> If I'm having a discussion with people in real life I decide what I accept or not, there's no third party that decides for me what is right.
Yes, and that works fine because there's no platform there, just a 1 on 1 or small group conversation. You can still easily replicate this, unmoderated, with email or various messaging apps.
Once you can talk to potentially hundreds or thousands of people at once, once there's a platform, that model breaks down. Bad actors who would be uninterested in trolling single individuals are very interested in trolling hundreds at a time. And nobody wants to "walk away" from an otherwise good community because of handful of very loud people are spouting hate there.
Any platform that's both popular and unmoderated will eventually be dominated by extreme content, and will push out normal people, who will go somewhere that's popular and moderated.
There's no intrinsical limitation on the number of participants
Don't you like what a user says?
You can ignore them
Don't you like what some instance does, you can block it.
Any platform that is popular has an editorial board and doesn't want you to say things they don't like.
Simple as that.
Newspaper had no comments sections because it's silly to comment the news, they already decide what to publish and what not.
They already chose who to talk to, there's no point in discussing when you can only comment what someone else wants you to talk about.
Have you seen today on HN a post about exactly 40 years ago, when an Italian civil plane, the Itavia Flight 870, was shot down by a fight between NATO and Libyan fighter jets and 81 innocent people died?
You won't, because it's gonna be flagged as politics.
But you're going to read about every cat fight between über rich silicon valley founders because that's not politics for them, it's what they wanna talk about.
Trolling is a problem for the platform, not for the users.
I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.
If they do it for me, it's censorship.
Censorship is not bad per se, but it's not done in my name, it's only in the platform's interests.
Do platforms ever ask users what do they think about banning someone?
> I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them.
This only works for small communities. You can't feasibly block the literally thousands of trolls and petty assholes that are posting on Reddit every day without that task consuming all your time. Multiply that by every single user having to do it personally and it gets even sillier.
There's a reason basically every popular platform is moderated on some level, and it's not because of some grand meta-moderator conspiracy.
Moderation is near-universally used because it works. Non-moderating doesn't work for conversations that eclipse some size. Disliking how moderators behave doesn't change that.
> Ad blocking works because I decide what to block
Ad blocking isn't a community or discussion forum, and most people just use whatever blacklists some 'authority' comes up with.
I guess the equivalent for a forum would be where you could not only block users (which is already common), but also share/combine blocklists. That's an interesting idea.
I think you'd run into the WoW sharding problem where it creates a sort of dissonance where you're nominally in the same space but also not in the same space at the same time. Still, would be cool to at least experiment with.
It's a user's side tool to remove unwanted content based on community generated rules
It's content moderation nonetheless
The error IMO is to think that the current implementation, which is also very young and immature, it's the best possible
It isn't
HN is not really a community, it's a platform run by a commercial entity, with (legit) interests
Imagine if HN was just a node of a larger federated network
They could decide what to post on their node(s) and which comments to remove
I could run my instance and subscribe to their feed or their same source feeds and make different choices
People could share blocklists, whitelists, favourites, ratings and everything else and decide what to use and what not
HN would still be popular, but other nodes could benefit from having more freedom or making different choices
Now HN (and every other UGC out there) is an all or nothing experience
Facebook is facing an ad boycott because they can't moderate the platform the way corporations want, it means advertisers are the ones who ultimately decide which content is valuable and which is not, sometimes it can coincide with what users want, but more often than not it doesn't.
But if we produce the content (like this conversation we're having) we should have control over it, and be able to reproduce it on a instance we control and continue it ad libitum even when HN decides our karma doesn't allow more than a few comments a day or one of us is shadow banned for reasons completely unrelated to what we are discussing right now or because it looks like spam to them or any other reason they think it needs moderation.
It's their right if the content is free for someone else to pick up and they are not responsible for what happens on other nodes.
It should be part of giving back to the community, you generate content for us, we moderate it like a DJ selects music for the listeners, but you can make your own playlists if you want to, because we don't make the music, we just mix it.
