This is the level 0 of reasoning about these topics...
We live in organised societies, nobody is forcing you to do crack but people doing crack will definitely lower the experience of everyone they interact with (and more given the burden on shared goods like healthcare, infrastructures, &c.), that's why we collectively decided that crack shouldn't be sold to 13 years old kids.
Now of course this is very flawed and we'll always have things slipping through the cracks (alcohol, tobacco, junk food, &c.), but unless you want to live in a mad max type of world you have to accept some level of regulation, and that level of regulation, in a working society, should be determined through politics
If tiktok is crack, HN is honey. One becomes problematic much quicker than the other, when you see a kid spending 5 hours a day on HN hit me up
Cool, you can use the argument I was replying to for everything too. I guess we're back to square one then.
If you think skiing and cooking have as much of a negative impact as social media as on entire generation of kids I doubt we'll find common ground to go further, usually it requires a bit of good faith
>This is not an actual argument because you can make it about anything.
>Like to ski? Your injuries have a societal cost.
>Like to cook? Your inefficient use of energy costs society.
This assumes that fairly standard activities are imposing the societal cost you are attributing to them. For most individuals who perform these activities, they are not producing an outsized societal cost, which is the delineation the parent comment was making. The parent comment used an example of something that from their point of view has a negative societal cost in the base case. Your examples are not similar as they are not referring to the base case of simply performing the activities, but only to the relatively uncommon tail end outcomes.
The impact stated is wildly outsized. I read a microsoft report regarding this that was heavily touted and one of the "prime" examples given was a 1M view Twitter video.
Yeah sure, Socrates was worried about books too... now if you can't see the difference between rock music and kids spending 5+ hours a day doomscrolling I think we'll have a hard time discussing anything. Feel free to share the studies showing the negative effects of books and rock music on kids by the way, because there are plenty of these when it comes to social media, especially the doomscrolling type.
Following your logic everything new has to be desirable, that's a tough position to defend imho. Just because new trends were incorrectly criticised in the past doesn't mean every new trend is good until the heat death of the universe, logic 101
Almost any form of media can be addicting. Kids these days might watch TikTok, but my worst addiction since young age has been reading online news.
Once I got diagnosed with ADHD and tried stimulant medicine, I noticed that the time I spend reading news, social media and playing games dropped dramatically. So, effectively all these activities have been nothing more than drugs for my dysfunctional brain. When my brain isn't deficient in dopamine, I seem to automatically spend most of my time on something more useful. Probably wouldn't be writing this if my meds weren't wearing off at this time of day.
hacker news has a lot of ideological community problems but HN is not "massively centralized", it's just a narrow window into the US tech scene with a relatively small community of people.
I think there's a great argument that says the first amendment is not a suicide pact. The social media environment right now is having an unprecedented destructive effect on US democracy. I think TikTok is right there as a key player in spreading weapons-grade, state-sponsored mush to younger people.
You know, I think lots of us on HN, can at least be the people who can and should go to next levels of this discussion.
So yes - we should definitely agree that all new technology for publishing (publishing? COntent creation?) result in issues of free speech.
I will say that each of these, have had different issues, and that from Radio onwards, we are dealing with several issues (side effects ?) that become more intense with each new media developed.
I'll jump to the end, but Social media is definitely different from the printing press.
We certainly get new and improved benefits, such as the distribution of publishing power to individuals.
At the same time, we are getting issues with an abundance of content, that people need content to be eye catching, in order to gain an audience.
Theres also a tendency for networks to consolidate over time, so at the start of the radio era, or TV era, you have a bunch of cable networks, then over time they start collapsing into larger groups, which are better able to survive.
Fully admit that these are highly generalized, I am just thinking of what others can chime in with.
I'd argue the two are like comparing apples and oranges. Yes, there is a competition of ideas, but accepted scripture is changed so much more slowly than society itself that it cannot exploit the zeitgeist of any one trend. More importantly, it doesn't change differently to each individual to maximize addictive interaction. The slowness is a feature. I'm not saying there aren't some problems with religion being exploitative, but the responsiveness is what makes social media a much more effective manipulator.
