Again, nobody is going to visit a website without critical mass. There is a huge cost to do this. That's why platforms should be common carriers in absence of social media being turned into a set of protocols.

> You aren't entitled to have a wide audience.

What does "entitlement" have to do with anything? You're making these arguments personal.

There's a science to virality. There's a cost to exploring state space and connecting ideas together. To matchmaking like thinkers. It's all just math.

I don't care if people choose to mute me. What I don't want is a platform muting other people on my behalf, or muting me when my messages may have an audience.

I was banned from /r/atlanta for complaining about crime on one occasion. My comment was entirely benign and apolitical, but it was against the rule of the mods to speak up about it. Now I can't post about events or ask questions. It's one of the biggest forums for my city, and I've been cut off at the knees. It's absurd. Like 1984, but we're doing it to each other.

Remember all of the censorship during Covid? Masks good -> censored, masks bad -> censored, lab leak -> censored. We lost our collective minds and started treating everyone like cattle, and that's just over one issue. This slide into darkness is going to get worse.

> If no one wants to broadcast or read what you say, too bad.

Again, your arguments are deeply personal.

One can learn how to say valuable or viral things. No one should have their finger on a trigger that can silence a voice for hundreds of viewers, let alone hundreds of millions. We're giving a few people the ability to un-person others. Technology is so central to our existence now that we need to revisit the first amendment to square up our rights and make sure they're still being respected.

> Read what I wrote again and pay closer attention, I don't care what you do, the question is if you care about the censorship on the site you are posting on now.

I don't like the censorship on HN. I don't like censorship anywhere.

We don't need to brainwash people into agreeing with us or hellban those we disagree with.

Signal to noise ratio is an engineering problem.

Do you have any remaining questions about my position? It should be pretty clear.

> I never said that, I asked why you were using a heavily censored site while being against censorship.

""If you don't like America, then leave.""

This is a perfectly salient analogy.

I will not leave because you don't like my opinion.

I will not leave because you may or may not want me to go.

I will not leave because this isn't my ideal communication platform.

There are lots of ways in which the world and technology could be better. I'll make do with what I have, and I'll strive for something better.

> You can look at voat, slashdot, zero hedge and 4chan knockoffs, and there is tons of nazi spam along with other terrible stuff that people don't want to read and sites don't want to broadcast.

Anecdotal.

Turning social media in a protocol would give everyone the lever to control their own intake. If that were built, you needn't worry about stuff you "don't want to read".

You shouldn't ever concern yourself with other people's business or determining what they should or shouldn't read. That's authoritarian.

> You can go make your own site but you aren't entitled to an audience.

I know I'm taking some liberty here, but this reads as, "leave me alone and go do [impossible thing]. You don't deserve to be heard and nobody wants to listen to you."

There's an audience for just about anything. The platforms we have today are suboptimal means of connecting interest graphs together. They have other people and objective criteria meddling in the middle.

I see your argument as potentially being one of desiring power over others. To control what one side can read or say. Have you ever wondered what would happen if the power dynamics reversed? Because that's one of my chief concerns. Free speech is so important that anyone should have access regardless of the institutions in power. Institutions that are fickle and subject to change.

Would you give me the ability to unilaterally censor or choose what you consume? Would you trust anyone other than yourself?

You shouldn't control what liberals or conservatives can see. Neither party should have control over the other. Everyone should be left alone.

The ideal stack would be pure p2p communication. Nobody sticking their nose in anyone else's business.

> You didn't actually make an argument and you didn't back anything up with evidence at all. You just said you wanted big sites to not have any moderation.

Let me clarify: websites with over 100M DAU should be public squares. We can't possibly agree on the right level of censorship to apply or which subjects are forbidden. Any influence thus exerted is a relative form of positional brainwashing and silencing. You cannot possibly get it right.

Illegal content can be removed - that's a pretty well defined line.

NSFW content can be tagged and users can (probably by default) filter it out. I'm even fine when platforms prohibit this outright, though you can easily get into debates about classification - "female presenting nipples" and other minutiae.

Political or controversial content can be annotated and filtered at the discretion of end users. This is where technology can and should be leveraged. The platform moderators should have no say.

Direct harassment can be muted. Every platform has a "mute" button and a "block user" button. A p2p platform could make these block lists shareable (another reason why p2p social media would be fantastic).