The Linux Experiment is probably my favourite linux-focussed YouTube channel. Nick has been doing absolutely fantastic work and his channel being permanently deleted would be an absolute travesty and a clear mistake. He is producing high quality, thoughtful, inoffensive content. Here's to hoping the channel is rightly reinstated ASAP, along with an apology and explanation from Google.
What is Odysee? I'm intrigued because at first glance it seems to be better than YouTube in almost every way possible. Page loads are quick, if you turn off AutoPlay it actually stays off, the controls are actually usable on an iPad etc.
It's a peer-to-peer video client, with part of it's data being directly shared (similarly to torrents) and part via a blockchain. This makes it highly resistant to censorship and thus is where many people are moving their channels to.
It's worth noting that while based on LBRY (The supposedly censorship resistant blockchain protocol) Odysee is a bit more opinionated front end with restrictions on things such as pornography.
By the standards of "alternative" video sites there's a pretty diverse set of content including mirrors from some well known YouTube creators (KhanAcademy, EEVBlog, GreatScott, Veritasium, HarwareUnboxed, Not Just Bikes, EposVox) who don't produce heavily political content (whereas many other alt tech video sites are just 99% political content going a single direction)
Given goals towards freedom of speech, some content won't align with you politically (and some might), but there's enough decent content that you can potentially use it as an alternative platform successfully.
> Given goals towards freedom of speech, some content won't align with you politically (and some might), but there's enough decent content that you can potentially use it as an alternative platform successfully.
I find high curation is the only way I find a service like YouTube to be usable.
There's an endless sea of content on there. It's not important that I agree with it or not, it's important if it's quality, which the overwhelming majority of it isn't.
I'm looking at the landing page of odysee now.
* Why can't Wolverine shack up with doctor strange?
* 1 minute of Luigi in a bag!!!
* Top sleep hacks
* Guess how old this Korean actress is?
I can't block these channels or show disinterest even though I made an account.
My issue isn't the politicalness, it's quality and relevance.
>I'm looking at the landing page of odysee now. [...]
I think your examples are a valid criticism, it's just that many of the alternatives are far worse (depending on your standpoint)
FWIW I would suggest looking at the home page of YouTube in incognito mode, most of the videos don't meet my quality standards either.
* TikToks that will get you in trouble
* Medical Emergencies: When Acts Go Horribly WRONG!
* Family Guy roasting every country
>I can't block these channels or show disinterest even though I made an account.
Yeah I think appropriate filtering options are vital for less curated platforms to be more usable. That's not an impossible problem to solve, but I would have expected better options by now.
>My issue isn't the politicalness, it's quality and relevance.
I think it's mainly a chicken and egg problem, there's not as much quality content as I'd prefer so there's less relevant quality content.
My biggest hope is that a certain threshold can be met where more quality content will be added and people aren't scared by the preexisting lower quality content that they don't want to be associated with.
There's definitely a need for there to be some competition to YouTube (Google et al.), but it's a pretty large hill to overcome to get there.
Of course YouTube still has a very strong hand in regards to monetization.
The prominent Linux tech blogger, Bryan Lunduke left and denounced them this summer despite having been an early adopter and supporter. He had made a complaint on how they chose to give an exclusive spotlight to a partiuclarly trashy channel and then recieved a reply from their "Cheif Marketing Officer" which was itself shamelessly vulgar and trashy and boasted that such trash is "the Odysee Brand".
Lundukes explaination for leaving seems to be only archived in his subscription/free-to-view social network lunduke.locals.com.
For worthwhile content I hold more hope for rokfin - www.rokfin.com/discover
I have no general opinion about Odysee/LBRY, except that I expect it to fair as well as every other blockchain buzzword bingo social thing and every other YouTube compete, which is to say, I expect it to never gain traction in any sizable way (I would certainly never choose it as a way to build my video audience), but if the argument against Odysee is that it is too permissive of what content it allows (and the line seems to be stuff that is maybe trashy and not like, beheadings), I have to think most of the potential users/creators see that as a good thing.
Like, if the worst thing you can say about it is that a guy that refuses to say “damn” or “shit” or “fuck,” is morally offended by some of the legal content, I’m not sure that will matter to people who are looking for a platform that won’t kick people off the platform for arbitrary reasons.
> if the worst thing you can say about it is that a guy that refuses to say “damn” or “shit” or “fuck,” is morally offended by some of the legal content
But that's not what I described. Its not the content Lunduke had an issue with, it was the marketting decision to promote it with an exclusive spotlight, and then the following unprofessional communications revealing something really dodgy about the company. Conversations about it on reddit have been removed apparently. I found Lunduke has posted an account of it on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBZjUPavvs8
I mean, again, as someone who doesn’t care about Odysee one way or another (but certainly wouldn’t use it to build an audience), I’m not sure the people that do use it because of some sense that it is less restrictive than YouTube or whatever, are going to care.
I just watched his video and then I had to go back and look at the video Odysee promoted. Is it content I like? No. I don’t find a guy in a mask yelling funny or even entertaining. The whole thing feels very juvenile in a 2003 internet kind of way. Looking at the Odysee social media accounts, I don’t like or agree with a lot of their content or politics. For the record, I don’t like Lunduke's content either.
That said, I find his outrage curious and poorly argued. Lunduke can choose to host his videos wherever he wants and can have whatever opinion he wants to have about a platform. But throwing a temper tantrum because a service he shilled for happens to promote content he doesn’t like and then the people in charge of the company won’t kowtow to his demands still strikes me as both a) hypocritical and b) a position most people who are seeking a platform that is anti-censorship won't find compelling. If you believe Odysee is shady (and I personally think most businesses with no direct revenue path other and reliant on buzzword bingo like blockchain and decentralization are inherently sketchy) now because it promotes a guy who screams about ass fucking, but you didn’t think they were shady when they were promoting your anti-vax/anti-mask rhetoric or paying you to write spon-con, I’m going to roll my eyes and discount everything you say.
