Saidit has the chance to become a free speech social media

submitted by GreenCappy from (self.SaidIt)

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]jmichaelhudsondotnet 7 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Free is a difficult word, at some point in a free speech system you have two people screaming at the top of their lungs and no one is getting heard. Or you have one person trying to argue a point and a gang of other users calling them a "faggot". Or someone sliding the thread with something like "stoooooooop infoooorming meeeeeeeeeeeee" . Both true stories in my recent history.

But anyone using speech to silence other speech is not speaking freely, they are speaking to limit the free speech of someone else.

None of this works without moderation. The people who do not want free speech, which are the most powerful, well-funded, autocratic, plutocratic, tyrannical people in the world, want to control the platform, the servers, the ownership, the moderators, and then ultimately the user base. Then the databases so they can know who said what, when, long after the site is abandonded.

We have seen this happen, over and over. I saw this problem coming in the early 2000s, I was at one point obsessed with it.

How would anyone think internet debating would work without fair algorithms and fair moderators? I predicted what actually happened, and I had to give up on my work to create alternatives because it was more than any one person could do, and the hundreds of other peoeple at the time I spoke to(and I wrote al gore and noam chomsky...) were just unwilling to even consider that it wouldn't just all work out.

What it boils down to is that operating a site like saidit in such a way it does not get taken over by forces that want to destroy it and use it for propaganda, is difficult and takes time. And it takes a certain kind of very fair, very knowledgeable person in the moderation chair.

And I have read the same story over and over again in dozens of communities, Raddle, reddit subs, chans, eztv, the actual police and military(JIDF...CCP) will spend 24/7 effort to take over the mod spots, over years, until they do. They will go to extreme lengths to make any debate over the admin rights and mod rights so bonkers, so extended, so tiring, that no one can read it. They will literally wear you down, and no volunteer can withstand it. Volunteers are in a way doing it for fun, edification, learning, community service, but the forces against free speech ruin all of that for them until they give up and the sub becomes a joke. The conspiracy about r/conspiracy is so far off the meta charts....

So I said in 2002, seeing this coming, and I was a much less effective writer than I am now, and now I have seen decades of this happening, and how dead(and hostile, full of nonsense) the internet is as a result) that this job of internet moderation and mediation is a real, actual job. Actual work. It will not ever succeed with a volunteer effort, especially an anon one. Just look at things like the Fram debates over at wikipedia, who can even follow that? The entire discussion is over what kind of organization is even being appealed to, and the "wikimedia foundation" and wiki corporate and jimmy wales have completely failed to solve this issue, with the most dedicated volunteer editing base(including phillip cross...) and millions of dollars.

Or look at .org and ethos capital, the "multi stake holder" chimera of orgs who claim to somehow kindof operate in the public interest, and how this is just being bought out wholesale which will give a zionist corporation veto power over every .org domain.

The cops and militaries and plutocrats of the world know that moderation and administration of intellectual content is a job and they are paying people to spend years taking these roles over, making a billion boutique controlled opposition sites like raddle and slug, why are we civilians so far behind?

Do you really think the debate pyramid idea is going to scale? Do you really think they havent started to degrade and take over here? (they have) Or that people will buy into this if there isnt something operationally different?

Imagine a utopic world that has done away with internal war, something like the start trek federation. Or even something so simple as a ship board computer on a non-autocratic ship run democratically. The operation of the debate computer in such a way it isnt gamed is critical to any idea of democracy. And the moderation of that server is critical to any idea of democracy.

But all of the billion dollar "democracy" funds like Tides and the NPR funding endowments have spent the last 20 years pretending the critical efforts of digital democracy can be a mostly volunteer effort.

Now we sit at home, everyone dreaming of the perfect stay at home job, stay at home jobs being actually critical perhaps to the entire survival of the economy, and our internet is full of disinformation that is also threatening not just the economy but our safety, and I am the only one writing about what it might look like for these idiotic aspects of the current internet were flipped.

What if moderators weren't anon and were vetted not to be cops/military and what if they were paid for their work? How would that look? How would you set it up? I have some ideas, some of them are in my Expanded Definitions book and some are in Mental Self Defense https://leanpub.com/mentalselfdefense https://leanpub.com/expandeddefinitions

Fact is, the state and corporation will never, ever give us a "free speech" platform outside of their control and they will always try to destroy it, subvert it while giving the illusion of freedom(always, always the trick of tyranny).

And anything that is not capable of resisting these forces is just another tasteless joke on r/conspiracy.

