"You need censorship on the modern internet." Featuring Linus Sebastian

[Arnox]

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7cpY49rzTY)

Ok... I'm gonna go through this. Quotes will be time-stamped.

I've seen some questions from people like, "Ok, is Linus just like silencing dissenting opinions?" No, it's just like actual wastes of characters on YouTube's servers.

"We're not silencing dissenting opinions, we're just silencing dissenting opinions that we don't like!"

Look, I never said that those dissenting opinions are always going to be shining examples of humanity's intelligence. In fact, some of them may be downright misleading, but the second you start judging a post based on subjective values instead of objective ones, you immediately step onto very shaky ground. Further, when you ban anyone, you are shutting down any chance of them being shown what's wrong with their post.

"Well, not my problem," you might say. Ok, but if you're actually taking the time to go through hundreds of YouTube comments to find people to shadowban, then you are, in fact, making it your problem after all. You're assuming the position of one who decides which communication can or cannot be replied to or even read. And since you are, you now have a huge responsibility of being a fair arbiter, and a fair arbiter is one who tries to fix a problem if they can instead of automatically launching a cruise missile at it.

The spirit of free speech isn't just about those who have the right things to say. It's also about giving other people a chance to have the wrong things to say as well, assuming there is ALSO a dialogue in progress that allows the party with the wrong idea to grow and learn. By banning those people instead, you are actively choosing to completely deny them that opportunity.

And while we're at it, let's talk about the ethics of shadowbanning. For those not in the know, shadowbanning is a technique employed that, in theory, should deter a user from ban-evading by making all their future posts invisible to everyone else but site staff for a set amount of time or indefinitely and not letting the user know that this is happening. Now, having thought about this some, I think this technique could be warranted for those who have a proven track record of ban-evasion, but for anything else, it definitely seems like a coward's move, automatically assuming that the user WILL ban-evade and making them suffer even more instead of just vanilla banning them and moving on.

Bit by bit, I'm cleaning up our comment section and I'm actually noticing a difference... It is a shockingly small number of users contributing to the vast majority of the stupidity in the comment section.

Actually, let's address the commonality of this happening as well. When he first brought this up I don't know how many moons ago, he was talking about comments that, for the life of me, I've never once read nor was able to find simply because they're just... Buried. Simple as that. So this supposed AWFUL problem of this utter horde of stupid misleading trolly comments coming in is, in actuality, a storm in a teacup, wildly blown out of proportion. And now guess what? You didn't actually get rid of the problem, Linus. You just shoved it over somewhere else to some place that you WON'T have any control over, and there, the commenters may just fester if they don't get anyone to talk to them or anyone that disagrees with them anyway. Banning doesn't actually solve the root of a problem. It is simply enforced exile. Nothing more. And it should only be an option you take when all other options are no longer viable.

Like, a decade ago or something, I used to be against that type of stuff, but I think, in the modern web, you just have to. I think it just is what it is. And I think, honestly, an argument to the other side is just an argument asking for... A bad experience.

"We HAVE to censor. We just have to!"

No, you don't. See my argument against that here starting at 28:51 and also 29:44. So no, it isn't just "what it is."

"You're fighting for a worse experience."

According to who? Who says a (generally (that "generally" is important)) free-for-all environment is automatically worse? You? And again, see the arguments above. I know that I, personally, love such an environment when posting stuff. You need to understand that not everyone is the same as you.

Putting all that aside now, if Linus had just simply said, "You know what, I know this is not ethically correct at all, but I just don't care at the end and I'm tired of reading this stuff and we're not a free speech forum." Fine. I'd disagree on his stance with this still of course, but I can at least understand that at the end of the day, it's his restaurant and it's his right to run it however he wants to. But let's not come up with nonsense about how "right" and "amazing" it is to do this. Maybe it's amazing for you and maybe even LMG as a whole, Linus, but this shadowbanning is, by reason of its implementation and the explanation given, detrimental to some individuals in your community.

 

[Signa]

I lost a lot of respect for Linus over the years. I probably would have lost it faster if I followed him closer, but he's a business first and not someone that has his audience's interests fully in mind.

 

[Arnox]

I lost a lot of respect for Linus over the years. I probably would have lost it faster if I followed him closer, but he's a business first and not someone that has his audience's interests fully in mind.

I think he does genuinely try to do the right thing, and he also does have a fuckton of responsibility and little time in which to handle it. Something that many people overlook.

Regardless though, there are still some things that I deeply disagree with in terms of how he handled them. This is one of those things. His shadowbanning here is a contrived solution to a problem that almost doesn't actually exist. Yes, there's some idiocy and trolling in the comments. Welcome to the fucking internet. You don't need to sort out every single little problem you find. You don't need to put out every single little fire.

 

[Houseman]

Welcome to the fucking internet. You don't need to sort out every single little problem you find. You don't need to put out every single little fire.

Managing (censoring) your community in this way probably becomes more important when you rely on money generated from those people, directly or indirectly.

If you allow your community to develop a bad reputation, that may effect advertisers, your PR, and the community members themselves. All it takes is one disgruntled user to go complain about some -ism on twitter or reddit, and then, next thing you know, there's a campaign to cancel you and advertisers pulling out.

Such a thing may not hurt you, because you don't have any business arrangements on the line. Your incentives are different.

In a broader sense, I suppose that's why there's so much censorship on the internet today: money.

I don't know anything about LTT, I didn't watch the video, I'm just speaking in broad theoretical terms.

 

[Arnox]

If you allow your community to develop a bad reputation, that may effect advertisers, your PR, and the community members themselves. All it takes is one disgruntled users to go complain about some -ism on twitter or reddit, and then, next thing you know, there's a campaign to cancel you and advertisers pulling out.

Keep in mind though, LMG has been going for years and years now without incident besides a few quality control fuck-ups they had. There's been plenty of time for them to get blasted for the comments in their comment section. It never happened though because even for the Twitter outrage mob, digging through literally thousands of YouTube comments just to find some assholes and trolls is a bit much.

 

[Signa]

I think he does genuinely try to do the right thing, and he also does have a fuckton of responsibility and little time in which to handle it. Something that many people overlook.

Regardless though, there are still some things that I deeply disagree with in terms of how he handled them. This is one of those things. His shadowbanning here is a contrived solution to a problem that almost doesn't actually exist. Yes, there's some idiocy and trolling in the comments. Welcome to the fucking internet. You don't need to sort out every single little problem you find. You don't need to put out every single little fire.

Yeah, I wouldn't say I've ever felt him being malicious, but those quality control fuckups are kinda a big deal, because he's branded himself as an expert source of tech information, so people are going to make decisions based off of what he says. The greater the negligence on his part, the more he's assisted big corporations in scamming users. It's not something that should be hand waved easily.

I also hate that guy he puts on the Tech Linked channel because he looks like a douche, and then they have that off-camera guy yelling quips as a gimmick and it gets really stupid. I stopped watching all those videos.

 

[Houseman]

Keep in mind though, LMG has been going for years and years now without incident besides a few quality control fuck-ups they had. There's been plenty of time for them to get blasted for the comments in their comment section. It never happened though because even for the Twitter outrage mob, digging through literally thousands of YouTube comments just to find some assholes and trolls is a bit much.

If we're just talking about youtube comments, yeah, that's stupid, and nobody should be caring about those in the first place.