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This decision is yet another distraction. It's attempting to treat an ephemeral symptom in a rapidly evolving landscape of digital identity and communications. Things are only getting faster, easier, more connected, more distributed, and more encrypted. There is no going back.

Until we collectively acknowledge that it's real humans behind these actions and create modern ways to identify and prevent them, a DDoS/CDN company turning off their service is about the most inconsequential change of all. Making some internet comments go away solves nothing.




>Until we collectively acknowledge that it's real humans behind these actions and create modern ways to identify and prevent them

Surely this has no downsides at all. For example, you can rest easy because YOUR ideas and YOUR opinions will never stray off the “approved” line.

... how is it people in tech can’t see past their own noses on things like this?


because the line of reasoning you are using has been repeated over and over and over.... but it's not exactly working out well. Words have a lot of power, and we already limit what people can say through libel laws. Much of the hate speech going on is really just libel to a group of people. No one really wants to police speech, but we already know untruths targeted at individuals can be devstating and we have created laws in most countries around that. It hasn't resulted in mass censorship of "YOUR ideas, and YOUR opinions" unless they are untrue ideas about other people that you think you can put out into the public space. America has this as their corporate slogan "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". Liberty cannot outweigh Life and pursuit of happiness. You need to balance all 3 of those, in fact, without rules everyones liberties are reduced.

We don't allow people to drive anyway they like on the roads, we have basic set of rules that allow everyone a lot more freedom to go where they want, violation of those rules tends to cause harm, and if it was total "freedom" then it would be chaos. If we cannot work out what those are for speech( and we already have some )so that everyone gets more effective freedoms, then more harm will keep happening.


Under your interpretation, would I be allowed to say that it’s evident that there are (nontrivial, sometimes cognitive) innate group differences between the sexes, or between racial groups? If you’re convinced that such a statement would simply be “libelous”, I can’t get on board with your idea. As far as I can tell, the current state of affairs is this: the science suggests rather strongly that there are indeed innate differences both between the sexes and among various racial groups; despite this, any statement to that effect is loudly denounced as “pseudoscience”. In other words, I believe that the current popular consensus regarding innate group differences is factually incorrect, but also believed in very strongly. So if that’s your angle, I think that your idea has reached its “dystopia scenario”—truthful speech being prohibited because it is falsely deemed libelous—right out of the gate.


no, I don't think want to ban the truth as we know it via evidence.

I'm not precisely defining what the law is, in NZ we have hate speech laws. Everyone still goes around with their own unique ideas, sometimes shitty ideas..... like when they mistakenly conflate genetic sex and gender identity, or talk about race as a scientific concept when really that's quite an ambiguous term ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) ). Its not even about the "truth" so much, I'm an atheist, but I believe in religious freedom and peoples right to believe in things I believe to be completely false. It's about making sure groups of people, especially minorities are free to live their lives according to their beliefs (not necessarily without criticism ).

NZ Law society did a pretty good summary recently

https://www.lawsociety.org.nz/practice-resources/practice-ar...


>I'm not precisely defining what the law is, in NZ we have hate speech laws.

Which is another way to say you do not have free speech.


I'm definitely not on the "approved" line, but that's not what I'm talking about though.

Politics have little to do with it. Any base ideology can be extrapolated to a violent end and the signs are all the same. Recognizing those signs is where attention should be placed. Unfortunately the media and general consensus will be on political hysteria and surface outrage instead of investigating the root causes.


>YOUR ideas and YOUR opinions will never stray off the “approved” line

Perhaps they will, but there should still be a line. There will continue to be political mechanisms in place to shift it.


That line is already in the legal system, and the ISP, and probably a couple other places along the way. It shouldn’t be at a content middleman too.

CF needs to stay out of it because they are no setting a precedent to be the gatekeepers of “what is good”.




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