>There are a lot of people who have nothing to contribute to a conversation,
While true, the few people who do have something to contribute to a conversation simply can't do so on a highly-sanitized, heavily-moderated forum. The things they'd say would be too upsetting to a status quo, and the status quo will win. There is a real difference between something truly insightful and flat earth theory, but outsourcing that decision to a reddit mouth-breather whose only qualification for moderating is that he showed up to r/whatever back in 2013 before anyone else is not the way to detect those differences.
Wait until you're banned without appeal from some place because you called it the master branch out of 15 years of habit then get back to me if this moderation thing is all its cracked up to be. 4chan, as bad as it is, is the least insane of all internet forums, and humanity would be ashamed of that if it wasn't the root cause.
> but outsourcing that decision to a reddit mouth-breather whose only qualification for moderating is that he showed up to r/whatever back in 2013 before anyone else is not the way to detect those differences.
Spez once compared these people to a landed gentry; they are not unlike domain squatters. Notably, 4chan is basically identical in this regard. I’ve been banned from /lit/, /trv/, and /his/ for posts that the janitors of each board have decided were off-topic, even though they were plainly related to the board’s subject. There are potential structural solutions to this incentive problem, but the easiest solution is to take your ball and go home when a platform demonstrates that they don’t want you there. The big issue is that the global audience has consolidated onto a few sites, so there isn’t a lot of meaningful competition for the users that do leave.
> 4chan, as bad as it is, is the least insane of all internet forums
Hacker News is superior by almost every metric. Reddit was also way better than 4chan for serious discussion in the years before Trump was elected. The model works as long as the managers are not incompetent. The true problem is how to keep the network effects in play when moderators abuse their position as stewards to censor others due to motives of pride or self-enrichment. Federated networks might be the solution here.
You described stackoverflow. People aren't banned elsewhere because they have nothing to say, not because moderators are better.
Those same mods ban for certain posts about Discord. Coincidence?
> People aren't banned elsewhere because they have nothing to say, not because moderators are better.
I don’t understand what you mean.
>Hacker News is superior by almost every metric.
In the most narrow of topics, it's semi-superior... and because of bizarre circumstances that aren't easily replicated. We can't do politics here (though that erodes every day, looks like), which keeps the worst shit-shows out of here, but anywhere else that wouldn't ever happen. dang is some sort of minor saint, had this been reddit that would have morphed into "we can't do politics except those I like".
Even in that one topic (tech, software, engineering) we still have these bizarre status quo opinions that you dare not buck.
>Reddit was also way better than 4chan for serious discussion in the years before Trump was elected.
Sure, for a brief period as the reddit population was ramping up, but before ever slack-jawed imbecile showed up thinking it was the new Facebook, it was pretty good. But that was earlier than 2016. Might have to go back to 2012ish. Pre-2010 even.
>The model works as long as the managers are not incompetent.
...
>Federated networks might be the solution here.
Doubtful. Then instead of bans, it's just a bunch of weirdo tiny forums that have all de-federated from each other. Have you checked out Lemmy? The first and biggest instance was a bunch of Stalin-esque commies who camped out on it with the intent of dominating the entire system. See, with reddit, no one quite understood that it might become big, and so no one was eyeing it with the intent od a landgrab. But once it failed, everyone was on the lookout for the next-big-thing, and if there was even a chance of it they set up shop. No technical solution can exist to fix that sort of a problem.
I would really like to see some exploration of alternative site structures, ways to design new social media sites with better systems of incentives, for users and for mods. There is very little diversity in how social media sites are driven by users and moderated by admins (engagement or vote driven post recommendations, opaque administration decisions). I think a small fixed cost per post paid in XMR has potential to significantly improve post quality for anonymous platforms. Moderation is trickier, especially if the owner doesn’t take a back seat and rein in the mods occasionally, but more transparency into moderators and their moderation decisions (public ban log with detailed justification, pseudo anonymous account tracking per mod) with some accountability from the user base e.g. meta discussion board around site policy with engagement from mods and owner.
> Even in that one topic (tech, software, engineering) we still have these bizarre status quo opinions that you dare not buck.
This line might exist, but I have yet to see it. I have seen users on this forum advocate for eugenics and murdering CEOs, and not obliquely.
> But that was earlier than 2016. Might have to go back to 2012ish. Pre-2010 even.
It was around the time they banned /r/TheDonald. There was still a ton of good discussion going on there until that point. The new app also brought in a ton of casual users who didn’t fit with the site’s historical demographic of cerebral young men.
> Doubtful. Then instead of bans, it's just a bunch of weirdo tiny forums that have all de-federated from each other.
That’s the problem I haven’t figured out. In theory you could have a branching moderation authority that could be forked if the moderator starts abusing their power, but the issue is that most users won’t notice anything is wrong until years after the problem arises.
> No technical solution can exist to fix that sort of a problem.
Would you not consider a shift back to personal networking a technical solution to the problem?
No moderation is still worse. It means that -- especially with 4chans activity-based thread sorting -- the most "engaging" (read: rage-inducing) content gets bubbled up without fail. AND that you can drive away all reasonable people with, e.g. gore or absolutely reprehensible political views. Views that are not only explicitly racist but genocidal. The board is called /pol/, but it doesn't actually discuss politics, it discusses racist or otherwise hateful worldviews. There's no serious policy discussion going on here. Let's not kid ourselves.
I was a regular in 2007-2010 on /g/, /sci/, /mu/ and /fa/. The boards had their share of trolling then, but were mostly alright. I cannot recognize the boards anymore. They are full of vile garbage. Nobody is interested in discussing the interests that the board is there for, they're just posting the most outrageous thing possible. It's slop for the brain just as much as any social media feed is.
