Imagine this attitude applied to climate change. Letting the stupid runs its course and choosing inaction, will lead to disastrous warming outcomes.

So, maybe there are situations where doing nothing is okay, but I don't think very large scale problems that require coordinated large scale action over long time scales to address, like global pandemics or mitigating the impacts of man made climate change, are the right situations for that kind of approach. Too many thousands/millions will die, too many billions/trillions of dollars of damage will be done, via inaction.

Of course, it all comes down to whether you can stomach the cost of inaction, because maybe you don't think the impacts are all that bad. I don't have an answer to that, if two parties fundamentally disagree about what the cost of impact will be or whether that cost is acceptable (e.g. many folks in the US apparently think 600k+ COVID deaths in the US isn't a big deal, and wasn't worth the interventions applied to mitigate it to that level).

> Imagine this attitude applied to climate change. Letting the stupid runs its course and choosing inaction, will lead to disastrous warming outcomes.

This is the same situation as climate change. Instead of doing sensible things, we banned plastic straws! (Now paper straws come in plastic packaging...). Or the situation that UK and Germany find themselves in (having invested in stupid but "green" solutions).

I didn't realise that a few regions banning plastic straws is literally the only thing the entire planet has done to combat climate change

Not at all, we also shipped our garbage halfway across the world while pretending we were recycling; and we turned the taps off while we were brushing our teeth.

Funny that you mention that since this is a real problem with combating climate change. You need to focus on the meat of the problem, not grasping at (plastic) straws (sensible policy, but not conductive to a solution regarding this case).

I don’t see the connection

The problem with climate change is that the average person can't see the effects until long past the point when the problem can be easily solved. It's not at all comparable to social media.

In Alberta, the <20% of individuals who remain unvaccinated make up >90% of ICU admissions. ICUs are so full surgeries are being postponed, resources are being diverted to COVID ICUs, and they may have to start triaging ICU patients soon because of the lack of capacity, all of which affects not only the unvaccinated but everyone needing medical care in the province. Letting the situation run its course will kill and has killed way more than just the anti-vax.

The case numbers in Alberta are half of the peak earlier this year (when Delta started ramping up). And yet 70% are vaccinated but only 3% were earlier this year (May).

Begs the question as to why the system is falling apart now and not earlier this year.

First of all, your assrtion about case numbers being half is not correct. The third wave peaked at 25k active cases. The current peak is at 21k active cases.

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

Second, despite the case number not being higher than the third wave, hospitalizations and ICU admissions are higher for the current wave compared to any before. This is despite the higher vaccination rate and due to the higher dangers of the delta variant. The third wave peaked at 555 non-ICU and 183 ICU; the current wave is at 860 non-ICU and 268 ICU. ICU cases are predominantly (~90%) unvaccinated individuals.

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

So the system is falling apart because the hospitals are being overwhelmed, because the delta variant is more dangerous that the previous dominant variants for unvaccinated people and there are more people in hospitals and in ICUs than ever before because of this.

And this is hurting everyone, not just anti-vaxxers or those who get COVID. They even had to close 75% of operating rooms in children's hospital, because they needed to divert the resources to adults in ICUs with COVID.

https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/alberta-childrens-...

I stand corrected on the latest numbers.

But why hasn't the higher hospitalization rate played out in other countries?

And regardless, it seems odd that you can hit 70%+ vaccination rates and see a worse outcome than when the vaccination rate was ~5%.

The only way those numbers work is if Delta is several fold more deadly/severe disease causing than the prior variants, and that hasn't been seen elsewhere.

This has been seen everywhere. Just google "Delta surge <country>."

I agree. The reasons for the situation in Alberta are

1) Delta variant being more dangerous that the previous ones, causing a higher number of infections ending up in hospitals and ICUs. I shudder at the though of what would have happened if we got a delta wave before vaccination. We are lucky we got it after vaccinating 70% of the population. India and Iran (and I am sure some other countries) got their delta wave before being able to vaccinate a large enough percentage of people and the result was a human tragedy.

2) During the previous waves, when the number of infections went up, the government imposed harder restrictions to avoid this very eventuality. During this wave, government thought the vaccines meant hospitalization and ICU would be fully disconnected from case numbers, so did not impose restrictions until it was too late and the ICUs were already on the verge of bursting. Restrictions such as mask mandates and capacity limits which were present in previous waves were not imposed until two weeks ago for this wave.

There doesn't seem to be much evidence to suggest Delta produces all that much more severe disease.[1] The CDC says "it might be". Much more infectious, yes, but not more deadlier or at least not so much deadlier as to explain the Alberta numbers (especially comparing a population that is 70% vaccinated now versus 5% in the last wave).

And again, we aren't seeing the same impact outside of Alberta. In the US, which has a lower overall vaccination rate, the death rate is actually lower than prior waves.

[1]https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-var...

US's death and ICU rates are higher than Alberta though, which can be explained by the difference in vaccination rates. So Alberta's current wave is not out of ordinary.

Rate of death (per 100k population) over the past 7 days:

Alberta: 2.3

United States: 3.01

Number of COVID-19 patients in ICU per million population:

Alberta: 268 / 4.421 = 60.6

United States: 62.5

https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s...

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths...

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-icu-patients-per-mi...

This was published recently. There is at least some evidence that the Delta variant is more deadly.

https://globalnews.ca/news/8244271/delta-variant-covid-19-st...

