darq

Brainworms.

A massacre, or a genocide, is more than just “one’s” life ending. It is one’s own life, the lives of one’s loved ones, and the lives of one’s people.

I’d urge you to try and read my comments again.

But how can I hear “diverse opinion” if X opinions are banned/blocked/moderated in the first place?

There is no space where all opinions are welcome. It simply does not exist. Some opinions are going to force out others.

If you run a space where Nazi opinions are okay to speak, you can’t really expect to hear Jewish opinions. Or opinions of PoC or queer people or disabled people and so on and so on.

So most places do the calculations. You can ban this one view. And in return an entire spectrum of views becomes more welcome.

Bigotry is a painfully simple, painfully shallow, and painfully boring viewpoint. It is almost completely one-dimensional, simplifiable to the idea that the “other” is inferior or dangerous and is to be shunned or feared. It is a viewpoint that we all already know, one we have all already heard. Banning it loses us almost nothing, and in return we gain so, so many more valuable insights.

Is it the fault of the principle of free speech, or the legion of stupid people being allowed to talk freely?

I’m not talking about “the principal of free speech”. I’m pushing back on the foolish assertion that moderation leads to echo chambers for lazy and dull minds. When exactly the opposite is true.

I’m saying that if you want to hear diverse opinions, a free-for-all is a bad idea. Because that free-for-all leads to echo chambers.

You probably want restrictions because it would never apply to you. Denying you talking about stuff that doesn’t phase you, is easy.

No no, don’t make stupid assumptions about me so that you don’t have to confront my point.

What if that platform bans opinions that you happen to have?

Most of them do. Your assumptions are wrong.

Sure, if you point at 4chan or similar…free speech attracts shitnuggets and end up being an echo chamber. But that’s the fault of us humans being crap, and not free speech being inherently bad.

I never said free speech was inherently bad. Try responding to what I wrote, not what you imagined that I wrote.

I personally prefer spaces where everyone can voice any shit. Censorship is for lazy minds and a dull audience. IMHO.

I always find this take to be remarkably short-sighted.

Because if you actually want to hear diverse opinions, you have to cultivate a space where diverse people, with diverse experiences, feel free to speak.

Pretty much every space that tolerates open bigotry becomes deeply unpleasant for the targets of that bigotry. Which means those people tend to leave.

Which in turn means that those spaces soon turn into the dullest echo chamber, populated only by people unaffected the bigotry. Sure no views were censored. You just harass everybody different off the platform. The net effect is the same.

You can’t just block someone doxxing you. And it’s a lot different when it’s not one person, or even a handful of people, but thousands of people who are sincerely furious with you because of things they’ve convinced themselves that you have done.

A bare keyboard attached to a screen, that I could plug my phone (possibly running Phosh) and use it as a hardware for a laptop experience

Those exist!

They’re called “lapdocks”.

Who cares? Like genuinely who cares? It’s a chunky laptop. Big whoop.

Eyyy

I would have thought that such a feature would be completely uncontroversial. Really weird that some people seem resistant to it.

Nobody decrees who is stupid or not. That’s a judgement everyone makes for themselves.

If you want to “Give people the resources to educate themselves”, you have to have a definition of stupid and not stupid that guides your choice of what is and isn’t good education; in order to “Give them the benefit of the doubt, once”, you have to have a criteria for when they’ve stopped being stupid.

No. I don’t.

When I hear people talking about climate change like it doesn’t exist, or has “concerns” about transgender people existence, or something like that, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they are just ignorant. I’ll be willing to talk to them, and maybe explain some of the misconceptions they might have.

But if they aren’t willing to listen, then they… Are either stupid or malicious. But the difference isn’t meaningful. They act exactly the same, either way.

They don’t have to agree me thinking they are either stupid or malicious. It literally changes nothing if they disagree.

What? Quite obviously not what I said.

Alright I don’t know who you are talking to, but it’s very clearly not me.

Yeah I still think you are talking about something else?

Okay, sure, what about vaccines then? Hypothetically, I think the idea that we shoot ourselves full of mercury and viruses is extremely stupid. Malicious too, by your model. And also, I don’t think climate change is real, so now I think you’re stupid and you think I’m stupid and it’s he said she said and if we both think the other is being malicious we have a brawl.

In reality though some people are right and some people are wrong. The person who talks about vaccines as just “shooting ourselves full of mercury and viruses” is either stupid or malicious. What they think of me doesn’t matter, because this conversation is about how I should treat this hypothetical person.

And that was the point I made. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if they are stupid or malicious, I should treat them the same way. Because their intent doesn’t really matter, their actions do.

The thing that fixes this is a definition of “stupid” that we both agree on that is clear, useful, and objective. What is that definition?

That is not how language or communication works…

People who are thought of as stupid, rarely agree that they are stupid. Same goes for malicious, to be honest.

I mean, people do treat those things as malicious already. So if anything returning the same treatment would be fair-play.

But more to the point, I don’t think that’s analogous to what the above posters was trying to say? A person “being” transgender/poor/an immigrant isn’t the same as say, a person denying climate change.

And that’s how I read the above commenter. There are two reasons for people to hold a climate-change-denying view, ignorance and malice. Ignorance can be met with education. But if a person begins holding onto their ignorance, their actions are fundamentally indistinguishable from malice.

I assumed it was a comment about the tactics we decide to employ when dealing with people. And at a certain point, if a person is stupid or if they’re malicious… Well it sorta does not matter.

At some point, does it matter?

Give people the resources to educate themselves. Give them the benefit of the doubt, once. But after that? Screw 'em. Move on without 'em.

i wish there was a paltform where everyone could have a respectable discussion without trolls or extremism…where people from every background could freely share their views and have a civil discussion

Such a place doesn’t exist, and has never existed. In fact, it cannot exist. Because some groups and opinions are almost mutually exclusive, so you won’t have them both in the same space. If you have a platform that tolerates hatespeech, the targets of that hatespeech will naturally leave.

If your goal is to encourage the broadest diversity of opinions, some moderation is always going to be necessary.

A lot of people think they want no moderation, but they really don’t know what they’re asking for. Setting aside illegal content, a lack of moderation just leads to deeply unpleasant places to be in. Which means the only people who stick around are the deeply unpleasant people.

And then there’s the fact that every single conversation can simply be drowned out by someone posting unfathomable amounts of Shrek pornography in every thread. And what are you going to do? Censor them? Go on… Give in to the temptation to moderate.

Oh, yes capitalism has optimised my devices. But I think that’s often bad thing. Because many of those optimisations weren’t for my benefit. In fact a huge number of them are directly detrimental to me.

The tech was an open platform focused on solving problems of the people working on it. And then capitalism “optimised” it by adding advertising and spyware, locking it down, removing the ability to control or repair it, and artificially obseleting it in order to drive further sales. All at the expense of the user, and the environment.

The optimisations also often removed user choice and product differentiation, rather than added them.

This I believe can only happen under capitalism.

I don’t think I can imagine a statement more false than this.

Capitalism increasing the availability of choice, only so long as those choices are profitable. If they are not profitable, those choices are actively removed. I used to be able to find multitudes of devices that were user-maintainable, had replaceable batteries and expandable storage. But those choices are not profitable, and so they get removed.

Technology would look different under a different economic system. Likely in some ways worse, but in other ways better.