Not completely sure what you mean by this, but if you’re saying HN moderators “moderated down” your submissions — no one was moderating them down, they simply didn’t have enough votes to stay on the front page.
I'll give it a try, but I'm already turned off by the "free speech" mention which has become synonymous with "give people a place to be a racist" and "all things Q."
Edit: for clarity, I believe everyone, including the racists, should have freedom of speech. Though, forcing companies to host that speech is not freedom of speech. And the speech that is supposed to be protected, dissenting views, seems as protected as it's ever been. Freedom of speech is not there to protect objectively harmful hate and conspiracies that intend to manipulate the vulnerable.
Yeah, that was an immediate red flag for me too. It's the same kind of rhetoric used by sites like Voat and Gab which are immediately taken over by the far right (and I definitely don't want a single cent of my money going to them).
I've honestly never understood the appeal of a completely unmoderated space. I'd prefer a site that was moderated fairly and competently so I didn't have to wade through extremist dross looking for content.
And I'd always thought that undesirables were a relatively smallish percentage of the population. As long as they are, we don't actually have to decide who's undesirable. They get outvoted. It's pretty clever.
Until the point where mean, angry, stupid people become a majority -- or worse, a near-majority with ancient thumbs on the scale favoring them. Then we've got a lot of very uncomfortable decisions to make.
> Education is lacking, democracy is suffering because of it.
We can only re-balance the power of manipulation through developing technology that values identity and transparency over fraud and misconduct (or social acceptance aka likes).
Currently, the economics behind misinformation are only feasible for a handful of institutions; and that unbalanced the power of acquiring knowledge online.
The Web has failed us as a technology, in the sense that its intention liberated knowledge to the people at first but then gradually pushed control over its discoverability and "trustworthyness" away from the people.
Yeah as a Mastodon user whenever I see someone touting "free speech" as a feature of their social media platform it's a huge red flag that usually just means "alt-right, racists and transphobes welcome"
Not completely sure what you mean by this, but if you’re saying HN moderators “moderated down” your submissions — no one was moderating them down, they simply didn’t have enough votes to stay on the front page.
Also, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html asks you to not use HN exclusively for promoting your products.