I often think this about Ring / permanent surveillance that exists now. Nobody can even be free in front of their own house without the threat of something ludicrous happening to you and then it being on public record until the end of the internet. It's absolutely wild to me.

That's the exact reason I just ordered a locally recording doorbell and am finally replaced the last cloud based "smart" device in my home. I found myself actually changing my behavior and not saying certain things to my wife in front of it. The thought that every time I passed my own front door a stranger, that I placed there, was recording me was nauseating.

I had a ring for about one week before I ripped it out and sent it back.

I can’t understand how almost no one realized we went far worse than UK or Singapore’s surveillance state and did it on our own dollar voluntarily.

What's really scary about this, is that it can be edited by anyone before being posted online to make you either look like a victim or an instigator. It's then picked up by the media (which apparently are just influencers or Redditors now). People will always view that initial video as fact, even after the full evidence is posted. This can ruin the rest of your life, the damage has been done.

While editing videos has always been an issue, it wasn't possible to gain notoriety, make money, or instigate racial/class/political/whatever warfare as easily as it is now. You just need to post an edited video and whatever side you want to instigate, you can.

Like it or not, this is just the beginning.

Fairly soon, all human life will be recorded.

There should be a right to be forgotten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

I agree that overexposure is a problem, but I can't support censorship of truthful information.

HN/YCombinator does not honor this correctly from a EU law perspective. They don't allow you to delete your content. What they do offer is renaming your account.

I'm salivating for this monster lawsuit once they they have enough EU exposure. It will probably be based in Germany.

Does HN have an EU company? If not, why should EU law apply?

I’m mostly pro EU but I’m against countries/unions enforcing their laws beyond their borders.

I don't know EU regulations well enough but isn't the ability to change your email address and scrub your about section enough? That would break any traceable links to you.

I live in a GDPR country and I don't really see the problem with HN's approach. They own the information you typed into their website, you own the privacy of your name. Why should they delete information you gave them, rather than just help you anonymise it?

> They own the information you typed into their website

Not a lawyer, but is this actually the case? I thought the core of section 230 was about exactly that - that a site operator does not constitute a "publisher" for everything that is written on their site, if the site is just a "dumb" software that displays content written by the site's users - and therefore can't be made liable for anything written in user-generated content in the way they would be for editoral content.

That would imply to me that the site operator does not own the user-generated content. Otherwise, you'd have a weird "have your cake and eat it too" situation where a site gets all the rights of ownership but none of the responsibilities.

(... this doesn't even touch on the situation where that content violates intellectual property or contains PII.)

> Not a lawyer, but is this actually the case?

Generally, no, they have a license, generally a broad, perpetual, non-exclusive license per the conditions attached to use of the site. not ownership. OTOH:

> I thought the core of section 230 was about exactly that - that a site operator does not constitute a "publisher" for everything that is written on their site, if the site is just a "dumb" software that displays content written by the site's users - and therefore can't be made liable for anything written in user-generated content in the way they would be for editoral content.

This is wrong on multiple levels; it specifically does not require that it be ”dumb” (neutral) software, which would have made them a distributor not a publisher under the law without Section 230; it specifically is to allow site operators (and other users) to do things that shape which content is presented without being subject to liability as a publisher.

But that's about liability, not ownership.

> (... this doesn't even touch on the situation where that content contains intellectual property or PII.)

If its not IP, no one has ownership ; ownership of content only applies to IP of some kind.

Thanks a lot for that clarification. That actually changed my understanding of section 230: I always thought that the "shaping" of content was some sort of loophole that the section might have more or less accidentally enabled - I wasn't aware that this was its main purpose.

Considering that we increasingly understand how much power lies in that ability to "shape" distribution of UGC, and how much platforms actively abuse that power, the people wanting to reform/repeal the section just got a whole lot more sympathetic in my view.

> If its not IP, no one has ownership ; ownership of content only applies to IP of some kind.