Nobody said HN should not moderate their public instance, they have people to respond to, it simply shouldn't be the only instance
If I had a feed of every comment and every link posted, I could read them and make my own rules
This post is being downvoted but it's a well known feature of HN that heated discussion are immediately flagged and they disappear very quickly
If a platform wants people to engage but don't want people to be passionate about their beliefs, it is not a discussion platform, it's a walled garden for a certain type of opinions.
Does it make discussions better? probably, if you already agree with the rules or can (or want) to follow them.
What if you can't?
What if a topic is divisive because on HN people refuse to acknowledge that the general view on HN is simply wrong?
Nobody will ever know.
Imagine a person going to a vegan restaurant asking for a steak. How long will it take to get kicked out?
That's a feature, if you are vegan, but it's not desirable for every restaurant, especially if they want (or like) to serve a broad range of customers.
Of course HN can say that this is exactly what they want, but what about the discussion about "is what they want right?"
I'm talking about HN because one of the post mentioned it like a good example of a free and open platform, but a platform that bans users for talking about politics is not really a good example of good moderation.
Moderation should happen on the receiving side, when it happens on the publisher's side it's called editing.
Any news outlets has editorial boards, there's nothing wrong about it, but it should be clear that the opinions expressed on an editorialised platform are not free.
Decentralisation has, among the many downsides, the advantage of being controlled by the party who receive the content, not the one who generates it.
my Android phone warns me if an app is trying to use features that require permission while in background and asks me if I want to revoke the permissions, enable it only while the app is active or let it use it always.
pretty easy to use and anyone can guess that the bus or car sharing app doesn't need to use GPS all the time
When the controller is a "smart" app store, you know what they delete, but you don't know what they keep and why they do it.
they chose for you and never ask you if you're okay with it or not, so basically it's not your phone, it's their phone.
Most Android phones don't have a 'supported' version of LineageOS. It's very hit or miss, usually miss. Hence why my Nexus 6 and my girlfriend's Pixel have supported versions but none of the other Nexus or Pixel phones do. Or the HTC One m8 has a supported build but no other HTC phones do.
"Warning: The Google Nexus 6P is no longer maintained. A build guide is available for developers that would like to make private builds, or even restart official support."
The devices link you included links to legacy builds/devices that are discontinued. The only Google phones currently supported on LineageOS are the Nexus 6 and Pixel 1/1XL. As another data point, the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S7 have no active support either while the S4 and S5 do.
Apple's upcoming iOS version -- not just current, but the one that's not even released yet -- supports all iPhones released in the last 5 years. There's just no comparison.
What's the point if you can't update the OS and if you do you have to jailbreak it again, every time, until you reach a point where you device is not supported or there's no jailbreak available and you are back to the doorstop?
Unofficial Android builds are fully supported, maintained and updatable builds, they simply are not released by the phone vendor or Google.
Thank you for the reply. Yes, I understand that Scandinavian countries do a lot of things better. I also understand that prisons are terrible in the US and jails are worse still.
However, from stories I've heard about "interrogation techniques"...
My understanding is that it is unlawful to torture (physically, mentally, ...) into answering questions and/or confessing to any crime in the US and you have a right to remain silent (in theory at least) in police custody. How well is enforced in other countries?
From what I understand, local police (talking about custody, not jail or prison) in the US will sometimes use torture techniques like isolation or suicide watch and will beat suspects when they get a chance (moving between rooms or whatever) but this is uncommon.
It's enforced better than in the US, on many levels.
First, they can't really arrest you without motiv, they can't even detain you without motiv.
Second: you can confront a police officer in EU, they won't shoot you or handcuff you, unless you pose a real danger to public safety.
I had a fight with one of them three months ago, he almost ran over me with his bike and when I confronted him he removed his jacket and told he was a police officer. I said "you are two times wrong then"
He yelled at me he was going to bring me in, I said "no way" and meanwhile people gathered around me and started saying to the police officer he was abusing his powers, that they had seen what he'd done with his bike and where ready to testify against him, if he didn't apologize.
