Not just a little heavy-handed. If that's what they did, they probably picked up users that just happened to use the service from one of the countries at some previous point in time. And, at that point, the sanctions may not even have been in place.
Now, I admit that visiting the countries on the list aren't on my to-do-list, but if for example I decided to make a vacation trip to Cuba I really shouldn't lose my account at any US-based service just because of that.
Sometimes I worry that I'm too old-school, doing things like throwing out frameworks everyone else is using, and I see young(er) developers being incredibly productive when using those frameworks plus components, libraries, etc but then I also see that a lot of what they create looks the same and works the same, contains the same bugs, because (IMO) they're sometimes over-using external code and using cannons to shoot flies. I'm probably a bit too much the other way around, but it seems to work for me. I tend to be quite focused on minimizing external dependencies and only use what is absolutely necessary.
...looking incredibly productive rather than being.
Complexity always come back and get you. All this frameworks focus on throwing out code in weeks and make stuff impossible to maintain in few years - that's the tradeoff.
It's no surprise FAANG and especially Amazon focus so much on simplifying their infra and write stuff from scratch so often.
How many technically challenging products have been overnight successes?
One thing that is really confounding about all the anti-blockchain rhetoric on HN is that people seem to expect these products to be finished instantaneously. Building great products takes years.
Blockchain has had eight years to come up with a use case that isn't a cryptocurrency. (And cryptocurrency has had eight years to come up with a use case that isn't illicit goods.) At this point, it's entirely reasonable to ask where the beef is.
I did leave FB for awhile. But I realized that there are groups on Facebook that I do find interesting. I do get the occasional event invite on FB, sometimes personal, sometimes even work related. And, there are some people I enjoy communicating with, on Facebook.
But, I really don't have much interest in what most of my friends post. Luckily, it's easy to just "unfollow" them to declutter my feed. They are still on my friends list and we can still communicate via FB/Messenger if needed. I just don't have to scroll through pictures of their food or kids or pets.
It's funny how what you say in line with what others often say.
To me it seems that you remove almost all of what facebook offers to keep instant messaging, contact list and email. Things one can achieve outside of facebook but for some reason people still insist on using facebook for these even though they admit they dislike it.
Just leave the damn thing already and build your networking outside of it instead giving more momentum to something you don't like and know is bad at the global scale.
I used to use a VPN to watch US Netflix, but they started to block known VPNs and I didn't feel like spending time on workarounds. On the other hand, downloading the latest episode of some TV series takes only a few mouse clicks. For sure easier than fighting geo-restrictions.
I still pay for Netflix, but doesn't really watch it much because of the tiny catalog available to me locally, I simply want to support them. Perhaps it will make me feel better if I would download any of their content. :)
Nothing to be sad about. Also curious, why do you want to support them ? Being a market leader, Netflix is a unique position to influence some of these regressive practices. More support is clearly not helping; it's only making it worse by creating monopolies that exert even more negative influence.
The biggest problem with Netflix is that it is not able to obtain rights for a lot of movies or series so you don't have a full catalog. So series and movies are fragmented between providers or totally unavailable.
Netflix is not much of a market leader until it contains at least 90% of the movies i want to watch, which can't happen without enough leverage from their part given by user support.
I do like some of their own content. I also like their general business model and I believe (well, I hope) that the stupid geo-restrictions are results of old-school licensing and not active business decisions made by Netflix.
But ofc, I wouldn't mind if they had some real competition, I don't want a monopoly.
>(well, I hope) that the stupid geo-restrictions are results of old-school licensing and not active business decisions made by Netflix.
Geo-restrictions have existed forever. What Netflix started was actively blocking entire ranges of IPs belonging to vpns and commercial ISPs (cloud providers like aws, dedicated servers like ovh etc.). This should fall under some corollary to net-neutrality where a service cannot discriminate between ISPs. Does such a corollary exist in countries that have some form of net neutrality (US, India, Netherlands etc.) ? Can someone with legal expertise comment ? From my standpoint, they can have geo-licensing, but should stick with some consistent way of showing content either based on billing info or IP. Blocking out vast portions of the internet because it doesn't suit them should clearly be some violation of laws like net neutrality.