I mean that's an unfunny off brand pewdiepie, but like, who cares? It's not morally reprehensible or anything, not even really particularly controversial I'd say. It's vulgar in sort of a bland way
Veritasium is not political? He is, very. It’s just that you don’t see it. It’s not an accusation, just a reminder that the background noise is non-neutral, and he doesn’t contrast very much on your background ;)
Maybe the driverless car one can be seen as somewhat political (by advocating for use of self-driving cars), but it's not necessarily a polarizing issue split along US political party lines, at the moment.
Or do you mean the host of the channel is very political, whether or not any of that is indicated in any of the videos?
Maybe, inasmuch as it's espousing an idea that is generally more associated with one party than the other, but the focus is really that idea, and it's supporting evidence, not how it related to politics or the parties and how they view it.
I would hope people try to asses it on the merits of the arguments and examples, and not how they perceive it related to a specific political agenda they are for or against.
Eh perhaps, I revised the comment a few times here and there.
I guess I would say I'm aiming towards examples that are big enough to be notable and not just directly focused on political analysis or similar or type channels.
A lot of what throws somewhat sane people (I would include myself in that but of course I'm biased) off of using the alternate video sites is the second you load up the home page of something like BitChute or rumble and see nearly an entire page full heavily one-sided political content and many (justifiably) believe there's no content for them if they don't align there.
Odysee could use some more quality content for sure, but they at least operate in such a way that I'm not convinced they're only for one type of content and some of the creators I watch in Linux/technology space have somewhat of a presence there.
there is something called tilvids.com that hosts educational as well as edutainment content. a good fit for the linuxexperiment. either that or do like videos.lukesmith.xyz and build your own.
It is really not difficult or does not cost a fortune
Sure, racists are censored by big tech, but also hackers/security researchers (if they show exploits for example), qualified medical doctors/researchers who oppose the official position of the WHO, journalists that share disturbing news (Facebook have been long deleting records of atrocities in Myanmar for example), creators that show the method for recreating dangerous experiments, etc, etc. And that's not to mention the selective monetization and promotion as a backdoor form of censorship too.
I think this just points out a fundamental misconception that censorship only applies to the ideas you oppose to and nothing else. I believe it's fully correct for the word 'censorship' to be used in this context.
"Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
"The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice."
What this is really describing is what we now call the Overton Window[1], and how it's controlled to a degree. I think it's a mistake to think it can be controlled completely, but depending on the society and the makeup of the media control, more or less control can be exerted. China has much more control over it for their citizens than the United States or the media companies within it, most likely.
"Proposed preface to Animal Farm, first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 15 September 1972 with an introduction by Sir Bernard Crick. Ian Angus found the original manuscript in 1972."
The essay I linked to was written in 1945 - if you read it, it actually talks about the ongoing war etc, e.g.:
"... we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won"
It wasn't published until 1972, for exactly the reasons Orwell outlines in it. Indeed, publishing Animal Farm itself was hard enough - many American and British publishers refused to do so, on the ground that the book clearly satirizes the USSR, which was then a war ally.
Yes, exactly. The outrage and cognitive dissonance that people experience when they see the censorship happening these days can only happen because they actually believed the propaganda about free speech.
How adorable! You think "propaganda" is anything more than a post-hoc reactionary label often applied by those afraid of the outcome of widespread espousal of a controversial idea.
Yes, it exists. Yes, people are far more vulnerable to it than anyone thinks they are. Free Speech, however, is an ideal exactly in that we often in reality fail to attain it, but nevertheless should strive to.
Without the ability to articulate that which is ugly and repugnant to the common sensibility, one is divested of the capability of immunizing oneself from being led astray by someone already too far gone.
We should protect the ability to speak monstrous things that we are not intellectually blinded to their existence. For they will arise whether we talk about them in polite company or not.
Propaganda does not preclude very real variability over time. It's certainly quite true that, for a while now, we have been retreating from "peak free speech" in the Western world. This doesn't imply that said peak was perfect freedom - of course not! But the trend is towards less speech overall, and even more specifically, towards privatized censorship (so as to dodge legal constraints).
> If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
>…the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Truth is not determined by a list of approved opinions, it can only be revealed by rigorously disproving everything that opposes it.
All these calls for censorship make me think we really are doomed to repeat history forever.
Everyone always seems happy to carve out their own exceptions to freedom of expression. Freedom, except for racism. Freedom, except for transgenderism. Freedom, except for porn. Freedom, except for violence. Freedom, except for political dissent or mis-gendering or the promotion or criticism of a religion.
As someone who falls near the middle on most issues I probably detest a larger percentage of speakers than anyone who's solidly on the Left or the Right, but I have no issue understanding that my freedom depends on their freedom. If the people I despise are not free to speak then neither am I.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.
It stands to reason then that if all speech is truly free eventually some speech will be censored. America doesn't allow people to say "Fuck" on public TV broadcasts, therefore all speech isn't free. No one is harmed by a curse word. Worst case a child will learn the word a few years earlier than when they usually do, and yet we censor that anyway.
Therefore, you can't say that all speech is free speech on all channels.
What you say in person may at worst get you into an altercation or ostracized, but you have the right to say it. Once your voice is amplified out of earshot you are no longer truly free to speak as you will.
You can say what you want to say, yes, but the repercussions of your words amplify with every repetition. Not everyone is aware of that, and when you are on a platform where, by words, you can incite a group to violence safely from the other side of the country, you should have your speech monitored and censored if need be.
