Extremely disappointed in Omar Roth, the creator of Invidious.
Taking a neutral stance against hate speech is choosing a side. What a cop out.
I dig Invidious. I think it's a great solution for people that want to interact with YouTube and not get bombarded with non-sense.
However in this day and age, you have to make a stand against hate speech. You can't just hope it goes away or it deals with itself, b/cit won't. We see what happens when we give it space.
And let's be real. The only time the free speech argument is deployed is when it is in defense of hateful and violent bigots.
This is how hate spreads. When people do nothing.
Software might be neutral, but the people making it are not, so the idea it is possible to remain in the middle is complete bullshit.
As we've seen with mstdn, Purism and even masto main, unless you come down hard and consistently on hate speech, harassment and abuse, it will spread. Period.
Bigots exploit the alleged neutrality of people to spread their hate and violence.
I believe in free speech too. What I don't believe in is endless harassment and abuse.
It's very easy to do both.
Invidious represents the main issue in FOSS right now.
We can absolutely build better tools to deal with online harassment, unchecked hatefulness and violence. We absolutely have the means to make significant progress in his arena.
Unfortunately, what we're seeing is a lack of will and ethics to do so. What we're seeing is people who want to be viewed as intelligent making very unintelligent decisions that usually benefit bigots.
People are choosing to keep the web a shitty place.
Like I constantly say, we all make decisions everyday concerning what type of community we want to contribute too.
Invidious is making the choice to give space to bigotry, hate and violence when it does not have to.
Remember hate never operates in a vacuum. It is given space by people that simply do not care.
It's not magic.
@Are0h As someone who has a lot of influence over who gets hired by my employer, I find this to be an excellent reason to dig pretty deeply into discussions any candidate has participated in related to open source projects. If I were to see something like this from any candidate, I would make sure they didn't even get a phone screen, even if their actual code contributions would have otherwise been enough to let them skip the phone screen and come directly onsite.
@freakazoid @Are0h So you wouldn't hire someone because they aren't against freedom of speech?