Not entirely inaccurate! Martin Luther's 95 Theses propagated from Germany to England in a matter of weeks, thanks to the printing press. I think society got better but it sure did change a lot.
the government of China is a hostile adversary and they dont just spread gobs of misinformation and pro-CCP propaganda on TikTok, they also heavily censor topics the CCP does not like. This is not about free expression so much as where the public square should take place. Having the US public square take place in a tightly controlled, deceptive environment controlled by our worst enemy presents an existential risk to the US.
think of the printing press as invented and controlled by your worst enemy and only printing what it deems to be acceptable.
It's not free expression when someone else chooses what everyone sees.
Threads is notorious for de-boosting posts with external links. This is a deliberate choice which filters facts and external references out of the conversation.
Or you can just delay the feed of posters you don't like. They arrive at every debate a day late, while your favourites go through immediately. And to more people.
And so on.
There's nothing free about any of this. It's covert behaviour and sentiment modification.
With a newspaper you get an editorial angle, so you can choose it if you want it.
Social media pretends to be a neutral conduit. But it's carefully curated and manipulated, and you don't know how or why.
What matters is not the diversity of the overall userbase but the diversity of what gets shown to you. From my (limited) experience TikTok is hyper-targeted and will narrow in on your interests/biases quickly and keep you in that bubble.
HN (and reddit) generally lacks this hyper-targeting. Obviously, just the act of going to HN is selecting for a certain cross-section of opinions, but once you're there what you see is determined by the community and not by your own personal preferences.
1. There's often little or no visibility on how this personalization happens. People with often try to guess and steer the algorithm but the reality is you don't know. This means that unpopular opinions can be quietly suppressed with no detectable censorship. On the poster/creator side this presents as constant paranoia about "shadow banning" and the like.
2. The personalized feeds are effectively endless. This allows for repetition that really amplifies any biases/fears. For example, suppose you're worried that the roads are getting more dangerous and you go on Instagram and start looking at car crash reels. Instagram will happily feed you as much of these as you can stomach and it starts to affect your perception of reality. Never mind that you're looking at incidents captured over a period of years from all over the world, seeing them all back to back will probably give you anxiety the next time you go to cross the street. Now apply this same logic to any political topic...
You're welcome here, and you're welcome to express contrarian views—that's an important part of an intellectually curious community, which is our goal with HN. However, we need you to do it while sticking to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You've unfortunately been breaking them in various places already.
I know how hard it is to be in the minority on a contentious topic without getting provoked (and then becoming provocative oneself), but that's what we need commenters with minority views to do. Otherwise we end up having to moderate the accounts, not because we want to suppress minority views but because we have to enforce HN's rules.
It's in your interest to do this, because then you maximize the persuasive power of your comments. Conversely, if you succumb to the pressure to be indignant and/or snarky and/or flamey and so on, that ends up discrediting your views, which is particularly damaging if they happen to be true: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
(p.s. I'm an admin here in case that wasn't obvious)
sorry being snarky, hard to help it, my bad, again
and there's misunderstanding, I was not provoked, at least in the comment above
it's not a critique to HN, in fact, isn't it obvious that HN inevitably ends to a echo chamber? unpopular opinions greyed out, popular opinions ranked up, wasn't it design to be this?
it's not that bad, most communities are echo chambers
You are 100% correct but HN mods will pretend this is not the case. This site is heavily moderated just like all major subreddits. Dissenting opinion will be silenced either by gang-flagging or dang taking action personally. HN is reddit in a tie.
We don't ban accounts for expressing minority or contrarian views. We do ban accounts for breaking the site guidelines, especially when they do it repeatedly.
But nobody ever says "I was banned for breaking the site guidelines". What they do instead is make new accounts to claim "I was banned for my contrarian views". How noble that sounds!
The tell is that they never supply links (e.g. to their previous account(s) or the place(s) they were banned). If moderation is so bad, why not allow readers to see what actually happened and make up their own minds? And yet these complaints are always linkless...
Hey dang so you just silently shadow-banned that user? That's what it definitely looks like. Not that I care but they seem to be right about you if you did.
