It's a sad state of affairs when online comment sections have become an integral part of the social cohesion (such as it is) of a society.
In my opinion, the current state of our response to Covid shows that the social cohesion of society has already been destroyed, mostly by pigeonholing everyone into neat little online boxes.
The corporate press doesn't care about being "called out" in an online comments section.
Real-life cohesion is incredibly more powerful than anything online.
I don't even like texting. Email is a letter replacement. Call me and pickup when I call, or GTFO.
Faceblock, Twatter, Instaglam, Discard, Snapper, TikTak, LinkedOut can all listen to the flushing sound of me deleting their advertising monetization. "Buh buh all of your Ivy and Pac12 associations that made you look important on a résumé." Too bad, I haven't talked to most of those people in years anyhow.
If you own the media then you can sit back and relax. At most you'll get few days of moaning and things will go back to normal. Majority of people won't even know or connect things anyway.
If media are licensed, then they will never run anything that will upset government too much. I've seen this many times. Even if hostile nation's media pick up the topic and report it honestly, the government can dismiss it as a conspiracy theory or just say it is an attack.
Ultimately even if people see all the evidence, most of the time they'll pretend they didn't and stick with the status quo.
As someone who done open source for a long time now, I think the newer generation of maintainers is missing one of the most powerful tools we have available as maintainers.
Ignoring others. You don't like the question? Ignore them. You don't feel you have the time to support them right now? Ignore them. It feels like they are entitled? Ignore them.
I don't think people asking others to work for free is anything new. The recent outrage about others asking you to work for free is relatively new though.
You're publishing open source code because you feel like it. This also means you can run the project however you want. Tell people to fuck off if you don't like them. Or don't tell them anything if you don't feel like it.
You'll feel much better as a maintainer once you act exactly like how you feel like it, no more and no less. Don't pay too much attention to what others say. Time is much too limited to be outraged at everything. Calm down, and ignore people you don't like.
Because it's anti-competitive dumping. The dirty secret of SV is that it's an enormous dumping scheme: burn billions of dollars of money to offer 'free' or goods and services, gain a dominant position in the market by driving the honestly priced competition into the ground, then jack up the prices and fleece the customers. Uber is the poster boy of this strategy, but it's not the only one.
The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0) possibly at a loss, or shut it down and offer a one-click migrate-my-data button and empower customers to shop around for the price / quality tradeoff they are willing to pay for. Of course, that will never happen, because antitrust in this country is toothless, paid for by the exact same corporations that engage in anti-competitive behavior.
HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person)
Twitter seems to value the individual, but devalue the content. (E.g. low quality posts by a famous person)
The former is more meritorious, inasmuch as the vote base can accurately judge a comment. The latter is more consistent, in that popular people stay popular (and admittedly, are popular for a reason).
Personally, I prefer the HN-style model, but I also believe it only works as long as the ratio of HN-encultured users to bad / average actors stays above a certain threshold. From a technical and vote system perspective, HN isn't that different than Reddit: what makes it HN is the culture and community.
Seriously. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down?
Apple is telling us we can't run our own software on their goddamned devices, yet they built their empire on open source.
Look at Facebook, Google, Amazon. They've extracted all the blood they can and given us back scraps. AWS is repackaged software you pay more for. Yes, it's managed, but you're forever a renter.
They've destroyed our open web, replaced RSS with DRM, left us with streaming and music options worse than cable and personal audio libraries.
The web is bloated with ads and tracking, AMP is given preference, Facebook and Twitter are testing the limits of democracy and radicalizing everyone to cancel one another.
Remember when the Internet was actually pleasant? When it was nice to build stuff for others to use?
Stop giving your work away for free when the companies only take.
There's a famous optical illusion with a spinning silhouette of a dancer. When you look at it, you'll swear it's spinning in one direction -- say, counter-clockwise. In fact, you'll be so sure it's spinning counter-clockwise, that the idea it could be spinning in the opposite direction will seem impossible to you. But if you stare at it long enough, and intently enough, you can make it spin the other way.
I've noticed the same phenomenon with political views.
People on the left think that anyone on the right is a lunatic, and everyone on the right thinks the same thing about the left. I, as most people do, lean in one direction politically, so naturally any comment I see coming from my side seems reasonable to me. In fact, it seems impossible that a reasonable person could think any other way. But since I grew up in a family that leaned in the opposite direction, and I shared their same mindset in my younger days, I can now draw on that experience, and I can take a political tweet that everyone on my side thinks is insane, and I can stare at it, and just as with the spinning dancer, I can flip it in my head so it seems reasonable.
To me, it's a testament to the power of the tribal instincts within us. We think it's the other side that's crazy, but we're all under the same spell.
It's not unchecked free speech. Instead, it's unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement.
As long as media companies get the most benefit from people engaging with content, they will continue to promote information that is damaging to society. It may even be true information but when the goal is engagement, it's purpose will be to enrage and divide because that's what's engaging.
Limiting speech will not cause this issue to go away. It's bigger than just misinformation. The core issue is the underlying system that values engagement over all things. That is, the advertising system.
Companies that make their money selling ads while providing content to engage have a perverse incentive to make society worse. This is the bad seed that needs removal.
This business model should be illegal. It's already trivially unethical.
Honestly, this is why we need the Web. But Apple even blocks that since they don’t allow any browser engine apart from Safari, meaning that there is no
- Add to homescreen dialog
- Background sync
- Proper push notifications
- Proper WASM support (a lot of features are missing)
Honestly, at this point, the government should step in, like they did at the end of the last century with Microsoft. Walled gardens hurt innovation a lot, and the App Store in combination with the restricted web on iOS are the ultimate expression of the former.
It's the 30% + being feature/speech-restricted by Apple while also competing with Apple in Apple's app store which holds half the US audience captive.
Third parties can't even make a browser that gets set as the default that opens hyperlinks. They can't replace iMessage or the phone dialer. They can't even use a browser engine other than the one that Apple restricts them to. They can't make political apps. They can't offer porn apps. The list goes on and on and on.
Furthermore, smartphones are way, way, way more ubiquitous and important to society right now than those devices ever were back in the 90s and early 2000s. Imagine only being allowed to shop at Walmart or Target with no other choice anywhere at all. If that ever happened in the real world and those companies were acting like Apple is, things'd change real quick.
>But the moves threaten to upend huge swaths of the real estate market and the half-trillion dollar market for commercial mortgage-backed securities.
And?
Seriously. We either have to choose to be a market that is somewhat free or not. At this point, the government is choosing winners and losers. It is a repeat of 2008. Oh no, it is too big to fail.
Someone will come by with the investment to buy what is left. Perhaps they will run it better. Prepare better.
We're going through this with airlines and cruise companies now fighting for more money and loans from the government. Perhaps Delta grew too large to be what they are now. Maybe there are too many malls in existence. Maybe the method in which we collateralize mortgages doesn't make sense anymore.
Our economy has developed the too big to fail mindset and forgotten, largely, you can lose.
you'd think so, but lots of this trust has already been lost when google started pulling highly used services like rss!
And what if somehow, they find appscript to be too burdensome, when it does not derive much, if any, revenue?