News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel by jancsika on Monday January 11, 2021 @12:22AM (#25724914)
> we cant let media/twitter/social media/ state actors amplify this.

I'd strongly suggest taking a harder look at the systems like HN, and consider how-- for example-- the posting speed it encourages works against you in this respect.

E.g., what made you write "equivalent person on the left" since that turns out not to be a relevant detail to you?

I think the system here-- like Twitter et al-- encourages posting too quickly in this context. Sure, it works great if I'm just complaining from memory about the SVG spec or something. If I get it wrong, someone will call out the error and I can double-check the spec and confirm the mistake.

But it's a royally bad idea wrt large political issues like this one. Instead, the entire system should go slower in general, encouraging one to reflect on their current knowledge and current blind spots before finalizing a post. That process could even be piecemeal over the period of days. A UI could easily be designed that makes it an enjoyable process to slowly build a post out of more meaningful little "lego-like" blocks.

To me there's a frightening disconnect here on HN. A significant portion of the users know about or perhaps even work on dark patterns like recommendation algos where one can fairly accurately predict the number of users who will fall down into conspiracy rabbit holes. Yet with HN's opaque posting/sorting/scoring system that knowledge goes down the memory hole; for some reason "personal responsibility" always seems to stand in for any serious attempt at analyzing the system.

Edit: clarification

Re:YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel by MrMan on Monday January 11, 2021 @07:40AM (#25728106)
I see alot of resort to calls for "critical thinking" which any FB employee knows is no antidote to marketing or propaganda.