[Chardok]

Genuinely curious, can you expand on how you will achieve the middle-ground between safe space and hate speech?

I would assume you are aware of Voat.co and think everyone would agree they are suffering from the "paradox of intolerance", how can you draw the line without stifling legitimate conversation? For example I can't even post an honest question about the Israel/Palestine conflict on numerous subreddits due to the inflammatory responses that usually accompany them.

[Deimorz]

Sure - I won't claim that I've got it solved or that it's an easy thing to do at all. I think it's actually a very common mistake to act like it is easy, and that you should be able to write a perfectly-objective rule or draw a bright line between what's allowed and what isn't. Anyone that's done much moderation on the internet knows that it's definitely not that simple, nothing where humans are involved is ever that black-and-white.

There are certainly blatant cases that there's just no reason to allow (and if you look at Voat you'll see a lot of those), but there are also a lot of more difficult ones that will take work to try to sort through. There are a lot of very smart people that have put a lot of thought into these issues while running their own higher-quality communities, and I think we need to try to learn from them instead of shying away from doing anything because it's a "hard problem", or hoping that AI will somehow solve it.

Just as an example, here's a recent blog post by some of the mod team of /r/ChangeMyView, which is a group I respect a lot and I think have done an amazing job of creating a place to have civil discussions. This is the level of reasoning they're putting into "simple" cases like whether "that's bullshit" is too rude: https://changemyview.net/2018/03/28/thats-bullshit-rude-enou...

[andrewmcwatters]

I don't know if this is a sentiment others share, but I feel like at some point from 2003-2015 (thinking in terms of 4chan's history) the Internet went from having people who said really crazy shit just being weird people from the Internet to people who said really crazy shit distinctly being far-right and far-left people. Or, they were labeled as such, when in the past, they wouldn't have been.

[SheepSlapper]

It's a shift in culture, with an added heap of laziness. We're in a time where people like to compartmentalize people/views/ideas in order to dismiss or demonize, because it's easier to do that than challenging ideas (someone else's or your own).

We went from one identity in the US (American) to putting ourselves and others in boxes (black, white, man, woman, whatever) to the detriment of us all. Identity politics: a curious game... the only winning move is not to play.

[dragonwriter]

> We're in a time where people like to compartmentalize people/views/ideas in order to dismiss or demonize

As opposed to exactly what time in the history of humanity where this was not the case?

[SheepSlapper]

Maybe I phrased that poorly, because you're right that we've engaged in this 'otherization' since the beginning of time (for good reasons and bad). Maybe a more important factor is that we're increasingly putting OURSELVES into boxes, which increases the polarization of discourse (because now WE identify as a group and not a whole, and those OTHER groups aren't US so clearly they're wrong/bad/etc).

This ebbs and flows throughout history (or rather the US and THEM changes, based on circumstances). There are plenty of unifying events in US history that lead to more of an 'American' identity (wars, 9/11, generally dangerous times or shitty events drive unification out of necessity). Those aren't the times we're in now, but it's cyclical. Some day we will be again, then not, ad infinitum. The pendulum always swings.

[dragonwriter]

> Maybe a more important factor is that we're increasingly putting OURSELVES into boxes

Tribal identity is also not new. If there is anything new, it is the existence of a situation where identity tribes can be maintained while being geographically diffuse and intermixed with other identity tribes, which makes it less likely for conflict between identity groups to be quickly resolved to a more stable state by the losing group being excluded from a geographically region with residual members being expelled, forcibly converted or voluntarily assimilated into the locally dominant group, or killed.

Arguably, this is in many ways an improvement, though it does make ongoing inter-group invective worse.

[iaml]

Interesting thought - maybe, there is a cure. Bear with me now, but isn't the main problem here the fact that massive ego builds a wall between you and other opinions? If so, there is a whole group of substances that do exactly the opposite - promote closeness to peers and temporary suppress ego.

[rc_bhg]

I feel like this will be addressed when it happens. But its not an issue until its an issue.

[andrewmcwatters]

I think the idea is that when you seed a community, it will attract a particular type of person. If you're seeding it in the same exact way Reddit did, sans-ads, that doesn't actually say you're changing anything, other than the marketing model. It says absolutely nothing about the people you're trying to attract.

HN distinctly attracts tech people, and Voat explicitly attracted Reddit outcasts.