“Morons Funding the Fight Against Morons” is IMHO a widely-applicable paradigm.
For example, I’ve always thought that we could “wind down” the existence of lotteries not by banning them altogether (for surely many people would be upset with such a decision) but rather 1. banning private lotteries; and then 2. having a single state-owned lottery commission, that is regulated by a law that forces it to be this type of “for-profit but we donate all profits” corp, with the profits funneled directly into public statistics education. Hopefully it would work as a negative-feedback system: the more money flowing through the lottery system, the fewer innumerate people there would be who think it’s a good idea to play the lottery, until eventually nobody wants to play the lottery at all and the state-owned lottery commission can close down with no complaints.
Are there other examples of MFFAM that already exist in the world? Or do you have an MFFAM idea of your own that you’d like to see implemented?
> For example, I’ve always thought that we could “wind down” the existence of lotteries not by banning them altogether (for surely many people would be upset with such a decision) but rather 1. banning private lotteries; and then 2. having a single state-owned lottery commission, that is regulated by a law that forces it to be this type of “for-profit but we donate all profits” corp, with the profits funneled directly into public statistics education
I can't tell whether you're being facetious, but this is almost exactly how it works. (Lotteries are state-run, private gambling is banned almost everywhere, profits go to state schools.)
The profiteers are the lottery mechanism manufacturers. The people who make the tickets, the machines, etc. State run lotteries are TERRIBLE across the board and are the natural result of money in politics. Some group gets together enough money, they can push the public to accept a policy that profits the group indefinitely while marginally changing the lives of the public (usually for the worse, with noise and misinformation).
The lottery, as a specific case, has an unfortunate loophole.
If the lottery funds public education, it allows the general fund from the legislature to allocate less money, with a fairly-clear conscience, to public education. The argument, "Math education is already well-funded by the lottery, and we have $IMPORTANT_CAUSE that desperately requires resources, so we will cut state support for math." is difficult to counter. The net outcome is that lotteries become a state-ordained tax on being less mathematically-literate.
I would welcome any suggestion that counters this slippery-slope scenario.
There is a well-established form of counter-protest at Neonazi marches in Germany: Citizens and companies pledge a certain amount of money to antiracist organizations for every person-meter the Nazis are marching.
Counter-protestors are then cheering the Nazis on and hold banners thanking them for their anti-racist activism.
The expected rate of return for movie tickets is lower than lotteries.
Yes, lotteries are bad investments. But also yes, many many people play lotteries as entertainment not retirement plan. The people who are addicted, gamblers, or spend more on (any type of) entertainment or luxury good than they can afford have problem. Some psychological, some educational. But those are the problems, not lotteries. If lotteries went away, those people would still have those problems and just manifest them elsewhere.
I believe this exact system is followed by the government of Kerala, India. Private lotteries are banned. Lotteries seem to be a significant source of revenue for the state.
A benefit they don't really highlight is alignment of incentives. The platform doesn't benefit from 'repugnant' sites -- they actually hurt the platform's bottom line. Compare to e.g. Facebook whose statements about fighting hate speech or disinformation are seen as non-credible because of the conflict of interest.
I had a business idea last year that would take advantage of a similar concept.
Basically, it would be like GoFundMe, but users could also pay money to defund a campaign if they so desired.
For example, if there was a campaign that people thought was distasteful, they could pay $10 to take $5 from the campaign and allocate the previously funded $5 and $5 from the defund fee to the antithesis of the campaign (selected by a site administrator).
The remaining $5 of the defund fee would go to site operations, allowing the defunding payments to pay for costs rather than taking costs out of campaigns themselves.
This would allow sites to respond to pressure from the public about controversial campaigns with less threat of being deplatformed by their ISP, host, or payment processor.
Numbers are just examples, a lot of changes on the pricing and fee balancing would have to be determined, but the concept intrigued me.
> For example, if there was a campaign that people thought was distasteful, they could pay $10 to take $5 from the campaign and allocate the previously funded $5 and $5 from the defund fee to the antithesis of the campaign (selected by a site administrator).
Sounds like it pays better to be the antithesis campaign. In other words, the site administrator would be the ideological point of weakness.
edit: Oh wait, I see, you pay $10 and get $10 donated. Different problem: the site profits from defunding, so they have an incentive to magnify distaste. And the defund target is still determined by the site administrator.
It sounds a bit like carbon credit trading but for controversy.
There is an entire class of objectionable speech and activity that is a mixture of phony provocateurs creating honeypots to exploit vulnerable and mentally ill people to create incidents for policy and political leverage. Variations on this MFFAM offsetting policy could mitigate a lot of it by deflating that leverage by normalizing lame speech and letting people recognize it for what it is instead of creating hysteria around it for their own ends.
