I find this individualistic view of the problem fascinating.
It treats companies as individuals and thinks they're all different, which is bolstered by the BS terminology about "corporate culture" that the companies themselves push.
But to anyone who sees the big picture, it's obvious that this is capitalism. Under capitalism, you are a cog in a machine. Always have been, always will be.
This isn't some particular company treating its employees like trash. It's the entire system of commodifying all aspects of life in order for the line in the chart to keep going up indefinitely.
But individualism has people so utterly blind to this that they treat companies as people, which is dystopian to the max.
I could see someone argue that, but would a monarch, for example, really hyperfocus nearly as much on optimizing crops to the point of driving the farmers to suicide, just so he could point to a line going up on a chart in a meeting with investors?
No, it's more likely to be a vague, emotional impulse for "more", without the bureaucratic apparatus to enforce it in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with human life.
Capitalism demands constant growth in ways and for reasons that are different from any other hierarchy.
Companies do differ. Not a high proportion of people are fortunate enough to work for a successful worker's co-op, but there the forces you describe take a quite different shape.
Even in a capitalist-owned firm, enlightened self-interest can lead to decent management practice.
This back-and-forth will never end until there's government regulation that tells the creators of digital communication platforms, in no uncertain terms, "You do not get to control the content on the platform you have built, because the platform exists to serve the people of this country, and this country has law enforcement agencies whose job it is to police any illegal communication."
As long as corporations have the right to control what people say just because it's on their servers, and as long as they don't feel threatened by the state, this problem will persist.
HN has the right to control what people say here. Are you against that as well? The reality is that internet discussion without moderation is virtually impossible.
many people here believe private business has a right to control anything they please (their platform, their rules) and to some extent they are right but the infuriating thing is that the banhammer is obviously not just. so one has to ask; what is their function?
Precisely this. A blog gets to decide what comments to allow. But if Facebook wants to connect everyone in my country then we as a people have a right to decide what is allowed and what isn't, not some billionaire. This is especially egregious for people outside the US where Facebook is a foreign company.
Why not let the market take care of it? I think it will in the long run.
We have CNN and Fox, because we want news and media through the lens of similar people politically? Why wouldn’t social media be the same in the long run?
No country has the capacity to have law enforcement go on active patrols in the digital space, many fail even to intervene when they're called in.
Platforms need to have some ability to moderate themselves, the things that are sorely lacking is due process in front of an actual court on one side, and some form of international agreement on how to deal with freedom of speech on the other side.
Just take Nazi symbols: it's perfectly legal in the US to fly a Swastika flag on your home, to take a picture of that and to post it on Twitter. In Germany, all three of these acts would be illegal per §86a StGB (with the exception if one was a journalist and tweeted that photo to publicly document this). In other countries, e.g. Russia, flying the rainbow flag may be illegal - something that is perfectly legal and mainstream in Western countries.
Porn is another thing: what is legal in the US under freedom of speech / art, may be illegal in Muslim countries. Not to mention that while porn may be legal in the US, advertisers still don't really want to have their brand appear next to fetish porn.
Should Twitter now ban such accounts worldwide, restrict the availability of the content to certain jurisdictions, should it do nothing?
These are highly relevant problems, which we need to solve as societies of this world.
So, if a country says "you cannot criticize anyone who promotes exclusionary ethnostates", or even "you cannot criticize anyone who promotes exclusionary Jewish ethnostates in particular", then Facebook should ban that content on behalf of the exclusionary ethnostate supporters.
Otherwise, allow criticism of exclusionary ethnostates. White supremacy and zionism are two sides of the same coin—both feed off each other, justify each other, complement each other.
> So, if a country says "you cannot criticize anyone who promotes exclusionary ethnostates", or even "you cannot criticize anyone who promotes exclusionary Jewish ethnostates in particular", then Facebook should ban that content on behalf of the exclusionary ethnostate supporters.
Exactly these kinds of questions are what should be regulated by international agreements between countries.
> White supremacy and zionism are two sides of the same coin—both feed off each other
Is there some reason no digital platform producing company ever washes its hands of all moderation and leaves control of illegal activity to the people actually responsible for it (the FBI, NSA, local law enforcement, etc.)?
