The issue with free speech platforms is they attract a crowd of people whose only narrative is one that can't be said in other places. It isn't a narrative of truth, it is one of hate and bigotry.
I've seen few examples where objective truth is banned. I have, however, seen a lot of Nazis get banned.
To truly be open to everything you have to make a lot of analysis and filtering effort. If you go to a lot of the sort of information sources the GP mentioned, the signal-to-noise ratio is so low that unless you have literally nothing to do with your day the chance of finding some useful truth is neg liable (sometimes even zero, because sometimes the signal is not just downed out by noise it is actively beaten away by it).
I seek truth as unconditionally as it is practical for me to do so.
What's really funny is how all discussions they host have to be approached from that angle.
So you can't just talk about your favorite TV show. You have to first make a nod to how it features a Jewish conspiracy to push black-white interracial relationships. Only then can you go on to discuss the actual episode.
If people with non-"odious" views end up at such a platform, they will quickly notice the unusual concentration of "odious" views, and generally find it uncomfortable and leave. Thus there is a steady increase in the prevalence of "odious" views until they are near-universal on the platform.
I've even seen a number of subreddits with no moderators/inactive moderators which were pretty good, even with a few thousand members.
I suppose might be that the forums you're discussing may be one of the ones created with the express selling point of having low/no moderation, while these other places where created as a place to have discussions first and foremost.
But I had the impression that you habe to ignore a swath of racism, sexism, homo/transphobia, and conspiracy theory to find them.
I’ve seen this again and again, people will see an ocean of normal content anywhere free speech is allowed and laser-focus on the single floating turd.
They’ll then mischaracterize the entire ocean as the turd, it’s like they have no sense of proportionality.
I'm happy to be shown to be wrong, but from my experience what you are saying doesn't exist.
For example of the second, there was a thread on /ck/ a few weeks back where some guy (probably a grad student; I'll never know) stumbled on a few $K of food lab equipment. Thread went on with a variety of experiments/projects which ranged from "reasonable" to "why would you even consider this" (some kind of flavored oil distillate from a happy meal, used to make ice cream).
If that was on HN, it would be someone's social-climbing portfolio blog, or I would have to wonder if it's astroturfing by some lab equipment company, or Mcdonalds. I'd question if this really was a curiosity-based endeavor, or if it was just someone trying to signal to potential employers "look at my Relevant Project!" or "look how quirky I am!" to friends.
But none of that was a concern; there is really no way for that individual to profit or benefit from this in any context. It's an anonymous forum, and there's strong social pressure to not subvert that (unless it is simply by virtue of posting similar content). It takes the game theory out of the equation; nobody is trying to sell me something.
It's not for everything or everyone, and there's definitely some effort in filtering out garbage posts. The same goes for HN, except the content to manually filter out is the sea of sometimes-veiled advertisements and self-promotion rather than plain-faced flamebait.
Emphasis on "the old". Usenet in the early to mid 90s was pretty great too, but again, emphasis on "the old". Niches that haven't been discovered by many people yet will likely always function well.
And you know what? I don't know many people who want to swim in even a 100m pool with a turd floating in it.
For instance, many posts here about geopolitics appear to me as xenophobic and full of false information (particularly when they're countries that I'm familiar with). But it's hard for people to see that, or even think anyone could legitimately feel that way, when it's considered by the in-group to simply be "common sense." Heavy handed moderation about a subject (rather than simple topicality like with Hacker News) can lead to the entrenchment of these in-groups, which can both increases the level of these comments and leads people to think of them as nothing more than common discourse. It also increases bifurcation, so you have competing "destroy all Pepsi" and "destroy all Coke" forums, both of whom think they're merely bring moderate common sense ideas forward to oppose the extremists on the other end.
Having said that, the forums I'm talking about seem to have a lower level of this in general, since they often focus on a particular niche. Similar to how the rules against political discussion let's Hacker News have better discussions than in general, but when political discussions do slip through then tend to be closer to typical internet discussions.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance. [0]
This isn't a knock on you personally, but when I come to HN for discussion, I'd like the discussion to be on HN.
Insisting that I view some YouTube (which I avoid like the plague because I hate their business model) content in order to understand your point of view, just makes me want to ignore you. Not down-vote you, just ignore you.
It sounds like you have a point of view that seems (to you at least) important. If it's that important/relevant/insightful, then please explain your point of view.
I don't know or care who "Nader Al-Naji" might be, nor am I going to jump off to another site to find out.
I want to be crystal clear about this: I'm not trying to beat up on you (andrewfromx) or anyone else. Rather, I'm interested in your point of view not that of some rando on the site of some rapacious corporation.
I don't say this to excuse their actions or say that this filter is good, but that seems to be the fundamental mechanism.
