Don't forget, there are hundreds of thousands of people employed by China to manipulate public opinion about China online.
Looking at the comment history of the person you responded to, they post pro-China stuff a lot. This is probably not a conversation being had in good faith by two disinterested parties. You're responding to a member of the 50 cent army.
They're everywhere online now. Some subtle, some not so subtle. But whenever I see a pro-China poster who doesn't really give any evidence to back up what they're saying, and they just spew pro-China apologist rhetoric, I become very suspicious.
I haven't seen much mention of the fact that Chess.com looks good, and Lichess looks bad. The graphics are prettier on Chess.com, and the sounds are better. Fortunately, this should be a very easy problem for Lichess to fix. Lichess just needs a bit more game juice, and it will feel as good as Chess.com.
> Rattle off what I need, semantically, and then by default it will be styled and presented in a sensible way. Then later, if our company stylist want our apps to look a particular kind of fancy, he can configure some styling that will apply to all.
You should check out Cascading Style Sheets. They let you write your document semantically in HTML, and then it is styled by a separate document created by the company stylist.
The most frustrating part of all this is that they could afford to hire people to manually do all of this work, they just choose not to, because it saves them money.
If we pressured companies like Google to hire people to do customer support and to review flagged videos manually, it would create more jobs and make using the internet a better experience. But for now, they can just choose not to, and save a buck.
The ratio of neuron count to body size is the important measurement. An orca might have twice the neurons, but those extra neurons go toward motor control, not experiencing suffering and contemplating mortality.
Likely, the site was set up before all browsers supported automatic hyphenation (fairly recently), and the soft hyphens were added to assist with hyphenation.
Epictetus said something similar almost 2000 years ago: "If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don't wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other."
I've tried using this form several times. They send me an email afterward telling me they won't delete my account. (This is despite me living in a jurisdiction where deleting my account is legally non-optional.)
> 'But those are different' is usually the argument here. But why though?
Because we already agree they're different, so they form a Schelling point. We don't have to argue about them, and so there's no slippery slope.
However, I'd say even these examples are not as clear as they seem:
Death threats: I can see the need to punish credible death threats (and any credible threats of violence), but that does not actually imply a need to censor the death threats. Allow them to exist on the platform, but punish the threatener.
Defamation: This seems like a pointless holdover from honor culture. If we didn't have laws against it, people would simply demand evidence more often when hearing someone defame someone else. I don't see why the government needs to certify that my statement about someone else is true. Let my reputation do that.
Pedophilia: Have any children been saved by child pornography laws? It's possible banning and deleting it only encourages them to make more. And again, you can punish the creator of the pornography without also having to censor the content. The two are separate.
Sharing bomb making materials: This is the only example you gave where the actual information itself is dangerous. I support this being banned for sure. (You could say defamation is dangerous, but I'd say it's only harmful when the government is certifying our speech. Take away defamation laws, and defamation itself becomes less harmful, because we won't believe what others say at face value.)
> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm
Honestly, I think it's just the fact that it's a website that allows you to constantly be exposed to different things that are interesting and stimulating. You can remove upvotes, scrolling, all you want, but you'll still have the IV drip of novel content. Constant exposure to novelty is harmful, I think. We weren't designed to have our minds blown every 5 minutes.
Spend a few hours a day having your brain washed with memes and fascinating articles (or at least the titles), and your brain will re-calibrate to this as the new normal, and anything less stimulating (reading books etc.) will feel boring. Constant novelty makes the world seem unstable and makes me feel flighty and anxious compared to more mundane activities, so the mental health connection is no surprise.
Hacker News is less stimulating than other social media because it's text-based, it's about more serious topics, it's well moderated, and it doesn't abuse addictive techniques like infinite scrolling. However, I bet many people here will attest that they sometimes close HN only to open it right back up again. Closing a website only to open it immediately because you are bored is a sign that you subconsciously believe the website is one of the only interesting things you can do. Either your brain is right, and everything besides HN, reddit, Twitter, etc. is actually boring, or these things are just so artificially stimulating that using them causes everything else to feel boring in comparison. I'll let you decide which you think sounds more accurate.
Looking at the comment history of the person you responded to, they post pro-China stuff a lot. This is probably not a conversation being had in good faith by two disinterested parties. You're responding to a member of the 50 cent army.
They're everywhere online now. Some subtle, some not so subtle. But whenever I see a pro-China poster who doesn't really give any evidence to back up what they're saying, and they just spew pro-China apologist rhetoric, I become very suspicious.