As an ex-scientologist, I know how labeling websites "Hate Speech" can be abused. It's only when I ignored their "Hate Speech" warnings that I was able to figure out the fraud that is Scientology.

Funny how you can have a community/forum/server for years without issues but when you go against the grain new accounts come out of the woodwork to post something rule-breaking which gets the whole place shut down.

Just looking at a site like Reddit, where over the summer most major subreddits were flooded with ACAB posts and the comments said some pretty extreme stuff without issue. But then a new account on T_D, a blue-lives-matters sub, said something anti-police and that was justification for shutting it down.

Don't let your dislike of certain communities cloud your views. Punishing the lawful majority for the actions of a few, often outsiders, and letting those few define what a community supports is not something our society needs more of.

It may not be said eloquently or politely, but assuming you know better than people because you don't like the language they use sounds elitist to me.

That said, choosing who you do and don't interact with is your own business. Perhaps "I know I know more than them because they use homophobic slurs" isn't the strongest reason though, as one does not always map to the other

fyi, the "hate speech" in question here is the fact that they were calling THEMSELVES "retards".

It's an open chat platform. Yes it can be manually moderated, but all it takes is one guy posting something they know is bannable for admins to be within the rules to ban a server. Pretty convenient.

Maybe that's the next round in the information wars? Each side probing the automated moderating systems of large social media platforms until they find the right sequence that will trigger a shutdown. I'd assume state actors will be able to do this on their own, but for us without state sponsorship, maybe you'll be able to buy it as a service off of the dark web.

Next? Triggering automated bans has been a tactic for quite a long time.

Discord applies automated bans for spamming and API abuse, not for hate speech.

Why wouldn't the probes be automated as well? I would expect some party to eventually unleash hatespeech spambots on the Internet, posting ban-worthy comments anywhere they can reach.

The flood of those comments would both drown out any manual attempts at hatespeech, while also being so unilateral that it wouldn't really make sense to ban any individual community for having them any more.

I love how Neal Stephenson predicted these spam bots in “Fall; or, Dodge In Hell”.

It's not an open platform by any means. 3rd party clients are banned, and what they call "servers" are really just subareas on the company hosted infra that where the broad terms of service are selectively enforced.

Statement from WSB mods:

> We're suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community instead of stepping in with the wrench we may have needed to fix things, especially after we got over 1,000 server boosts. That is pretty unethical.

Based on the Reddit post someone got around auto-modding bots by using UTF-8 icelandic characters that look the same as the english ones to say naughty things to report the Discord.

Given that it has 250,000 users i imagine individual posts would be easy to miss manually.

> people might start to think 'Hate Speech' could be misused to pursue an agenda

If people don't already think this then they haven't been living in America.

The mods said that there were bots spamming actual hate speech and they couldn't remove it fast enough.

First they came for the Trumpists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trumpist.

Then they came for the British socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a British socialist.

Then they came for some Redditors, and I did not speak out— Because I was not like those Redditors.

(Obviously will be continued - this has progressed faster than expected, but it's not surprising at all. See earlier comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880239)

Derogatory remarks will be the downfall of WSB just like tax evasion was the downfall of Al Capone.