Without a Facebook account, your Oculus headset has "limited" features. There's also been a bunch of stories on HN from people who've bricked their headset when their linked Facebook account got banned or deleted.
The frustration is fair and understandable, but his characterization of Rust is wrong IMO.
Side note, has anyone read a Java textbook? They are notable for not being able to go more than a page without extolling Java's virtues in a way that is repetitive and annoying.
(My experience with Rust textbooks was not like that. They tend to explain the drawbacks of Rust's "radical wager" with the stipulation that for the authors, the payoff is worth it.)
They're not banning all allegations of fraud. They're blocking a specific set of claims that have been shown to be false, for instance that Donald Trump won the 2020 US election.
> IMHO you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant.
Defending speech I find repugnant is not the same thing as defending a nonexistent right to post lies on Youtube.
Host the lies on your own website. Create flyers and pass them out. Talk to people in public settings. Write to the newspaper (they might not post your lies, but you're free to try to get them). Hold conferences. Do whatever you want. As long as the lies don't violate a few well-established exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
But the right to have your lies hosted for free (and given a valuable, far-reaching audience) on a private platform, no matter the consequences to others or to the platform itself? It doesn't exist.
The whole point is the sanctimonious, heavy-handed nature of a platform that otherwise likes to act like they're concerned about the public good.
I recognize they have a right to do it, but I have a right to make noise about it and criticize them.
We got so many pop-ups, accounts suspended, etc. around the Hunter Biden stuff, and what do you know - it turns out there was substance to the story.
This never happened around the Russian collusion stuff and I suspect most of the city lib elite that inhabits tech companies wouldn't find that a sanctimonious.
> I recognize they have a right to do it, but I have a right to make noise about it and criticize them.
Nobody suggested otherwise, and your statement that "you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant" is clearly a sidestep. You can support free speech without supporting the nonexistent (and unrelated) right to post lies on Youtube.
They also prevent sending links to known phishing sites. They prevent the spread of malware.
Yes, this Trump-idiocy is malware.
Yes, this oversight needs oversight in the open. A list of banned stuff, with explanation.
Also, not surprisingly alternative platforms quickly sprung up to serve that audience and host. Though they might eventually get kicked off Cloudflare, and so on.
HN is fairly equivocal on the concept of walled gardens as a safety measure, despite the lack of accountability. There's some consensus that it's perfectly fine for e.g. Apple to prevent you from installing something outside the app store, or to put up major hurdles to installing anything unsigned on MacOS, because Grandma and Grandpa can't be trusted not to do something silly and get pwned. "It's not a hacker device!" is the usual refrain.
Yet the consequences of having your brain be pwned are so much worse. There are people who believe the Earth is flat and that vaccines cause autism; some of these beliefs can cost lives. Maybe YouTube shouldn't be a "hacker platform" either, but a place where people can watch videos without fear of being led down a rabbit hole.
At some point you have to trust adults and allow them to make mistakes. I get protecting children from bad information but adults should be trusted with their own lives. We should trust them to have a basic level of comprehension and logic by a certain age. If they don’t we need to revamp the education system, not cater to the lowest common denominator.
It's the same problem as the "both sides" approach to anything [0] ("my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge").
This inherently just moves the problem to decide who's informed (or equivalently what's the required level of "informedness").
Many jurisdictions routinely suspend people's voting rights. Due process and all. Of course when it comes to giving them back after they've served their sentence the process somehow slows down. So I'm fully aware of the downsides of this.
I'm not advocating for doing that to any concrete group of people, I'm advocating for working on this problem. It's not the first time this has come up in history, nor the last.
The long term solution is education. Yes. Is there even a short-term solution? Maybe not. However I'm interested in the details of best arguments for and against.
And I'm not convinced at all that just because someone is older than X years they now have to be "trusted". After all we should protect elderly people from bad information too, they seem to live their second childhood.
> They're private platforms. You can send those links via many other routes ...
That is a complete non sequitur. You say it's not about freedom of speech. Someone responds that, in fact, blatant censorship is occurring. You don't even attempt to refute this point, instead falling back to pointing out that the censorship isn't illegal!
Censorship reduces freedom to speak. That statement remains true whether or not the speech happens to be legally protected, and regardless of how wide spread the censorship might be.
Removing spam could be considered a form of censorship. It is removing the speech of others.
Generally anti-spam measures facilitate rather than inhibit freedom of speech. A sufficiently popular internet forum without spam controls would quickly become mostly unusable.
In this case, doesn't censorship enable freedom to speak?
These aren't singular global quantities. Such censorship reduces spammers' freedom to speak in order to preserve that of the other participants. Spamming closely resembles a tragedy of the commons (overuse of the system to solicit sales) and anti-spam an associated regulatory action.
The problem with such an analogy is that spam is inherently off topic - approximately none of the other participants actually want to see it. That's fundamentally different from this case. Whether you deem it misinformation or political speech, many of the participants clearly do want to see it. In fact, they want to see it so much that such information is consistently selected by the automated algorithms that are designed specifically to maximize engagement metrics.
We should be careful not to conflate wanting to see something with clicks. By that metric, spam about free bitcoins has more interested participants than much of the political speech in question.
It's not a non sequitur. Freedom of speech is not the same thing as a (nonexistent) right to post whatever you want on a private platform regardless of the consequences for others or for the platform itself.
I never said it's not censorship. You can post links on a number of competing services (or start your own), therefore statements like
“A group of unknown people at a technology corporation should be the ultimate authority on what I’m allowed to say, read, or share with my friends.”
