juniper_strong

I've stopped caring about institutions' reputations because I don't need them to gatekeep for me anymore.

If I want to read about finance, I can read Matt Levine. If I want to read about law I can read Eugene Volokh. If I want to read about about security I can read Bruce Schneier. In every category I care about, there are writers who are experts who make their expert opinions known without me having to subscribe to the Economist, FT, or the WSJ, all of which are great, all of which I grew up reading.

But I think I'm done with their gatekeeping now, I don't need it.

WaPo and NYT are trash and that was made nakedly obvious in 2016. It's more blatant now than it was then, but I guess if you didn't notice it then, you won't notice it now.

It is not just much more commonplace but obligatory for print magazines to exercise that control. A print magazine can't say, send me slander, send me libel, send me copyright violations, send me terrorist threats, if they agree with my personal political slant, I will print them all no questions asked.

Why can't a print magazine do that, but a website can? Did 230 say anything about why those are treated differently?

Why should someone running a website be able to moderate without fear of litigation when someone publishing a print magazine is not able to moderate without fear of litigation?

Did 230 say anything about that or did the law have no stated reason for that difference?

Here's the Merriam-Webster definition of censored: "suppressed, altered, or deleted as objectionable : subjected to censorship".

Government censorship is a subset of censorship. Private citizens of a private company are perfectly capable of suppressing, altering, or deleting material they consider objectionable, which seems to have been what happened in this case.

Here's an article by Eugene Volokh on the difference between publishers, distributors and platforms: https://reason.com/2020/05/28/47-u-s-c-%C2%A7-230-and-the-pu....

"Historically, American law has divided operators of communications systems into three categories", he says, and he describes the third category as:

"Platforms, such as telephone companies, cities on whose sidewalks people might demonstrate, or broadcasters running candidate ads that they are required to carry."

His description of the liability rules for platforms:

"Platforms weren't liable at all. For instance, even if a phone company learned that an answering machine had a libelous outgoing message (see Anderson v. N.Y. Telephone Co. (N.Y. 1974)), and did nothing to cancel the owner's phone service, it couldn't be sued for libel. Likewise, a city couldn't be liable for defamatory material on signs that someone carried on city sidewalks (even though a bar could be liable once it learned of libelous material on its walls), and a broadcaster couldn't be liable for defamatory material in a candidate ad."

If you see a difference between that and "common carrier" that is relevant to whether an entity considered a traditional platform would have to carry spam or porn, what is it?

Historically the term platform has meant just that, they have a legal requirement to allow all content. Think something like a phone network.

There are rules about what constitutes spam on a phone network - laws limiting robocalls in some situations for example - but it isn't the phone company making those rules.

"Hypertension markedly increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases and overall mortality. Lifestyle modifications, such as increased levels of physical activity, are recommended as the first line of anti-hypertensive treatment. A recent systematic review showed that isometric handgrip (IHG) training was superior to traditional endurance and strength training in lowering resting systolic blood pressure (SBP)"

-- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5807761/

> I'm not sure how new teams can be formed and new staff onboarded with zero human contact or office interaction

The company laptop shows up at your front door and you get on the phone with the hiring manager who tells you how to log in.

I started in April and I've never met any of the people I work with in person. On my team, only one of the people was ever in the actual office.

It isn't a problem. Takes a little longer to build trust with people, that's about it.

> Laborers couldn't really ask for higher wages, because that was politically impossible

Not just politically impossible, illegal:

> World War II disrupted those trends. As demand for everything — particularly labor — climbed, Congress passed the Stabilization Act of 1942, which allowed the president to freeze wages and salaries for all the nation's workers. A day after its passage, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order invoking these powers, which applied to "all forms of direct or indirect remuneration to an employee," including but not limited to salaries and wages, as well as "bonuses, additional compensation, gifts, commissions, fees."

But there was an exemption of massive proportions slipped into a fateful clause: "insurance and pension benefits" could grow "in a reasonable amount" during the freeze."

- https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-obamaca...

And, relevant to today's discussion:

> By slapping corporations with tax rates of 80 or even up to 90 percent on any profits in excess of prewar revenue, Congress all but guaranteed a frenzied search for loopholes.

Also interesting to note that the change in question wasn't a switch from workers paying for their own health insurance to it being paid for by employers. Prior to WW2 less than 10% of Americans had any form of health insurance, by the end of the war it was close to 30%.