Go and actually read Popper and you'll find he was close to a free speak maximalist his views on when you shouldn't "tolerate" intolerance was an incredibly high bar that almost nothing ever hits.
My read of Popper was that we should be prepared to even use force against intolerant people who are not willing to engage in rational debate.
What Popper didn't anticipate is that the square of public opinion would become the internet, and a big question this creates is if the internet is a place where rationale debate and proportional representation of ideas is possible or not.
If the internet were to make the public square of opinion a place of irrational debate, I think Popper would be very much against it, and would want us to do something about it.
Here's a quote from him:
> as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols
So the condition he puts forward is: can we counter the intolerants on the internet by using rational arguments? If we can, than suppression (he claims) would be unwise, but if we can't, than suppression by force (he claims) might be warranted.
To me it seems he’s clearly saying that if they decide to use force then we should be prepared to respond in kind not that we should use force to suppress irrational argument. The end of the first sentence maps to the end of the second.
How I interpret it is not that we should use force to suppress irrational argument, but that if we are failing to counter intolerance with rationale argument in the public opinion, than we should be prepared to do even more to counter it, maybe even to use force. And then he lists examples of what he'd consider cases where more than just countering with rationale argument would be justified, and those are: denounce all arguments, not willing to discuss at a rationale level, not willing to listen, believing they are being deceived, using pistols and fists.
So, I should read 25 books to verify that your one sentence claim is valid?
Why not back that up with some relevant quotes to support your thesis, friend? That seems a decent thing to do compared to the litany of homework you callously threw at me.
>> Go and actually read Popper and you'll find he was close to a free speak maximalist his views on when you shouldn't "tolerate" intolerance was an incredibly high bar that almost nothing ever hits.
> So, I should read 25 books to verify that your one sentence claim is valid?
> Why not back that up with some relevant quotes to support your thesis, friend? That seems a decent thing to do compared to the litany of homework you callously threw at me.
Your snark isn't warranted. The Wiki article you yourself cited says where Popper introduced the concept and even speaks about what his limitations were.
I will let you read that again to find them, rather than providing a quote.
Honestly, given the comment being replied to started with "go and actually read" I think the snark is warranted if they want. Also, for what it's worth I think they were trying to modulate that snark a bit by using "friend".
If it's truly easy to realize what is being asked, a pointer in the right direction is useful. If it does require a lot of work, then providing some evidence to at least get someone started if not an actual reference would be called for.
In any case, I'm not sure a comment that boils down to "if you actually read X, you'd know that what you just said is wrong" is worth defending, regardless of whether you think it's factually correct or not. You could have just pointed out that there was evidence of this position and left it at that.
For what it's worth, I only bothered to reply because you're not the only person that took the comment that way. The strongest possible interpretation of the prior comment is "This isn't helpful to me. If you're going to state I'm wrong, please provide more information on how so I can address that usefully" which I think is a vary valid complaint to what it was responding to. Interpreting snark where it doesn't necessarily exist or providing additional snark in your own in response (not that you did this) isn't a useful way to move the discourse forward.
> The internet sucks for nuance, but "friend" in this context doesn't read as modulation to me, it reads as sarcasm (and thus intensifies the snark).
It does suck for nuance. The safest and most useful thing to do here (as a place that tries to keep things civil) is to assume it's not snark and treat it as sincere. If it was sincere, treating it as if it's not is causing more of a problem, and if it's not, treating it as if it is leads to useful responses.
> I don't think that's the case. There are a couple of other comments that read the GGP as unnecessarily snarky.
I think perhaps you misread me? I chose you as a representative comment to reply to because there were a few along similar lines. If it was just one, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
> The only thing I did that was unique was note that he didn't have to search through "25 books" to get the answer, because his own source gave it directly.
I'll just say that if that information was known to the original replier, it should have been included, and if it wasn't, perhaps the reply should have been reworded?
That you actually provided useful info is another reason I bothered to reply to yours. As one that actually provided value to the discussion, I hoped to steer any additional eyeballs responses might draw to a useful comment, rather than a useless one.
I don't want to clutter this discussion too much with meta forum etiquette stuff, which I'm already prone to do at times, so I'll try to refrain from any additional responses on this.
> I think perhaps you misread me? I chose you as a representative comment to reply to because there were a few along similar lines. If it was just one, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
When I use the word friend with a stranger, I mean it to say, "I have no ill intentions towards you". I'll look for a better way to express that in the future if the intent isn't coming through.
Maybe using the word "callous" made it seem that way, but that is an accurate depiction of what their response was, rough, without thoughtfulness, the reflexive expression of an above average mind unconcerned with how their message was received.
Just look up where he wrote about this paradox of tolerance? It was in a footnote. (To guard, I'd guess, against people deliberately misinterpreting his words in the main text and going "Ha, look at this doctrinaire free-speech absolutist." I've read the book that was in.)
Why does where it was written matter? Saying that it being written in the footnotes invalidates the argument is the logical fallacy of poisoning the well.
You would actually need to refute the argument directly for your assertion to have any weight to it.
- People make a big deal about renowned philosopher Karl Popper warning us of the danger and incoherence of tolerance towards free speech. I think this misuses his rep.
- The one-paragraph quote on the Wikipedia page linked above was Popper's full writing on this. You don't need to look further for it.
Others were already addressing the object-level arguments.
That's such a weird reply. You claimed, were told that it's not accurate, and then went on the offense with a slightly nicer version of "why should I read about the things I claim? How about you prove that it's not as I read on that one meme on imgur.com".
I didn't ask why I should read it. I asked for what to read. If they so much as selected the single book they're basing their claim on that would cut down their homework assignment by 96%.