(I edited the GP before I saw the reply)

My point was more who is responsible for violations of other IP in UGC - i.e. the classic case of someone uploading a blockbuster movie to YouTube. Would the liability fall on YouTube or the individual user who uploaded the content.

Or, in a similar vein, you post your address/phone number/real name/whatever to a platform, then later want to delete the post again, but the platform doesn't let you. Can you (legally) force the platform to delete the post or not?

However, the fact that both scenarios resulted in years-long, (and still ongoing) debates and in the end, new laws had to be passed to handle them (DMCA and GDPR), shows to me that the whole area seems to be extremely messy and not completely well-defined.

But yeah, the other question is also interesting: If I uploaded some personal project to YouTube (which would constitute IP I believe) and suddenly it goes viral, could Google steal the video and publish it as their own? Good to know here that they can't.

> Considering that we increasingly understand how much power lies in that ability to "shape" distribution of UGC, and how much platforms actively abuse that power, the people wanting to reform/repeal the section just got a whole lot more sympathetic in my view.

I’m curious who you’re referring to as the people wanting to reform/repeal. Most of the discussion on section 230 that I’ve seen in recent years can pretty much be summarized as “I allege that you’re shaping content to reflect a particular political/cultural preference. Therefore you should not be shielded from responsibility for illegal content”—which is a total non-sequitur. But maybe there’s also bee more thoughtful discussion that I’ve missed since I was never really paying that close attention to it.

Yeah, that's the point. Create a negative outcome for companies that perform politically biased censorship, as many do. It gained a ton of popularity during covid because so many were against the government banning public assembly. Yet the only remaining avenues for broad speech censored views that went against the CDC's demands

> [have the government] Create a negative outcome for companies that perform politically biased censorship

Let’s not leave out an important few words.

No, the government does not create the negative outcome. It is simply an act of removing broad protections granted to a social media company from hosting illegal content. When it's clear that the assumption they have little control over the overall content are not true, because the act to censor to politically slant said content.

The risk comes completely from their members and the ones who may sue them

Why has the focus been purely on instances of perceived political bias if this isn’t just a pretext for punishing the wrong type of perceived political bias? Shouldn’t any demonstration of content control cause the same loss of protection (and cause the same fervent calls for loss of protection)? This would include removing illegal content. Removing illegal content, under your theory, should cause a platform to lose protection from hosting illegal content.

Well that's a bit of a chicken and egg. You only get "protection" from accidentally hosting illegal content if you never host any illegal content in the first place?

The idea is that if you have time to shape the slant of your community, you have no excuse for letting illegal content faster

We need a privacy bill of rights.

Until then, based on how it’s going, the EU will lead on this for the foreseeable future so let’s hope they nail it.

American intelligence agencies are complaining and lobbying hard about even the possibility of restriction in buying unlimited amounts of warrantless location tracking data on all their citizens at the moment as if it’s their God given right and without a thought to the monstrosity that could create… so… yea.

Those ring cameras are actually crazy. The fact that they are so normalized in the BA is kind of disturbing

This lady just moved in next to me. Drives a leased luxury car. Doesn't interact with anyone, she just put up a ring camera (on an apartment door) and doesn't go outside

I absolutely can't stand people who put up all of this cringey privacy invading IOT shit, in a relatively nice area on top of that

In Switzerland those cameras are illegal, since there is a right to privacy for all persons. Security cameras can exist on private land or where the need is deemed to be absolutely necessary (eg, high security or high value areas where it is in the public interest to have a camera) - but filming the street from your house fails these tests. Same for dashcams.

People like to make this "oh but you're in public so why can't I film you" argument and it's so strange to me that this is something people actively want - to not be allowed privacy from other peoples pictures and recordings.

> People like to make this "oh but you're in public so why can't I film you" argument and it's so strange to me that this is something people actively want - to not be allowed privacy from other peoples pictures and recordings.

I don’t find it at all surprising that there’s disagreement about this. You have two entirely reasonable and important principles that are butting up against each other. Personal freedom is important and so is personal privacy. Of course there’s going to be controversy and differences from place to place and culture to culture on where the dividing line should exist.