Are companies actually liable somehow if they don't take proactive steps to mitigate illegal content, which nowadays also leads into heavy-handed censorship because of what they interpret as being borderline illegal (like "hateful speech")?
In other words, is this a purely risk assessment related action, or an ideological one as someone like Alex Jones would shout into a mic?
This is a reasonable question. I hope you are able to find an answer but I don’t have one for you. I’d start by reading the “you’re wrong about...” pair of posts covering the First Amendment [1] and Section 230 [2] as they are good primers, even if you aren’t “wrong”. I’d also read the text of Section 230 itself [3] and then read up on safe harbor in general [4]. That should get you going in the right direction.
and fosta / sesta cut up some pieces of that for some sites / situations, which could create some of the issues that op was suggesting for some parts of the internet and not others (yet).
Of course there has been talk on both sides of the aisles (especially the past 6 months or so) to remove 230 totally or update it so that moderating speech makes you lose 230 protections - the argument that 'we don't write the words our users do so we aren't responsible" - the 'dumb pipe' defense, starts to erode when you censor some things you don't like - especially if you censor them before they are posted - from what I understand.
Of course some portals have already destroyed thier dumb pipe defense all on their own, aka cloudflare -
This leads to interesting situations where I believe most users do not know that their assumed private speech is being monitored, censored, judged, reported, deplatformed etc..
IANAL, dr., etc - anyhow I think it's a fluid situation currently.
We know what happens to totally unmoderated social platforms: you get 8chan, child porn, and the absolute worst content humanity produces. It's not just about legal liability, it's about what community you curate.
This appears to be a common flaw in human reasoning.
Email has sent countless child porn. BitTorrent as well. SMS? Check.
Everyone understands you don’t blame AT&T when someone texts CP, but to wrap a pretty UI around your protocol and suddenly the unwashed masses expect you to be the sole arbiter of truth and legality for everything that flows over said protocol.
> Is there some reason no digital platform producing company ever washes its hands of all moderation
Perhaps all that is necessary is the empirical observation that every completely unmoderated forum turns into a metaphorical sewage containment vessel once it gets beyond a certain size.
Doesn't matter who's "actually responsible" for hateful and toxic speech if no one - neither users or advertisers - is willing to patronize your business for hosting that speech. Would you be willing to pay to use 4chan? If you ran another business, would you advertise on there? So ask yourself: if you owned a digital platform where users/advertisers were fleeing left & right because they constantly see vile content that they don't want to see or associate with, would you be content to wash your hands of moderation and impotently say "well actually the FBI/NSA is responsible for this, not me" as your platform dies around you?
The goal of most platforms is to get more adoption and more users. People who post hateful, weird, and/or borderline illegal content are mutually exclusive with the vast majority of other "normal" people. When the majority of people view something as tainting then the platform will remove it because hosting it will taint the platform and the majority of people will leave the platform, or not join it in the first place.
Remember Voat. They wanted to be "free speech Reddit" but predictably they turned into a cesspool of degenerate users, even for a time hosting the r/jailbait folks who had been kicked off Reddit a long time ago. And unsurprisingly Voat never got mainstream and now it is dead, while Reddit is still online and growing more and more all the time.
If you have one platform which bans, say, racists, and another platform which doesn't, then most normal people will gravitate to the sans-racist platform. The sales team of the latter platform then has to go out and convince people that they want to advertise to a small market of racists and racism appreciators. This, fairly obviously, isn't as easy as selling ad-space on the less racism-y platform.
People have _tried_ unmoderated forums and other social media, again and again. It doesn't work. Being unappealing to advertisers is actually the _good_ case; the bad case is that people use it to orchestrate serious crimes.
Imagine living in 2021 and still thinking this propaganda talking point from 1949 still holds any weight with anyone.
We know competition doesn't work. Competitors get bought out. We know the stock market doesn't work. Money raised gets used to automate away jobs, not expand and increase the number of human beings actually needed by the company. We know pricing doesn't get corrected, at all, because everyone who runs businesses or owns property is so rich they are able to self-sustain and ignore any market signals urging them to adjust prices.