I don't need chapter and verse, just a homing beacon would suffice.
Besides, we're roughly adults here. Someone saying "Nuh-uh" to an oft-quoted article has the gravitas of damp toast. Why shouldn't I question their response?
Because you haven't read the source you're basing your claim on, you've only read about it from other people who haven't read it and are parroting it because it fits their agenda.
What the hell kind of response is this? You try to puppet Popper's work, I tell you that's not at all what he said, you affirm you never read any of it and complain it's unreasonable to expect you to read it.........
Well, you're the first person I've encountered who has said that the well-known and oft-quoted bit of his work that I even provided a link to in wikipedia with quotes taken directly from is completely false in all regards.
You followed that up with a command to read more of his work without narrowing down out from which of his 25 books would provide any context to back your assertion up.
I just want a little more context than a single sentence from some person on the internet to re-evaluate my hypothesis. That shouldn't be too much to ask. Especially since you're asserting that you know more about the subject than the people who authored the Wikipedia page and every person who has written an article about it.
No, it doesn't. Went to the Supreme Court, and that is not free speech. "the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has become synonymous with speech that, because of its danger of provoking violence, is not protected by the First Amendment."
> Went to the Supreme Court, and that is not free speech.
No, it didn't go to the Supreme Court.
> "the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has become synonymous with speech that, because of its danger of provoking violence, is not protected by the First Amendment."
While the phrase may be used that way, its referencing nonbinding dicta (expressions in a ruling that are not germane to the decision rule for the case actually before the court) that does not reflect preexisting law from a case that has since been almost entirely overruled and is widely recognized as being an aberration that (in its actual binding holding) allowed extensive government regulation of core protected political speech.
It reflects neither the law before the decision, the binding case law created by the decision, nor the state of the law after the decision was rejected.
Okay, but how do you reconcile that with the fact that hate speech and propaganda has been a part of almost all atrocities ever done in the past?
Or put some other way, how do you reconcile that your freedom can be affected by someone's else's freedom? Like what if I use my freedom to turn others against you and have them hate you and berate you and bully you and ridicule you and refute you, and potentially have them vote for laws that take actions against you, or possibly have them commit hateful acts towards you, etc.
Not the OP, but basically you are complaining about humans. I am not convinced that by banning certain expressions you get any security against future oppression.
Stupid hateful people might get trapped by anti-hate-speech laws, but the smarter ones, precisely the ones you need to be careful about, are fairly good at avoiding them and may even use the threat of prosecution to raise sympathy from the part of population that dislikes the incumbent government.
Most European countries have vibrant extremist movements (left, right, Islamic) even though their freedom of speech is much more limited than the U.S. standard.
I see your point, and I think that needs thoughts for sure.
I think most people (including myself) don't know why some harbor hateful resentment and intolerant ideals. And it isn't clear how to deal with it. It's very possible that we need to resist the temptation to try and simply brush those people aside. But I think one thing that isn't clear is if one of the cause for this increase is related to the internet providing bigger megaphones to those smart ones who like to recruit members to their ranks.
And part of that for me is how recommendation algorithms on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube operate, it seems to be tuned towards sensationalized and hateful content. So it does give you the impression that those platforms are failing to educate people with values of tolerance, liberalism, freedom, and individual rights which the USA is founded on.
It's a great question though, you probably don't fight intolerance with intolerance, but at the same time, you might need to be ready to fight it if it comes to that. But how do you avoid having it reach this point?
I have no issue with people turning against, hating, berating, bullying, etc. me. These are simply matters of feeling and opinion. I do have a problem when other people feel entitled to escalate such conflicts by reacting to these unwelcome points of view with real, actual violence, including government censorship. Even, and perhaps especially, when these people are purporting to act in my defense.
Ok, but what are you referring too? Because I'm not sure I'm seeing any government censorship (except for maybe the voter suppression and the child protection laws as well as some of the anti-protest forces deployed by the government in recent protests like BLM). And I'm mostly seeing violence driven by hate speech, like the various shootings happening.
I would be very against government censorship or interventions against constitutional rights of free speech and right to assemble and protest, and right to vote.
Maybe I just don't have the data you have, but right now I'm not too sure I follow you.
I would posit there's little correlation between hate speech laws and hate crimes.
For example, the United States has no hate speech laws. In 2017 there were 2,024 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. Germany has very strong hate speech laws, both applying to private citizens and obligating online networks to censor them. In 2020 there were 2,032 anti-Semitic hate crimes in Germany. Despite restrictions on hate speech, Germany has four times the per-capita anti-Jewish hate crimes as the US, a country with no hate speech laws.
How about the UK? They have strong hate speech laws. You can get arrested there for teaching a dog the Nazi salute. In 2018 there were 1,201 Islamophobic attacks in the UK. Despite having a rabidly Islamophobic president at the time, the US only had 223. That's over twenty-six times the per-capita Islamophobic hate crime rate.
Always in tandem with propaganda I feel. So it would censor criticism of the regime, and any opposite viewpoint, while replacing all voices with the pro-regime voices instead.
I'm not sure this is the same as letting one freely voice their hate of another and propagate lies and falsehoods about them.
I guess you see it as let's just all use propaganda and defamation against each other, and hopefully that evens out where we all meet in the middle through constant bi-directional propaganda and hatred.
But I see it more as let's not allow the use of propaganda and hate anymore, because those things are at the detriment of other people's freedom, and you should only be free to do what doesn't take away freedoms from others as well, unless it has been agreed between both parties through a contract and a system of laws.
