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FWIW, I appreciate the problem of 4chan (and I have seen in person the pain of moot's face as he tries to grapple with what he accidentally managed to build)... but you can't exactly stop the existence of opt-in full-on 4chan: we don't have, and I will argue really wouldn't want, the technology required to do that, and it isn't like "with Section 230, 4chan became illegal". However, to the extent to which 4chan still works at all without Section 230, it doesn't pop up everywhere any more than it did before the Internet existed: the "dark corners" of the Internet are just as corner-y without Section 230 because most people avoid darkness when it is opt-in. I frankly think the core problem in a lot of these discussions is "a lack of vision" with respect to what all the changes would be to get a website compatible with a complete lack of moderation. Like, look at comments on videos: I think in practice almost no videos would have comments (and I think this is great, as YouTube comments are well known to be extremely low quality, despite supposedly having moderation: we finally got to the point on the Internet where we realized that even comments on news sites are generally harmful, and have given people a weird expectation of a "right to be heard" as opposed to merely "a right to free speech"). The assumption--which makes no sense to me--is always "without moderation everything you see would be a cesspool", when I will argue that it should be obvious that that won't happen, because you will have to rethink how comments work entirely if they are unmoderated, and I think the result of this is that comments will just get turned off. When you follow some random channel, you will see videos from that channel and videos shared by that channel (the content of both of which the people who make that channel will be liable for, but not YouTube, as they exercised editorial control but YouTube did not) and that's it: you won't see videos from other channels (as YouTube won't take that liability unless they carefully hand-curate their selections, which maybe some website would but Google would never bother with ;P) and you won't see comments on any videos unless someone agreed to pre-moderate them (and accept liability for them). Again: you won't see YouTube showing you random videos unmoderated, as that isn't a useful platform (ignore "horrible" for a moment: this would be 99% spam... even 4chan doesn't work once you truly reject Section 230; and again: maybe that isn't a bad thing ;P), and you won't see unmoderated horrible comments for the same reason: the feature set of the Internet changes once you change this law; and maybe you really really like those features and refuse to give them up... but trying to make arguments about what the content on the Internet would look like without first contemplating how the feature set changes is a nonsensical prediction and I think does a disservice to these discussions and forms a kind of strawman for the position against Section 230. |
1. No moderation and continuing to allow user created content.
2. Removal of all user created content (with some narrow exceptions like YouTube video channels).
I don’t think either of these is a better outcome.
Along the way we’d lose sites like HN and any others that do the best they can to moderate a varied user base.