Complex Numbers

Control Alt Delete

A reminder: postings here will be at irregular times for the rest of the month due to an epic beer adventure upon which I am about to embark... weather permitting.

Meanwhile, one of the last few prompts from "JAFBG"  [XGC]:

If you could delete one website or tv channel from existence, which one would you delete and why?

Here is where I normally come up with an obvious joke answer, but to be honest, I don't want to.

For one thing, censorship sucks. "I don't like what you have to say, so I'm going to make sure no one else hears it." Sure, some censorship is unavoidable, because if you allow things like unrestricted ads or hate speech, things get ugly real quick and people will leave your site. But in my view, restricting what goes on in a forum that you control is a different matter than deciding that someone else's platform must be deleted.

I mean, age-restrict it, put up content warnings, whatever, that's fine; people should know something about what they're getting into. Banning something should be a last-ditch thing for truly despicable and/or illegal content (on the level of videos / photos of child abuse). Since I don't know any website or TV channel that portrays that, my answer is still "none."

For another thing, okay, let's say you don't agree with me (which is fine) and you decide to nuke... I don't know... Twitter. (Look, I understand. That was the one I was going to make the obvious joke about up there.) So you eliminate Twitter completely, dismantle its servers, send its administrators off to a gulag, and ban its corporate executives from going anywhere near a computer or a venture capitalist.

You do all that, and within a few months, there will be a new Twitter, run by different people.

If there's a demand for a service, someone will provide it. Eliminate Fox News? Something else will take its place. Pull the plug on Wikipedia? It'll take a while, but there will be a Wikipedia II at some point.

When there are both ethical and practical reasons for doing something (or in this case, not doing it), I'd say it's not worth doing (not worth... not doing... okay, whatever).

So, no, I can't answer the prompt because I wouldn't delete any website or TV channel from existence.

I sure as hell avoid a lot of them, though. Which if you don't like something, that's the way to go, instead of imposing your own standards on everyone else.