They could rule against personalised recommendations (YouTube) vs while protecting recommendations where everyone sees the same thing (HN). In HN’s case I’m not sure it would matter much either way. HN is pretty heavily moderated already. If stories went into a moderation queue before hitting the main page rather than being retroactively moderated I’m not sure many of us would notice a difference.
The heavy moderation of HN would mean that they would be more liable for content. And the algorithms showing the front page recommendations would likely be found to be similar to the "what a visitor to YouTube who isn't signed in sees" or "what you see if you go to https://twitter.com without being logged in."
Instead, HN's view would likely become "everyone sees https://hackernews.hn/newest and showdead is set to 'yes'"
I'm not sure how to construct an argument that would allow HN's front page while at the same time curtailing YouTube's not signed in front page - both are recommendation algorithms.
They could rule against personalised recommendations whilst protecting recommendations where everyone sees the same thing, but logically it seems more likely they'd do the opposite (more reasonable to consider a single centralised top stories system consistently highlighting content to all its users a reflection of a "publisher" preference than an algorithm which highlights content based on each individual user's activity and filters the individual user may have set, moderators tend to manually intervene to influence the former more, and of course it's less reasonable to demand that all potentially libellous content is screened from procedurally generated individual user links than from a "top stories" list or home page.)
I think most of us would notice the difference if HN was allowed only to rank comments only in chronological order, never mind if for liability reasons the stories permitted to appear in order of upvotes on HN were restricted to the ones Dang was satisfied weren't libellous, or possibly none at all if YC decided it wasn't worth the risk
HN is not recommending stories. Community members are endorsing or flagging stories and HN displays them ranked on that process.
There is moderation as well with the removal of stories but I’m not sure the responsibility is for removing harmful content. If someone posted a slanderous story or other illegal content and it was allowed to stay for some length of time then I think HN would be responsible. The most egregious would be if a child porn story was on the front page for days because HN staff chose to leave it there.
For YouTube, they are suggesting beheading videos to my child and I think bear some responsibility for doing that, and hopefully to stop doing that. They are making editorial decisions to promote content and so, I think, shouldn’t be protected by 230.
HN does recommend stories. If the mods feel a story doesn't deserve its virality, they will manually weigh it down, if they feel a story isn't getting the visibility it does deserve, they will manually boost it. They will even sometimes replace the posted URL with one they feel is more relevant. This forum asbolutely does not place content based solely on user input.
What does 'choose to leave it there' mean in a legal sense?
For example if I the moderator check the site once a day, and someone posts 5 minutes after I leave, would the law say it's ok for the content to remain up another 23 hours because no moderative choice occurred? Is there now a legal requirement to ensure you moderate fast enough?
