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0 pointschinesempire5y ago0 comments

That's the nature of discussion when there is someone who controls the discussion.

If I'm having a discussion with people in real life I decide what I accept or not, there's no third party that decides for me what is right.

Decentralisation is exactly about that: it empowers you and not someone else to decide what you like to read or not.

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TulliusCicero5y ago

> If I'm having a discussion with people in real life I decide what I accept or not, there's no third party that decides for me what is right.

Yes, and that works fine because there's no platform there, just a 1 on 1 or small group conversation. You can still easily replicate this, unmoderated, with email or various messaging apps.

Once you can talk to potentially hundreds or thousands of people at once, once there's a platform, that model breaks down. Bad actors who would be uninterested in trolling single individuals are very interested in trolling hundreds at a time. And nobody wants to "walk away" from an otherwise good community because of handful of very loud people are spouting hate there.

Any platform that's both popular and unmoderated will eventually be dominated by extreme content, and will push out normal people, who will go somewhere that's popular and moderated.

chinesempireOP5y ago

It works because I decide.

There's no intrinsical limitation on the number of participants

Don't you like what a user says?

You can ignore them

Don't you like what some instance does, you can block it.

Any platform that is popular has an editorial board and doesn't want you to say things they don't like.

Simple as that.

Newspaper had no comments sections because it's silly to comment the news, they already decide what to publish and what not.

They already chose who to talk to, there's no point in discussing when you can only comment what someone else wants you to talk about.

Have you seen today on HN a post about exactly 40 years ago, when an Italian civil plane, the Itavia Flight 870, was shot down by a fight between NATO and Libyan fighter jets and 81 innocent people died?

You won't, because it's gonna be flagged as politics.

But you're going to read about every cat fight between über rich silicon valley founders because that's not politics for them, it's what they wanna talk about.

Trolling is a problem for the platform, not for the users.

I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.

If they do it for me, it's censorship.

Censorship is not bad per se, but it's not done in my name, it's only in the platform's interests.

Do platforms ever ask users what do they think about banning someone?

Of course they don't...

TulliusCicero5y ago

> I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.

This only works for small communities. You can't feasibly block the literally thousands of trolls and petty assholes that are posting on Reddit every day without that task consuming all your time. Multiply that by every single user having to do it personally and it gets even sillier.

There's a reason basically every popular platform is moderated on some level, and it's not because of some grand meta-moderator conspiracy.

Moderation is near-universally used because it works. Non-moderating doesn't work for conversations that eclipse some size. Disliking how moderators behave doesn't change that.

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TulliusCicero5y ago

> If I'm having a discussion with people in real life I decide what I accept or not, there's no third party that decides for me what is right.

Yes, and that works fine because there's no platform there, just a 1 on 1 or small group conversation. You can still easily replicate this, unmoderated, with email or various messaging apps.

Any platform that's both popular and unmoderated will eventually be dominated by extreme content, and will push out normal people, who will go somewhere that's popular and moderated.

chinesempireOP5y ago

It works because I decide.

There's no intrinsical limitation on the number of participants

Don't you like what a user says?

You can ignore them

Don't you like what some instance does, you can block it.

Any platform that is popular has an editorial board and doesn't want you to say things they don't like.

Simple as that.

Newspaper had no comments sections because it's silly to comment the news, they already decide what to publish and what not.

They already chose who to talk to, there's no point in discussing when you can only comment what someone else wants you to talk about.

You won't, because it's gonna be flagged as politics.

But you're going to read about every cat fight between über rich silicon valley founders because that's not politics for them, it's what they wanna talk about.

Trolling is a problem for the platform, not for the users.

I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.

If they do it for me, it's censorship.

Censorship is not bad per se, but it's not done in my name, it's only in the platform's interests.

Do platforms ever ask users what do they think about banning someone?

Of course they don't...

TulliusCicero5y ago

> I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.

There's a reason basically every popular platform is moderated on some level, and it's not because of some grand meta-moderator conspiracy.

Moderation is near-universally used because it works. Non-moderating doesn't work for conversations that eclipse some size. Disliking how moderators behave doesn't change that.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse