> I think people need thicker skin

What a ridiculous thing to say. Actually plenty of us (and I've also been on the internet for many decades now) would like to hop online to engage with some cool folks about [insert interesting topic here] without having utter garbage and dreck thrown up in our faces like racism, transphobia, misogyny, bigotry, etc., etc.

Well it is good thing for you all major platforms have the ablity to block, mute, or otherwise curate your experience, including sharing "block lists" and other innovations so your personal experience is what you make it to be

I support giving people the power to create their own echo chambers and safe spaces, feel free to do so..

No one should be forced to communicate with anyone they do not want to, however you also should not be able to prevent me from communicating with others that I desire to

>>What a ridiculous thing to say

Not really, it is sad parents have stopped teaching "Sticks and Stones my break my bones but words will never harm me"

We really have lost the cultural axiom "I may hate what you say, but I will defend your right to say it" haven't we.

> Well it is good thing for you all major platforms have the ablity to block, mute, or otherwise curate your experience, including sharing "block lists" and other innovations so your personal experience is what you make it to be

Why would i choose a platform where i have to moderate thousands of individuals? Ie what's the purpose in that lol?

Where is this world where we went from having Forums of communities to global cesspools where we want to manage what sort of nonsense shows up on the feed?

> We really have lost the cultural axiom "I may hate what you say, but I will defend your right to say it" haven't we.

I didn't say this, so your two replies in one feels odd. However, no one is stopping you from saying it. Say it all you want. I'm advocating a smaller forum where i don't have to listen to you say things to me that i'm uninterested in.

I'm not stopping you from being on the internet. From having electricity. Just like i'm fine with you yelling on the street corner.

I'm moving to the other side of the street. And you object to that, for some odd reason. Because by me moving, it doesn't give you a voice?

Edit: To sum it up, this isn't about safe spaces. This is about spam. There's only so much "Vaccines give you 5G!!!" i can put up with lol. Just like the guy on the street corner. Hard to have a conversation around that annoying screaming.

> "Sticks and Stones my break my bones but words will never harm me"

Emotions are real, and emotional pain is real. Of course words can hurt you, they evoke emotions.

Emotions are real, but is it not the public responsibility to manage your emotions. Each person, solely, is responsible for their own emotions. If "emotional harm" becomes the basis for what speech is allowed and what is not then we cease to have a culture of free expression

“It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what." -- Stephen Fry

You can not have free expression if the only thing required to shut down that expression is to claim emotional harm. I did not respect that position when it was the Christian right claim harms if gays spoke nor do I today when the authoritarian left claims emotional harm over the wrong pronouns

> Emotions are real, but is it not the public responsibility to manage your emotions. Each person, solely, is responsible for their own emotions. If "emotional harm" becomes the basis for what speech is allowed and what is not then we cease to have a culture of free expression

Yea, this is bunk. What do you think fuels things like mass hysteria? What do you think fuels illogical decisions made in mass?

I'm not advocating for mass censorship, but lets not pretend humans are either logical or capable of handling their own emotions. They're terrible at it. Look at any collection of humans. You can't walk forward without stubbing your toe over examples. Daily commute traffic is full of humans who can't manage their own emotions. edit: Even police know that human memory can't be trusted. What do you think fuels decisions we make, if our memory is so mutable?

Likewise, if it was just emotions up for discussion that would be one thing. But it's not, it's so much more. It's "facts". A mass information war is taking place. Standing on the sidelines saying again, people can handle it, has already been proven false. Repeatedly. People cannot nor will not handle it, at least without help.

The more quickly we recognize how horrible humans are at handling emotions and information ingestion the better we can make reasonable decisions about how to aid humans in actually making progress.

>>I'm not advocating for mass censorship, but

then proceed to advocate for mass censorship, you are functionally saying we need fact checkers the problem is I do not trust the fact checkers that have been appointed in the past because they have been proven to be partisan hacks that spread "approved" disinformation only dispelling unapproved disinformation

Nor do I trust government agencies (like the CDC or the WHO) to be the "source of truth"

> then proceed to advocate for mass censorship, you are functionally saying we need fact checkers the problem is I do not trust the fact checkers that have been appointed in the past because they have been proven to be partisan hacks that spread "approved" disinformation only dispelling unapproved disinformation

I did not, you misunderstand.

I merely advocate for acknowledging that humans are terrible at the things i pointed at. Which conversely, you seem to advocate that we are capable there. You can both identify that we are terrible at information and not advocate for surveillance/censorship. Why do you jump to those contrasts?

To think of it differently, we have to acknowledge we have a problem before we can fix it. Information is a gun, and we have not taken gun safety. We need tools and acknowledgement of our limitations before we can wield the power you so haphazardly throw around. I do not trust young children with guns. We are nothing more than children in our current state.

My previous post advocated that we don't pretend the children can handle guns safely without training and safety tooling. edit: That we should find ways to prove gun safety training / tooling, rather than remove guns (in this analogy lol)

>>To think of it differently, we have to acknowledge we have a problem before we can fix it.

That is the thing, outside of mass censorship it is unsolvable problem

You either allow people to speak freely, in which case misinformation will spread, and emotions will be harmed. or you restrict speech eliminating the very concept of free expression

There is no utopia to be found here

> That is the thing, outside of mass censorship it is unsolvable problem

Completely agree there. edit: Or rather, that it's an unsolved problem. I misread `able` for `ed`

> You either allow people to speak freely, in which case misinformation will spread, and emotions will be harmed. or you restrict speech eliminating the very concept of free expression > There is no utopia to be found here

Yes, those are the current available options. I'm not questioning that.

I'm challenging your assertion that we're capable. More specifically, saying we must acknowledge that we're not capable. We must acknowledge and identify the problem.

> I do not agree, and it does not make me unhappy at all. I am late 70's child, I experienced the Wild West of the internet, nothing posted to twitter (or the chan's for that matter) shock me, or makes me unhappy

Yea, i did say "everyone" but i didn't actually mean everyone. Lots of people enjoy Facebook in all it's glory, too.

> Censorship is not the solution, never has been in history and never will be in the future.

My comment wasn't about Censorship, though. It was about people and a possibility that they may prefer categorized focused communities like many of us grew up with. Which may or may not include moderation (aka "censorship")

I certainly enjoyed the forums of old more than the modern day global scroll feed. But i prefer focused/categorized content, clearly.

My point wasn't that you do or don't. Merely to pose a question. A question (among many) that could dictate whether or not the Forums of old have a place in the modern day. Whether or not the global attention draw that is Twitter is actually desired. edit: Desired enough to keep it alive and "successful", at least.

> Censorship is not the solution

LOL. You posted this to a moderated forum.

> I experienced the Wild West of the internet

I was on USENET in the early 90s, and newsgroups like comp.lang.c.moderated were created for a reason. Unmoderated forums end up as cesspools.

Censorship and moderation are very different things. Moderation is more about format than content: too frequent posting, adding hyperlinks to irrelevant sites, intentionally poor formatting (all capslock) and so on. And moderators are usually public figures, because the rules are simple and widely supported. Censorship is "wrongthink moderation": censors dont care about format of the message, but care about the thought behind it. Censors are usually anon figures and the rules are usually unpopular and secret for this reason.