Of course, having a topic is all good. But what some channel owners did is to prevent people from talking on the channel via bans, tried to block discussion and forcefully make people move over. That, in my book, is not ok.
It's the issue with discussion platforms where the speech is not regulated, they tend to bring people that have been kicked out of other platforms, even if they are not really interested in the main focus of the forum.
it is very often not a willing listener. and there is plenty of content that should be blocked between participants regardless of their willingness to share it.
There are valid reasons for limiting which topics people can discuss in a space, in my opinion. If I disallow people from discussing politics on my cooking forum that's not censorship. It's keeping the discussion focused on the actual topic.
HN seems to take a middle ground position of allowing politics when they are relevant to the topic, but not otherwise. That is also what I promote on all platforms I moderate.
The problem with topics bans is that you can sabotage topics you don't like to silence them. E.g. Rust evangelicals could have been silenced quite easely by flame baiting their posts.
Honestly this position is pretty backwards. Forums shouldn’t be policing content unless it’s illegal. Why is everyone so desperate for regulated discussion?
It's not the case that most users aren't able to read the content. Some may find the content blocked by their government, or some similar entity, but many users simply refuse to read it, and insist that no one else be afforded the opportunity to do so.
It makes little sense to ban discussions among the set of users who can and are willing to read the content.
Sometimes. As is often the case, there is evidence for both (banning/limiting, Chilling Effect, power pressure & scolding, etc), depending on the community.
In your second link, the topics were literally banned from the platform, rendering the question moot in that case.
If you only provide a forum, and give moderation power to users (block other users, select what they want), then let whatever speech happens there to happen.
However, if you (as a forum provider, social network, whatever) select the content to be viewed and promoted (either using a proprietary algorithm or human discretion), or you are optimizing for engagement, then you are responsible for moderation failures and suspensions.
If you think people should be banned from discussions because of their "attitudes" regarding moderation, you don't understand the difference between moderation and censorship, and you are advocating censorship.
> I would ban you for such an attitude.
Well, then you are a would-be censor, and it's a good thing you can't ban everyone everywhere, or else the whole world would fall silent and the only sound would be of your waxing nonsense. All those "spammers" with their "spam" complaints about CP, amirite?
If you think people should be banned from discussions because they won't stop complaining about all the CP on the network and how they can't legally run a pod anymore, well that's the attitude I'd expect from a CP network admin.
Right, so it's a bit more coarse then banning or allowing users, but if you selectively ban or allow topics that certain kinds of users want to talk about (or don't want talked about), you can definitely shape your user base.
The hidden piece of the puzzle here is that objectionable speech pushes regular speech out.
Most users don't want to wade through toxicity to get to signal. If they're discussing a topic of interest, say baking, and someone comes in and starts ranting on how a vast global conspiracy made up of surprisingly-homogeneous ethnicity given its global scale is pushing up the price of yeast to weaken the market for white bread, either the moderators squelch that noise or people who want to talk about baking go somewhere else to do it.
Given their own freedom, when given a choice, users tend to select moderated channels over unmoderated ones. We've been doing the Internet long enough to know this to be true.
I didn't say that ideas need to be 'approved'. I challenged the idea that the ability to reach a worldwide audience should be free and available to anybody, regardless of content therein.
Filtering mechanisms exist in all forums, online and offline. Some suck, like certain sub-communities in youtube. The discussion should be about what filters we employ to best balance the positive value of conversation against the negative.
I think moderation should be about the words that are being said, not the ideas that are being discussed.
A free speech platform should allow a wide range of topics, but it's not expected to stand for all manner of trolling and bad faith argumentation. I think that conflating the two is tripping a lot of people up in the debate about the topic.
> The issue seems to be generally framed as "FULL CENSORSHIP" or "FULL ANARCHY NO MODERATION", with little middle ground considered.
With just a few exceptions, most platforms already seem to be somewhere in between now -- but it seems like the most popular ones also coming under more pressure to change some of the substance of their moderation.
> Topic
From what I've seen recently, I think this would be one of the most contentious to get people to agree on (including in particular the interpretation of what is "on topic" or "off topic"). I just recently read a thread about how hard this is where people were talking about the tendency of politics to creep into forums about hobbies, which some of the people involved wanted to find a way to avoid.
But that posed a lot of thorny questions... like
* what if some people feel like a certain political or social topic is obviously very relevant to a certain hobby or interest, but other people don't?
