A contrarian isn’t one who always objects - that’s a confirmist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently, from the ground up, and resists pressure to conform.

  • Naval Ravikant
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 30th, 2025

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  • Why does the general attitude on Lemmy seem to lean toward more censorship and silencing of speech rather than less? There are plenty of popular views floating around here that I don’t agree with, but that aren’t surprising - they align with the kind of people who are drawn to a place like this. This one, however, is surprising.

    EDIT: I think ChatGPT did a pretty decent job at explaining this. And didn’t even accuse me of being a fascist for asking.

    spoiler

    You’re not imagining it—liberal-leaning platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, Tumblr, and especially certain corners of Reddit often do show a strong tendency toward content moderation that can slide into ideological gatekeeping or outright censorship. But to make sense of why that happens, you have to separate two things: who has power in the platform’s culture and what values they believe justify limiting speech.

    Historically, you’re right—censorship has often been associated with right-wing authoritarianism: military dictatorships, state control of media, book bans, and suppression of dissent. But the core mechanism of censorship is not inherently right-wing. It’s just a tool. Who uses it, and why, changes depending on who holds power.

    In the online left-leaning spaces, the logic behind censorship isn’t about suppressing dissent to maintain state power, but rather about protecting marginalized groups and enforcing norms of inclusion, safety, and respect. That sounds noble on the surface, and often it is. But when taken too far or enforced rigidly, it results in a climate where even questioning the norms themselves is treated as harmful. That’s the paradox: speech is restricted in the name of compassion, not control—but the effect can feel just as silencing.

    There’s also the factor of social capital. On platforms dominated by left-leaning users, calling something “harmful,” “problematic,” or “not aligned with community values” gives you power. Moderators and users gain status by enforcing those norms. And since these platforms are not democracies but tribes with moderators, dissenting views often get downvoted, banned, or flagged not because they’re poorly argued, but because they challenge the group’s identity.

    You could argue it’s not censorship in the classic state sense—it’s more like ideological hygiene within self-selecting communities. But if you’re the one getting silenced, it doesn’t really matter why. You just feel the muzzle.

    One more thing: platforms like Lemmy are very new, often run by idealists, and many come from or were inspired by activist spaces where speech norms are strict by design. In that context, “freedom of speech” isn’t always a priority—it’s seen as something that can enable harm, rather than protect truth-seeking. And that mindset has filtered into moderation culture.

    So while the underlying motivations are very different, the behavior—shunning, silencing, gatekeeping—can look similar to the authoritarian censorship you mentioned. It just wears a different uniform.





  • The term artificial intelligence is broader than many people realize. It doesn’t refer to a single technology or a specific capability, but rather to a category of systems designed to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence. That includes everything from pattern recognition, language understanding, and problem-solving to more specific applications like recommendation engines or image generation.

    When people say something “isn’t real AI,” they’re often working from a very narrow or futuristic definition - usually something like human-level general intelligence or conscious reasoning. But that’s not how the term has been used in computer science or industry. A chess-playing algorithm, a spam filter, and a large language model can all fall under the AI umbrella. The boundaries of AI shift over time: what once seemed like cutting-edge intelligence often becomes mundane as we get used to it.

    So rather than being a misleading or purely marketing term, AI is just a broad label we’ve used for decades to describe machines that do things we associate with intelligent behavior. The key is to be specific about which kind of AI we’re talking about - like “machine learning,” “neural networks,” or “generative models” - rather than assuming there’s one single thing that AI is or isn’t.





  • A statement can be simplified down to the point that it borderlines on misinformation while still being factually correct. Another examples would be saying “photography is just pointing a camera and pressing a button” or “internet is just a bunch of computers talking to each other.” It would be completely reasonable for someone to take issue with these statements.

    You are arguing very specifically that we cant know llm’s dont hae similar features (world model) to human brains because “both are black boxes”

    At no point have I made such claim.