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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t agree, the FAQ answer doesn’t relate « moral alignment » to monetary value.
I think it simply states that advocating for free speech doesn’t mean falling into relativism, assigning the same value to all positions and endorsing the most extreme ones.
Pretty refreshing in the current context.
They hope to offset some sort of imperative burden (presumably moral) of hosting onerous content by countermanding the effect of hosting that content with paired monetary support of its adversary. My consideration is that pairing effect there is extremely weak - maybe so weak that the policy is on net dubios.
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!
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.
> 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.
+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.
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
> 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.
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?
(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.
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.
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.
> 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
Honestly that’s just embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for them in the way I’d be embarrassed for someone still injecting “Nope, Chuck Testa!” or “an arrow to the knee!” in human conversations in 2025. Oh wow, an internet crusader who especially hates “Nazis”. How unique and cool. I wonder if the writer also courageously boasts about “punching Nazis”, both in combat and even “in the street”.
If only I could be so brave (rather I am a mewling coward who dares not insult the mighty Nazi global hoarde, and certainly not publicly! They might throw me in one of their odious concentration camps!)
In principle you are right, but for some reason there are people who are vocally offended/displeased by the "fuck nazis" slogan. That's weird to me, because as you say this should be uncontroversial and yet here we are having this conversation.
I think this is because this is not actually about the words itself. Similarly, everyone agrees that black lives matter[1], but that words imply a certain political alignment that the person you're talking with may not subscribe. Similarly, by saying "fuck nazis" you will get reactions from people who, in principle, don't like literal nazis too, but feel targeted by that sentence anyway.
Sorry for my rambling thoughts.
[1] as in, nobody sane would unironically agree with "black lives don't matter"
“The best organization in any given case meets two criteria:
1. The recipient organization does share our values.
2. The recipient organization is as opposite (and hopefully as offensive) as possible to the site operator that funded the donation.”
This seems flawed on so many fronts. This is likely just donating money to your own favorite causes. And if they are not causes that you have already vetted, how do you know that organization you found is not worse than the one you’re trying to punish? It would take a good deal of research to figure this out.
What percentage of the values of the organization need to meet your values? Virtually no organization perfectly matches the values for anyone.
Furthermore, who is “our”? Does everyone in your company or organization have the same exact values?
This happens all the time outside of webhosting. The products you buy to eat, be clothed, and be sheltered are produced by companies that may lobby for laws against your values. As one has a choice to not use this webhosting provider, one also has a choice in what to buy with the aforementioned products required for survival--that is, if that choice hasn't been taken away by a legal monopoly situation (e.g. ISPs), industry consolidation, regulatory capture, etc.
I used to volunteer for a NGO that sends books to Prisoners across the penitentiaries . We sent out thousands per month . We had a code called BBG for books containing Boobs, Butts and Genitalia. Sadly this means manga comics and Biology textbooks are not allowed or ripped to rid of those contents
Readit News
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.)
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.
Unless you come up with a court order. They are not the police and are not judges. Let the professionals do their jobs.
Imagine you have a website about Vim and you realize you are paying for the promotion of Emacs.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Is it? If you just mean explicit "lets go kill <group>" messages, then sure. But, we also have:
If only I could be so brave (rather I am a mewling coward who dares not insult the mighty Nazi global hoarde, and certainly not publicly! They might throw me in one of their odious concentration camps!)
I think this is because this is not actually about the words itself. Similarly, everyone agrees that black lives matter[1], but that words imply a certain political alignment that the person you're talking with may not subscribe. Similarly, by saying "fuck nazis" you will get reactions from people who, in principle, don't like literal nazis too, but feel targeted by that sentence anyway.
Sorry for my rambling thoughts.
[1] as in, nobody sane would unironically agree with "black lives don't matter"
1. The recipient organization does share our values. 2. The recipient organization is as opposite (and hopefully as offensive) as possible to the site operator that funded the donation.”
This seems flawed on so many fronts. This is likely just donating money to your own favorite causes. And if they are not causes that you have already vetted, how do you know that organization you found is not worse than the one you’re trying to punish? It would take a good deal of research to figure this out.
What percentage of the values of the organization need to meet your values? Virtually no organization perfectly matches the values for anyone.
Furthermore, who is “our”? Does everyone in your company or organization have the same exact values?