Comment by amanaplanacanal
5 months ago
This is essentially the free speech maximalist position: allow any legal content.
If they did that, people would leave the service in droves for a competitor with reasonable moderation. Nobody wants to use a site that is overrun with spam and porn.
Perhaps. But another approach would be to give users better filtering features so that they wouldn't see content they consider objectionable, even if it's not censored and still readily available to other users.
So what's the solution, just continue to build two Americas that will eventually go to war?
> If they did that, people would leave the service in droves for a competitor with reasonable moderation.
Did people leave Google in droves in favor of a competitor that censors out all porn from search results? No, people had no issue that you can find porn on Google, they still used it. Youtube providing porn to those who want it does not cause problems for anyone, just like it doesn't for Google search, and Google even run both so they can easily apply this same feature on Youtube.
> Nobody wants to use a site that is overrun with spam and porn.
The internet is overrun by spam and porn yet people still use it, so you are clearly wrong. Google already manages as search engine over the internet that is capable of not showing you porn when you don't search for it, but you can find it if you do, so Google has already solved that problem and could just do the same in Youtube.
Note that we are having this conversation on a site with heavy moderation. I doubt removing this moderation would in any way make the site better.
You might ask yourself why you are here, instead of another website with less or no moderation.
The only reason we need moderation is that we have discussions, youtube videos doesn't have that feature, you can't attach a video to another persons video, but you can attach a comment here to another persons comment. I am all for moderating youtube comments for that very reason, but not youtube videos.
I would prefer if discord / reddit and similar became common carriers of forums, not messages. So discord and reddit can't control what a subreddit does and what its moderators do, but the moderators can control what the people posting there can do.
By having a common carrier forum provider anyone could easily make their own forum with their own rules and compete on an open market without needing any technical skills, and without the forum provider being able to veto everything they say and do on that forum. That is where we want to be, in such an environment HN wouldn't need to depend on ycombinator, you could have many independently moderated forums and you pick the best one.
Discord and reddit today aren't that, both ban things they don't like, it would be much better if we removed that power from them. Both reddit and discord admins allows porn and spam, their censorship adds zero value to the platform, the only thing it does is kick some political factions out of the platform which doesn't add any value to it, as I wouldn't visit those discords / subreddits anyway so they don't hurt me.
So it isn't hard to imagine how to draft such laws where all our favorite usecases are still allowed while also adding much more freedom for users and making life easier for these content platforms since they are no longer targeted by takedown request spam, it is a win win for everyone except those who want to censor.
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