[koglerjs]

Are you saying you can't comprehend what I was trying to mean?

Your second paragraph is exactly the attitude that I despise. I don't care what your intent is: the effect is you want to hide what people really think.

There are no tools to handle that discussion. And that doesn't mean it shouldn't happen. And that means we'll find the tools for it.

Clueless.

edit: I feel like I'm in the midst of the argument that HN doesn't want. And I both don't want it and do want it in the same breath.

HN doesn't have the self-examination reddit does. It just doesn't. HN manages it by careful changes to its ruleset.

Reddit manages it by having an incredibly uncontrolled diverse ecosystem of recursively examinative subreddits.

And while I admire HN's adherence to quality, I will endure downvote after downvote unto hellban in order to defy our stodginess.

[ahelwer]

So, I suppose you would describe yourself as being absolutely in favor of unrestricted free speech. Nothing is off-limits. All shall be discussed.

Now, what happens when you mix this attitude with a self-moderating system? There will be no moderation at all. Every and any topic is able to be discussed by anyone. The fringe opinions mobilize and are given a powerful soapbox, and so horrible becomes the new normal. You can see this in nearly every thread on reddit dealing with sexism and (especially) race relations.

You can't say that the average internet citizen, wandering into any of the sickeningly racist discussions found weekly on r/videos, won't see the hundreds of upvotes on vile opinions without also seeing an illusion of consensus, the normalization of disgusting prejudice. And you can't say that won't have an effect on their thought process next time they interact with a person of colour. That is the price paid for unrestricted discussion of the worst crap people can dedicate themselves to typing on the internet.

That was just a particularly salient example. Everywhere else you see normalization of mysogyny, normalization of pedophilia (seriously, nearly any discussion of gymnasts during the olympics was disgusting). All this on a website with tens of millions of users, claiming itself as the front page of the internet.

You go on to say reddit has self-examination. Reddit is not a single organism; the self-examination you refer to comprises many disgusted users, yelling at the people spouting crap who carry along regardless. "Self-examination" in this fashion is not a substitute for actual moderation. SRS has started linking to the odd HN comment, by the way.

The crux is that tolerating and analyzing horrible opinions only serves to normalize them. There are some ideas that quite simply don't deserve to see a soapbox. You'll probably play the slippery slope card here. I don't care. We have many excellent moral frameworks with which to analyze ideas, and they are more than adequate for sorting out the grey area of what should and should not be allowed.

[koglerjs]

>So, I suppose you would describe yourself as being absolutely in favor of unrestricted free speech. Nothing is off-limits. All shall be discussed.

Yup.

>Now, what happens when you mix this attitude with a self-moderating system?

/r/AskScience

You can't make horrible opinions less horrible by making them invisible.

[lotharbot]

> "I will endure downvote after downvote unto hellban in order to defy our stodginess."

You made some good points in the "nobody wants to read your shit" thread. You should apply those insights to your own posts here.

We signal, with downvotes and hellbans, the kind of shit we don't want to read. Some of your earlier posts in this thread were merely disagreeable, but you've descended into full-on trolling. Please don't do that.

[jmduke]

The hell?

No, discussions which lead to more rape should not happen. This, I feel, is an unambiguous truth.

(I'm not saying that the particular reddit thread encouraged rape, though a psychologist much more well-versed than myself did -- but I don't think its a logical leap to see why victim-blaming would encourage self-rationalization of rape.)

[koglerjs]

The psychologist you cite I myself cited. The point of discussing anything is that no discussions lead to more rape.

Unless you're afraid.

If you're afraid that real discussion will cause more rape, and that the sacrifice of real understanding is worth pretending that that more rape doesn't exist.

Because that's the guarantee.

That's what that meh-ish psychologist proved.

We will not forget. Because there's nothing we're not afraid to know.