zlacker

>>southe+(OP)
When the platforms starting censoring during the pandemic and last election cycle I remember saying they better get it right 100% of the time because the moment they get it wrong their credibility is shot. Hear we are.

Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.

>>chasd0+u8
They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly.

So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship currently, I think of things like youtubes copyright claim process and how that is routinely used as a censorship backdoor by anyone - including the police. Sometimes its not even for any good reason and done by unthinking bots. This is banning more perfectly fine content than anything the government has done. I don't understand why there isn't more pushback against that process to punish people for frivolous claims.

>>Eddy_V+Db
> They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly.

If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.

>>ryandr+wt
This is where I really feel my age. Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all, yet we all mostly got by. You went to the places you knew to go to. The communities mostly self moderated by kicks/bans. It worked really well.

So whats changed?

Well, I have my thoughts, but one thing is for sure, as soon as the platform itself tried to start moderating, that's when things really started changing.

>>dimitr+sR
> young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all > The communities mostly self moderated by kicks/bans.

Kicking people off was and still is censorship and moderation. Services really try hard to not kick people off now and just police the content instead.

>>matwoo+eU
You were not kicked off the platform. You could join any other thousands of rooms, boards, etc. And you were only booted if you truly were a real dipshit.

>>dimitr+q71
You could absolutely get kicked off those platforms permanently. Every IRC network has had banlists for decades. I knew people who got banned from AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, Livejournal, etc. IP bans were often easy to evade, but the intention was there.

>>djur+BZ1
Again: The platform is IRC. The servers are the individual communities. There were hundreds of IRC networks. You were not blacklisted from all of IRC. You were blacklisted from a particular server. And in my personal recollection, you only got banned for something especially egregious, not like today where saying the wrong "trigger word" can get you shadowbanned, which is even more nefarious.

On top of all of this, bans were frequently appealed and overturned.

>>dimitr+dz3
IRC isn't a "platform", but you started here:

> Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all

But if your definition of "virtually uncensored" is that there are uncensored instances, then IRC, forums, etc. are just as "uncensored" as ever. There's just a lot more internet users on moderated platforms now.

>>djur+zf8
Yes. Advertisement is a helluva drug. No one's IRC server has a billion dollar marketing budget.

Also Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et all all started off pretty uncensored and unmoderated to build the moats. Then they started cracking down once the feds and political influences kicked in.