Their permissive approach to free-speech one of the things that keeps me with them (there are other reasons as well - the service is pretty good, though I've been so comfortable them for the past decade or so I haven't even looked into price comparisons with other services). Long may their service continue to hang about!
While I host some sites via github, for potentially sketchy/objectionable websites where I want to give them the best chance of continuing to exist long-term even should some people object, I've used NFS. Are there any better/comparable options that aren't too onerous workload-wise?
I chose NFS specifically for their free speech policies many, many years ago and they have continually impressed me not just with the fact that my websites aren't booted (not that they are even that offensive) but also their incredible uptime and ongoing service.
I reach for them for anything that could possibly be controversial specifically because I know they won't be the weak link in the chain, but they are also just great as a shared host in general. The pricing is good too.
I can't recommend them enough, especially if you're saying anything that might ruffle some feathers.
Maybe I missed a step. They talk about how site operators with objectionable content know they are not welcome and maybe leave, but don't mention how the site operator would know their site has been marked.
That step is implicit in "organizations that have received funding over the years include the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, local chapters of the NAACP, the National Bail Fund Network, the American Immigration Council, the Trevor Project."
Someone who doesn't like those organizations is incentivized to not use NSFN to host sites that those organizations would oppose.
Wondering about that too. The last paragraph can I think be read as suggesting such sites are proactively notified by NFS:
> It helps the people who operate repugnant sites understand that they are here because we tolerate them... barely... not because we endorse them or their views. It also does a pretty decent job of further thinning out the number of such sites, as a fair number of people who run them only believe in free speech when they're the ones talking.
While this policy is better than nothing, it is, as they admit, is imperfect. They may put their part of the profit to good use, but their service still provides an implicit benefit to an offending site. The damage caused by this second part could far exceed the good they are trying to do donating their profits.
What if the owner has a different opinion than you of what is offending and what is not?
They get to remove sites you think are good and keep sites you think are bad.
In the end, the only fair and objective way to filter content is the rule of law, as it applies to everyone equally. Every subjective decision will always offend some people.
I personally think the linked page "the long game" [1] found in this page is more interesting on this topic than the original link.
Damn, I’ve been an NFSN customer for over a decade, and I didn’t know about this. I would be pleased about it, except that they’ve chosen poorly with the orgs they donate to. SPLC in particular is an ideologically possessed organization which doesn’t fight for justice; rather, it fights to silence those who disagree with their preferred dogma.
This makes me really sad, because otherwise NFSN is a really great outfit.
a) The number of customers who are interested in actively "bleeding money from" their hosting provider is probably zero.
b) The number of customers who actively want "a little hate speech" on their site is probably zero.
If you want money directed towards an organization you feel makes a positive impact, their are more efficient ways of doing so, like giving them money yourself.
So I could donate $20 to the Matthew Shepard Foundation, or I could sign up with NFSN (who can and will dump you in a heartbeat if they catch you lying about your identity), post hate content traceable to my real life ID, and cause them to donate $10 to the Foundation while keeping $10 for themselves?
In the end, someone has to choose who “morons” are. I was born in Yugoslavia where communist government protected its citizens against “external and internal enemies”. Many “internal enemies” were identified and sent to work in labor camps. The enmity of these enemies was telling jokes abot the ruling class.
I like NFSN, but what qualifies as "offensive" or "repugnant"? We know the goalposts about what constitutes racism are being moved; currently, being insufficiently anti-racist is grounds for being considered a racist. Certainly a site denigrating members of a racial group (with the possible exception of white people) would count as repugnant, but what about a site that, say, questions or challenges the tenets of critical race theory? What if it has a title of the form "Make X Great Again" without particular reference to Trump or his politics (e.g. "Make Regexes Great Again"?) That has been considered "normalizing hate speech" and grounds for a pre-emptive ban from open source conferences.
What, exactly, constitutes making you enough of a moron to where you involuntarily donate to a grift organization like the SPLC? Or is it a super-secret, shadowban type of thing where you can't know the rules or that you've violated them, only have them enforced against you?
I don't understand how this is relevant. you're getting the service you paid for, and they're funding organizations they like with money they got from you.
I'm involuntarily donating to all sorts of garbage organizations in the exact same way just by participating in the economy.
This is nothing more than a private transaction that they're talking about publicly.
I wish the right to offend was a human right. Otherwise you have to keep watching the media and be constantly up to date about what thought you speak up could cancel you.
I mean, this is effectively what free speech is. It's already a "right" at least in the US.
But offended people also have the right to blacklist (oops!) you. I think the setup is fine, but we're in an interesting place culturally where it's effectively a McCarthyesque "offense" witch-hunt. I don't really think you can regulate witch hunts.
It's more a matter of enough people saying "ok, enough" and not caving to the whims of a bunch of perpetually-offended twitter crybabies with anime avatars. Once a critical mass of people stop caving to this bullshit, it will eventually just die out, and offended people can go back to writing in their diary instead of getting people fired.
