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I don’t know why these people find it tough. It just isn’t. Don’t censor. But someone said something I consider naughty? Who the fuck cares.
There are plenty of people who aren’t interested in a place that tolerates anti-semitism. Somebody on /r/TheMotte or /r/slatestarcodex once made the interesting point that maximizing speech is completely different from refusing to censor anything — at a certain point you’re driving out as many viewpoints as you’re enabling by tolerating certain people.
Also advertisers – advertisers care.
Might be true, but trying to carefully micro-manage which views need to be pruned to what extend in order to give room to which other views, and deciding which views bring how much value, and having an apparatus in place to enforce all of that...well, it might work on small internet forums where small teams of savvy mods who know their userbase well and actually care to maximize viewpoint diversity (though still - by what metric?), but I don't think it scales at all without devolving into conformity enforcement machinery.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record that goes "AI will fix it", that sounds like a job for AI.
I suspect a model finetuned on the moderation decisions of The Motte will beat the brakes off the typical internet or reddit mod.
I think you underestimate how many humans want censorship. To me reddit is a boring sterile place in most areas where any political sub becomes parroting of the same agreed ideas. But humans seem to want that because we converge on it repeatedly.
Even here if someone parrots a few ideas like more communists leaning they probably get enough disagreement that they end up just deciding to go to the place where everyone will call them geniuses.
AI might be able to maximize for users by never showing that posts they don’t like. Effectively letting everyone live in their self-reinforcing bubble. But it does seem many on the left don’t like the idea of supposedly something they think is a Nazi being on the same platform whose thoughts they never see.
I think people are confused about what they want. They don't understand that in order to get lively, creative, intellectually stimulating conversation, they have to be willing to tolerate people with beliefs that are far different from their own.
The modern progressive movement has sold the idea that you can have all the vitality, ingenuity, and fun that we've always had without the dissidents and the ghouls and the witches. Hell, they push the line that without those bad people, there will be even more of the good stuff!
Unfortunately this message is, likely unintentionally, a classic example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Who's they? How big exactly do you reckon the audience for these things is?
'They' are the 'average person' that @sliders1234 is referencing above. The standard, everyday, stereotypical person or I guess 'NPC' (although I find that term demeaning). People who for whatever reason don't have the ability or time or inclination to think deeply about their beliefs and struggle towards improving them. Who tend to latch onto mainstream messages and not question them too deeply.
In terms of the audience for these things, well, I'd say everyone? If you ask a person on the street if they prefer interesting conversation over boring conversation, what do you think they'd say?
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In this particular case they could be both the establishment and the normie audiences.
It's ginormous. Why else were they (the establishment) raiding all the lively, creative, intellectually stimulating cultures for popculture entertainment?
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