So what's next, Hacker News is illegal because the point system encourages retention?

zbentley 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This kind of absolutism is unhelpful. At every point on the spectrum between "a good app that people choose to spend time on because it's valuable to them" and "heroin marketed to preteens in schools" there is no clear line or delineation between addictive abuse and autonomy.

But we still don't let liquor stores sell to kids. We still criminalize a lot of drug use. And while there are tons of different opinions about whether specific instances of those restrictions are appropriate, pretty much everyone agrees that there are qualitative differences between predatory behavior-influencing and bad choices.

It's a question about where to move lines that society already broadly agreed to put in place, not about whether to have lines at all a la "well you might as well just make bad choices illegal then". We already do that, and it succeeds at mitigating harm in many (not all) cases.

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krapp 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The point of the absolutism is that the line will be drawn not where society broadly agrees it should, but where governments find it most useful, and that line will always move in the direction of increasing censorship and propaganda. If Hacker News becomes enough of a threat to the regime it will be classified as "social media" and all of a sudden it will be illegal to moderate without a court order or some nonsense. This is a fundamentally different argument than with liquor, or cigarettes, because those don't intersect with fundamental human rights. Social media intersects with free speech. I know people here don't want to admit that, but it's true.

It used to be understood within hacker culture that government influence over speech is never good. For some reason when it comes to social media we're suddenly willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Even banning algorithmic feeds is a problem. Do those feeds push harmful and extremist content? Yes. But they push everything else as well. Making it more difficult to find related content of any kind is a kind of censorship.

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zbentley 3 hours ago | parent [-]

And that kind of absolutism isn't helpful either!

"Government" isn't an external actor; most governments exist on the spectrum between "a big chunk of the public is OK with or supports what they're doing" and "directly influenced by public opinion" (democratic states).

And yeah, they abuse power a lot! So do corporations, tribes, religions, etc.--governments are just the "big group with violence capability and power" we put in that role during this chapter in history. There's no magical "autonomy is theoretically possible and therefore it's OK" line between letting a corporation that everyone is hooked on control what content people see, and letting a state restrict what content can be shown. The technicality that "people could choose to watch something else" for the corporation is just that--a technicality, and just as specious as the "if you don't like it here, then you can move" argument against participation in a state.

> This is a fundamentally different argument than with liquor, or cigarettes, because those don't intersect with fundamental human rights.

Well, liquor quite famously is considered as something to be protected in the U.S.; we had widespread civil unrest about removing legal restrictions on it! As for cigarettes: what's different about my right to express myself in speech and my right to put what I want in my body? Aren't both protections trying to draw a line between preserving autonomy and preventing harm? That's not whataboutism--I see that as a very similar regulatory space: personal choice and trust versus behavioral likelihood/distrust + negative externalities.

> It used to be understood within hacker culture that government influence over speech is never good.

It used to be felt within hacker counterculture that some government influence over speech was bad. Then counterculture expanded into a regular subculture (whether you call it eternal september or just popularity). Some popular opinions about speech restrictions changed (whether you call it orchestrated frog-boiling or just shifting opinions). And even in the '70s-'80s, few hackers believed that a free-speech-absolutist position would scale.

We also heavily restricted speech then; take off the rose-tinted history glasses. Broadcast media restrictions were insane. Things like the MPAA had widespread public support. Pearl-clutching was at a high level. Hell, the CDA in many ways had more teeth to restrict outlets back then, and a centralized social network sure looks a lot more like an outlet than a Usenet server does. I'm as thankful for section 230 as the next person, but even I have to admit that it is looking more and more like a technicality-shield every day.

Like, you and I probably agree extensively on the specifics of what counts as government overreach and the strong need to protect against that. I just don't think the way to do that is to stake out deliberately absolutist positions--either because you think an absolutist outcome is good or out of a flawed belief that an extreme position will somehow help move the consensus position in the direction of the extreme.

	▲	krapp 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Well, liquor quite famously is considered as something to be protected in the U.S.; we had widespread civil unrest about removing legal restrictions on it! And yet there's no Constitutional right to liquor, nor is access to liquor generally recognized as a fundamental human right. The civil unrest was due to the obvious result of banning liquor being the creation of mafia-run black markets. Same as the "war on drugs." Banning drugs only makes black markets and cartels more effective. >As for cigarettes: what's different about my right to express myself in speech and my right to put what I want in my body? Cigarettes aren't speech. Speech has value, even if it can do harm. Social media, being a means of effecting speech, has value even if it can do harm. Cigarettes have no value and can only do harm. >We also heavily restricted speech then; take off the rose-tinted history glasses. Broadcast media restrictions were insane. Sure. The argument for regulating broadcast tv and radio was the spectrum being a limited resource - but the web is not a limited resource. No matter how big Facebook or Twitter get, we're not going to run out of internets for new platforms. >I just don't think the way to do that is to stake out deliberately absolutist positions--either because you think an absolutist outcome is good or out of a flawed believe that an extreme position will somehow help move the consensus position in the direction of the extreme. I don't believe my position is necessarily absolutist - although it gets interpreted as such - I believe that social media platforms have the right and the moral duty to police themselves and deplatform dangerous and extremist content. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence nor does it oblige you a platform. I just don't believe that having governments step into that role is a good idea, and I think recent history in the US and UK back me up in that regard. And yes, social media platforms may (and will) get things wrong, but they can't send men with guns to shoot me in the head. But staking out extreme positions to the contrary is sometimes necessary when confronted with extreme positions. I consider the position that social media is more addictive and dangerous than heroin to be extremist, that algorithms need to be banned, that social media platforms need to be nationalized, all of that hyperbole is getting ridiculous to me, and it smacks of a moral panic. But almost no one seems willing to push against it or even question it.

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20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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