I don't really have a proof that one would have better outcomes over the other, but personally I find having a civil debate in good faith with rational arguments is more pleasant than to have a demagogue debate in bad faith using appeal to prejudice, emotions, desires, falsehoods and defamation. So I'd rather we as a society needed to engage respectfully, rationally and in good faith, and I wouldn't mind this to be enforced both culturally and by law.
I've heard the "slippery slope" and the "what if that just radicalizes demagogues even more" arguments, and the latter one I find more possibly valid. I feel the slope isn't that slippery personally, like the slope would only slip if the person in power was again a demagogue ruling in bad faith, and at that point it be too late anyways, since they'd already be in power.
Now the argument that it could radicalize demagogues further, by giving them more ammo to justify themselves, I think that's a more plausible prediction. I'm not too sure about this bit yet, so I could be convinced here, but I'd need to also be convinced that letting demagogues continue to have large public reach isn't itself a bigger threat.
In that case lets apply your principal evenly to all rights.
Freedom of movement: heading somewhere we don’t agree with, ok but you aren’t allowed to use public roads since we own those. Good luck getting to the voting station.
Freedom of assembly: we don’t support your protests cause, stay off public property, go hold your protest at your own house.
Freedom of conscience: fine think whatever you want but if you attempt to record it in any way we’ll block you.
A right without the means to act on it is nothing at all. You’re arguing for a society built like a prison. You should be ashamed.
YouTube, as well as other major Internet companies, have a near-monopoly over their sectors which leaves them lacking any competitive drive to be better, do better, or for people to go elsewhere.
Without realistic alternatives it is spontaneous (even if erroneous) to think about the implication of private infrastructure over public rights. But the real matter is an issue of scale.
I am convinced that sooner or later governments will wake up and that the tech giants will be broken up or severely limited: the European GDPR and the Chinese crackdown on the sector are only the first signs.
This is a slippery slope fallacy. Just because you can see a flaw with a system does not mean there is a flaw.
Sometimes the flaw is with you & or your line of thought.
In this case, equating "not being allowed to post far-right propaganda on every concourse of communication" is not the same as being harassed at your own home because people are allowed to protest.
Isn't the root problem here is the near monopoly held by god-tier corporations? Shouldn't FB/Goog have the right to moderate their content as they see fit? Shouldn't their network effect de facto monopolies be regulated so that there is room for other voices?
An illusion of truth can be created by repeatedly stating falsehoods by agents with an agenda to push. The question isn't about censorship, but rather how we can make our liberal democratic societies resistant to this type of manipulation, which inevitably results in terminal decline.
What I've come to realize is this asks far too much of the average person. Ideas do not win on their logical merits. Rationality is not the driving force of opinion for the majority of people. The alternative is probably worse, as some sort of totalitarian regime, but I just don't think billions of humans are capable of ensuring their own survival as a species
People have a right to speak, but they don't have a right to have their speech amplified by others. There is no right to broadcast. Mill would agree with this, assuming you could explain to him how broadcast media works, which didn't exist in his time.
Mill wasn’t talking about rights; he was talking about the propensity to suppress unpopular speech, why that’s dangerous, and accordingly, and the moral necessity (and implications) of open discourse.
(So we've already given up on "Truth is not determined by a list of approved opinions, it can only be revealed by rigorously disproving everything that opposes it" then. Fine. Truth is relative.)
No, what I'm really asking is, "What happens if innocent people start being hurt by the lie?"
What happens if you are seriously injured in an accident but cannot get medical help because the intensive care facilities are full of people who disagree with the truth? Thoughts and prayers?
> No, what I'm really asking is, "What happens if innocent people start being hurt by the lie?"
That would suggest we might benefit from a better mechanism for establishing the truth.
The best mechanism we’ve come up with so far is open and vibrant debate.
Do you have a better suggestion?
> What happens if you are seriously injured in an accident but cannot get medical help because the intensive care facilities are full of people who disagree with the truth?
The Rolling Stone story positing the above turned out to be entirely fabricated.
How would you propose we stem misinformation like that Rolling Stone article?
> Thoughts and prayers?
Open and vibrant debate.
> Does freedom come with any responsibility?
Sure it does, though assessing culpability is often a nightmarish impossibility, especially a priori.
Should we establish prior restraints on individual’s freedoms to enforce correct speech and beliefs?
"The best mechanism we’ve come up with so far is open and vibrant debate.
"Do you have a better suggestion?"
I do not. But open and vibrant debate only works when people are capable of determining when the debate has been settled, at least for the moment. And are willing to accept the settled decision.
Have you ever had a serious chat with a creationist? Of course, there is no positive evidence that can disprove the young earth theory, any more than you can disprove solipsism. The creationist argument ultimately fails because of the implications of its own flexibility. I've known people who claim that the faster they drive, the better they drive. Or that they are perfectly safe to drive stoned or drunk. fortunately, in those cases culpability is, as you point out, is easy.
Anti-intellectualism comes in many varieties. Someone can be so skeptical that they do not accept any argument because, say, Big Media and The Man are out to oppress them...somehow. Someone else can be so un-skeptical as to believe the first comforting story that comes along in spite of any facts suggesting that reality is harsher.
Open and vibrant debate is the only way to establish the truth, but truth is not established by popularity, nor by who yells the loudest.
"The Rolling Stone story positing the above turned out to be entirely fabricated.
"How would you propose we stem misinformation like that Rolling Stone article?"
I have no idea what Rolling Stone article you are talking about. Is it one of these:
Not really an answer to my question, but I'm sure it's very comforting to intensive care patients spending hours to days on gurneys in hospital hallways.
Freedom is easy if it doesn't come with responsibility, precisely because culpability is often a nightmare to identify. How many people are you willing to injure or kill in the name of freedom?