Yes, when there's evidence that an account is someone whom we've banned in the past and that they're making new accounts to post abusively, we (sometimes) shadowban those later accounts. You can find past explanations about that here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
In this case you've been using multiple accounts to post in the same thread in ways that are misleading and abusive. That's clearly over the line, so I'm banning this account (and also saying so). If you would please stop creating accounts to break HN's rules with, that would be good.
I can see you flagged all my comments, even unrelated ones within minutes. You also immediately throttled me. You're vindictive and on a power trip. Your moderation style goes directly against the quote from your bio. You're a hypocrite, man.
"Echo chamber" is a tautology by this point. What's bad about a narrower focus? It's good to cross pollinate on occasion but you're not going to ever get to deep discussions when you have the same arguments over and over with people who share little common ground. I don't come to HN to read what flat earthers think about that gorgeous photo of the Earth's curve taken by an astronaut, and I can have productive disagreements with other technologists.
> I can have productive disagreements with other technologists
Only for tech topics
Things went ugly(but fun!) for political/geopolitical topics, 'unpopular' opinions will be grayed out, opinions survived coalesced into the essence of the Anglo-Saxon spirit
but HN is centralized, so you agree if HN exceeds some arbitrary amount of users it should be banned? how ridiculous. tiktok is not any better or worse than facebook, youtube, or the mainstream media.
the only thing nosql means is that there are no relations. mongodb 8 and newer for example support schemas and validations, cascading checks, etc. dynamodb, more relevantly does also support a schema, and in fact you can't even create a table without defining one.
That seems unlikely. The play store lists it at 10m+ downloads and it's still a very Chinese app. I checked it out myself. This is people trying to troll the US government
what seems unlikely? it's simply a fact that many are going to the other app. as you said yourself, 10m+ downloads on play store, #1 on ios app store, etc.
RedNote don't have english user interface, and it have worse censorship compare to tiktok or facebook.
Unless you want to learn Chinese and/or spend time to navigate around the content modulation system (not very hard, it just different), the experience ain't great.
I think they do have an English user interface since yesterday, which may still be unpolished. TikTok is available in many countries under their own languages though.
Rednote is a popular meme at the moment for obvious reasons. But TikTok has around 170 Million users in the USA. What you see at the moment is a loud minority checking out the app and creating content. This is something happening all the time with Social Media and especially TikTok, loud minorities doing something, and people hard overrating the numbers. There is simply no way that with Rednotes state at the moment, we will see a significant number of users switching from TikTok to it. Maybe at the end we will see some millions switching.
That depends on the definition of "many". Some use it relative, some absolute. On its own, Millions can be a big number for a service, but in relation to the absolute amount of TikTok-Users in the USA and Globally, it's just a few, a handful, more than 3, less than a majority.
They are simply different translations, period. The book you mentioned is usually referred to as "红宝书" (Red Precious Book). Don't know where the translation on Wikipedia comes from.
Not the first, but the general idea that the usa behave like ignorant entitled kids with too much power is indeed very worrying for the rest of the world.
Yeah… This thread exemplifies the HN trope of the “analytical type” who thinks they’re more social and more intelligent than others while coming across as bizarrely out of touch.
They don't know. The average american is super uneducated and can barely read a graph. Most of the ones that heard about it probaly did thanks to the netlix adaptation to the 3 body problem, but certainly not school.
Trust is never all or nothing. I trust Apple to an extent, but trust needs to be earned and maintained. I trust my mom, but if she suggested installing video cameras in my home for my "safety", or worse, she secretly installed video cameras in my home, then she would lose my trust.
Likewise, you need to trust your spouse or significant other, but if there are obvious signs of cheating, then you need to be suspicious.
An essential part of trust is not overstepping boundaries. In this case, I believe that Apple did overstep. If someone demands that you trust them blindly and unconditionally, that's actually a sign you shouldn't trust them.
> If someone demands that you trust them blindly and unconditionally, that's actually a sign you shouldn't trust them.
That's certainly a take, which you're clearly entitled to take. I don't disagree with the point that you make; this ought to have been opt in.
