There’s a difference between a state actor controlling the whole of the public arena and a private individual controlling their own privately-sponsored forum; the latter allows you to crack open a blog and flog whatever opinion you want, and the former does not. I admit there’s some gray area for something like google, which by virtue of its size and role as intermediary has censorship abilities approaching governmental levels.
Freedom of Speech is a restriction on the government, not a duty on the part of private individuals to let you come in and piss on their living room carpet.
This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship. The law doesn't protect this kind of speech, which means they are legally permitted to participate in censorship, but it is censorship all the same. Yours is a common and poor argument for justifying this behavior. There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral. I would prefer to participate in a transparently moderated community where the rules are clearly defined and aren't selectively enforced. This makes for a better community.
They don't have a legal obligation to behave this way, but that needs to stop being used as an excuse to shut down discussions on how to make the community better.
This ends up being a debate about word choice, and I normally hate that. But there is good reason to distinguish the two carefully, and the easiest way to do that is word choice.
I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still talk on thousands of other places.
I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.
>I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still talk on thousands of other places.
I would argue that this is definitely censorship. Just because you can go somewhere else doesn't mean you aren't being censored - you are being denied access to the HN audience. Somewhere else isn't going to have the same audience. And that audience isn't making the decision - a small number of moderators are. But you're right that this is just down to pedantic word choice, feel free to discard this thread of the discussion if you'd rather not push the matter further.
>I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.
I'm not here touting free speech like it's a legal right I have as a submitter and an obligation HN has as a publisher. Instead I'm touting it as a damn good idea that makes for a better medium for discussion and suggeting HN embraces it anyway.
> feel free to discard this thread of the discussion if you'd rather not push the matter further
Think you're right. You completely ignored my point, so this is pointless. But the root issue is not different than, either through ignorance or deceptive calculation, claiming that copyright infringement is theft. It is a category error that negatively effects people's understanding of what's going on, so it matters.
> This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship
It's not about justifications, it's about prerogatives.
> There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral.
Despite what you seem to be implying, the operators of a privately run forum have no moral obligation to let anyone speak, regardless of how that might impact the quality of discussion in the community. It is totally fair for participants to criticize the moderation efforts, but just because the site is high profile doesn't mean that the moderators are any more morally obligated to permit comment than you are morally obligated to amend your fine article with my commentary.
You seem to believe that it is a moral obligation of anyone with an audience/platform to provide that platform to anyone that wants to use it...? Specifically, you described “depriving (someone of an) audience” as the immoral act.
Just to recontextualize that: if I have a blog, am I immoral for not allowing comments? Am I immoral for not allowing guest bloggers? Do I have a moral obligation to allow advertisement?
This is odd. A moral obligation to use one’s private resources to provide an audience to all comers isn’t free speech; it’s not even a free marketplace of ideas. It’s appropriating someone else’s communications infrastructure.
I think a blog is a different enough medium that it renders the comparison meaningless. Hacker News is a website that posts user submissions. I wouldn't make this argument about your blog, but I might make it about Medium.
But they’re not a site that posts user submissions. They’re a site that posts certain types of submissions: that’s what distinguishes them from reddit, 4chan, voat, etc.
A failure to maintain that identity would fundamentally change their offering and lose them their audience. You make it sound like a trivial expenditure of Nothing more than a little bandwidth.
And you haven’t meaningfully distinguished it from a blog. Blogs host comments; they host guest posts, and multiple authors. The degree to which they’re one voice or many depends on their individual structure - and none of that contradicts your core moral statement about the immoral act being not letting people have a free-for-all on your private platform. You make a distinction without rationale for why some private platforms are allowed to curate their offerings, and why others are /immoral/ for doing skz
>But they’re not a site that posts user submissions. They’re a site that posts certain types of submissions: that’s what distinguishes them from reddit, 4chan, voat, etc.
>A failure to maintain that identity would fundamentally change their offering and lose them their audience. You make it sound like a trivial expenditure of Nothing more than a little bandwidth.
They have rules and guidelines, and they set the overall topic by calling it Hacker News. Users do the rest by voting up stuff that they find relevant or interesting. This doesn't work everywhere, but it works here. I've seen it first hand by browsing my stats, posts that are off-topic don't make it far.
>And you haven’t meaningfully distinguished it from a blog. Blogs host comments; they host guest posts, and multiple authors.
Your blog is still curated. I can't make an account on your blog and post an article to it without being invited by you and presumably having you read and approve it. On HN, on the other hand, every submission is like this. If you make a "blog" where every article is submitted by users, then I'm going to give you the same speech.
All arguments are subjective so I'm not sure what that statement is supposed to convey except maybe "I am not concerned with the persuasiveness of my argument".
No, I would argue that it's different. CNN has a limited amount of time to fill and doesn't accept user submissions. HN has neither constraint, and gives users voting rights over some of the success of each post.
