Big Tech designed their platforms to keep you trapped.
YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok aren't neutral spaces. They're businesses built on capturing your attention and data. Their algorithms, notification systems, and content policies all serve one purpose: keeping you engaged on their terms. And their terms alone. There's no freedom
Why moderation? The old internet didn’t have moderation. Why does everyone feel the need for moderation?
The old internet was hidden behind dial-up modems and TCP-IP stacks and weird telnet and usenet protocols. This complexity worked as a filter and the people using it were mostly academics, students, techies and other nerds (me amongst them). The moment uncle Bob could poke his way through social media on his phone from the shitter, the whole thing cascaded into Eternal September and “the old internet” was lost forever.
Trolls, bots, and scammers make them necessary at a minimum, and then the subliminal messaging from the cronies of politicians, etc. make them welcome. Bots are easier to make than ever before so you can’t compare the past with the present that easily. kbin.social died last year because of relentless spam bots posting garbage/malware links 100x/sec.
Computer bots always act a certain predictable way. You can filter out most bots easily based on time-based filters or other algorithms. The rest should not be moderated, except for illegal things like selling weapons, drugs, or hiring a hitman.
Moderation is a skippery slope. Everyone wants to moderate something different. Rights want to moderates Lefts, Lefts want to moderate Rights. Moderators have the power to decide which side they are on. If we had clear laws that forbid most moderation, there would not be any discussion about it anymore. Just allow everything and deal with it.
That hasn’t been true for a long time. Filtering bots has increasingly become more difficult, expensive, and sophisticated. Not to mention that there are still plenty of state sponsored bad actors using real people and hybrid approaches.
What’s your solution to that? Not filtering out bots? Or manually moderating? The latter is even more expensive.
Your proposal is equivalent to just letting bots completely control the internet. It kills it. We either want an internet or we don’t.
And the extremism follow.
That’s fine by me. I’m capable of ignoring that. Call me anything you want. Insult my family, my life, my person, my culture; I literally don’t care. I’m either going to ignore you or respond accordingly. Let the extremist come in. Everyone that can’t handle it is a weak wimp that isn’t worthy of the free internet.
If they stay on the net fine, but no amount of tick skin n is bullet proof. Its not if but when those extremists move off line.
What? The old internet absolutely had moderation, even back in the day of BBS.
I don’t know what old internet you used, but the IRC channels and forums I used to run around on definitely had moderation. This was about '97. Maybe you’re talking about the late 80s when barely anybody knew the Internet even existed and it was just academics and ubernerds?
Guess you never used forums.