And that last part is the entire point: There simply is no mainstream-relevant occurency of left-wing terrorism and murders any more in the Western world. The most relevant militant group was the German RAF, which has all but dissolved in the early 90s (there are three still on the run and occasionally robbing a bank but that's it). In contrast, murders and other organized violence and terrorism based on right-wing ideology is shockingly commonplace.
With online-based hate speech, it is just the same matter, only a different medium - and there is so much more content that draws in right-wing hate speech (such as anti-immigration stuff, antisemitism, Islamophobia and LGBT hate) than anything that inspires left-wing hate speech. The only thing that comes close to hate speech from the left wing are the "eat the rich" slogan and Stalin/Gulag memes, and that's it.
As a result, it is obvious from the numbers that the right wing will always complain about "we are getting censored and the lefties are not!!!"... well, duh, how about if the complainers would stop doing the things they get moderated for?!
Schopenhauer's commentary on authorship and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivations should be far more widely read.
Those whose focus is overtly offensive and oppressive speech, however ...
Reddit claimed free speech as a value in its early years. That sentiment has evolved, for all the usual reasons.[1]
It is possible to host a wide range of significant views without becoming overtly hostile to the majority of the population, and the viewpoints held by those.
Reddit was in no way "the original free speech platform".
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Notes:
1. TL;DR: it's untenable and spirals into a cesspit, QED.
Not sure I agree on this one. Forums like /r/conservative, patriots.win, and Gab claim to be in favor of "free speech," but dissenters quickly get banned. 4chan comes to mind — people do indeed post things of all political slants there, and the only moderation seems to be removing obviously unlawful content. And yet 4chan is almost decidedly covered in turds.
My main complaint with Reddit is that the direction it's been taking the site over the past five years or so, and more pointedly the improvements it's not made, are far divorced from where I'd like to see it go.
Reddit wastes my time and does not reward time spent on site with valuable insights. Not strictly for cultivating misinformation and disinformation, though that's a fair-sized piece of my concern. I'm more concerned that it simply kills good conversation or prevents it from arising in the first place.
I can't really blame them for not stepping up to the plate and saying 'fuck off', since the genesis of the site had to do with Reddit overmoderation, and even appearing to step into the same shoes could have had killed the site.
Usually the general sentiment on HN seems to be quite similar to that of the unmoderated communities. It's just that people here are more sophisticated in telling you why poor people had it coming.
Again, I fundamentally disagree. You are being vague and overly general on the sort of moderation pressure. The actual banned content on most social media platforms, if we bring it out of context, ends up things like CP and Nazis. If those are the "disruptive ideas" we need to explore truth, then I'm pretty ok never finding it.
On almost every social media site (except, ironically, "free speech" platforms) there is a space to discuss everything from communism to anarchy. Crystal healing to quantum physics. Ghosts to exoplanets. Nihilism to Scientology.
The actual set of banned discussion is pretty much all centered around speech that directly leads to harm.
The reason I keep bringing it back to "what is actually banned" is because when you get right down the actual banned conversations, they are both few and not really worth discussing for "truth".
Name a banned "golden nugget" conversation. You say there is censorship, so list it. Tell me what sort of deep conversation or truth we can't know because we stop Nazis from using the N word.
I can tell you ‘about’ something that would. For instance, I would get banned for doxing you. The reason why I would get banned is that the information would be very valuable to someone that the forum is not interested in helping. Some banned conversation includes realities that explain what is going on in the world in a way that can greatly benefit a potential investor, or equivalently, greatly misguide them. Given that there is no way to discern between the two, both are banned.
I have one personal example that I am willing to share. I learned a tremendous amount of helpful information about birth practices and infant care from one of these ‘extreme free speech’ platforms. An example is cord clamping. The debate of this topic was extremely irreverent and ad-hominem, but it was easy to see that logic and objective results clearly favored one side, regardless of the civility with which this information was presented. Sadly, I don’t believe the information would have been effectively communicated in its most polite form, because it was clearly out there for all to see for a very long time without any improvement to common practice. The problem is that a reasonable person must ask why experts would ignore such information before accepting alternative possibilities, and this necessarily leads to a very dark rabbit-hole showing politically-incorrect evidence of extreme dysfunction within their profession. This became broadly applicable to me personally. My OB/GYN was objectively harmful to my baby, my pediatrician and nurses were wonderful, and this was all much less confusing given that understanding.
Ok, and how would doxing me be something that would further finding truth? That's not an example of a productive conversation limited because of anti-free speech.
> An example is cord clamping.
Nothing in your example is a conversation that couldn't be had on "anti-free speech" platforms.
What you've failed to give me is an example or description of communication that cannot be had on non-free speech platforms that isn't itself a turd.
Unless your doxxing example was to say "Hey, this researcher that lives on 123 maple street is where clamping came from and we clearly can't trust people from maple street because that's were bad people are from".
That, in and of itself, doesn't seem like a good way to go about discovering truth.