I think it's entirely valid for me to present my case and submit it for the consideration of the community and the moderators. I don't understand what you're getting at here, you're not making a very compelling argument for anything in particular.
In arguing that CNN's decision not to air your opinions in prime time is legitimate while HN's decision to be selective about what they'll provide a venue for isn't, you've accepted unquestioningly CNN's constraints while dismissing HN's.
In both cases, you're applying an enormous amount of subjectivity. But you'd prefer not to acknowledge that, and so have instead attempted to reframe the discussion as if your conclusions about CNN and HN are self-evidently objective. They are not.
I didn't think you had a point, it looked like you were asking contrived questions so you could antagonize him with his answers and "win" the argument, instead of just making your comment about subjectivity in the first place.
For what it’s worth: to the extent that you keep answering “but you refuse to apply your own logic to (any other medium, without reason as to why)”, I think a lot of people in this thread believe that -you’re- not debating in good faith. You can only handwave an argument away with “but different medium” so many times without explaining how a change in medium changes the relevant logic.
I think it's clear to everyone how the mediums are different. What's not clear is how subjective decisions CNN makes about what to air are acceptable, but subjective decisions HN makes about what to allow on the front page aren't.
What's especially weird about this argument is that the US media market is in fact in the middle of a giant debate about how acceptable CNN and Fox News's editorial decisions are. It's not like it's a reach to get from moderation to CNN's editorial decisions; it's a pretty obvious comparison.
Thank you, I understand where you're coming from now. Let me clarify.
The difference is because CNN makes a subjective editorial decision about what to air. Their content is curated and prepared by paid staff. The success of CNN is entirely built on the talent and hard work of these people. There's a whole side discussion about the ethical responsibilities of CNN we can have, but let's set that aside and just distinguish them from HN.
HN's success is built on its community. The overwhelming majority of submissions are user contributions - far less than 1 in 1000 HN posts are written by the mods, and they're generally meta posts. HN owes the success of its content to the community, and such I feel that they're morally obligated to treat that community with a certain level of respect. Part of that is everything I've argued for today - well-defined rules that are enforced equally and transparent moderation.
I'm not invested in CNN. I haven't participated in the formation or success of their "community", if you could even call it that. But I, and many others, have participated in the success of Hacker News by submitting articles, Show HNs, etc - and participating in discussions on the site. HN would be nothing without the community that participates in it, and frankly I think YCombinator's core business itself would be measurably worse off without HN.
Since the HN community is responsible for HN's success, I say we can call for transparent moderation.
I don't question your ability to call for it, but I don't think it's realistic to expect it. HN is built on a whole lot of user participation, but YC has also spent millions of actual dollars keeping it running, maintained, and moderated. It belongs to them, not to us.
Your recourse, if you don't like how they're managing it, is to start your own site, or to move to a different site. Indeed, if value on HN primarily comes from its users, as you say, it's hard to imagine a more powerful recourse to have.
Tangentially, I think HN's value to YC is hugely overblown. YC has been privately telling batch companies not to participate here for almost the whole time the site has existed. The fundamental key to YC's success is being first to fully commit to a market for small investments in marginal startups. It was an extremely good investment thesis, and it compounds dramatically every year as the value of the alumni network increases.
YC could kill off HN tomorrow and it is unlikely it would harm their returns at all. If you're not close to SFBA tech company investing it's easy to miss the extent to which YC is currently running the table on small startup investing, and none of that has anything to do with how HN is moderated.
> A lawsuit challenging the doctrine on First Amendment grounds, Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission , reached the Supreme Court in 1969. The Court ruled unanimously that while broadcasters have First Amendment speech rights, the fact that the spectrum is owned by the government and merely leased to broadcasters gives the FCC the right to regulate news content.
So are you suggesting that if I (the grandchild of Holocaust survivors) ran a link aggregator site, I would have a moral obligation to let self-declared Nazis who want to exterminate people of my ethnicity use it as a platform to speak about their hatred of people like me?
Or that a rape survivor has an obligation to allow someone to post on their site that there's no such thing as rape and every woman is "asking for it"?
No, and that's not what I'm asking of HN. I like communities that:
- Have well defined rules
- Enforce them equally
- Moderate transaprently
That's it. I'm not asking for an unfettered platform for free speech. If one of your rules is "no hateful posts targetting specific people or people groups", then it's a well justified decision to remove that post.
OK.... so if I enforce "no hateful posts targetting specific people or people groups", I have to ban the person who posts "the KKK are awful people and I think we should jail them" as I do someone who posts "people with dark skin are awful people and I think we should burn them"?
I'm somewhere between you and the parent. So much of the public square, figuratively speaking, is owned by private companies today. It's good to understand what the parameters are so you can know to what extent free expression and the free flow of ideas is occurring in a particular venue. Personally, I'm wary of just about any form of censorship, but I recognize it's a continuum, and not even I have my settings at 0.
Freedom of Speech is a restriction on the government, not a duty on the part of private individuals to let you come in and piss on their living room carpet.