Comment by marginalia_nu
4 years ago
In general I'm not a big fan of censorship. I think it's ultimately counterproductive. It sends the message that the "truth" needs to be protected from independent scrutiny, effectively undermining the credibility of the institutions, while enabling crackpots to develop a persecution narrative.
That said I do block some sites, mostly nazi stuff if it's designed in such a way that it crops up in regular searches. It's a fairly small number of sites though.
> while enabling crackpots to develop a persecution narrative.
I see this sentiment a lot lately and it seems weird to me that since narratives don’t need to have an inch a truth to be constructed. Narratives can be fabricated from made up atoms if need be . If crackpots wants to believe they’re being prosecuted , they’ll do it anyway. The ammunition you fear you’ll give them is one they already possess if they’re already too far gone.
Do you have a list of the blocked domains?
Yeah, I didn't start annotating them until recently though, and like 39700 out of 40000 the domains are blacklisted because of spam. Probably a few false positives in there though but it's 40k domains :-/
You can check if a site is blacklisted using a site:-search like
https://search.marginalia.nu/site/news.ycombinator.com
Thanks. That is a great feature.