MaxwellEdison said:
Verlander said:
I was thinking about this the other night actually.
Youtube is one of the biggest online communities, and seems to have little to no official moderation. What you get is a load of rubbish commentary, racism, arguing, bullshit claims, and general online disinhibition effect.
You then look at smaller communities like this one, with strict moderation, and you see (mostly) civilised conversation, discussions about different views, and general learning, guided by a primary interest.
Obviously these are very brief summarys, but I think there's an interesting study to be made here-maybe this is reminiscent of the real world? Maybe an overly strict government, that at least appears to be working in the direction of the people works best.. hmm?
My original reply was marked as trolling, so let me go in to detail about why I claimed this was stupid.
In real life, arguing is not bad. That rubbish commentary, racism, and those bullshit claims? Those are called beliefs. You use arguing to fight those beliefs. You do not create a government akin to forum moderating, because that would utilize a police force that jailed people for being impolite.
The main difference between forums and real life, is that in the real world, people do more than just type, they live in a multi dimensional existence. This is a physical world, and being physically impolite, in the way that youtube comments are verbally impolite, is the equivalent of assault.
You missed my point about online disinhibition effect. What people say, do and believe are all different things. A lot of youtube comments are trolling. In a lawless society, where people can get away with any behaviour, I'm thinking that not only will people take advantage of each other, but they will also lead each other on, and provoke people for shits and giggles. An ultimately free society could be one where people had no immediate consequence to their actions, and would act as such. Their actions could ultimately come back and make the society worse off, although the average person doesn't consider that far ahead.
In the UK, the finest example of this is newspapers. Bar a few laws regarding defamation or slander, papers can write what they want and pass it off as "news". Good ol' freedom of press. Stories can be (and sometimes are) pure fallacy, and are done so to make money. Big stories can be scaled down to reduce their apparent significance (and vice versa) and their pages are chock a block full of opinions and viewpoints, which most certainly isn't the same thing as factual information.
Imagine a world with complete freedom where people in the real world did this all the time. This is in fact what we are seeing in Libya, Egypt, and the rest. The people are talking to each other, raising opinions uncensored, and egging each other on to the point of civil disobedience. Now, those guys are "oppressed masses" and suchlike, and so it's taking a more positive step for them (currently at least, although what I said above about there being consequences in the future is almost a certainty in these situations), but the same thing is happening in the western world as well. Wikileaks is an example of that. Suddenly governments cannot hide things as well any more, and while the world is more interested in scandal, there is other, more important and dangerous stuff being released.
My point is If people have ultimate freedom, how would they choose to use it? At some point we must have had freedom, limited only by the natural hunter/homemaker hierarchy. Then society evolved into what it is now. We are continuously fighting for more freedoms, but why, and to what end? If you compare forums to real life, the results are pretty shocking.
As for a society that heavily restricted freedoms? All societies restrict a certain amount of freedoms. It's just working out the right formula, the right freedoms to restrict. China restricts loads, and seems to be doing pretty well for itself. The UK is a lot more lax, and seems to be pretty shambolic to me (although that could just be the "free communication" working). The USA restricts loads of rights, but claims that it doesn't, even going so far as to write on a piece of paper that they don't, and this seems to leave the population and even the legal system pretty confused and contradictory as to what they do. It seems to work, so maybe just confusing the population is the right way to go.