Should we just get used to the fact that there are no limits on lies and an idea just dreamed up by some rando on the internet is just as true as something from a so-called expert?
Marx was almost right: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
Postmodernism, the first time around, was the comedy.
It's sad that that was your instant thought. My experience so far with Odysee has been pretty good. It's no YouTube, but for the channels I follow, it's good enough. I hope it continues to to build momentum.
It definitely is sad, but the sad part is that it's a true comment on human nature. Every other application that advertises in this way has eventually ended up being primarily used for racism, glorifying violence, and spreading falsehood. What happens is that even if they attract good natured users early on, they are eventually discovered by people who have been run off of other platforms after publishing actually awful things, and then the good intentioned early users leave because they don't want to be associated with that newly dominant crowd on the platform. It's a constant pattern.
the only thing sad is that its the reality of the situation. Tor started off with some pretty pie in the sky ideals and now over half of its active use is for illegal activity. Tech censorship doesn't even register on the scales of stuff that is de-platformed from social networking platforms.
Given that CSA, human trafficking, etc. and political extremism were/are rife on Tor, I would say that just because you bought some weed from Tor, doesn't make it a paradise
This is not so far from the truth. In the past, censorship usually only happens to people doing something illegal, meaning copyright infringement, radical political content or other disturbing content (usually porn or violence-related). So most of those people have seek for alternative platforms where they are free.
But more and more the line is shifting, and we see censorship happening with far tamer content. Youtube specifically seems to crack down on security-related content for a while now. I've seen similar things happening over trivial content in the past. Things which nobody working in the business would consider as problematic, like how to setup VPN and firewalls. It's not really clear why this is happening. People at Youtube are claiming the content seems to be ok, but system says nope.
And people opposing powerful institutions, and people who are concerned they may be censored in the future, and people who love free speech and want to enrich any medium that promotes it, and people who have unpopular opinions, right or wrong... and some racists too. That's the way freedom works: some people use it to do good stuff, and some people don't. I believe it's worth it, even if some people might hurt others' feelings.
> We should probably stop using this phrase as a feature
> Instant thought was "ok so other than this channel it's all racism"
If you want to be in a place where only approved thoughts are allowed, there's plenty of places in the world and on the net that would accommodate you right now.
No need to turn every place into an arm of Mini-truth.
Fan fiction has a lot of problems with censorship as well.
Recently, Games Workshop went after all fan animations on Youtube based on the fictional sci-fi setting it owns; Warhammer 40,000.
I see you are getting a lot of pushback and I think its unwarranted. I agree with you, the phrase is becoming tainted. I would like a way to differentiate between places that are wary of the whims of power and places where opinions are so appalling they can't be a part of polite society. We currently talk about them the same, and there has been an uptick of the latter recently that makes being able to differentiate more relevant.
As a side note its sort of interesting to me how your un-popular, perhaps controversial yet not particularly offensive opinion is going to be censored from this discussion in which people are opposing your perhaps reasonable association with the phrase 'resistant to censorship'. "how dare they voice a dissenting opinion!" they might tell themselves, as they press the little button that will make your words fade away.
I gotta say thats something I really enjoy, being publicly wrong about something and getting educated, or some one else doing it for me and getting the chance to read some thoughtful stuff.
Normally I wouldn't consider downvotes to be worth mentioning, but I thought the irony here was special and worth observing :D
I'm the asker of the original question, and I actually agree with you on a lot of this. As soon as I read @fragileone and @iotku's excellent answers to my question my heart sank a little at the thought of a site even more racist than YouTube. Almost every site that pops up claiming an anti-censorship position is quickly filled with pretty abhorrent content. Downvoting someone on HN for pointing it out doesn't make it untrue.
It gets filled with all kinds of content, of which racism and other far-right talk is merely the most visible part because it's in the spotlight. But it's not just far right that's getting "deplatformed". Even politically, there are plenty of leftist groups that were wiped out from e.g. Facebook during the recent purges. All those people also have to look for other platforms.
I'm not saying there aren't other valid uses, just that racism is pretty much guaranteed on a no-censorship site. It _should_ be something that we can all agree on as being "bad", even when dressed in its Sunday best from the likes of Jordan Peterson.
We can agree on it being bad, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to censor it, and especially so when such censorship has an already-demonstrated tendency to quickly expand in scope.
Yeah, sounds like an unregulated place for all the people who were thrown out by those with at least some ethics left.
update: yeah, downvotes, whatever... "censorship" these days is often enough because people tell other people to use horse dewormer or drink bleach. It's not because they're having highly sophisticated discussions about global politics, but simply because they're actively harming people, spreading hate and whatnot. platforms should be able to decide whether they want to "poison" their living room by giving a platform to such content.
And the folks downvoting you would probably call themselves "free speech advocates".
Which in my experience means they speak from a position of high privilege to not see the massive negative effects of the hate speech they strive to protect. Or that their purpose on this site is to spread division and hate.
US guy detected. Go travel to Russia, China, Middle East and other funny countries, you would find a lot of interesting things which you can be jailed for, not just banned by gov request on social media platform.
If you talk about international platforms, you should kinda think about that.
And I think it's fair that people in Germany are not allowed to deny that the Holocaust has happened. Call it whatever you like but remembering this monstrosity is the least thing we can do and far-right idiots don't need to have a platform for telling otherwise.
> Here's to hoping the channel is rightly reinstated ASAP
I for one am not looking forward to this. Youtube is no longer an acceptable platform for distributing your videos. If a person who makes good videos is forced out of youtube, that can only be a good thing. Hopefully their videos will help make another service more popular.
Youtube terms of service are public and unacceptable. People who get burned by them had it coming.
