Do people really view so much content of questionable provenance? I read a lot and look at a lot of art, but what I read and look at is usually shown to me by people I know, created by authors and artists with names and reputations. As a result I basically never see LLM-written text and only occasionally AI art, and when I see AI art at least it was carefully guided by a real person with an artistic vision still (the deep end of AI image generation involves complex tooling and a lot of work!) and is easily identified as such.
All this "slop apocalypse" the-end-is-neigh stuff strikes me as incredibly overblown, affecting mostly only "open web" mass social media platforms which were already 90% industrially produced slop for instrumental purposes anyways.
Watching Americans freak out about post-8AM sunrises is surreal to me. The sun doesn't rise until 8:45 during the darkest times of the year here in the Netherlands and its really not much of an issue.
Whether standard time or summer time is the better choice here is something I hold no opinion on, but the sheer hysteria some people here express is very overblown.
This post appears to me like two paragraphs of correct and important information, cut in two by a seemingly unrelated quote that summarizes to nothing more than "rich people are evil". People with greater wealth having access to certain services and procedures that normal people don't is unrelated to all rich people supposedly looking down on everyone else.
Virtually anything that is enjoyable is potentially addictive. Trying to police the "addictive substances industry" will very quickly turn you into the fun police.
Don't you see how extremely patronizing it is to say, essentially, "you can't make your own decisions, your brain isn't fully developed"? I get that this is occasionally necessary to say to actual kids, but it does not seem appropriate to say to anyone we deem capable enough to vote and drive a car.
This is a good point that I do not have a solution to. I do see that "I think the internet should be a neutral platform", "I think that the internet should be run by private companies" and "I think that private companies should be free to decide who to do business with" is also a set of incompatible beliefs (that I personally hold). Thankfully, I do not need to have all the answers to point out the issue :)
Good and bad is not a binary, it's a spectrum. If you put the cutoff for what is allowed very close to the limit of hwat you think is "good" (i.e. you try to ban everything you would consider "bad"), there will inevitably be people with different viewpoints who can bring up a convincing argument that your cutoff also bans some good tihngs. We need a "buffer" of things generally considered "bad" but not too bad, so that we can ensure that good things really are allowed; allowing good things is more important than banning bad things. That is a key principle of having a free society.
Of course, things wihch are obviously really very bad should be banned. Good news: they already are! Hate speech is banned in virtually every country I can think of. I'm explicitly not arguing against legal action against hate speech here; I'm arguing against private ocmpanies banning things which are not illegal.
Leaving all that aside, even if you think all bad things should be banned, I do not think that Cloudflare of all things should be the arbiter of right and wrong.
This once again goes to show that you can do nothing illegal and still be virtually locked out of the internet. The viewpoint that "it's okay to kick 8chan off the internet" is not consistent with the viewpoint that "the internet should be neutral infrastructure". Take from that what you will.
People are doing the "yada yada not entitled to a platform" thing, but the distinction between free speech and having a platform is meaningless in reality. It's like saying "you can say anything you want, but we won't let you use the atmosphere to propagate the sound waves".
We now live in a society where it is acceptable for private companies to essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech on the internet. The canary in the coalmine was The Daily Stormer; all the content there would be considered very objectionable and completely without merit by any remotely sensible person, so few people complained about it being shut down. Then came Gab and such. Now it's 8chan, which last time I checked still had more posts about video games and anime than about politics.
Make no mistake, sites you use will be next. /r/the_donald is already quarantined. Youtube and Twitter have gotten much more aggressive with their moderation too.
We need to allow people on the edges of the spectrum to say what they want even if it is without merit. Extreme speech is what prevents normal speech from being censored.
More than anything we can not allow random internet companies to be de-facto lawmakers and speech police by controlling who is allowed to say things on the internet.