What you should do now is acknowledge this in your original post and then explain why they should have been more careful about how they released this feature. Homomorphic encryption of the data reframes what you wrote somewhat. Even though data is being sent back, Apple never knows what the data is.
> What you should do now is acknowledge this in your original post and then explain why they should have been more careful about how they released this feature. Homomorphic encryption of the data reframes what you wrote somewhat.
Do you mean my original blog post? The one that not only mentions homomorphic encryption but also links to Apple's own blog post about it? I don't know how that can "reframe" what I wrote when it already framed it.
I apologise, I didn't fully read your original article as I find that your writing is prone to exaggeration. I've reread it a few times now and I stand by what I said. You mention homomorphic encryption only in a quoted piece of text and a link. You utterly fail to explain what it is. You didn't frame it at all. You hand-waived at it. I don't disagree with you on the point about this being opt in, but your blog post is a massive overreaction, heavy on prose and opinion, but light on any tangible facts.
How can you trust any mainstream "working" iPhone or Android device? You already mentioned open source android distros. You mean those where no banking or streaming device app works because you have to use a replacement for gapps and the root / open bootloader prevents any form of DRM? That is not really an option for most people.
I would love to have a Linux phone even with terrible user experience as long as I do not lose touch with society. That however seems to be an impossible task.
You don't trust Apple's and Google's mobile phones. And some bank doesn't trust open source android distros on mobile phones. Those are both fine positions. You are free to move to another bank, just like the bank is free to not accept you as a customer.
When I'm in Canada I often transfer money (interac e-transfers). I always use the website, even on mobile, but the website has some arbitrary limits than the app does not. For example I can only transfer $1,000 at a time, the app allows $10,000. There's also a limit of recipients per day.
My charitable interpretation is that the app allows a greater verification process so the bank trusts it more and it's "to protect me, the user". But then, the website lets me transfer $100,000 using a multitude of other methods if I want (wire, e-check, create carrier check), so... yeah.
Depends where you live. In the US, probably not much, but in other countries where transfers are ubiquitous, being unable to use a banking app could be a real problem.
I don't know, though certainly the experience is a lot simpler without the 15 minute timeout, painful login, and extra security checks I see on web banking.
Edit: Not to mention that many of the newer banks don't even have web banking. It's app only. Of course, its your choice to open an account there though
In Germany and I think the whole EU 2 factor authentication is mandatory, for which the favored implementation is an app. SMS TAN is out, the alternative is a secondary device you stick your card into.
Haven't seen a bank offering software TOTP in Poland. Over a decade ago, before smartphones became ubiquitous, I've seen a bank offering a physical TOTP device. These days, as far as I've seen, it's either SMS codes or single use codes on a physical scratch cards (haven't seen one in 5 years, though), or in-app confirmation.
Yes and they tend to be shoddily programmed security theater. My bank makes me use SecureGo plus, which goes as far as redirecting you to a website telling you screenshots aren’t allowed when you try to
document its latest glitch (which may be another misguided “security” feature, who knows).
In Germany you can use the website BUT you still need the app for 2fa. SMS is no longer an option for most banks, because it is considered insecure. Same goes for TOTP since this can easily be replicated, if you have access to the device generating the TOTP.
Bank transfers, online purchases (most banks reqire 3DS now and usually won't let you buy things online without the app on a phone), some don't have a web interface, and others if they do require you to approve the login to that from the app
It doesn't have to be binary. I have some trust for apple. They've earned it in various ways by caring for privacy.
When they start opting me into photo scanning I lose a bit of trust. The homomorphic encryption makes it less bad. The relative quiet around the rollout of the feature makes it worse. Apple's past attempt to start client side scanning makes it worse. Etc...
The net result is I trust them a bit less. Perhaps not enough to set my apple devices on fire yet, but a bit.
Here is my simplified take on it which will likely get me flamed.
Trust has many meanings but for this discussion we’ll consider privacy and security. As in, I trust my phone to not do something malicious as a result of outside influence, and I trust it to not leak data that I don’t want other people to know.