> You have two entirely reasonable and important principles that are butting up against each other

How exactly is being allowed to record someone else in public without their consent an "important principle"? Especially if the non-consenting person is the subject of the recording?

Why should I need your consent in public? Especially, if it’s incidental. If I follow you around all day, I see a problem. If you’re in the background of a video or photo I took of something else, I can’t see an issue.

The important principle is that people should be generally free to do what they want in public if it’s not harming others. It’s natural that it becomes more difficult to decide how to apply that principle when you begin talking about vague notions of harm, or potential harm, or harm that’s dependent on the personality or opinions of the person potentially being harmed.

Edit: I meant for this to be a reply to the parent comment.

There are degrees to this, going up to some random person and photographing their face is more egregious than photographing a friend with the random person in the background

Ring cameras are wired and you can set them up to only turn on when you aren't home. Thats what I do. I also don't have neighbors and live in the woods.

I know I'm not saying anything new here, but I'm always shocked by just how vicious the Reddit community is, especially from a group who considers themselves highly intelligent (compared to those "other" people). Videos like you describe are there every time I visit, along with fight videos and comments making up a back story as to what the victim did to deserve it, etc.

Sometimes I wonder why things like vigilanteism and other bad behaviors were so prevalent in the past, but then you go to these communities and realize it hasn't gone away, it's just moved online. Which, I guess is progress of a sort (less violence) and a big step backwards when you think about how in the past you could have moved away from a mistake or embarrassing encounter, but not anymore if it becomes viral enough.

It shouldn't surprise you that online communities are a reflection of human nature. The behaviors we see are the effects of groupthink taken to its extreme. Even in "civilized" forums such as this one, you'll notice people conforming with the group mentality, and deleting their posts if they get downvoted. When there is little to no moderation, and viciousness is acceptable within the group, this behavior will spiral out of control, as individuals try to one-up each other, leading to vigilantism, manufactured outrage, cancel culture, racism, and all sort of abhorrent behavior an individual wouldn't do in isolation. We all seek validation in our ideas, after all.

All of this still exists offline, BTW. This is how riots happen. What the internet does is make it more possible by connecting more people than we traditionally could communicate with, and providing a safe space for any kind of discussion to happen. It's a tool our tribal monkey brains aren't ready for.

I think you're largely right, but IMO the difference between what happens online and what happens offline is that you have to look people in the eye offline and you may encounter them randomly in person. There's a moderating function that generally (not always) keeps the heat down.

Same for pile-ons. I'm not so naive to think that they never happen offline, but there's a higher cost to doing them than there is when all you have to do is write 140 characters to dunk on someone you won't even remember in two weeks.

People that write on the internet are probably just on the average less sane. There are prevalent types on the interwebs that I just never meet outside.

Are they a different set of people online and off, or a just a different set of behaviors for the same people?

Reddit is far worse than human nature, I believe. The upvote and downvote system favours people that are authoritarian (as a personality trait). There is this sect like wibe nowadays on Reddit.

I don't think voting is related. There are some subreddits that do have quality content, but this requires a substantial moderation effort. The *chan sites are even worse than Reddit, and there's no user voting AFAIK. Slashdot had a voting system before Reddit, and the discussion there is mostly civilized. Usenet didn't have a voting system, and the discussions were civilized before Eternal September, when users generally followed a netiquette. HN itself has limited voting and civilized discussion, but the site could get overrun at any point if the userbase grows rapidly, and new users decide not to follow the rules. There have been Reddit-type comments here for a few years now, and it seems to be increasing.

So it's a matter of community morals and values, and laborious moderation efforts to sustain it. Once the community grows large enough, moderating content becomes unmanageable. All large social media sites struggle with this, as they literally can't keep up with the amount of content. This is a scale problem that is unique to the internet.

Reddit is arguably worse than 4chan on this front. I don't know about altchans.