If there was a clear alternative that’d be one thing, but there isn’t, and I suspect this creator is one of those high-quality-but-small-audience channels where they don’t have enough pull to bootstrap an alternative themselves. So it seems kind of naive to say “that can only be a good thing”.
Ultra-famous accounts with zillions of subscribers are likely on a first-name basis with the youtube admins who cater to them. The move out of the platform will of course start from below.
Markiplier, one of those ultra famous accounts who is on a first name basis with their rep, has posted a few stories about how content gets demonitized for no reason and even his rep has no clue why and is powerless.
And still there is nothing else that gets him close in reach and monetization. Even if only one out of ten videos is monetized that's most likely still better than anything else.
High-quality-but-small-audience might have an easier time than most, I suspect. To get niche content people have to be willing to trawl the internet.
Still wild guesses, but I'd be worried about mid-sized channels with a lot of ambivalent viewers, not really invested, not going to swap platforms. Although how all that factors in to various monetisation strategies is complex.
Anyway, the situation is really interesting. I don't think YouTube can pull off the censorship campaign that they are trying for. They're fighting some really fundamental economic forces - it is too cheap to get people a message if they want to hear it.
Does there need to be "a clear alternative?" A video host is a video host. I don't care where I watch videos, I only care about what I'm trying to watch. I never understood this insistence that a video has to be on a certain site. The more video hosting sites there are the better.
Media publishers, broadcasters, or netcasters (as with YouTube) serve a number of critical roles. Among these are both audience and advertiser aggregation.
Audient aggregation matters because once on site, recommendations and discovery systems increase the likelihood of some other site content being viewed or accessed.
Advertiser appeal matters if advertising provides a significant portion of site revenues (and it virtually always does, for large-scale properties). Advertisers themselves seek audiences, with particular interest in both size and composition. As with audiences, there are cognitive and organisational costs to maintaining multiple relationships, so that advertising platforms tend to grow and monopolise over time. Small niche platforms are of very limited interest.
Both factors intersect with other elements, including site infrastructure development and maintenance, such that large sites have vastly superior economies of scale. This includes a lot of activities and benefits with low public visibility including moderation, abuse, legal, and general business overhead effects.
The overall result is a pronounced tendency to create large and durable media monopolies. New technologies may disrupt earlier established entities for a time. But the old structures have an exceedingly high likelihood of re-emerging. More pointedly, technologies of greater efficiency only amplify the tendency to form, and the size of, such monopolies.
YouTube provides content curation in addition to mere video hosting. In the current state, I can open up my YouTube subscriptions page and see a list of all new videos from people I'm interested in. If every video creator hosts their work on a different platform, I no longer have a one stop shop for video consumption. I subscribe to lots of people on YouTube, but there are probably only two or three that I care enough about to go check a different site for new content.
The situation you just described does not match YouTube's value being in that it "provides content curation". The situation you described involves you doing the curation, and YouTube acting as a glorified RSS reader.
If you can subscribe to channels on YouTube and be satisfied with that content (and not from e.g. YouTube's recommendations for stuff you don't subscribe to), then you can do those same things whether the videos are hosted on YouTube or not, just like millions of people do with their podcast subscriptions that are never actually hosted "on" iTunes.
Is that something an average teen with an iPhone can do, or wants to do? And apart from the subscription feed, there's recommendations based on the videos you already watched. If creators were distributed across different platforms, this wouldn't work.
> Is that something an average teen with an iPhone can do, or wants to do?
Use an app that can listen to podcasts? Uh... yeah.
> apart from the subscription feed, there's recommendations based on the videos you already watched
So you're just going to ignore the context and pretend that you're saying something insightful? The comment you're responding to specifically pointed out that the original commenter doesn't cite YouTube's recommendation engine as the source of value for him/her.
Could do? Yes, it's as easy as adding a contact to your phone. Wants to do? I'm sure some do and some don't, but I'd argue that there's conditioning involved there by these services so that is irrelevant.
I can think of a simple engineering solution to the problem of recommendations, an open API standard to fetch them should a user want that functionality. So it could work, but the hosts don't want it to work.
But that aside, just because a service makes recommendations doesn't mean the recommendation engine is more useful than randomly finding things or getting sent things by friends. I'd argue that YouTube recommendations, at least in their current iteration, are less useful to users than their friend sending them a video they were subscribed to, following random twitter accounts that share content they enjoy, or even a chronological list of uploads sorted with content tags. You're placing a lot of value on something that frankly is a raging dumpster fire of hot garbage.
I think curation might be one of the drivers of the problems we have nowadays, I'd prefer a host that does no curation.
> If every video creator hosts their work on a different platform, I no longer have a one stop shop for video consumption.
Yes you can, use an RSS reader and subscribe via RSS. This problem was solved before tube sites were even widespread, and then the UX for subscriptions devolved, primarily because these sites want to lock you in and make you feel how you do. But you can still curate your own feed and have all your video content in one feed, I do it, you just have to use RSS.
Sure. On desktop I use Thunderbird, on mobile I use something called Feeder, it is a FOSS RSS/Atom feed reader with built in Webview so you can watch the video in app if you like.
YouTube and Bitchute both support RSS, also Peertube has RSS built in if you watch anything self hosted using that software, as far as all the other tube sites out there I'm not sure because I don't subscribe to anyone on those sites, but I would expect that they do more than likely as RSS is still a web standard.
All but Peertube I've found sort of hide syndication in some way to encourage their account based subscription because they'd rather you use that. It might take a minute when you want to subscribe on a new site you don't usually use to figure out their feed URL format.
It can be a little clunky to add subscriptions I guess, but how often are you doing that? What matters more is integrating all your subscriptions into one feed, you're watching every day multiple times a day, you're not subscribing every day.