None of the free market capitalist tenets actually work the way they're described, and there's a growing proportion of the population realizing this finally. It's just unfortunate they're being steered towards communism because the communists are currently the loudest opponents of this absurd system built on lies.
It's pretty common to ship chicken to china for processing since the cost of shipping is lower than labor... however since it was raised in the US, it's totally legal to say "US Raised Chickens"
It’s actually extremely rare. As of 2018 there where 4 Chinese processing plants that took chickens killed and frozen in the US, thawed them out for processing, and then froze them again and shipped them back to the US. Bulk freight shipping is generally cheap, but shipping frozen goods across the Pacific Ocean twice adds up.
Surprising it's taken them this long. It's basically the world's news aggregator at this point.
Unlike Instagram or TikTok or any entertainment-focused social media platform, Twitter feels necessary to its users, whether to stay informed or to stay angry or to feel connected to other people.
That flippant posturing is the result of reading history books from the perspective of everyone who lived over the past several thousand years being backwards and evil.
It blinds people to the realities of power dynamics that still exist today and have not been at all lessened or subdued by progressivism one bit.
I've always had near zero empathy for anyone who isn't a close friend or family member, and I have very high pain tolerance, to the point of outright ignoring minor wounds on a regular basis and then finding them later (sounds edgy, actually majorly annoying finding unexpected blood stains on clothing or furniture, or realizing I have an eyesore of a bruise somewhere).
> ignoring minor wounds on a regular basis and then finding them later
In my experience that's pretty common, especially among guys. It's a running joke with my wife that I'll be leaking blood without even knowing I cut myself. Or I know, and just don't really care. Several of my friends are similar. It does lead to awkward explanations sometimes. My wife still doesn't really understand how I can have a great big scabbed over wound or a nice big purple bruise with not the faintest idea when/where I did it.
I wouldn't say I'm low on empathy, either. But I hide it pretty well, bury it quite deep.
Don't know why you're being downvoted. Of course this is all anecdotal and armchair psychology/psychiatry/neuroscience/neuropharmacology, but there could plausibly be some kind of correlation, here, and every anecdote adds to the discussion, even if of course they shouldn't be taken as empirical support for the hypothesis.
I've seen research about how opiates seem to reduce perception of both physical and emotional pain, which may partly explain why some people in unfortunate situations may become addicted. Emotional pain isn't adjacent to empathy but isn't necessarily orthogonal, either. If there's anything to this, it makes me wonder if there could also be some correlation between opioid receptors and empathy, or even some sort of correlation between pain and emotions in general.
While we're talking anecdata, for the first ~30 years of my life I found absolutely no relief from acetaminophen for anything from illness to injury to random headaches.
A couple years ago my wife cajoled me to try taking it again, and I went from bed ridden to feeling poorly but able to function. Not a miracle cure but really helpful a few times a year. Is there any known association of age and acetaminophen effectiveness?
Anecdotally I used to be less empathetic but I took some steps to change that long ago.
But, high pain tolerance would still describe me even after that point... I've had broken ribs, broken fingers and toes, broken hand and wrist, chipped teeth, broken nose, seriously infected abrasions, large boils (now these fucking hurt), torn labrum on left shoulder, surgery on right shoulder with a really uncomfortable elastomeric pump, a few minor head injuries, minor fracture in one foot, cigarette tattoos, high-speed bike crashes with no protective gear, a perplexing squishy fluid sac under the sole of my foot from sprinting, etc.
I still feel pain but I would have to imagine that a pain-sensitive person might not get up to the same stuff that I do. It really depends on the type of pain.
The two most excruciating were dengue fever and a couple bouts with moderately-sized kidney stones. Dengue was worse, definitely earning its local name here of "bone-break fever" due to the intense and constant aching. Near the end there is a characteristic rash, which is mercy compared to the first 3-4 days. The whole experience left me physically destroyed for months! I returned to lifting weights after I thought I had recovered, but my one-rep max lifts were halved on every single movement and it took another month to return to the level I was at before.
