Fine. Websites aren't responsible for the content. But make them responsible for promoting or curating the content, if they choose to do so.

Instagram just shows me all the stuff my friends post. That's it, as far as I can tell. It's great. Facebook amplifies some things and doesn't show me others. If it wants to be in that game, of distorting informational impact, it needs to take responsibility for what it's amplifying.

> Instagram just shows me all the stuff my friends post. That's it, as far as I can tell.

Unfortunately, Instagram is not just "showing you everything your friends post".

I’m kind of curious as to what the person is seeing, because every third post I see is an ad placed by Instagram, and for some of the meme pages you reach nearly that much saturation with sponsored posts.

I mean obviously there are ads, but if my friends post something, it's at the top of my feed, and I can scroll through only content that my friends post (and ads).

It's still not just a linear feed, though. Years ago it was just a reverse-chronological feed of things your friends post. Now the ordering is "algorithmic". I can't think of any good reason to reorder posts other than to try to increase engagement, which is the problem we're talking about here.

If you don't allow curation, that's the end of moderated forums like Hacker News, isn't it?

Who said anything about not allowing curation?

> make them responsible for promoting or curating the content, if they choose to do so

So, Y Combinator can choose to be liable for anything defamatory that manages to get onto the front page (there is, after all, an algorithm), or anything defamatory that they fail to delete out of the comment section. It doesn't seem sustainable.

Which ends up affecting sites like Github and support forums. The moment Section 230 was repealed you'd see thousands of frivolous lawsuits against any company with deep pockets.

Or maybe centralized services like GitHub should not exist?

And internet should be back to BBS days where public content are moderated by volunteers in each community separately?

Now I think section 230 is not a necessity for an open internet. It just changed how internet works by making centralized business easier.

What is the material difference between a web site and a BBS?

BBS operators would be equally responsible, and won't run BBSes. Same with chat rooms and IRC channels — their operators could be sued, so they won't run anything like that for public service.

Of course, a web forum could still be run over Tor, hiding the webmaster and the participants. There would be no one to sue, so whatever inflammatory content were on such a forum, it would stay unless the moderators cared.

If the point is to stifle the public discussion and push it underground, then removing the protection of operators from liability for UGC is the way to go.

I don't find it unreasonable to ask website / BBS owner to be responsible for content on their website.

I don't remember BBSs constantly got sued in the old days.

A BBS in the days of yore didn't have deep pockets for anyone to go after. They did however get sued or taken down for copyright issues and other content. There's the infamous case of the Secret Service raiding the offices of Steve Jackson Games [0] over content that was in an upcoming book for the GURPS role playing game [1].

[0] https://www.eff.org/cases/steve-jackson-games-v-secret-servi...

[1] http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

Open source software has been massively buoyed by the availability of platforms like Github and before them SourceForge. Before these platforms OSS maintainers had to manage their own version control, packaging/distribution, and issue tracking. Without those things in place (managed or self hosted) it's pretty hard to collaborate with others. Big projects could afford to do it (both money and effort) but most hobbyist projects would just dump a tarball on their university or ISP provided web space.

Services doing that laborious work for no cost has let OSS authors more easily collaborate and just get work done on projects. They've also enabled small projects to just exist since the author doesn't need to even know about the infrastructure needed to host their code.

You can, and many do, self host Github equivalents. It's not like Github used all the oxygen in the room and monopolized source control.

The same is true for web fora. You can go host your own forum/fediverse site right now pretty cheaply. Domain names are cheap and TLS certs are free. There's nothing stopping you or anyone else from doing that. Plenty of people already are doing so.

Centralized platforms come into being because of network effects. You can host your own forum (or whatever) but that doesn't mean people will come join it. Lots of groups formerly served by on-topic forums moved to Facebook groups because all the participants were already there. It's no-cost vs low-cost and all of the infrastructure is managed by Someone Else. Infrastructure maintenance is a pretty thankless task.

Starting a new group on Facebook (or wherever) is pretty frictionless if all the participants are already on Facebook. There's a lot more friction starting a new little island of discussion with a forum.

By wanting to go back to the "BBS days" you're wanting network effects to not be a thing that exist. You're also somehow expecting people to have the technical chops to run a site. In the "BBS days" only a minority of a minority of people even had the modems to host or call a BBS. Just by the nature of the home computer market those people would be more technically adept than the average person.

My mom, a non-technical user, can join a Facebook group very easily. She's not going to seek out let alone join some forum even if it's dedicated to the same subject as the Facebook group. She's also not going to run her own forum to talk about some topic where she can simply and easily start a Facebook group.