I think the tides are starting to turn here, TBH. Personally I've been more actively speaking out against cancel culture recently. And I'm a communist.
I like this policy, but I wonder how long it'll take for it to become controversial. After all, it's the logical compliment to "cancel culture". It goes like this:
1. Money is fungible.
2. The one who decides what to do with a dollar is the holder of it.
So, a dollar from a good person and a dollar from a bad person are the exact same thing: a dollar. What only matters is who gets to decide how to spend it. So based on this, the rules for creating moral pressure through economics are:
1. Accept money from bad people. Spend it on ends opposed to their interest.
2. Refuse to give money to bad people. Doing this prevents them from spending it on ends opposed to your interest.
And #2 is pretty much textbook "cancel culture". Eg, don't buy books by Orson Scott Card, because he might spend that money on something unfriendly to LGBT people.
Also, #1 is a bit of a tricky position to take in practice, because it's hard to prove to others what you spent your dollars on, but being friendly with the wrong kind of people easily gets interpreted as being on their side.
If #2 is "cancel culture", then we can officially retire that meaningless phrase. Everyone who I'd ever want to spend in-person time with has someone they wouldn't do business with.
Some people are going to take the position that accepting money from bad people makes you a bad person, regardless of what you do (or claim to do) with the money.
NearlyFreeSpeech.net doesn't seem to aim to be the world's biggest low cost host, and their policy is pretty clear. I don't think they would lose a lot of customers if it became known that this part of their policy is in active use.
[+] [-] derefr|5 years ago|reply
For example, I’ve always thought that we could “wind down” the existence of lotteries not by banning them altogether (for surely many people would be upset with such a decision) but rather 1. banning private lotteries; and then 2. having a single state-owned lottery commission, that is regulated by a law that forces it to be this type of “for-profit but we donate all profits” corp, with the profits funneled directly into public statistics education. Hopefully it would work as a negative-feedback system: the more money flowing through the lottery system, the fewer innumerate people there would be who think it’s a good idea to play the lottery, until eventually nobody wants to play the lottery at all and the state-owned lottery commission can close down with no complaints.
Are there other examples of MFFAM that already exist in the world? Or do you have an MFFAM idea of your own that you’d like to see implemented?
[+] [-] tobinfricke|5 years ago|reply
I can't tell whether you're being facetious, but this is almost exactly how it works. (Lotteries are state-run, private gambling is banned almost everywhere, profits go to state schools.)
[+] [-] Supermancho|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ISL|5 years ago|reply
If the lottery funds public education, it allows the general fund from the legislature to allocate less money, with a fairly-clear conscience, to public education. The argument, "Math education is already well-funded by the lottery, and we have $IMPORTANT_CAUSE that desperately requires resources, so we will cut state support for math." is difficult to counter. The net outcome is that lotteries become a state-ordained tax on being less mathematically-literate.
I would welcome any suggestion that counters this slippery-slope scenario.
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
Taxes on cigarettes that fund anti-smoking campaigns.
Taxes on soft drinks that fund anti-obesity campaigns.
There are many others.
In general, they called "sin taxes," and the money is very often earmarked to eliminate the source of those taxes.
[+] [-] Tomte|5 years ago|reply
Counter-protestors are then cheering the Nazis on and hold banners thanking them for their anti-racist activism.
[+] [-] njharman|5 years ago|reply
Yes, lotteries are bad investments. But also yes, many many people play lotteries as entertainment not retirement plan. The people who are addicted, gamblers, or spend more on (any type of) entertainment or luxury good than they can afford have problem. Some psychological, some educational. But those are the problems, not lotteries. If lotteries went away, those people would still have those problems and just manifest them elsewhere.
[+] [-] throw080700|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LudwigNagasena|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bo1024|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] durkie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deftnerd|5 years ago|reply
Basically, it would be like GoFundMe, but users could also pay money to defund a campaign if they so desired.
For example, if there was a campaign that people thought was distasteful, they could pay $10 to take $5 from the campaign and allocate the previously funded $5 and $5 from the defund fee to the antithesis of the campaign (selected by a site administrator).
The remaining $5 of the defund fee would go to site operations, allowing the defunding payments to pay for costs rather than taking costs out of campaigns themselves.
This would allow sites to respond to pressure from the public about controversial campaigns with less threat of being deplatformed by their ISP, host, or payment processor.
Numbers are just examples, a lot of changes on the pricing and fee balancing would have to be determined, but the concept intrigued me.
[+] [-] FeepingCreature|5 years ago|reply
Sounds like it pays better to be the antithesis campaign. In other words, the site administrator would be the ideological point of weakness.
edit: Oh wait, I see, you pay $10 and get $10 donated. Different problem: the site profits from defunding, so they have an incentive to magnify distaste. And the defund target is still determined by the site administrator.
