Hacker Remix

What Is the "MFFAM" Policy?

104 points by Tomte 1 week ago | 68 comments

lanternfish 1 week ago

This relies on an EA adjacent market fallacy where we can resolve all moral action down to funding actors of various moral alignments - there's no reason to believe that the end utility (or whatever metric) of the action is linear w.r.t amount of cash moved.

Garage band EvilWebsite.com is going to appreciate that 5$ way more than the SPLC or whatever.

This isn't to say that the policy is strictly bad, I just worry that it reinforces pretty negative patterns. Carbon offsets barely work, and that's an actual market - bigotry offsets are a dark line to walk.

(edit - misread the policy; it's not about matching cash flows through the service to offending websites, it's donating profits from offending costumers. That seems more consistent to me.)

mquander 1 week ago

Although I agree with you that there's no reason to expect an equal dollar amount to produce a balanced outcome, I disagree completely with the conclusion. The paying party is a random website saying an offensive opinion, and the receiving party is a professional activist organization designed to turn dollars into utility. Why would you figure that the former is exerting more influence per dollar?

lanternfish 1 week ago

Maybe its unfair pessimism, but I definitely believe that Kiwifarms (ex) is way more efficient at turning money into targeted hate than - say - the Trevor Project is at countering it.

I guess my sense is that if you actually want to counter this kind of harm, you have to do so on a fundamentally structural level, and the host in question is the structural enabler.

immibis 1 week ago

And some of their listed organizations also turn money into targeted hate. So the offensive website gets double impact.

speerer 1 week ago

I think a major part of this policy is that the hosting site does not want to (and does not want to be seen to) _profit_ from what they consider to be repugnant customers. It's not a bigotry offset policy: It's a self-modulation to preserve the integrity of their principles all the way to the end.

lanternfish 1 week ago

Oh shit I totally misread the policy - I interpreted "payments to such accounts" to mean donations etc. made through channels that the host supported. As written, it's not really an offset, and really just a way to wash hands, which honestly I probably support more.

speerer 1 week ago

That's funny, I made the same mistake on my first reading. I had to slow down and go back over it!

dejj 1 week ago

Thank you. I used to fancy MFFAM for it’s seeming cleverness. But tobacco taxing basically does the same. And you could literally pave a road with its residue of good intentions. We’d all be hosting CSAM and pour the revenue into government programmes, but we don’t, because we know it to be more effective to prevent damage than trying to fix it afterwards.

rurban 1 week ago

You didn't get it. CSAM is illegal, hate speech not.

Unless you come up with a court order. They are not the police and are not judges. Let the professionals do their jobs.

mardifoufs 1 week ago

CSAM is legal where you live?

GuB-42 1 week ago

Even if it doesn't do much from an economy perspective, the simple idea that the offending websites are paying for a cause they are against may have an effect.

Imagine you have a website about Vim and you realize you are paying for the promotion of Emacs.

jibcage 1 week ago

Nearly free speech for me is one of those services still (excellently) run by nerds.

Its no-frills, functional UI reminds me of the old internet before services and sites began coalescing into bigger, faceless, soulless monoliths. I didn’t know about this policy before today, but now I love them even more.

If you’re looking for a place to host your next project or domain, I can’t recommend them enough!

closewith 1 week ago

I put NFS is the same category as Tarsnap.

While I love the aesthetic and mission, I long ago moved away because the UX is just so obtuse and pricing unpredictable.

As NFS say, they're a service for smart people and while I hesitate to call myself smart, whatever neurons I do have are better spent thinking about my family than obscure service offerings.

makizar 1 week ago

> the UX is just so obtuse and pricing unpredictable

Could you explain that in a bit more detail ? I used both OVH, Google Cloud and NFS to host small websites. With OVH and Google, even for small things like setting up DNS I’d get lost in a hellish kafkian maze of help pages, wheras the NFS FAQ is the best one I’ve see. I have yet to find an issue it doesn’t cover. Pricing-wise, I’ve found it pretty transparent, and overall, dirt-cheap.

radicality 1 week ago

+1 to nfs. I use them for my static site/blog since 2013, and think I haven’t touched the control panel for at least 5 years and perhaps even longer (apart from topping up some $ to the account), and it’s been working great. I haven’t updated my site for a long time and for a while I even forgot where it’s hosted, and everything still working fine without intervention.

on_the_train 1 week ago

They are great, but the speeds are sometimes atrocious. Too bad to even host my completely static personal site, because potential employers would have to wait up to 10 seconds for it to load. And ftp connections often fail completely. Bummer, really

neilv 1 week ago

This is kinda neat.

> 2. The recipient organization is as opposite (and hopefully as offensive) as possible to the site operator that funded the donation.

This is vulnerable to "false flag" abuse, from faux-morons.

> 1. The recipient organization does share our values.

This partly mitigates that risk.

Faux-morons can still generate more funds for recipients chosen by the site, and/or hurt the profitability of the site, but at least it's for causes within the values of the site.

willvarfar 1 week ago

Wouldn't faux-morons be better off just giving the money to their target charities? Why set up a website pushing the agenda they don't support, and pay to do that, in order to get some of that money they pay be siphoned away to causes they do support?

neilv 1 week ago

(Sorry I said "site", which was confusing; I meant nearlyfreespeech.net.)

I'm not certain, but I read the following part to probably mean that nearlyfreespeech.net donates their own estimated profit from providing service to the morons in question:

> When we find a repugnant site on our service, we mark the account. We receive reports about all payments to such accounts, and we take a portion of that money larger than the amount of estimated profit and we donate it to the best organization we can find.

InsideOutSanta 1 week ago

Their own estimated profit comes from the entity that hosts the content, right? So if I want to trick them into supporting a charity, I open an account, give nearlyfreespeech x$, they make x-y$ profit, and then give that to a charity. I've just lost y$ on that transaction, compared to just giving it to the charity directly.

graemep 1 week ago

Yes, but their estimated profit is less than the revenue from providing the service, so the morons have still spent more than their target gets.

neilv 1 week ago

Thanks, I missed that. (I stupidly commented while waking up.)

Someone trying to abuse this policy might have additional reasons to false-flag, but I no longer think that that angle on policy abuse is a significant risk.

Mistletoe 1 week ago

The amount of money made from those sites (and spent for good) is surely infinitesimal to the bad they do by spreading hate. Much better to just not host the content. I don’t believe in slippery slope nonsense, it’s easy to know what sort of speech is about harming other people and no I don’t believe in publishing that.

xigoi 1 week ago

A hosting service is not a publisher. They don’t want to restrict speech, but still want to punish hateful sites, and this is the compromise they came up with.

craftkiller 1 week ago

> it’s easy to know what sort of speech is about harming other people

Is it? If you just mean explicit "lets go kill <group>" messages, then sure. But, we also have:

  - People who think the existence of trans people is harming children
  - People who think alternative medical practices like homeopathy is harming people
  - People who think vaccines are harming people
  - People who think 5G towers are harming people
  - People who think discussing methods of suicide is harming people
  - People who think abortion is harming people

stevage 1 week ago

And it gets a lot greyer than that.

valicord 1 week ago

One of these is not like the others

craftkiller 1 week ago

I think if you ask enough people, you will find people will have differing answers on which one(s) are different than the others. I intentionally included both things I agree with and disagree with.