one that was moderated.
> home field advantage
.. with a $1.4 Trillion influence on the tech industry, there will never, for long anyway, be critical articles about the US' military industrial pharmaceutical complex, or Israel, or anything to do with war crimes prosecutions or crimes against humanity committed by the 5-eyes coalition on the front page of HN...
Ensuring that the people who most need to be discussing such issues, don't.
1) Downvoting is not censorship, even if the reasons are arbitrary and capricious.
2) Disagreeing with you is not censorship.
3) I find it difficult to believe that HN is downvoting you because they are imperialists who are trying to suppress an ideological challenge. They are probably downvoting you because your arguments are badly written and badly thought-out.
For instance, I am also anti-imperialist and I downvoted your comment. It's not because your bold anti-war stance is threatening my politics. It's because your comment doesn't add anything useful to the discussion and is indistinguishable from outright trolling.
I agree with you. I see you around HN. DM me sometime if you want to talk. Not about Q I hope; I am tired enough of politics as it is and can’t wait for the election to just happen and be over. I only mention it because I believe there’s a link between the downvoting parties and Q, though I can’t prove it in any specific instance.
Will look for citation on research I read the other day showing that #alllivesmatter is almost entirely a reactionary movement in response to #blacklivesmatter original content, lending credence to the theory that it is a small group of people operating a lot of bots to down out #blacklivesmatter, which was supported with data and code from the Twitter API. If someone has this link drop it below.
I have zero interest in Q other than that it is yet another collective entity which is self-serving opinions to an in-group, who as individuals, collectively form a consensus - whether its 'correct' or not - and strive to either grow that group or attack anyone who would act to counter its narrative. This is an intrinsic feature of human discourse, whether its with the "everyone knows those guys are crazy" group, or "everyone knows what everyone knows" group ..
The point is, collective agreement is not truth. Its just what the masses think is true - and this is highly specious, anyway. For example, it was once collectively 'true' that disease was spread by miasma, and anyone who suggested hand-washing was degraded into oblivion. This factor happens intrinsically in all human relations - and online social media is not immune to it, but rather acts as a force magnifier for collectively-derived reality.
What is todays "hand washing decreases mortality rate" issue, is tomorrows "this is an amazing discovery we should have paid more attention to at the time, but didn't, because 'everyone knew' it was 'wrong'" ..
Would having a thumbs down emoji/emoteicon with a large counter vastly overwhelming the tbumbs up one be something anyone could argue with any credibility as censorship?
But that's not what happens. Get downvoted too much, and you will get the dang hammer brought down on you, and its back to a rate limited life of communication for you.
This is the danger of the collective reality. It isn't always the truth - but rather, what everyone thinks the truth is, and we can see time and again just how wrong collectivity can be through history.
I like to think that dang gives us all just a sharp enough edge to his moderation for us to cut ourselves on, but I take your point. I found myself in a flame war, got rate limited by a mod, actually emailed Daniel, got a soft agreement to lift limits in a week or so with good behavior. In his and HN’s defense, I was a bit edgy and I agree it was not an isolated comment but closer to 15 across a couple threads with the same person. I thought I was having a spirited debate at the time and still do, while recognizing that protracted flamewars burn down the users’ and mods’ and admins’ morale and it is a kind of social contagion that self-reinforces negative reactionary behavior among and between users. So that’s to say I agree that I did something unsuitable for HN.
What happened next was nothing.
For almost a month, I was rate-limited. I just thought I was still letting Daniel down. I had no transparency into my mod action. No mod mail like on reddit. I ended up emailing about something else entirely, and casually mentioned it. Daniel almost didn’t really know what to think. He didn’t do the original action; a mod did. I did email him, but that was like 5 in a thread out of how many he must have to read a day? I sent him our original thread, he read it, and I wasn’t rate-limited anymore. He genuinely forgot.
Daniel is too busy to care about anyone’s agenda but keeping the site what it’s meant to be, and trying to build it slowly into what it will become. He’s a good dude. Let’s not make this personal. I only email with him, but I know this much: HN is lucky to have him.
Some more transparency into mod and flag actions wouldn’t go astray, either.
You call social media the megaphone of the protests, but when Trump went to threaten the protesters “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” he did it on social media.
That’s your opinion, obviously people took to the streets because social media can be ignored And minimized but people in the streets can’t be ignored.
I’ll return the favor to say social media is the protestors megaphone over the streets is deeply disingenuous...see how easy it is to speak past each other online, good luck with that in the street
In effect, social media users are just acting as speechwriters for the companies' political views. They submit comments, and mods chosen by the company decide which comments are published. Or sometimes the company simply bans particular viewpoints.
What gets published on social media is increasingly company approved just like any other company's public messaging.
Well, since you brought it up, which speeches of yours did you take this comment from, and who are you writing those speeches for? Whose agenda do your words subtly lend support to?
The number of anti-cancel-culture posts on HN, as well as a post about "aggressive conformity" on HN right now by the founder of HN, suggest that HN has a similar agenda, so I suppose I am simply adding content that supports the company's position.