That's an application-centric view of development, as indicated by the phrase "the application". If an application is successful, its data will likely end up being used by other new applications, and the data will survive the lifetime of the original application that generated the data. The applications themselves will be rewritten many times as technologies evolve. Think mainframe to client/server to EJB to lightweight J2EE to Spring Boot microservices.

If there is logic or metadata that is common across all those applications, there are a couple choices. You could duplicate that logic across all the applications, and rewrite that logic every time you do a rewrite of the application, or you could keep it one place.

If you keep it one place, one way to do that is to have a service in front of the database that every application that uses the data calls instead of hitting the database directly. That has some disadvantages in that it requires upfront design and planning, the service in front of the database will likely be rewritten in new technologies over time, and it has performance implications. And for the developer, instead of having to deal with logic in an application and a database, now they have to deal with logic in two applications.

Another way to do it is to have common logic for the data implemented in key constraints, check constraints, triggers, stored procedures and other similar tools in the database so that any application that uses the data doesn't need to rewrite that logic, and can't intentionally or unintentionally violate the rules of the common domain. That does have its own disadvantages, and it makes things more complicated for developers who will need to be familiar with an additional set of technologies, but it is a valid use case for stored procedures.

Right on.

Publisher, distributor, and platform are legal definitions that have been worked out through case law over a long period of time. Blocking content on a political basis as a non-internet content provider would be more than enough to get you treated as a publisher.

In pre-section 230 law, even blocking content for vulgarity was enough to get you treated as a publisher, that decision was Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.

Eugene Volokh has a good summary of this at https://reason.com/2020/05/28/47-u-s-c-%C2%A7-230-and-the-pu.... You might want to read it so you don't make completely uninformed statements on the internet. You should stop doing that.

If a poster printing company started making editorial decisions about which posters they printed, they would be at risk of being considered a publisher and as such being liable for the content of the posters they printed.

That isn't true for internet content providers due to section 230.

I use JIRA at home for side projects and every job I've had for the last decade used it at work.

Personally, I will worry about replacing it in 2023. Professionally, it's not my problem to worry about.

As for the replacement for people who want to run something like that on their own server, well, anyone down with writing some code? I am.

Your only positive statements in that whole thing were "I think a job as a quant or something at a finance firm would be interesting" and "I'd really like to consider starting my own business".

Everything else was I don't I don't I don't I don't.

You've got your answer right there. Go make it happen.

To me, both Personal Jesus and Hurt are Johnny Cash songs now.

You've got 4 years. I'll worry about it in 2023.

Portland gets winter, but you can just stay inside that weekend.

> I'm not keen on keeping suspects locked up on risk of re-offence, either; it seems a total violation of presumption of innocence

So if you were making the laws, the trooper that pulled over Timothy McVeigh would have just given him a summons and told him to show up in court?

Wikipedia has Russia at 346 people incarcerated per 100,000 and the US at 655. El Salvador is at 590.

So, highest in the world but not anywhere nearly double the second highest, and not an order of magnitude greater than Russia.

> At no point does it create a category called "publisher" who is subject to different rules from a category called "platform."

Section 230 does not need to create those categories because they already exist under the law. Historically, content providers have been treated as either publishers, distributors, or platforms, and there are different rules for those categories.

If a law is saying someone isn't going to be treated as a publisher, it is implicitly saying they are going to be treated as a distributor or a platform.

Section 230 says that internet content providers aren't going to be treated as publishers of user content, while the same law also says that internet content providers will have some of the rights of publishers - for example, by moderating content.

Under Section 230, internet content providers are treated as distributors in some cases, for example where upon request they need to remove content that violates copyright, but not liable as long as they do so. They are treated as platforms in other cases, for example defamatory content. Although in some ways they have even more rights than offline platform providers - traditionally platform providers have a legal requirement to accept all traffic.

So 230 gives internet content providers the privileges, but not the obligations, of traditional publishers, along with the privileges, but not the obligations, of traditional platform providers.

The reasons this was done are spelled out in the findings and policies section of the law. Some of the reasons no longer make sense - I don't really think we need government policies at this point to "to promote the continued development of the Internet". And some of the things that the act called out as beneficial about the internet are being harmed by the current actions of internet content providers. We are seeing them act less and less like "a forum for a true diversity of political discourse".

That's why people are talking about modifying Section 230. If you get the benefits of a traditional publisher, maybe you should get the obligations as well. If you get the benefits of a traditional platform, maybe you should get the benefits as well.