Imageboards push actually contrarianism to some degree as it gets more replies (the only metric equivalent to a voting system)

No I think the upvote and downvote system gives psychotic vibes. The normal disagreement does not exist (outside some niche subs maybe).

I dunno but Slashdot but you can have a voting system if users are not using it to silence those they disagree with. Not showing the score goes a long way of keeping it sane, like HN.

Reddit has grown large enough to lose any identity it once had. It used to be tech literate, now it is really just the average population.

> I'm always shocked by just how vicious the Reddit community is

Eventually you won't be shocked.

It's anonymous and you can say (almost) anything you like. Moderation of large subs is a joke, even before the strike. Just like the reddit "Trust and Safety" team, the mods of this particular subreddit, even though the post violated a sub rule along with the site rule, stayed up, unlocked.

> but not anymore if it becomes viral enough.

Not everyone wants to be a celebrity. But just read _this_ thread. You have at least one individual justifying this behavior.

Reddit has always been hostile/tribal, I would say it's slightly less so than in the past.

Absolutely not, in the beginning it was a super welcoming community, that openly accepted all types of people with open arms, where you could have friendly debates with people you'd probably punch in the face in real life.

But it quickly changed as reddit became a more mainstream 4chan alternative rather than the welcoming community it was in beginning.

Have you ever been to the php subreddit... toxic since day one.

Here's the ironic part: Where are all the actually smart people?

If the person is actually smart in a field, they probably have jobs in that field. A job that is often extremely mentally or physically involved, leaving little time for revisiting that job over recreational periods (no time to hang out arguing with strangers, life's tough enough). There might also be NDAs involved, or concerns from higher-ups that the user might post anything that might embarrass the company, etc. It is also completely common for the smartest people in a field to have not an inkling on how to set up a website or join social media (because they are generally... on the older side).

The result is that Reddit, and social media, are mostly people who have studied those fields and didn't get in. The results are self-evident.

Intelligence is not a spectrum you can place people along and then point to a dot and say "this is where stupid comments stop"

Groups which consider themselves as very intellectual can commit the worst atrocities. Just look at communists.

It has little to do with education or intellect.

The disease of righteousness is available to all.

Being able to reflect and examine one’s own thoughts and beliefs is harder than fitting in and being righteous.

Smarter people are better at rationalizing away their bad behavior, though.

You need certain cognitive capacity in order to engage in sophistry.

Fair, there's plenty of extremely cognitive and smart "uneducated by higher education" people.

I don't know if that makes it less worse, or worse.

Enabling righteousness, where others are wrong, or missing the details, or thinking there can't be any understanding in something they don't understand or disagree with is a big problem.

Lots of people whack others over the head to externally validate their beliefs. I think Evangelism might even fall under that category by some definitions, no offence.

Communists were quite anti-intellectual. Literally against intelligentsia

The backstory ones are amazing.

It's like an LLM were set free.

"He probably stalked her from the age of 12 and waited till she was 19 before he bought her an ice cream of the flavour her mum liked before she died. All so that she'd invite him to this party where he could fight this other guy.

Imagine you think this guy is a friend and he only became your friend because he hated someone else.

As someone with trauma because of my parents dying when I was young, finding out that the one guy who was your friend is not would be devastating."

It actually reads like modern TV. Soaps, and teen drama.

Part of the problem is, we tend to ignore age. That sort of post could have been made by a 9 year old.

> I know I'm not saying anything new here, but I'm always shocked by just how vicious the Reddit community is, especially from a group who considers themselves highly intelligent (compared to those "other" people).

Oh, the others are just the "deplorables". Say anything that isn't hard left and get banned. That being said, the developer subs are much better than Stack Exchange, where you have egotistic moderators high on power.

Really depends on the sub. r/conservative bans everyone who questions the right, even conservatives. They’ll ban you for being opposed to banning books, fer chrissake.

Reddit just lends itself to tribal behaviors.

Your first paragraph is true but also, what do you expect when politics is exactly the same.

