I’ll pass that on. Every community needs a @PatPlusLinux because you’re scared of no one and speak your mind. Rare thing these days, good to have around.
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Firefox is free software and as such can be (and is being) forked. DDG is also far from being monopoly. As such you haven’t answered any of my questions. You also ignored most of my arguments.
I know how US’s law works on this matter. It is indeed pretty bad. It doesn’t change the fact that your argument is a slippery slope fallacy.
Excuse me, for pointing out ad Hitlerum.
My whole argument is that no idea should be absolute and judging situation by yourself is better than dismissing something just because is falls into those very broad categories.
Using examples of most extreme cases against the claim that is specifically about avoiding extremes is not answering the actual argument.
I wouldn’t mind using Qwant, but efforts to fight for truth are a point that would be in DDG’s favor when picking a search engine.
As long there is no evidence that slope in this case is indeed slippery, the argument remains a fallacy, because it’s unjustified accusation that can be made for any scenario. For example: “You don’t want search engine be able to moderate propaganda? This is creating a precedence for banning all forms of online moderation”.
Yes, it is easy to jump to the most extreme example and say “that’s where we’re headed!” I’d say the problem with slippery slopes is that you don’t necessarily know how slippery they are until you start sliding. I think most people would rather not test the slope at all just in case it happens to be slippery.
The one analogy that I like when talking about censorship or whatever is to compare it to counting to infinite. How do you count to infinity? Just one at a time. Every new “biggest” number you count can have just one more added to it. It’s such a slow, nearly imperceptible progression that you wouldn’t think you’d ever get anywhere and it’s not a big deal to just add one more. You think “ah, what’s one more in the grand scheme of things? That’s hardly anything at all!” But slowly and most definitely you approach infinite. Infinite, of course, represents whatever extreme you can think of. WWII Germany for example. Nobody thinks we’ll be there tomorrow, or in a decade, but you just add one more little restriction or censor every year or two, just one more, not a big deal, and you’ll get there sooner or later. All these little “one mores” don’t really affect me at all but sometimes I am bothered that we are closer than before even if we are still very very far away.
Like frogs in a pot, at what temperature should I jump out? Depends on the situation I suppose. When do you think you would stop using DDG?
You said it! And both sides are doing it right now.
If that is true than that would be unacceptable. That would mean blocking Russian users from accessing DLN and or even from participating in other Linux communities.
This argument doesn’t deal with core problem of fallacy. You can still use this reasoning as justification to blame anything. There’s a good reason why you’ll find “slippery slope” on every list of bad arguments. Duck (or google) “logical fallacies” and it will be there.
Very bad example, given frogs will actually jump out of a pot when it’s getting too hot. The story about frogs being boiled is actually a myth and only happened during an experiment in which frogs had parts of their brains removed.
And it’s similar with services. I agree that gradual changes make it more difficult to spot them, but “more difficult” doesn’t necessarily means “very difficult”. For example, I follow gaming industry, where the slope is indeed very slippery and every bad move is met with backlash. The reason why the pole is being moved isn’t because people are fine with those changes.
I’d love to say “when they actually do something bad”, but it’s more complex than that. I still use Steam for example, despise its censorship of games containing anti-Chinese government messages, even though I do believe this to be very bad. It’s a sum of many factors. That being said, I wouldn’t defend a bad move, even if it wasn’t bad enough for me leave the platform.
My old forum was actually forced to do that, years before, because otherwise we weren’t able to deal with Russian bots.
Discussion that both leans political and has an audience is very prone to becoming gladiatorial and that’s lead a lot people to intuitively believe it’s gladiatorial by nature.
That tends to be why many platforms ban it entirely as it just takes 1 or 2 people coming in hot (and these are hot times) to devolve a conversation into activism and just shutting people down. While not present here, that also makes it so people can silence others by merely goading them into a situation where the platform takes that step for a thread or completely.
These conversations aren’t supposed to exist and at some risk to myself I actively push DLN to allow them but this would be an example of me failing to justify that.