Whatever communities I found on 4chan have managed to survive outside of it, and none of us go there anymore. I don't use reddit, but it is still 100x better than 4chan.
Why do people think 4chan is unmoderated? It is moderated, spamming an unrelated board with gore or porn will certainly get you banned, and illegal porn will get you banned and reported to federal agencies. It's unmoderated in the sense that you're allowed to say things that are against the status quo, but that's a good thing.
>absolutely reprehensible political views
Also known as thoughtcrime
Please, 4chan has always been rife with illegal porn. It's been like that since the beginning. The Fappening and subsequent leaks were driven by 4chan. It's about as moderated as twitter is these days. Let's not white wash the site and pretend that every thread doesn't have multiple people just popping in to call OP or other uses slurs.
> Also known as thoughtcrime
Is conspiracy to commit murder an unfairly persecuted thoughtcrime that we should permit on the off-chance that punishing it would lead to Orwellian outcomes?
I've never seen conspiracy to commit murder of individual people on 4chan. That would violate U.S. law and thus is banned from the site. There are retarded posts about genociding whole groups of people, but while that's totally retarded, it shouldn't be censored, no more than it should be illegal to propose blowing up the sun.
> There are retarded posts about genociding whole groups of people, but while that's totally retarded, it shouldn't be censored
Why should it not be censored? You can go from vague sentiments to active perpetration faster than you might think; look at Rwanda.
Because it doesn't harm anyone. If censorship laws are all that's preventing genocide, it's not like people are going to go, "Well, we'd love to genocide that other group, but these pesky censorship laws, I guess we'll have to find something else to do..."
Anyway, your argument, whether intentionally or not, is a kind of motte-and-bailey fallacy. You accuse 4chan of allowing "absolutely reprehensible political views". In many circles, that description would include views like "Women shouldn't be allowed to play in men's sports" or "Young children shouldn't be allowed to have sex-change surgery". That's the "bailey". But rather than defend that, you fall back to the "motte" of things like conspiracy to commit murder. In some peoples' views, abortion is murder, should we censor talk encouraging abortion? Of course not; that would be me countering your motte-and-bailey with my own motte-and-bailey.
The fact is, private companies shouldn't be allowed to choose what we can talk about. We DO have people allowed to choose that; they're called legislators, and if you dislike the things people are saying on some website, you should take that up with your legislators, not with the website.
> Because it doesn't harm anyone.
Threats don’t harm anyone physically. Similarly, conspiracy to murder isn’t an actual murder until the murder is carried out. Calling for a genocide isn’t an actual genocide, but it’s hard to see what purpose it serves other than being the first step to enacting a genocide. There are plenty of other examples of speech acts rising to the level of criminality that no ordinary person would consider to be Orwellian.
> If censorship laws are all that's preventing genocide, it's not like people are going to go, "Well, we'd love to genocide that other group, but these pesky censorship laws, I guess we'll have to find something else to do..."
By this logic we shouldn’t have any laws, because people will always find a way to circumvent them.
> You accuse 4chan of allowing "absolutely reprehensible political views"
You are quoting a different user. My chief contention is that the sort of material you can find on /pol/ often rises to the level of incitement and that there isn’t anything wrong with prosecuting people for it. The same logic used to justify the criminalization of threats can be used to justify the criminalization of hate speech. The meta then shifts to inventing new or redefining existing categories of violence, sure, but this is just a slippery slope fallacy which assumes that there will be an endless tolerance for bad faith interpretations of an existing law. Outlawing murder has not led to the definition of murder becoming so expansive as to prohibit the general public from discussing the death penalty, for example.
> the criminalization of threats can be used to justify the criminalization of hate speech
This doesn't make sense to me. The reason threats are only illegal when they are "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"[1] is because of 1A.
Hate speech isn't well defined. As the GP stated, some may say that abortion is murder. To others, it is hateful to suggest they don't own their bodies. Same argument can be made for trans, gays, etc.
Disallowing speech like, "Kill all Christians! They're ruining our nation." doesn't incite people to imminent, lawlessness. There is a massive jump mentally the reader must make to transform that statement into action.
Rwanda wasn't well-known for its expansive internet forums. The genocide in Rwanda stemmed from whispers and hushed conversations in rooms with closed doors. That no one could easily monitor. If you succeed in censoring the likes of 4chan, then you can look forward to those whispers here in places where they'd find no agreeable ears.
There is a natural human inclination to want to listen to and read the words that you're not allowed to listen to and read. If you want to lend credence to genocidal ambitions, ban and censor them.
> The genocide in Rwanda stemmed from whispers and hushed conversations in rooms with closed doors.
This isn’t true. Radio played a huge role in coordinating mob activity during the Rwandan genocide. Several radio hosts were prosecuted for the role they played in inciting the genocide.
https://unictr.irmct.org/en/news/three-media-leaders-convict...
> If you succeed in censoring the likes of 4chan, then you can look forward to those whispers here in places where they'd find no agreeable ears.
The catharsis of venting about racial minorities doesn’t lessen the inclination to vent about racial minorities, it just creates an hedonic treadmill which rewards further radicalization.
> If you want to lend credence to genocidal ambitions, ban and censor them.
Can you point out any historical examples of this occurring?
>There's no serious policy discussion going on here.
Presumably leftypol is underrepresented on /pol/ because it's overrepresented everywhere else. Additionally it crucially relies on favorable moderation, so it really opts out on its own.
Reasonable people are boring though. I find the vile people amusing.