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.