> Freedom of speech is not the same thing as a (nonexistent) right to post whatever you want on a private platform
Again with a non sequitur - I never claimed that it was. I said:
> > Censorship reduces freedom to speak. That statement remains true whether or not the speech happens to be legally protected
It's really hard to have a good faith discussion about the pros and cons of a nuanced issue when one of the parties repeatedly fails to make good faith interpretations of claims which appear to challenge their worldview.
Don't worry, you're free to speak your mind so long as you don't actually try to communicate with anyone. Please take care not to express your opinions outside of the officially designated free speech zones!
Don't be ridiculous. There are thousands of competing communications providers. If you want to share content that harms society or harms the platforms themselves then you might just have to do it outside of Facebook or Twitter.
> It's about freedom of Reach, not freedom of speech.
What a snappy cliche. If you prohibit certain people from using the printing press but allow others to do so, then in practice you are limiting their freedom to speak relative to other people. To imply otherwise is either disingenuous or profoundly misinformed.
Everyone has access to the modern equivalent of a printing press. Anyone can buy a domain name and a VPS and "print" as many leaflets as they want.
Publishing on YouTube is more like, well, publishing. There's a middleman. They own their own press, they have a reputation and an audience, they bring the eyeballs, they make the money and they give you a cut. It has never been censorship for a publisher to decline to publish something.
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc (and to a lesser extent search engines) are the modern equivalent of the printing press in terms of the effect they've had on how we communicate. A domain and VPS are simply not a viable substitute for access to mainstream social networks; to claim otherwise is disingenuous.
They are not at all similar to publishing. There's no editor. There's no approval process for the typical use case, only a retroactive removal process. They don't have an audience in the traditional sense of people paying someone to curate information for them but rather depend on network effects to maintain a monopoly on their segment of the market. To that end, they have more in common with a dating app than they do with the New York Times. The presence of advertising revenue is the only legitimate similarity I see to a traditional publishing model.
In spite of your claim that YouTube isn't infrastructure, it appears to me to have far more commonalities than differences with it. That it isn't (yet) regulated as such is merely a legal peculiarity from my perspective.
(And the above doesn't even begin to consider the effects that dumping VC and megacorp funded free product has had on the market. Good luck starting a competing platform when there's no viable way to operate a subscription model and your direct competitor has a monopoly on the relevant advertising market.)
The person I responded to did, in fact, directly imply this. Recall that I had compared the impact of modern mainstream social media to that of the printing press historically. Directly ignoring my central point clearly places your comment in bad faith.
"Freedom of reach" is nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on (cultural, not legal) freedom of speech (and liberalism more generally) for the reasons I've already articulated in this and nearby threads.
Original person you responded to here - I did not, in fact, imply this. My thesis is that your analogy is broken. We agree that having a domain and a VPS is a poor substitute for a voice on a major social network; likewise, owning your own printing press is no substitute for, say, a regular column in a popular newspaper. It's incorrect to frame it as forbidding access to technology, when what it really is is a middleman refusing to do business with you. We can debate about the precise nature of the middleman, but the presence or absence thereof is the defining feature. You CAN publish without Facebook. You CAN'T publish (paper) without a printing press.
It also bears noting that the gap in access to publishing technology has radically narrowed - it is WAY easier and cheaper to buy a domain and a VPS and publish your thoughts to the entire world without any content middleman, than it was to procure your own physical press and set up an operation to print even thousands of leaflets, let alone publish something with global reach. You have access to - pretty much - all the same technology that Facebook does.
No. Those are the very definition of publishers, not communications providers masquerading as publishers when it's politically convenient for them (recall the dance around Section 230 protections).
If a local newspaper ever somehow became the central point of communication for a significant fraction of the population, posting nearly everything they received by default with very little to no curation, then it would be reasonable to reexamine the expectations placed upon them by society.
> It was turned on by default in May of 2020. It was available before then.
Thanks! I do think default matters though. Do you know how they handle groups and metadata?
> He could, though, and you have to trust him not to. I see that as a problem.
Personally I don't. At the end of the day we have to trust a lot of people for society to operate. I'll stay on Signal where I can get my non privacy concerned friends connecting while all signs point to the opposite of Moxie turning. Especially considering the tradeoff of how the space is moving so fast currently. Maybe I'll revisit when no metadata E2EE group chats are widespread and Matrix creates a very simple server setup. Federation makes sense to me for mature technologies, but not for fast moving technologies.
Rubber hoses still exist. I think GP was trying to correctly point out that having a single point of failure is a weakness in any system, cryptographic or otherwise.
But Moxie's point in the blog post that is referenced is that with federated systems you have a lot of failure points. You can't keep everyone on the latest update in a federated system. You need all those actors to function perfectly, most of whom aren't going to be experts. This makes federated systems not great for anyone but experts.
> federated systems [..] have a lot of failure points
They sure do, but you also have access to all the parts needed to maintain your own instance and so does everyone else. Failures, when they happen, are limited to instance who aren't "functioning perfectly" instead of extending to every user of a centralized system.
Just to keep everyone reading this thread on the same page: The point of failure being discussed here is the human factor. See comment ancestors for context.
> Just to keep everyone reading this thread on the same page: The point of failure being discussed here is the human factor.
Thanks for reiterating this, because I think it is a key thing people who are scanning this thread are missing.
I think this is actually the argument for a centralized system though. At least for something that's a replacement to text messaging. I think the issue with a federated system is that most people don't know how to run a server, even pretty technical people. So this makes sense as a slack replacement, but not text messaging. At least to me.