People seem to forget that in the "good old days" of the early web it was mostly the technically adept building and browsing sites. In terms of conversations had or bytes transferred the vast majority was on closed platforms like AOL and CompuServe. Even in the "BBS days" (the latter era) Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL were far more popular than BBSes. Even with a BBS being "free" online services had a national reach and just far more resources available. Unless you had a big multi-line BBS in your area dialing into a board could be a crap shoot.

The olden days were not necessarily better than today despite nostalgia and fetishization. Some stuff today is not better than things in the olden days. I'm not saying I like or support Facebook or Twitter or that centralization is unalloyed good. Centralization doesn't just happen in a vacuum and for no reason. Usability is very important as well.

Your assumption of current social media is the only way for mass to run content is not necessarily true. One alternative I would imagine is hosting companies to develop one-click solutions for grandmas using cellphone to create their own websites / blog under their own domains. They can choose whether to allow strangers post comments on their websites.

Of course there's more possible alternatives.

The good old “frivolous lawsuit” trope, the classic Republican boogieman since the days of malpractice “reform.” What’s wrong with people seeking justice through the courts? Lawyers need to feed their kids too. They do the job others won’t do—ambulances don’t chase themselves.

Frivolous lawsuits are a literal denial of service attack. It costs money to defend yourself in a lawsuit. In the US there's no default loser pays system.

If I sue you and lose, you're out the cost of your defense. You'd have to sue me for your expenses. While an attorney might take the suit on contingency you're guaranteed to win and unlikely to recoup all of your original expenses even if you do.

Frivolous lawsuits are not in any was a boogeyman. One need look no further than bullshit DMCA takedowns and bullshit patent suits filed in East Texas to see the model for frivolous lawsuits with a Section 230 repeal.

> Frivolous lawsuits are not in any was a boogeyman.

They certainly were in the 90's and 2000's. This lawsuit[1] became a talking point against "frivolous lawsuits", and ammo in a PR war for tort reform[2] in the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort_reform#Frivolous_lawsuits

I find it quite odd that [1] is considered frivolous, given that the plaintiff required emergency surgery, left the hospital weighing 38kg and ended up partially disabled.

I agree with your point in general, but I'd also argue that there are companies that weaponize copyright and patent law in order to intimidate individuals and companies without the means to go to trial, even if they don't have a real legal standing to do so. GitHub seems like a great place for patent trolls to find their marks.

> No one is going to risk being sued over something a user says.

No small company would, but some multi-billion dollar companies might. They sure would censor the hell out of any user content, though, or else they'd run the risk of being raided in the middle of the night by the FBI if a user found it funny to upload something illegal to their servers.

Which brings us to the OP's argument, that repealing Section 230 wouldn't do what the repeal proponents want. The end result of repealing Section 230 of the CDA is that total online censorship becomes the norm, and only giant companies would be able to benefit from the limited user-generated content that's allowed to exist after the repeal.

It's possible, but your scale is severely limited as you have to actively moderate your site. You also have to build a culture where users value their position in the community and fear losing access to it for doing the wrong thing.

Websites/forums exist in countries without an s230 equivalent.

> The problem is that without section 230, it becomes impossible for any website to have user hosted content. If websites are responsible for shit their users say, no website that posts user content can exist.

That has nothing to do with section 230. Websites weren't responsible for user-generated content before section 230 and they still wouldn't be if it went away.

What section 230 does is extend the same immunity that content-blind hosts have always had to hosts that modify the content they get from users.

This comment upthread:

> If a user writes some content that stays as a comment somewhere and it is defamatory, then the user is responsible. So far, so good. This is what 230 used to address.

is wrong. Section 230 didn't address that case; the user was always the responsible party. To see section 230 at work, you need a more complicated setup:

1. User A posts defamatory content to a web forum.

2. User B posts defamatory content to the same forum.

3. The forum operators see User B's post, are outraged, and take it down.

This is where section 230 makes a difference. It says that, even though the forum takes control of user-generated content for the purpose of expressing its own views, it still isn't liable for content that it hasn't directly touched. In the absence of section 230, the forum would bear liability for user A's defamatory post as soon as they took down user B's post.

There's no problem hosting user-generated content without section 230. You only have a problem if you editorialize on top of that content.

I prefer my jacket News with moderation. Section 230 is what allows sites to moderate. Without it you have to have either no moderation, or perfect moderation.