[+] [-] phreack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw080700|5 years ago|reply
https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2021/01/19/free-speech-in-...
[+] [-] motohagiography|5 years ago|reply
There is an entire class of objectionable speech and activity that is a mixture of phony provocateurs creating honeypots to exploit vulnerable and mentally ill people to create incidents for policy and political leverage. Variations on this MFFAM offsetting policy could mitigate a lot of it by deflating that leverage by normalizing lame speech and letting people recognize it for what it is instead of creating hysteria around it for their own ends.
[+] [-] luguenth|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakeva|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jan_Inkepa|5 years ago|reply
While I host some sites via github, for potentially sketchy/objectionable websites where I want to give them the best chance of continuing to exist long-term even should some people object, I've used NFS. Are there any better/comparable options that aren't too onerous workload-wise?
[+] [-] orthecreedence|5 years ago|reply
I reach for them for anything that could possibly be controversial specifically because I know they won't be the weak link in the chain, but they are also just great as a shared host in general. The pricing is good too.
I can't recommend them enough, especially if you're saying anything that might ruffle some feathers.
[+] [-] andrewflnr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gowld|5 years ago|reply
Someone who doesn't like those organizations is incentivized to not use NSFN to host sites that those organizations would oppose.
[+] [-] everybodyknows|5 years ago|reply
> It helps the people who operate repugnant sites understand that they are here because we tolerate them... barely... not because we endorse them or their views. It also does a pretty decent job of further thinning out the number of such sites, as a fair number of people who run them only believe in free speech when they're the ones talking.
[+] [-] wheybags|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vzaliva|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karrotwaltz|5 years ago|reply
In the end, the only fair and objective way to filter content is the rule of law, as it applies to everyone equally. Every subjective decision will always offend some people.
I personally think the linked page "the long game" [1] found in this page is more interesting on this topic than the original link.
[1] https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/q/TheLongGame
[+] [-] camdenlock|5 years ago|reply
This makes me really sad, because otherwise NFSN is a really great outfit.
[+] [-] happytoexplain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FeepingCreature|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phekunde|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lupire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mankyd|5 years ago|reply
b) The number of customers who actively want "a little hate speech" on their site is probably zero.
If you want money directed towards an organization you feel makes a positive impact, their are more efficient ways of doing so, like giving them money yourself.
[+] [-] kstrauser|5 years ago|reply
This... does not seem efficient.
[+] [-] s9w|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] drno123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonogo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|5 years ago|reply
What, exactly, constitutes making you enough of a moron to where you involuntarily donate to a grift organization like the SPLC? Or is it a super-secret, shadowban type of thing where you can't know the rules or that you've violated them, only have them enforced against you?
[+] [-] durkie|5 years ago|reply
I'm involuntarily donating to all sorts of garbage organizations in the exact same way just by participating in the economy.
This is nothing more than a private transaction that they're talking about publicly.
[+] [-] Hitton|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comfyinnernet|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gowld|5 years ago|reply
You don't need to know anything about the details; simply continue to exercise your free speech.
[+] [-] intricatedetail|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orthecreedence|5 years ago|reply
I mean, this is effectively what free speech is. It's already a "right" at least in the US.
But offended people also have the right to blacklist (oops!) you. I think the setup is fine, but we're in an interesting place culturally where it's effectively a McCarthyesque "offense" witch-hunt. I don't really think you can regulate witch hunts.
It's more a matter of enough people saying "ok, enough" and not caving to the whims of a bunch of perpetually-offended twitter crybabies with anime avatars. Once a critical mass of people stop caving to this bullshit, it will eventually just die out, and offended people can go back to writing in their diary instead of getting people fired.
I think the tides are starting to turn here, TBH. Personally I've been more actively speaking out against cancel culture recently. And I'm a communist.
[+] [-] dale_glass|5 years ago|reply
1. Money is fungible.
2. The one who decides what to do with a dollar is the holder of it.
So, a dollar from a good person and a dollar from a bad person are the exact same thing: a dollar. What only matters is who gets to decide how to spend it. So based on this, the rules for creating moral pressure through economics are:
1. Accept money from bad people. Spend it on ends opposed to their interest.
2. Refuse to give money to bad people. Doing this prevents them from spending it on ends opposed to your interest.
And #2 is pretty much textbook "cancel culture". Eg, don't buy books by Orson Scott Card, because he might spend that money on something unfriendly to LGBT people.
Also, #1 is a bit of a tricky position to take in practice, because it's hard to prove to others what you spent your dollars on, but being friendly with the wrong kind of people easily gets interpreted as being on their side.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kstrauser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toast0|5 years ago|reply
NearlyFreeSpeech.net doesn't seem to aim to be the world's biggest low cost host, and their policy is pretty clear. I don't think they would lose a lot of customers if it became known that this part of their policy is in active use.