You tear yourself apart!

Not with that attitude

You can’t seriously be against all censorship in books, right? Where are your actual boundaries? I don’t think you’d be ok with something obviously evil like a book of cp… Right?

Edgecases are why it’s hard to be consistent.

I can’t help but project an old version of myself on you. I can’t imagine defending 4chan unless I was actively using it a lot… It did used to be basically my only internet community, so I understand being particularly fond of the cesspool.

However, I don’t actually understand your reactions here. Why are you defending it when it seems like 4chan itself wouldn’t even go this far except maaaybe as a limp wristed attempt at an excuse when something truly horrific happens because of them? I genuinely don’t think I understand

Like, to currently vilify it is easy, just take a screenshot of pol. I remember looking pre2016 and seeing HYPERPARTISANSHIP all caps everywhere. It’s an anonymous forum with people discussing plans to make life shittier for various groups, essentially at all times… And before pol it was b (my era was back when pol was a boring place, I don’t know the current state of any board, but I know some of the history and what motivates some normies of my niche who fuck with it)

I just don’t understand the downplaying of it, normal people participate in shit ways on 4chan specifically because of the anonymity. The anonymity is why it’s such a cesspool in the first place. It’s toxic keyboard warrior syndrome to the extreme.

This ignores that 4chan is widely known as the cesspool of the internet and attracts those types. It’s like going on Hexbear and being surprised at the communists. People gather where their banners are. Shit attracts shit. This reduction is apt.

Sure it kind of does some good ish things sometimes, but more often than not, it’s just an internet mob internet mobbing. That’s essentially all it is: chaos waves constantly crashing back in on itself. Any good that comes from it is incidental at best.

Also, defending 4chan on the wider Internet is a little odd, 4chan itself revels in its shit reputation…

I’m interested in where the limits to expectations lie here. I’m not trying to be a jerk when I say this next part but I do worry I may come off that way but I’m trying to figure out the boundaries of what a “reasonable” expectation is so I can make tasks like this easier for my own team (completely unrelated to this project but it’s essentially the same problem).

Is it not reasonable to expect people to type into a search engine something like “GitHub help” and then poke around in the links that come up?

… Well I’ll be damned, I tried my own method before commenting, and the first link that comes up is a red herring, how obnoxious. I was hoping it’d be a link to the docs, not GitHub support. I guess I just answered my own question: no that is not reasonable.

As a technical user, I am still at a loss for how to help a non-technical user in an algorithmic way that will work for most non-technical users x.x guess I’ll be thinking about this problem some more lol

(I guess I’m rambling but I’m gonna post this anyways in case anyone wants to chatter about it with me)

Ngl, pretty rude to just go poking around in stranger’s holes like that without warning lmao (/s/jk/etc)

Christ Almighty this is the dystopian software future that my college computer science ethics professor was working so hard to delay.

Hmm can someone tell me if I’m just in a “republicans are hysteric about it so it must not be that bad” mindset?

It’s obviously spyware to some degree, but this really seems more like a case of red-scare. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, though. Makes me think I might just be reacting to their reaction.

I guess, what exactly are they afraid that China is going to do with this data? It’s a missing puzzle piece that I’ve heard nothing coherent on besides “China gonna spy on muh datas”. Like, sure, maybe if you’re a government official, and I don’t think bans of tiktok on government devices are stupid, but I think the nationwide ban idea is pretty dumb and baseless. So I guess my actual question is, what are they afraid of happening, exactly?