* what if some people want to make a critique of the hobby or interest or its associated community, but other people think the critique is mistaken or off topic, or don't agree with its premises?
* what if some people want to coordinate a defense of the hobby or interest or its associated community against a political or cultural attack? (e.g. we should fight this legislation that would be bad for our community, or we should coordinate a response to so-and-so who is badmouthing our community)
* what if some people feel that something is so important that it's inherently always on topic everywhere?
* what if some people mention their other views or affiliations in passing in a way that feels genuinely innocent to them, but that upsets other people? (e.g. they use an avatar that expresses some kind of political, social, or religious identity or some negative implication toward other people's identity; or they just tell a story that's like "while I was doing off-topic thing X, I had this on-topic thought Y")
* what if people within the community get in a fight that somehow seems to tie in to a larger social conflict?
* what if people want to have a meta-conversation about the best way of handling these issues?
* what if people feel frustrated because some off-topic posts (that are less controversial in some way) get treated more gently or indulgently than others (that are more controversial)? (e.g. Bob doesn't get in trouble for writing a 100-word anecdote on the cat fancy forum about his cooking, but Sarah does get in trouble for her 100-word anecdote about her political organizing)
* what if people disagree about whether historical or philosophical aspects of a primarily practical subject matter are on-topic or not? (what if some people feel that some of the historical or philosophical commentary is "really" thinly-disguised political commentary, because it implies that probably someone was awesome or terrible in some way connection with the practical topic?)
I don't mean to say that all ways of handling these issues are just as good as all other ways, but more that it's not always clear whether there's a meaningful way to define topicality -- or at least not that people would be able to agree on them easily.
I once had a personal experience of this that doesn't really relate to current events. :-) When Dmitry Sklyarov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.) was arrested in August 2001, I ran an e-mail discussion list for people who were trying to free him. So far so good -- it seems like all of the subscribers were there because they wanted to free Dmitry and just wanted to talk about the best way of doing that.
But just a few weeks later, the September 11 attack happened, and immediately people on the mailing list wanted to talk about it, because it was such an intense and raw thing, and almost immediately they got into a fight about their views about the U.S. government! I was very anguished to have to be in the position of trying to force them to stop in order to get back to talking about the core concern of freeing Dmitry.
But of course the attacks were also on everyone's mind, and in principle they did have a lot of practical consequences for our goals, e.g. because it would be drastically harder to get press coverage, because relations between the U.S. and Russia might change as a result of the war in Afghanistan, because Dmitry himself might be alarmed to suddenly be surrounded by so much upheaval, because people's availability to protest about the DMCA might be reduced by their desire to deal with consequences of the attacks, because officials like Robert Mueller whom we were trying to influence might become preoccupied with a whole new set of concerns, etc.
I'm really not sure exactly what would have been either most fair or most useful in terms of what aspects of the September 11 attacks I should or should not have let people talk about on the mailing list.
Also right now there is a thread about LAEDA and EARN IT on another mailing list that I'm on, where people started talking about the legality of buying body armor, and about gun politics, and some other stuff. The moderator got annoyed and tried to get people to stop, but on the other hand these analogies aren't entirely irrelevant -- for example, some of the politicians who are going to vote on legislation about encryption might be influenced by lobbying and advocacy that tries to draw analogies or distinctions between encryption and body armor. Even though the list members may not be very good at discussing it constructively, it's not like there is no relevance at all of U.S. gun politics for U.S. encryption policy.
I was also in a thread just a few weeks ago here on Hacker News about "what topics are within the purview of public health?", and we found it very hard to agree about that. If Hacker News were about public health, we might have a huge ballooning disagreement about that scope question -- breaking out into public view pretty regularly.
As people already mentioned here, try running a free-for-all moderation-free discussion board and see what happens.
Back in the day, the Internet was full of HTML discussion boards just like this one, and idiots were banned with no questions asked. It was beautiful, and no one complained.
This site has moderation, no one is complaining. YouTube is a "person" - legally now, but somehow they don't have the responsibility to be a good citizen?
The fact that allegedly smart people on HN use the term "censorship" in the context of non-government control is pretty shocking. You don't know censorship.
"Censorship" has absolutely nothing to do with it. A private company can allow/disallow whatever content they f---ing please, and the Wild West capitalists on this board should be the first ones to support this move. Who is going to force them? The government? Oh, hello.
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