He went away.
That's almost impossible in the US, where officers are trained to respond physically to basically anything that they consider a threat.
Stefano Cucchi is a very peculiar case he wasn't lawfully tortured, he was killed by the police and then they tried to cover it up.
I went to many events in support of his cause.
After years of trial the officers have been condemned and many high ranking officers asked for forgiveness to Stefano's sister, Ilaria, a great woman who stood alone against the injustice her brother faced.
But it's been a very popular case all over the news, for years, there have been a few others in Italy, but the point is it is unlawful and you can count them on the fingers of one hand.
The real problem in Italy is that it takes decades to get a final judgement.
And right now the right wing parties, that also support Trump, that wants free guns for everybody like in the US.
Anyway, torture is a crime in Italy and it is considerd an aggravating factor if it is committed by an officer.
> Anyway, torture is a crime in Italy and it is considerd an aggravating factor if it is committed by an officer.
Thank you. I appreciate your answering my questions and not assuming I am asking rhetorical questions (something I am not very good at yet). I didn't know about the case and saw it when I googled for any case.
> And right now the right wing parties, that also support Trump, that wants free guns for everybody like in the US.
I don't know for sure as I am not friends with many 45 supporters but my understanding is the "base" is more interested in guns for everyone more than 45 himself. Not that it matters in the larger scheme but just thought I'd share my understanding.
I don't blame the people of US, but their cultural system, I do.
Those who criticize or just reports things that don't work in the States are immediately flagged as anti American, it's like an instinct.
Their homicide stats are worse than many developing countries in Africa, four time worse than Canada, six times worse than China, ten times worse than Europe and Asia
Singapore's homicide rate is 30 times lower than in US!
It's really a lot
It's a failure, no matter how one frames it
But it's still very hard to get the general population to confront the numbers
They say you shouldn't shoot the messenger, but even on HN, where people are generally more educated than the average, it's really hard to start a conversation about the causes of this debacle
I lost 20 points of karma in two days because I showed stats about police brutality in US
I hope they'll get it one day, I live in Europe, my country has a lot of problems and there are many things that US does better and we looked at them for decades in search of a solution to our shortcomings
But if there's one thing we do well in EU is how our police handles critical situation, it varies from country to country of course and there are exceptions, Poland is not Spain, but in general it's true
It's pretty easy to say when your stats are 10 times worse than a similar developed country and look more like a developing country where warlords are in charge
Or, in US police is at war
Which is equally bad
EDIT: to give more context
If poverty rate in US was worse than in Nigeria, people would say that something went horribly wrong
Homicide rate in US is actually 1.5 times worse than Nigeria and two times worse than Uganda and Congo
I'm starting think I'm in an episode of Twilight Zone: we are in an alternative world where people suffer from severe cognitive dissonance and can't argue properly
Real work referred to computers means heavy load
The original post said "Apple is killing laptops to sell.more tablets which are gadgets and you can't do real work on gadgets"
Which is true
There are a lot of people driving push scooters, you can't do real work with them, you need a proper vehicle if your job requires moving things and/or people all day
Paper and pen have nothing to do with laptops and, usually, brain is more powerful than an i5
> Real work referred to computers means heavy load
I think this is perhaps the source of your problem. You are assuming that others interpret the phrase "real work" to mean exactly what you think of when you hear the phrase.
For many people, when you say someone is not doing "real work", you are implying that their work is not important, or it's not valid. If someone says to you "why don't you go get a real job" - it's the same kind of thing. There are plenty of jobs in our industry writing CRUD apps for businesses, for example. Those ARE "real work", no matter how common or unglamorous they might be. However many of those jobs can easily be done on a machine with very modest resources.
Yes, there are jobs where the demand on computer hardware is much more resource-intensive. But it is a mistake to assume that those scenarios are what people will think of when you use the phrase "real work".
If I'm having a discussion with people in real life I decide what I accept or not, there's no third party that decides for me what is right.
Decentralisation is exactly about that: it empowers you and not someone else to decide what you like to read or not.