There are people for which this has been a pattern of behavior over time. If I have warned you several times in the past there will be no future warnings and no flexibility.
Everyone makes mistakes, everyone has a bad day, bloody noses are part of being family but on the whole the fundamental requirements of basic conversation need to be met assuming we want the type of community the creators can be proud of and want to invest in.
Do your best to…
- Understand someone’s point of view so you know what their words mean rather than responding to them out of context.
- Speak in a way the people your conversing with are the most likely to understand and will want to understand.
- Ignore people who are looking for a fight and don’t allow someone’s perceived failures to justify your own.
- Accept conveying meaning and concepts is 100x more difficult than you think it is and will make you prone to frustration.
- Accept this isn’t fair and it never will be.
I have absolute faith this is something we can do and this isn’t just about us. We are providing an example not just for other Linux cultures but for the World as a whole for how people from all walks of life who may strongly disagree can come together under one roof and hash it out in a way everyone gains even if ultimately they remain in disagreement.
If you want to change the World you can start here because that’s what we’re doing and i’ll do everything I can to make sure these conversation can still happen so we don’t lose the opportunity to do that.
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I think you’re right. This is still slippery slope explained with too many words isn’t it? I think the analogy is still useful to inspire some forward thinking you know? Not all effects are immediate.
That’s what I mean. We all have a tolerance and some are just apathetic (or had their brains removed haha). The apathetic ones might have you believe the average tolerance is much higher than it actually is because they can’t be bothered to jump out. And realistically new frogs would arrive in the pot over time. Each new generation derived from the most tolerant ancestors, and having no baseline for what “no heat” actually is they endure because they are accustomed.
Hey, I’m not trying to be combative here. I agree, in part, with lots of your points and I like a little push-back on my ideas. In truth I’ll be keeping DDG in my Searx results because I don’t search for anything that’s even affected by their decision. At least they’re principled enough to be transparent about it and so far we haven’t seen anything terrible come of it.
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Coming in late here. I think I caught the jist of the conversation here. Could someone please clarify, when I hear “DuckDuckGo is censoring content”, is it outright omitted from the search results, or demoted to page (5) or page (6) or something?
If this is the case, we currently have a filter to block adult-ish content. Why not add a filter that can ‘censor suspicious content’?
(My grandpa used to always say, “If you don’t know what you’re talking about, anything is possible.” And this could be one of ‘those’ kind of suggestions.)
Just a proactive idea.
Ok, this is not funny anymore. I think this goes too far and shows that we was right when DuckDuckGo started with censorship of news. Now youtube-dl website gets blocked and major or all known pirating sites, such as The Pirate Bay.
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It shows up in the predictive search box and is the first result in the search???
So I’m doubting the validity of the article.
Edit: same with The Pirate Bay.
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It is reported by Pirate Bay itself (which I did not want to link here) and other news (including Mental Outlaw). So I do not doubt the validity of the article itself. Maybe this change will be rolled in waves to different regions. Or they enabled it again after backlash.
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Whatever happened to . . .
now more than ever we need choices in this space, Google is too large for it’s own good… DDG is trying to set itself aside from the others without thinking it’s process through.
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Or maybe it never happened in the first place.
Or maybe the site that provides the main index (bing) delisted these sites and the world had to wait until DDG’s own robot spiders indexed them.
Anything to keep beating that dead duck, i guess.
I did the same test when I heard about this and came to the same conclusion.
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Ouch. Dark Theme please…my eyes…
I wonder if this reporting is just a copy of what someone else reported. I see it all the time now. Sometimes, nothing is added, it is just a copy and paste of someone else’s work.
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Light your room for free with the this one simple trick 
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Every time I see altavista.com, my mind associates astalavista.com - LOL
Edit: Added Below Info
You can only see the goodness from wayback now. FYI for those who don’t know, it was a security and hacker’s portal in the late 1990’s and 2000’s
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