[RonaldSchleifer]

You're missing the obvious solution ... not being authoritarian vile people that censor what others legally say and do in public.

It has been disconcerting to me for a long time now, even back when I was told that I do not know how the internet works when I foresaw the very outcome we are currently in, back about 20 years ago now. What has really happened here, is a kind of fascism (the alignment of state and industry) not by the grass roots so much as it was approached in the past, but through a top down consolidation, concentration, and now ever increasing and tightening control over all aspects and manners of freedom and liberty, under the guise of doing things for others' best interests, which of course always align more closely with the interests of the power seeking than the blissfully unaware recipients of this benevolent good intention of the power hungry.

I do not foresee a positive future at this point, because the very mindset of the trend curve has solidly crossed with the power broker curve, and there is ever weaning realization that the only way to resolve these matters in anything but a violent manner is that everyone be allowed the God given rights that the US Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) prohibits the government from violating.

Those include free speech and assembly (of any kind, regardless of whether you agree with it), freedom to arms to protect yourself from the very government mob that demands to take the right to protect yourself from it (it's a self-fulfilling and self-validating argument that is rather genius), and other inalienable rights that are innate to actual Americans (and anyone who were to adopt the same) and God given (which you presumably should not and do not prescribe to if you do not believe in God from which they are unavoidably and declaratively derived) that are not necessary to be listed here for reasons of brevity and their only tangential relation to the topic.

It has always surprised me, and it is one of the most interesting questions for me, how that a presumably extremely logical and systematic cohort of humans as the ones assembled in this forum, would seemingly lack any semblance of a capacity to understand the consequences of making fundamental changes to a system, in what appears to be some bizarre and inverted assumption that no change to a system will in any way result in negative outcomes. Unless of course the very prime assumption is a desire to sabotage the system, whether you are a knowing and willing participant, or just a placed saboteur ... a rube, not in any way understanding that he was placed to spread his negative impact on the system from within.

[rpmisms]

Even the most rational people can get dragged into systems of reactivity and emotion. There are very few truly rational voices left today, since the new description of "rational" is non-religious and liberal.

[braythwayt]

The problem that all “We should have unrestricted free speech” (and the more general case of “unrestricted freedom to X”) proposals must always solve, is what to do when a group of individuals acting in bad faith use that freedom to effectively deny other people that freedom.

Lots of fascists demand freedom of speech. And what do they do with that freedom? Assemble mobs online to harass people who say things they disagree with. Or take control and then ban books and “intellectuals” and so forth.

If you don’t like the example of “fascists,” there are plenty of other examples you could pick, like press barons. History abounds with examples of people using democracy to acquire enough power to uninstall democracy.

This is a hard problem. There are no easy or simple or ideologically pure solutions. Absolute freedom of speech leads to people using that freedom to deny other people that freedom. Absolute freedom to own a weapon leads to people using that freedom to deny other people the freedom to live, much less own a weapon of their own. And so on. And so forth.

TL;DR:

There are no simple solutions to problems involving systems where people are prepared to act in bad faith to abuse the simple solutions.

My personal claim: The above does not mean, of course, that there are no solutions, or that the only options are “unrestricted and absolute freedom” versus tyranny. It’s just that there are no simple solutions.

——

Related:

There is a reason that we are having this discussion on a forum that explicitly does NOT grant unrestricted free speech.

Let’s ask ourselves this question: What would Hacker News look like if we turned of spam filtering, moderation, flagging, banning, sorting comments by votes, greying out downvoted messages, &c.?

What value would it have as a community? As a source of information?

Would you find yourself feeling smarter and better educated about an issue after reading the comments on a subject? Or would you feel like you lost 50 points of IQ to toxicity?

Would you consider it a good use of your time to independently verify each and every claim people made? What about disproving known rubbish claims?

How would you feel about logging in every day and having the exact same debate with the exact same people who seem to have an infinite amount of time available to make false claims?