You're given and us Vs them narrative and if you fall on the wrong classification by whoever decides they want to apply a label, any harm you can come to is delightful and cherished. Violence is justified too. "Words are violence" so violence can be used to "defend" against it.

I think it goes well beyond Reddit and has all to do with creating a context of righteousness and dehumanization to be able to justify mob behaviour and, ultimately, violence. Power, in one word.

> Sometimes I wonder why things like vigilanteism and other bad behaviors were so prevalent in the past,

For vigilanteism it seems simple to me: it was the original counterforce against anti-social sociopathic and predatory behavior such as murder - predating law enforcement, predating law, predating humanity. Even animals arguably engage in "vigilanteism" when retaliating against another pack's attack, or when pack leaders are overly cruel and tyranical. The deterence of "don't hurt us - or we'll hurt you".

We rightfully look down on vigilanteism now as it tends to short circuit things like the due process of an assumed-to-be effective, functional, and ethical legal system... but those are some pretty big assumptions, and I have several bridges to sell you if you think they're always true, or if you think everyone agrees on which legal systems rise to that level. Vigilanteism is merely the default form of "justice" that we sometimes rise above, given the right circumstances.

Circumstances which are often lacking online.

I kind of wish that some billionaire would just get mad, buy reddit, and run it into the ground. The world would be a much better place

Or better yet, round the redditors up and send them to Siberia

Be careful what you wish for, this has already happened to The Social Network Formerly Known As Twitter.

I wonder if anyone who wished doom upon X in the past years is finally getting the satisfaction they wanted from watching its steady demise. Personally I don't see anything stopping someone from just making Twitter: The Sequel and starting the whole cycle all over again. There's nothing that outlaws the creation of an internet cesspool.

There was little of lasting value on Twitter. It was great for breaking news or timely discussion but I’ve rarely had the need to go back and reread old tweets. Reddit, at least in the right subs, is often a StackExchange with a much broader scope and less pedantic moderation. I probably refer to old Reddit posts multiple times a week.

I don’t miss Twitter. I would absolutely miss Reddit.

For some reason, this reminded me of the Bansky quote:

“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.”

How many millions of people post on Reddit?

Reddit is just made of everyone, and it turns out that everyone is a bunch of jerks.

Reddit is a cesspool. There are people actively using it for radicalization. It takes them far too long to shut down subreddits dedicated to far-right eugenicist delusions, if they do so at all.

My man… if you think the problem with Reddit is “far right” that is just how far your perspective is skewed.

There are a lot of accusations to make at Reddit; that is by far not even close to reality.

Reddit has a far everything. From tankies in denial to straight up Nazis, Admins do nothing with both sides. I used to like the libertarian approach (except the borderline/straight up cp subs...) but it is evident that they dont do anything except punishing their own community and censoring what they dont like because of being understaffed and underqualified rather than sacrificing on advertising revenue for the sake of liberty and pulling users that way.

Show me.

I’ve been to every corner of Reddit and never seen anything remotely “far right”. I’ve seen the conservative sub be brigaded by other subs that are allowed to break reddits rules about hot-linking to brigade, though I disagreed with them I saw The Donald get banned for two astroturfed posts that MediaMatters (Hillary Clinton) used to get them banned (ironically before “all cops are bastards” was promoted), and I’ve seen actual far right forums that make me sick. None of that is far-right on Reddit.

So show me. Link a sub. It should be easy for your claim. As response other than “here is a far right sub on Reddit” will be an admission you are making it up.

Of course, this is what I expected to see when you claim far right content isn't a problem. You are severely biased to think that The Donald was anything other than a cesspool of radicalism. The dude has been a lifelong con man. He was an utter failure (and traitor) as a president, as was obvious from the start.

Reddit is full of whatever a dogwhistle becomes when everyone can hear it. Just whistles, I suppose. It is shockingly easy to find racists commenting about IQ and 13/50 bullshit in any subreddit that isn't actively moderating against that, let alone one that encourages it like the Donald.

the_donald was banned years ago, along with many other far right subs. Where are these far right wing subs?