> It can be a little clunky to add subscriptions I guess, but how often are you doing that?
And you're saying that as a techie. How do you think the average subscriber of Markiplier, Pewdiepie or Logan Paul would feel about that? Things like peertube will always be a super small niche because there are two dozen alternatives to YouTube and they all suck if you depend on YouTube for income. As long as those oopsies don't happen to the big YouTubers on a regular basis, the status quo will remain.
Plus, as much as people complain about YouTube recommendations, I found a couple small but interesting channels already. Imagine everything were distributed across ten different platforms.
> How do you think the average subscriber of Markiplier, Pewdiepie or Logan Paul would feel about that?
I don't care about them. People can do what they want. I'm not trying to revolutionize the world. I'm just trying to live life the way I want to and help people who are interested in doing things that I do.
It doesn't require you to be a techie to copy paste a URL. It's as easy as adding a contact on your phone.
I watched an interview with Jaron Lanier yesterday actually talk about YouTube recommendations, he talks about an experiment, click the top recommendation and let it play 10 times and see what you get. You have to keep in mind just because they've been helpful a few times doesn't mean they're more helpful than no curation at all. Confirmation bias exists. Remember YouTube before Google owned it? Most of the content was not as good as it is now but it was still much easier to find new interesting things. That algorithm is superior to anything that's been implemented since, and honestly every iteration makes it worse. The fundamental difference with it was that it recommended based on what other people watched, not based on some hand waving about getting to know you and your preferences.
If everything were distributed across ten platforms then viral spread of content could only occur organically. That would be amazing.
What do you mean by clear alternative? Feature parity? There's at least 10 nearly feature-compatible software out there. I can name five without looking it up: PeerTube, LBRY/Odysee, Cinnamon, Nebula (okay this one's a bit of a stretch because you can't outright sign up and post videos, you need some creator to invite you), DTube.
Thing is none of them will make you YouTube money, so smaller creators don't bother, while larger ones usually just cross-post stuff, leaving no incentive for their audience to bother with the alternative.
These networks, no matter how they work under the hood, are obviously the problem, as they are single points of failure.
Run your own stuff. Most channels will not have enough visitors/viewers to kill a shared webhosting package, so there's no big deal in doing this on your own.
So "the network" in context of sites like Facebook or YouTube is a fancy marketing term for "the website." Peertube servers actually federate, so there is actually a network there.
You don't have to federate. As host, you can host whatever you want (you are of course subject to laws in the country you're hosting in) and censor whatever you want on your server. You can basically do anything you want.
If you host adult content like pornography it is very likely the larger federation will not federate with your server, and for adult content that isn't pornographic in nature it is probably best to require content warnings.
How are people gonna view the description if the channel is suspended? The web is already a clusterfuck, perhaps its most powerful incumbents should be subject to certain restraints. I'm sure you can make this argument better without engaging in name calling and emotional attacks.
AIUI creators can post links or to other services? So you can link Patreon, or link Twitch or what-have-you, and people can then find your content elsewhere.
Presumably, it's better financially for big channels to keep users on YouTube.
I just scrolled through their main feed and every other video was some kind of alt-right misinformation rant (COVID is fake, Joe Biden is dead/dying/has dementia, Antifa is killing kids, etc.). Just based on that alone I want no part of it.
Most of the content on any such platform is going to be the kind that was banned from mainstream platforms for whatever reason. But it's not just alt-right agitprop that gets banned. And any individual targeted group is not large enough to maintain a viable platform of their own. So either we have a public platform place with the stink, or we have none at all.
I think the complaint isn't that the content exists there, but rather that it makes up the vast majority of what is found there. If the majority of Netflix content is trash that I wouldn't want to watch, why would I continue using Netflix? I think the big issue here is that there hasn't been a need for opposing content to be published on the platform, and until there is it will remain slanted one way. This in and of itself will further reduce adoption by the opposition, as seen above, because of how immediately off-putting it is.
You might continue to watch Netflix because the shows you do like are exclusively available there, and just ignore the rest of the library.
It's not that there hasn't been a need for other stuff to be published - it's that there hasn't been a proportional need. Which is exactly what I meant: any alternatives to established platforms are going to have the preponderance of content banished from those established platforms, in direct proportion. So if the purges on e.g. YouTube mostly target right-wing extremism, but also target some other content, then that's the distribution you're going to see on alternative platforms. But what other choice do you have, if you're interested in that other content?
You can nearly always find some other route to a given piece of content, or just lose interest in consuming it. Very little content is sooooo compelling that it overcomes all other considerations. Otherwise people who had problems with YT would just set up on a big porn site, which tend to have good infrastructure and long-term viability (at least for as long as people want to keep watching porn, which is probably forever).
The difference is that Netflix isn’t promoting and profiting off of hate speech and disinformation. Odysee apparently is. I’m sure there is content on the service that I would enjoy, but having to wade through the garbage to find the gold doesn’t appeal to me.
But you don't have to wade through anything. With the service being there, somebody can send you a direct link to the video, and it'll play. In this scenario, you don't interact with their catalog at all, but you still rely on the service for the video to be available in the first place.
This was exactly my point, thank you. Unfortunately it seems like expressing my desire not to see hate speech is an unpopular position here. I expect better from the HN crowd, but there it is.
I’m sure you’re correct, and I know how to use a search bar, but my issue is that their main feed is full of garbage and hate, something I don’t want to see every time I go to the service. I get the need for a censorship free service, I just lament the fact that they always end up as cesspools of hatred and idiocy.
Also, if you don't know the channel and want to check out his videos, you can still watch them on Odysee - https://odysee.com/@TheLinuxExperiment.