Don't do shit is how you turn into 4chan.

And even 4chan has moderation.

4chan is infinitely more enjoyable than the majority of social media and forums out there, precisely because of how lax the rules are and because of the lack of perverse incentives for users trying to one-up eachother for internet points. The only real rules are that you can't post anything illegal and that you have to stay vaguely on-topic, and it works great.

Also, /pol/ is not all of 4chan, there's a reason it's called a containment board.

The irony is that even /pol is more "diverse" than the groups commonly requesting content control.

I suspect in intolerant times like this a lot of Jews and black people, which are probably still the prime targets of /pols "hate" go there on holiday just to get away from crazy.

Maybe not too healthy, but very much preferable to another slick corporate or political message about how they will implement racism in the future. At least /pol fails with their racism. Governments and corporations are pretty successful with it.

I mean, maybe you like 4chan, but I think the majority of people don't see that site as a glowing example of what online communities should want to be

They have the diversity others want to achieve, so 4chan is like the attractive person in the room.

4chan is more tolerable than any forum with upvotes

"like 4chan" is the godwin's law of social media moderation

It is a very public example of the result of limited moderation.

Free speech advocates advocating for absolutism in free speech need a counterargument if they're going to go down that road.

In my experience, aggressive moderation, whether by the community or by admins, is the only way to keep a public community from turning into a cesspool, so if you're arguing for no moderation you better have a solution for what that actually entails.

Doesn't 4chan kind of disprove this though? I mean sure /pol/ can be a bit of a cesspool, but that's not all of 4chan. It was designed as a toxic waste storage facility and it has done that job fairly well.

You can hold great conversations on any of the like 30 other boards on the site without worrying about censorship or performance for internet points. There is still moderation, just the minimum amount possible.

A default of anonymity also helps curb a lot of spillover into the real world that happens between users of other forum sites.

The only reason 4chan gets dragged through the mud is because its containment facilities (/pol/, /b/, etc.) are among the most active boards. That speaks more to the human condition than 4chan in that people, when given a choice, tend to gravitate towards the least moderated sections of a website because they are the most engaging.

In terms of a solution I think it offers a fairly good one. If you don't want to have to keep banning malcontents across your site, then give them a place to congregate and they will mostly stay there. Try to ban them and they swarm looking for a new home.

What’s wrong with 4chan? I for one think it’s awesome, one of the few outlets that haven’t gave in to censorship.

I can give you a counterexample of Reddit that turned into cesspool with (and may be because of) excessive moderation. Just check their front page with posts celebrating people dying of Covid https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/

That’s some weasel wording with “(and may be because of)”. Also if you want posts of people celebrating death just stroll over into /b and mention anything to do with minorities and/or genocides.

/pol is not the only containment board or issue with 4chan

>That’s some weasel wording with “(and may be because of)”. Also if you want posts of people celebrating death just stroll over into /b and mention anything to do with minorities and/or genocides.

So like /r/HermanCainAward but without the doxing?

There's plenty of "death of the outgroup" celebration on Reddit even in big subs.

This thread was discussing whether moderation was needed or not for a forum and 4chan was brought up as a forum without moderation and all the issues with that.

You brought up /r/hermancainaward as an example of Reddit having a cesspool and tried to imply without evidence that moderating it had a hand in its creation, _and_ implied that it’s the same level of cesspool as a place like /b.

Even if we assume you are correct about it being the same level of cesspool, as we speak the Reddit admins have been instructing the hermancainaward moderators to clean up the board or be shut down, which would get rid of said cesspool.

The only thing shown is that people can be terrible as a group, but moderating at least removes the worst excesses. That does not show how to deal with those excesses in an unmoderated forum

they had done a lot of debate at there, about whether this behaviour is acceptable. I just want to direct that the original purpose of this forums is try warn people what is the result of choice.

>no moderation = 4chan

>4chan has moderation

Please, elaborate

As people already mentioned here, try running a free-for-all moderation-free discussion board and see what happens.

Back in the day, the Internet was full of HTML discussion boards just like this one, and idiots were banned with no questions asked. It was beautiful, and no one complained.

This site has moderation, no one is complaining. YouTube is a "person" - legally now, but somehow they don't have the responsibility to be a good citizen?

The fact that allegedly smart people on HN use the term "censorship" in the context of non-government control is pretty shocking. You don't know censorship.

"Censorship" has absolutely nothing to do with it. A private company can allow/disallow whatever content they f---ing please, and the Wild West capitalists on this board should be the first ones to support this move. Who is going to force them? The government? Oh, hello.

> Back in the day, the Internet was full of HTML discussion boards just like this one, and idiots were banned with no questions asked. It was beautiful, and no one complained.

Back in the day, the Internet wasn't dominated by Facebook and Google.

> "Let stupid run it's course"

4.5 Million Deaths Later...

Not all of which were part of the stupid category...

But some are. Is 10% of those deaths worth social media platforms not censoring false claims about vaccines and masks?

Should they censor that they don’t work or they they work? Both were official policy at one time in 2020

You're arguing to let low information or critical thinking challenged people die because of the actions of others (whether those actions are in good faith or not is immaterial). If Youtube decides it wants to take action to promote the public welfare, that's their right as a business.

"Doing Something" is usually harm reduction within the framework of law and public policy, and there's a lot of harm out there, hence the continual debate over a) should something be done? and b) what can be done?