WARNING: Language. 

Online comments suck.

The reason I'm writing about this is a little ways down the rabbit
hole. I was thinking of Winamp and saw a video[0] about its history.
No big deal. One of the sections brings up an old 2004 article[1]
about Winamp with a screenshot of a weird rant[2]. I have to read
this. It looks like the classic conspiracy theory stuff that I want to
believe ;). So I go to the site. It's a comment. 62 comments. Okay.
Cool. I click the link to show the comments. Nothing. Damn, let me go
to Chrome because my privacy setup on Vivaldi doesn't work so well
with embedded JS. To my surprise, a big nope on Chrome. But Chrome
works with everything? Fine. Last gasp. Wayback Machine time. And...
Disqus fails to load.

There it is. The point of failure is Disqus. It's not loading
properly. That blows. After a bit of tweaking, it still isn't loading.
Fuck. So now I have to search by keyphrase. DuckDuckGo has me covered
and leads me to a Reddit[2] thread. Cool. I finally get the full text
of that ramble. It's interesting.

I want to believe it, but at the back of my mind I'm sure that at
least some are simply the musings of a madman. Whatever. It's still
cool to get a biased history lesson about software.

But back to the topic: online comments. Platforms like Disqus, Google,
Facebook, etc. all have embedded, unattached comments. Sites that have
the article (in this case, Betanews) have less control over what shows
up and who can post, etc. On the flip side, they don't have to worry
about the moderating as Disqus or whoever can do it. It sucks. Now, if
not for the brave copy/pasting of a Reddit user, this rant may have
been lost to the ether. THAT sucks. JS shouldn't be used for freaking
comments... Maybe form validation, but that's it. FFS, why? Disqus
ruined all those comments by breaking. Maybe Betanews didn't want to
pay for it anymore? Is it a paid service? I don't know, but in the
end, tiny little pieces of history are lost, truly lost, unless
someone has the screenshots, and even then, finding the comments could
be impossible. I mean there probably aren't many gems in those 62
comments, but just one lost is bad.

***

Youtube's AI has been involved in a massive censorship campaign. I
spend too much time on that damn site. Anything controversial or
"wrong-minded" is deleted within seconds of posting. And it's
horrible. It leads to echo chambers and fake civility and fucking
horseshit grammar and spelling to try to dodge the auto-delete. There
is no room for competing ideas. No, I don't think Trump is an alien
messiah who eats babies, but I'd like to know I have access to the
(probably entertaining) video about it. I know it's BS. So is the BLM
movement that lead to riots killing more people with certain skin
pigmentations than staying peaceful would have been. Diversity =
light-skinned "black" female. Every. Fucking. Time.

To me, freedom of expression is an inalienable right. Youtube is a
virtual monopoly on streaming "amateur" videos, where billions of
people talk and express themselves every nanosecond. It's not fair to
censor commentary on there, IMO, unless it's something outrageous like
credible violent threats, doxxing, or causing a panic. If people can't
handle you saying "KYS," they should really kill themselves.
Seriously. Youtube's looking more and more like North Korea and China
than an American website. If someone insults me, I should have the
freedom to insult them right back, and vice-versa. Just because I can
type out more devastating insults than "fuk u idoit" doesn't mean I
should be censored.

They even fucking delete "U mad, bro?" Why? What's so fucking
intolerable about that? And "retard." Why can't I say "retard?" It's a
perfectly acceptable word that people decided wasn't sensitive enough.
Fucking Christ. Not to mention I've used "retard" to mean holding
someone back, which is what it actually means. But no, that's too
offensive to some retards who don't vaccinate their kids. It's really
bad, and it seems to be only some "troublesome" people. Like if I
copy/pasted some other person who wasn't habitually antagonistic, then
my copy would get deleted within 20 seconds and the original would
stay up there.

The worst part? The fucking worst part? They allow spam bots to get
through. Of course the fucking idiot spam bots are just putting out a
couple random timestamps and saying "Hello ;) emoji emoji", but still.
Fuck. Your automod AI doesn't fucking work well and completely cuts
off unpopular opinions. How do you make an awful comment system worse?
Big G will find a way. Fuckers.

I hate Trump. That doesn't mean I think Trump supporters shouldn't be
allowed to talk. I mean they shouldn't, but they absolutely have the
right to, as do I. Censorship is just creating more and more anger and
divisiveness. People who share "wrong" opinions will find their own
outlets to have their own echo chamber of what's right and what's not.
Ideas will be reinforced without dissenting voices. And the incidental
brainwashing will commence.

It's just awful. It really, really is. I can actually appreciate some
Trump supporters. They can be really nice, even if they're politically
retarded. But nothing can be learned if we don't listen to the other
person. And we can't listen if they can't speak.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Bgiv4lL5I
1. https://betanews.com/2004/11/10/death-knell-sounds-for-nullsoft-winamp/
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/1tozow/one_of_founder_of_winamp_9_years_ago_wrote_about/