To support your point, there's a press release circulating from Google and Facebook right now. They've launched a program to share hashes (fingerprints) through a database identifying offending ("extremist") content so it can be more efficiently removed from the web. Yet, we aren't allowed to comment on this - I just posted it and the story was flagged.
There's a huge difference between saying "No more gratuitous flamebait about the US Election", and "no technical discussion permitted about any topic that could possibly be controversial."
- what's extremist? this is just going to be used to silence my particular views
- this is anti-free speech
- some mention how this is against net neutrality
- some mention of Trump and the cabinet
- some discussion on how Facebook is not taking ownership of the problem
- Facebook echo chambers
- diversity, racism, gender, safe places, identity politics (and likely bathrooms)
- how this is needed to create a safer online community
- something about how this ties in with the views of the MSM (and likely some misrepresentation of polls)
- something about how this wouldn't be an issue if the results of the election would have been otherwise
- something about the difference between the EC and the popular vote
All of these points have been discussed ad nauseum in other threads with no appreciably constructive discussion.
And for the life of me I can't think of any technical discussion that would be made on the topic other than possibly on how calculating all of these hashes/signatures isn't really going to be technically effective to catch everything.
What's useful about that?
mini-project idea: HN discussion generator, maybe markov chain based. Provide a topic, out comes a full-fledged HN-style discussion, complete with vote/flag estimates (not for posting to HN, of course)
+1 - also an HN discussion auto-up/down-voter.
What's useful about that?
Personally, I've been struggling with the question of, are mega-services like Google and Facebook compatible with an open Internet? This helps to clarify my thinking.
Up to now I've been thinking about what evil they might do individually. Now I see the obvious: just like in any other industry, the objective is to reduce the market to a few major players (3-7). Then these become the only companies who can get "copyright clearances" or "non-fake news certification" in exchange for supporting their patrons' programs.