My first instinct is it's people who have a high threshold for pain who don't appreciate being called out for a lack of empathy. But perhaps didn't have a rational defense to jump in and comment.
It would be interesting to hear a response from a downvoter contradicting this instinct.
More likely, the people doing the downvoting have low thresholds for pain and do not want to see people with low empathy become normalized, as it would make their pains feel even worse.
It's usually prescribed specifically for fever, not just for any pain.
Could this be why so many people (myself included) report feeling a sense of wanting to live a more proactive life when sick with a fever?
You'd think it would just be because you're feeling a sense of contrast from your usual more energized state and want to avoid wasting energy on unproductive things once you get it back, but could it actually be because the Acetominophen reduces our overall sense of anxiety?
The article talks about how there have been studies that show it dampens all emotions, but to feel more sure about long-term efforts, you don't strictly need to be emotionally charged or inspired, you just need to be less anxious about the potential failure of such efforts.
> It's usually prescribed specifically for fever, not just for any pain.
It is regularly prescribed (alone or as part of a compounded drug with opioids) for post surgical pain; as I understand it's the most effective common non-narcotic painkiller for traumatic injury, but not as effective as NSAIDs (or steroids) for inflammatory pain, because it doesn't specifically target inflammation.
> report feeling a sense of wanting to live a more proactive life when sick with a fever?
There is (very weak) theory that, given that viruses want to spread to more hosts, and given that certain infections like toxoplasma or rabies can change the hosts behaviours, that a virus wants us to get out more and be more socialable. The urge to live a life when we feel when sick with fever could be part of the infection changing our behaviour to make it spread!
Viruses and other things exploit our behaviours of sneezing and coughing to spread after all, so why not increase the chances some more.
There was one study done that showed that those who were just injected with the flu vaccine (as a safer way than actually infecting people with the flu) that they became more gregarious and went out socialising more.
The science is pretty weak and can be explained that those who had the vaccine felt more protected and invulnerable, so it does not prove anything.
The researchers theorised that sexually transmitted diseases may also want to spread. Its possible that being infected by STDs could make you more promiscuous therfore.
There's no studies done on covid infections and change of host behaviour. Suggesting that people might not be fully free in their decisions when pre-symptomatic and infectious would mainly be not helpful, useful and also dangerous.
To me, the idea that viruses could affect our mental state is so out there its similar to the idea that the bacteria in our guts could affect our mental state 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, many multiplayer games have neither skill-based matchmaking, nor a ban on premade groups playing against solo queue players.
I just can't grasp how any developer can seriously think a game can be enjoyable when you're on a team of arbitrary players but being matched against a premade team of players all of whom have 2,000+ hours logged in that game and are coordinating flawlessly.
In COD4, some servers ran tools which would autobalance the teams. So if you had a group of 3-5 which played together and the rest were randoms, the the other team could end up with a lot more players to compensate.
Was generally quite nice, except when you really wanted to play with your mate and the tool kept swapping you over because it didn't find any other way to balance the teams.
Not very many, these days. There are a handful, like Escape from Tarkov, that are super hardcore and have no matchmaking. It will probably never be more than a small niche game as a result, since any new player has to contend with an extremely rigorous onboarding process in which you are unlikely to have much success for dozens of hours until you get the hang of things.
I used to play Battlefield 2 competitively. After our official clan practises we'd roll into random pub servers to mess around. It usually only took ~6 of us to just dominate the server, and this is a game with (2) 64 players teams.
Rarely did we ever win though, usually we'd end up getting admin kicked for 'cheating'.
It treats companies as individuals and thinks they're all different, which is bolstered by the BS terminology about "corporate culture" that the companies themselves push.
But to anyone who sees the big picture, it's obvious that this is capitalism. Under capitalism, you are a cog in a machine. Always have been, always will be.
This isn't some particular company treating its employees like trash. It's the entire system of commodifying all aspects of life in order for the line in the chart to keep going up indefinitely.
But individualism has people so utterly blind to this that they treat companies as people, which is dystopian to the max.