Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

So if you are behaving obnoxiously in a private coffe shop the owners can’t ask you to leave?

Everyone is free to choose who they do business with. There are some protected categories but “people wantonly destroying airplanes for publicity and profit” is not one of them.




And should libraries and book stores ban books documenting past exploits? Where does it end.


It can end with whatever criteria you want. I think clearly a viral video with this behavior fits the definition of something that should be taken down. It’s a guy deliberately crashing a plane for views. It’s the same thing as not publishing a mass shooter’s name. I’m sure they’re written in books somewhere, but not everything is a slippery slope to PRC censorship. It’s the process of finding the blurry line.


There have been a number of best sellers about people breaking the law in real life. No one was harmed in this case or the other case. I can't imagine someone wanting to censor this, just seems quite a bit extreme.


Businesses that hold a massive and unfair effective monopoly on communication and information are different from unremarkable coffee shops. And, furthermore, this is not an action that the business is going to take out of their own freewill, it's an action that you want to force on them by some mechanism of public rage, so it's not actually YouTube choosing who they do business with, it's YOU choosing for YouTube who they do business with, but masking it as YouTube's own decisions.

I don't get the obsession with removing dumb online stunts. I can understand calls for censoring violent crimes and even then you don't get to make this decision for other people, censoring unpleasant things doesn't make them go away.

But with dumb online posts the case just completely falls apart. "But he's going to benefit from this" ok so fucking what ? there's a whole class of people who do dumb, dangerous and harmful things for public approval and profit from it, they are called polliticans and celebrities. They routinely do unimaginabley stupid and outrageous things and profit from the publicity that comes with it. How is this any different, except that "online influencer" is a relatively new class of people unlike the other ones?

>There are some protected categories

Appealing to protected groups is the weakest argument you could ever make for "Businesses can censor whoever they like". Protected groups are arbitary and reflects lobbying and political considerations more than any moral truth. Why are some religious groups protected for instance? it's just a bunch of beliefs, they could be as wrong or as dumb as any other set of beliefs right ? they are not immutable characteristics of the people believing them. (not anymore than any other kind of beliefs)

My own personal opinion is that it's stupid to classify people as "Protected" or not, but rather any business that have reasonably-easy-to-find alternatives can do whatever the hell they like, refuse to serve customers based on skin color, gender, favorite programming language, you name it. As long as it's "easy" to find alternatives (by some objective standard the law defines, like "there's is a similar service within a 1-KM radius"), they can do whatever they like.

But for all other businesses who aren't so easy to replace, common sense morality says they should be EXTREMELY curtailed from censoring or denying *anyone* without a very good reason.

Alas, we don't live in my utopia and the laws of this time and place are extremely dumb and discriminating.


> Businesses that hold a massive and unfair effective monopoly on communication and information are different from unremarkable coffee shops.

Youtube does not hold monopoly on communication or information.

> it's an action that you want to force on them by some mechanism of public rage

Lol. :) Public rage you say? Where is the rage? :)

> I don't get the obsession with removing dumb online stunts.

Let me help you with that: This stunt was done in order to get attention. You fuel it with attention and there will be more stunts. Either from this dude or others. You remove the attention and it dies out on its own.

I believe, and many others seems to agree this stunt was potentially dangerous and we should have less of these in the future. Removing the video is the way to achieve that, keeping the video up is youtube profiting from a potentially dangerous stunt.

> Appealing to protected groups is the weakest argument you could ever make for "Businesses can censor whoever they like".

Because it is not an argument for that.


>Youtube does not hold monopoly on communication or information.

What, pray tell, is that other service that has several hundred million of viewers and thousands of hours of video being uploaded every hour?

As soon as you tell me it's name, I'm going to concede that YouTube is not a monopoly.

>Where is the rage?

Are you implying you just call for censorship as a hobby without even feeling angry? that's even worse.

>You remove the attention and it dies out on its own

This is demonstrably false, the guy who made the video didn't have a trend to draw inspiration from, he thought up of a dumb idea completely on his own. Even IF (a very big if) your model of how social imitation works is reasonably accurate and taking down the video really prevents any further stunts of those type, other influencers will simply think up of new dumb stunts like this.

Let me stress, again, that the world is not a kindergarten and you are not it's caretaker. If people want to crash aircrafts to get internet points, that's completely an issue between them and the relevant authorities, those bureaucrats suck up an awful lot of tax money, let them work for it for once.

You don't get to decide for the hundreds of millions who watch YouTube what's acceptable and what's not. I and countless other people fund this shitty public record with the attention we give to countless 20-second ads, and I want every recorded moment to stay recorded, at least until they go out of business. You don't have the right to force me to respect what offends or worries you, don't worry about public safety, let everyone worry about their own.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: