Be brave, what is the point of open discussion if you are too afraid to speak your mind? If you get banned or your post removed, so be it. Why self-censor? You are doing a disservice to yourself.
The guy that died of actually curable cancer because he believed in some alternative nonsense cure? I cannot think of a single other reason why Apple would be "hiding a bitcoin manifesto in Macs [...] fueling theories that Steve Jobs was Satoshi Nakamoto".
That's just a glimpse of reality you're witnessing for the first time. It can be quite disorienting after decades of indoctrination on US social media. I'm just so sick of all the pro-war propaganda we're getting here in the EU from the US.
I am getting nothing from your comment, so could perhaps elaborate: Which community is moribund? What is the nature of terminal illness? and why is the community so vulnerable to this, is it fragile?
The problem with modern social media, compared to traditional ones, is it offers you to consume other peoples feedback on the story. It's a bit like traditional media publishing an opinion poll with every story run. The problem is how these "polls" influence peoples opinions and the role censorship plays in this.
Imagine a politically divisive event occurs and while the original feedback was 50%-50% on opposing opinions, the moderator made it look like it was 100%-0%. This makes people feel isolated and forces them psychologically to change their opinion to the virtually predominant one. You can image LLMs only enhancing these mechanisms.
As an extreme example of this, I remember during the corona pandemic, on reddit r/worldnews there was a weekly thread that was cheering on for deaths of Russian citizens to corona. The whole thread was heavily curated only to display pure hate towards Russians. And the moderators always deleted the thread after a week and started a new one. People who posted in the thread and didn't get on with the program, had their accounts simultaneously permabanned on all major subreddits. I know, because it happened to me.
If I wrote this on Reddit, I would be called a dirty Russian, a spy, a bot, a generally evil person, a traitor and I have also been called various anti-Chinese racial slurs, some quite graphic and disgusting. There's many people out there seeking validation and acceptance, and they find it in such hate groups. I believe historians far in the future will be putting Reddit in the same category as the Hitler youth organization.
And HN is very much like Reddit, only with slightly smarter people. The moderators in here also hold very extreme views on various topics and manipulate the discourse to give false appearances of public opinion on those topics.
Anyone know a good resource for searching through old DEFCON presentations? There's a couple I'd like to link in such cases, which will of course be swiftly taken down by the Dan, but maybe some lost soul will get the hint.
