this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Well would you fucking believe it: it turns out that deplatforming your horrible arseholes fixes the problems! (archive)
(well, until one of the problems scrapes together $44b and buys the platform)
every fuckin time
bsky comment:
one of the follies of the early non-research internet was that the folks in charge of the more influential communities (Something Awful comes to mind) all tended to be weird fucking libertarian assholes insisting that debating fascists in a “free and fair environment” (whatever that is) must be a good thing, we can’t just ban them on sight for some reason. generally these weird libertarian assholes were motivated by typical weird libertarian asshole things — greed, or being fascists themselves.
and all of these horseshit policies around not banning fascists ended in complete disaster for those communities and those libertarian shitheads (SA again), but somehow they’re practically the only element of those early communities that carried over to the modern internet, likely because caring about community quality doesn’t make money, but pandering to nazi fuckwits does.
it probably goes without saying, but I take the apparently radical stance that nobody needs to interact with fascists and assholes and I won’t give their bullshit transit on any system I control. it’s always been surprising to me how many sysops consider “kick out the fucking fascists” an unworkable policy when it’s very easy to implement — it only gets hard when you allow the worst fucking people you know to gain a foothold.
to be fair, a lot of the early Internet, including the early research Internet, was driven by libertarian tendencies (which always ignored the dilemma in combining libertarian tendencies with the fact that the entire early Internet was enabled by massive government funding). John Perry Barlow, the EFF, etc. It’s just that a lot of those people were libertarian utopians – and I will fully admit that in my youth it seemed very convincing. It felt like there were no space for bad actors because when the Internet was smaller, it was less obvious to idealists and the naïve that a larger internet would be incredibly useful for bad actors.
As recently as gamergate the EFF was loudly insisting that all moderation by private companies was wrong, and in the intervening few years they have only grudgingly and rarely admitted that overly libertarian moderation policies can suppress speech massively. And yet I fully believe all the EFF people mean well.
i look askance at the ones stanning for fucking bitcoin mining
you're not wrong.