[gotothedoctor]

Thanks for saying this. Threads like this baffle me, make me sad and wonder if its time to just stop visiting this site.

If you don’t mind being bullied, harassed, or threatened, that’s great, but it harms people. Whether you think it should or shouldn’t is irrelevant. Personally I don’t know anyone who has experienced it that wasn’t harmed. YikYak specifically was also horrific for Professors. (& of course, it also had disparate impact on women and people of color). So, either you don’t actually believe it does harm or you don’t care.

Please don’t @ me about free speech or censorship; not only is it irrelevant to startups because they are businesses & not the government, but moderation & boundaries are what make communities endure.

We make choices about what we build & what behavior it will enable. Choosing to permit or even encourage such behavior is not a matter of principles—it’s a choice of who can and cannot participate, which, as YikYak, Secret 4Chan etc show, directly correlates to the viability of the product as a business.

[nyolfen]

>Please don’t @ me about free speech or censorship; not only is it irrelevant to startups because they are businesses & not the government, but moderation & boundaries are what make communities endure.

"don't @ me" about completely relevant challenges to your opinion that are based on axiomatic political principles is cowardly and foolish. free speech and avoiding censorship are not just legal rights, they are principles that ought to be defended. those who would argue for a world where the de facto standard is censorship because they are capable of a narrow legalistic interpretation of freedoms are hideously short-sighted. if you endorse the erosion of these principles in the venues where you are strong, your enemies will use your exact arguments to erode them where you are weak.

>(& of course, it also had disparate impact on women and people of color)

is there a term for this akin to 'draping oneself in the flag'?

[dvt]

> free speech and avoiding censorship are not just legal rights, they are principles that ought to be defended. those who would argue for a world where the de facto standard is censorship because they are capable of a narrow legalistic interpretation of freedoms are hideously short-sighted. if you endorse the erosion of these principles in the venues where you are strong, your enemies will use your exact arguments to erode them where you are weak.

Although I agree with your general sentiment, I think you're being a bit bullish. It's important to understand what, exactly, we mean by "free speech". John Stewart Mill's On Liberty is the starting point for any such discussion.

In the essay, he discusses "freedom of thought" in this very famous paragraph:

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

The idea of freedom of speech isn't simply that "anything goes." In fact, the Supreme Court has upheld this position many (many) times: see Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire for the canonical example. Preventing shitposting on 4chan or on Yik Yak is not (I repeat: NOT) an infringement of free speech. There are no veritable opinions there. There is nothing that deserves the invokation of Mill's freedom of thought. In other words, there is nothing of value.

Note that this distinction contrasts with something like Bill O'Reilly's The Factor or your annoyingly conservative grandfather, whom you may disagree with, but who also might have some insight.

But there are some things which we've resolved: we know that Nazis had it wrong, we know that racism is immoral, we know that we landed on the Moon. So not giving a platform to anti-Semites, racists, or flat-Earthers is not an infringement of free thought, as Mill described it.

[stale2002]

Popular speech doesn't need to be protected. It is never in any danger of being censored, almost by definition.

The only purpose of freedom of speech and thought is to protect unpopular, evil, and straight up false speech.

That's fine if you use your platform to exclude those that you don't like.

But we aren't talking about that. We are talking about platforms that explicitly ALLOW this shitposting, and yet other people who don't own the platform are trying to stop it.

Sure, fine, businesses can do whatever they want with their own platform. So how about we allow that? Those that want to censor can censor, and those that don't can not do so.

And it turns out that there seems to be a huge demand for a platform that doesn't censor and allows people to post anonymously. (yik yak only died because it went away from what made it good).

So how about those procensorship people just leave it be and let those of us who disagree with them go to our own platform?

[dvt]

> The only purpose of freedom of speech and thought is to protect unpopular, evil, and straight up false speech.

This is patently false. Did you even read the paragraph I quoted? I'm not sure if I even need to get into details here. There are hundreds of historical examples where non-hateful, and non-evil speech was censored. But you're being incredibly disingenuous by lumping in "unpopular" with "evil" -- the two are not even remotely the same.

You're trying to put an equal sign between, e.g., Communism (unpopular) and an anonymous post doxxing a rape victim on social media (evil). Give me a break.

[DanBC]

> So how about those procensorship people just leave it be and let those of us who disagree with them go to our own platform?

hypothetical: I've just told all your neighbors that you've got a criminal conviction for raping 8 year old children. It's just words, what's the harm?

[stale2002]

Anonymously on the internet? Sure, whatever.

If we live in a culture where people understand the concept of "people on the internet could be lying", especially with regards to specific, highly serious, allegations against specific people, then someone posting something like that about me wouldn't be a big deal, because nobody would believe them.

There certainly could be "harm", but I'd argue that on average, the harm would have a very low chance of mattering, and I'd rather live in an open society.

The more people are able to talk, the more they are able to get to the actual truth of the matter.

[DanBC]

> If we live in a culture where people understand the concept of "people on the internet could be lying", especially with regards to specific, highly serious, allegations against specific people, then someone posting something like that about me wouldn't be a big deal, because nobody would believe them.

We don't live in that culture. We live in a culture where paediatricians are attacked because a group of people was too fucking stupid to know the difference between paediatrician and paedophile.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.s...

[gotothedoctor]

To be clear: I support free speech and oppose censorship by government. I don't know how or why one would want to enforce these principles on businesses--let alone how it would not run contrary to the most basic principles of private property & capitalism.

I said don't @ me because I've been in this conversation before & recognize there's little point in arguing when we are clearly defining the concept of free speech very differently.

Maybe I'm missing something, but weren't the majority of targets of harassment on YikYak as I described? Is it not ok to recognize this? Why? If we don't, it won't change.

Its ok that we disagree obviously, but I can't help but note that we are doing so on a privately owned platform that moderates its comments. Maybe you would, but I certainly wouldn't be here otherwise. Which maybe you'd also prefer:)