And yes that would be a huge change in the way content is provided on the internet.

> Yeah, it really does seem some times like what Section 230 abolitionists really want is better accomplished through antitrust law

That's called false dichotomy.

> But they then have to choose...

Yes, that's correct. They have to choose what content to allow. That's called being a publisher.

> Telephones are not public communication

I'm guessing that you are too young to have heard of party lines.

But yes, telephones were public communication.

Wishing the president would die of COVID would obviously be allowed under a platform scenario, what law do you think it breaks where a content provider wouldn't publish a wish that the president of the US dies of a disease?

Also, I don't think you know what the term agitprop means.

> The world you propose gives more power to large site operators, not less, because they're the only ones that could possibly afford the requisite moderation resources

Not true, someone running a small blog can read every single comment that gets submitted. Twitter can't.

> The world you propose does not have functional real-time public communication, because nobody could risk the liability of allowing the posting of content they haven't checked yet

Not true, even pre-internet the world had functional real-time public communication. We called them telephones. You didn't get cut off if your politics didn't match the phone company's. And if you act as a platform like that on the internet, you could allow the posting of content you haven't checked yet.

Platform or publisher, pick one.

> The world you propose is one in which nobody could take the risk of running a community online

Not true, there are print communities that publish users' content - people take that risk.

> "publish" is a distortion promoted by people trying to use the repeal of Section 230 as a weapon

Dictionary definitions of publish: "to make generally known", "to disseminate to the public". No, "publish" is not a distortion, it's a dictionary definition, you just don't like the consequences of that definition.

> "Without that distinction, the Internet cannot exist as a medium for any kind of user-generated content"

Not true, user generated content exists in print and it should be cheaper on the internet than in print. False claim.

> A functional Internet

An internet where 3 weeks out from an election, the major providers of information ban information that hurts their political candidate is not a functional internet, it's an Orwellian dystopia.

No. Just no.

> "leave this problem alone, it's working just fine"

You have the major internet networks 3 weeks before an election banning speech because if they allowed it it might hurt their preferred political candidate. I mean they can claim otherwise, but they don't apply the criteria they use in this instance to instances where the speech is done by their political party. It is clear what is going on here.

Maybe that is working fine for you, it isn't working fine for me.

The ask of companies under section 230 is that they be allowed to publish libel, publish slander, publish copyright violations, publish content that violates laws against discrimination, publish threats of violence, publish posts by terrorists coordinating their attacks, publish all this with no liability whatsoever.

That is a huge ask. The question is, what do we get back for allowing them that privilege? Increasingly, in my opinion, we get negative value back for that.

It's not working just fine for me, it's time to amend section 230 so that the law advances the policies it advocates or abolish it altogether and let internet content providers live by the same rules that print content providers have lived by.

If the companies actions aren't advancing the stated policies for which the law was enacted, then the law should be strengthened so that it promotes those policies.

Companies currently are acting in ways that are in direct opposition of those policies, so if you believe in those policies, you should want their actions to change.

When they want the protections of section 230, they claim to be platforms, when they want to block content on a political basis, they act as publishers.

I think they should have to decide on which they one want to be, and I think platforms should have greater protection against liability than publishers.

The "Findings" passage of section 230 itself called out the internet as "a forum for a true diversity of political discourse".

> By using a different information provider.

That doesn't work when network effects are involved. Just like there aren't going to be hundreds of cell phone networks, there aren't going to be hundreds of networks with the reach of Twitter or Facebook.

Any time Twitter or Facebook don't allow certain information to be sent, users have less control over the information they receive.

> Believe me, no one of any political stripe should want to take away ability to moderate Internet forums. It will turn all forums, regardless of political, religious or other affiliation, into spam-filled, unusable messes

The question is where the moderation happens, at the corporate level or at the user level. If a user who creates a space on a discussion board gets to moderate it, and anyone can create a space on that discussion board, that's perfectly usable and it puts the control in the user's hands.

> You can't have platforms without moderation

The cell phone network is a platform and it has no moderation.

If you want to decide what is acceptable content, you're not a platform, you're a publisher. A stated rationale for protecting internet platform providers was to provide true diversity of political discourse. It wasn't to make it easy to run a forum for Ninja 400 motorcycle fans.

You want to moderate content, fine, you're a publisher and you should be liable for the content you publish. The same way you would be if you published that content as a newspaper or magazine instead of over the internet.