[–]MostlySunnySkies 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

This is the second fundamental problem:

They will literally wear you down, and no volunteer can withstand it.

This is about being forced to spend time and attention. They bankrupt you. They bankrupt your mental "bandwidth".

In the world, two people in a debate can't agree because they don't have the time and bandwidth to run down the ultimate truth of assertions made by the other side. Neither does the audience.

So this is not a Saidit problem, or even an online community problem. It's a non-trivial problem that is the chief thing gating the adjudication of everything from climate change to Holocaust Denial among people who sincerely intend to know the truth. My point here is- don't expect to solve it.

Problems we can't solve we deal with, and if you look at civilization, the way we deal with this problem is through structured debate. We create systems which define what is admissable and what constitues valid evidence and who won or at least is winning or has assembled the best evidence.

Science is one such system. The judiciary is another. If you look at how those activities are structured you can get an idea of what the site would have to be like in order to enact a simliar solution. These represent humanity's best efforts at fact finding.

The failure called Wikipedia is the best example I am aware of that attempted to realize this.

Sure, science is also corruptible -the Food Pyramid and the Stanford Prison Experiment have now both completely and uncontroversially ( everyone is in full agreement) been outed as outright, full-on, self-conscious frauds perpetrated by zealots for their cause. Stil, science seems better than Wikipedia.

So the point here is this- threaded discussion groups are good for talking like this, for communication, but they can't by themselves sustain a debate. That looks like something else. We don't know what. Something.

[–]jmichaelhudsondotnet 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I agree with this assessment. I find also at the moment, especially due to china, the peer review process of science is nearing 50/50 reliability, about a coin flip. Now we see with cv that no one can even agree on what a virus is. This is very bad, regression.

With law, we have things like epstein, where some people are getting away with everything and others get the full weight of the law, it is broken down.

You are right, what I am proposing is a major change to the way all of these things operate, an entire new basis for trust in human argumentation. I spent the last 20 years thinking someone else was going to try to solve it and no one did, it got worse, then worse, then worse, then worse, only worse. Like most things, rather than reform what is broken the broken has been treated as a feature by those who can just bribe their way to what they want using the broken parts as tools. That is exactly what ethos is doing, what youtubes censorship department is doing, exactly what "citizens united" supreme court decision enabled on full blast.

And so we have the end of trust, and now I am talking about, maybe just as a stunt because everything is too broken to fix, what is the beginning of trust. And I think one of the ways to accomplish that is through sacrifice and overwhelming contribution, with the hard fought knowledge of experience engaging bad actors.

That is what my site and my books are. That is why I am posting under my real name. That is why I do so much without compensation.

Maybe my demonstration will show, if nothing else, that some people who are very competent and good writers with something to say, are not just being censored, but are being attacked, and maybe that will spur some people out of complacency. In American culture, according to my experience being denied entry into any intellectual field, and being permantly harassed without being charged with a crime, there must be a vast class of people ready to work on these things, ready to contribute, who have simply been denied an existence in their chosen profession by a corrupt(and foreign) cultural hegemony run by people like epstein and weinstein.

And if that is the case, there are all of the resources for this change, for this entire new basis, really just a set of tools and methods, and non-psychopathic people, prepared to implement it. The computers and network is there, the coding work is being done with things like matrix, the people are ready, but there is no financing or institution to do it. Because the corrupt cultural hegemony has a literal billion dollars to ruin the internet for top down control, but not a single dime to enable an effective platform for dialogue.

If nothing else, this indicates the true nature and intent of tptb, that they intend the internet and computers be used only for control, and as such they are just tyrants in new clothes and have no legitimacy, moral or otherwise.

Good news, ethos got stuffed. (also your link had a security warning, might want to look into that) http://domainincite.com/25497-dangerous-precedent-as-icann-rejects-1-13-billion-org-buyout

Sadly it appears part of a long term strategy that they will not give up on. But a better illustration of my point about how these people "erik brooks" and the kushners will spend a billion dollars for control, but not a dime on actual moderation. It is a fact the internet and things like wikipedia cannot exist without moderation, and it is a fact these things are now core to the functioning of human society, and it is a fact that moderation is actual work, but with all of their thinking caps on the rich and cultural hegemony cannot with all of their money and fancy solve the issue.

Like I said, it would involve them giving power away, and for them the internet is only about their power, their goals, their propaganda, and they do not want to share, they just want our volunteer efforts to give their phillip cross edits the air of legitimacy while they further lock down control incrementally.

And that is evil, demonic, regressive, tyranny. https://archive.is/2MFbn