Right or wrong, I don't really care. The far right has been effectively purged from Reddit.

Maybe a single hive was removed after years of activity. The users from the Donald were not removed. They moved to other subreddits where they persist with the same behaviors. There has certainly not been any sort of purge.

Nah they instead purged those who opposed the hate mongering and called out the trolling...

I've come to hazard a guess they prefer the TD folks because the have higher engagement rates and are more prone to fall for the shady ads that reddit seems to be rife with

Where? I just don’t see it.

It looks to me they moved elsewhere, in some cases probably more radical communities.

https://pbfcomics.com/comics/deeply-held-beliefs/

>racists commenting about IQ and 13/50 bullshit

I don’t know what you are saying. Explain?

You've thoroughly proven you have no clue you would recognize far-right content when you used the Donald as a counter-example of it, no need to continue.

Why are you having difficulty explaining all the things you are saying are so commonplace?

You are making claims but unwilling to back any of them up.

Imagine for a moment… if you were so far left that everything looked “far right” to you, how would you know?

I'm not having difficulty, I'm choosing not to follow the directives of someone who thinks the Donald wasn't far right radicalism.

"You didn't write responses on my terms so you're wrong and biased to the point of delusion." No, actually, you think a far-right echo chamber finally getting banned for agitating users towards shooting police officers is somehow Hillary Clinton's fault.

So you're saying there's no examples, meaning that you're actually claiming such subreddits don't exist

From your comment history on vaccines and illness I presume you are more familiar than I with far-right subreddits. Perhaps you should list a few here to satisfy yourself, since I won't be entertaining the question.

You have now in this thread accused two HN members of being far right… while being completely incapable of linking far right activity on Reddit you claim is all over the place.

You may have a religion you aren’t aware of.

Again, you think a subreddit purpose-built around supporting lifelong con man isn't far-right. Not even after he has been indicted for insurrection and stealing secret documents is it clear to you.

I don't understand why you can't link to a single _existing_ alt-right subreddit. You keep referencing a single one that was purged years ago.

You're claiming they're still on Reddit but using a long gone subreddit as proof of Reddit being alt-right today? How does that even work? If you can't link to something today you can't say the problem still exists today.

This is just another admission that your claim has no merit

It would be more tactful to just admit you are wrong. Attacking me with strange baseless accusations, based on what I can only assume are my correct positions in previous scientific discussions, is a strange saving face tactic

my HN client doesnt have notifications. You havent been to 'every corner of Reddit' if you are making this claim. Especially around the 2016-2018 mark, there used to be horrible subs. The far lefters overtook (mostly), for sure, but Reddit used to be (maybe still is, i dont know) the front for recruiting new misguided teens for those forums you mentioned.

I agree reddit is a cesspool. I disagree that rightwing groups are the cause. Leftwing groups, Rightwing, groups in the middle, groups around programming languages are all filled with toxic people showing toxic behaviour that the same people would complain about on other mediums.

Any examples of that? That sounds pretty far fetched

I saw the same video on r/publicfreakout and I didn't see a single comment laughing at the guy. Most were expressing concern. Many were saying it shouldn't have been uploaded.

Different subreddits will have different reactions. Also, moderation and up/down voting will swing the tone over time. One of you may have seen the post early and the other later and you could both be right in your impressions.

As time goes on, I find myself avoiding posts like these on purpose. I just don't find them funny or entertaining and I find the comments to generally be quite heartless and judgmental. We're collectively laughing at these people like they're caricatures. They're people like you and me, but they're treated like subhumans. I saw that post of the airport video and briefly considered watching but, honestly, I don't want to participate anymore in the collective ridicule of somebody whose personal situation I don't know and can't judge fairly.

There was a post the other day by a wife who briefly saw messages between her husband and some 16 year old. They seemed 'intimate'. All the comments condemned him as a vile pedophile. A day later, she writes that it turned out the girl was her husband's daughter. That he'd only recently found out about her.

We judge as if we're any better than these people. We're not.