Open source software is not inherently more secure nor more private. However it can sometimes be more secure (because more people are helping find bugs, because that specific project prioritizes security, etc.) and is usually more private. Why? Because it (usually) isn’t controlled by a single central entity, which means there is (usually) no incentive to collect user data.
In reality it’s all kind of a mess and means nothing. There’s tons of bugs in open source software, and projects like Audacity prove they sometimes violate user privacy. HN-type people consider open source software more secure and private because you can view the source code yourself, but I guarantee you they have not personally reviewed the source of all the software they use.
If you want to use an open-source Android distro I think you would learn a lot. You don’t need to have a CS degree. However unless you made massive lifestyle changes in addition to changing your phone, I’m not confident it would meaningfully make you more secure or private.
It was a bit of a strawman question anyway; as someone who could review the source myself but wont (because the pain-to-utility threshold is way too high) I am then required to place my trust in some ad-hoc entity (the open-source community), that doesn't actually have a financial disincentive to make sure things aren't bad.
I have other reasons, perhaps, to prefer open source stuff, but I am not ready to assume it is inherently more private or secure.
Sorry, I lost some context in the thread or something because I thought you were asking as someone who legitimately didn’t know what open source was. Which I thought was kind of weird for HN but didn’t put two and two together.
strange comment - this should be a website that would presumably be hosting, where exactly?
the average person would not be able to make something even close to this sheet. where are they going to host it? do they have a domain? certs? do they even know how to write html? css? during a spiky event such as a wildfire, will their website even stay up?
>Wouldn't this be a near perfect use-case for AI generated websites?
A non-tech user prompting ChatGPT to write out HTML+CSS+Javascript still doesn't cover the other logistical challenges of hosting it on a server somewhere. E.g. Buy a domain? Then buy web hosting package? Or use Netlify? Amazon S3?
Maybe someday OpenAI will have AI agents with authority to pay with customers' credit-cards and opens Cloudflare or DigitalOcean accounts on the users' behalf. That's a long time into the future where such a workflow would be trusted by non-technical end users. And then you still have the irony of using another proprietary entity of AI to empower users to put up web pages.
Whether the internet was 1990s Geocities or something like Github Pages today, a user sharing content on a personal webpage is not a trivial task. So non-techies compensate with commercial services such as MySpace pages, Twitter tweets, Facebook pages, or examples like this thread's Google Docs spreadsheet. A common theme of all those commercial services is: they handled the complexities of web hosting.
EDIT reply: >I feel like this response contains within it a great deal of contempt for average people
No, you misinterpreted. I was trying to get techies to empathize with typical end users and understand the reasons why they don't host their own web pages. If that empathy was fully internalized, we'd already predict that a ChatGPT-CoPilot assisted HTML tool isn't the only issue. The gp you replied to highlighted that in his first paragraph.
I have true admiration and not contempt for the end users at this charity using Google Spreadsheets to empower themselves to share a doc without waiting for a "real programmer or webmaster" to do it for them.
>Could you not just ask an LLM how one could host this website for free somewhere,
What's the current best answer for "website for free somewhere" that doesn't have the same criticism of being a proprietary entity that this subthread's gp was lamenting?
I feel like this response contains within it a great deal of contempt for average people and their problem solving ability.
Could you not just ask an LLM how one could host this website for free somewhere, and do the same for any logistical challenges that arise beyond that?
People could do that. Or they can click "new doc" in Docs, start typing, then copy the URL and send it to a friend. Look at that, they published a page, no problem solving necessary. Thus people, no matter their ability, will probably default to that approach.
I don't think it's a value judgement to say one thing is easier than another and hence people will. Choose the easier thing.
If we want more folks to use and build websites, it needs to be Google-Docs level easy, otherwise people will use Google Docs.
Exactly this. I do find it kinda funny that Google Docs/Word and their ilk have HTML export options. Kind of a weird funny/sad anachronism. As if there was some hope that people would use Google Docs to make their own contributions to the independent web.
It doesn't really make any sense to use it locally - the whole point is that it's managed. If you just want a clustered key value store you could use Cassandra, Garnet, etc.
is there actually any evidence more money would fix public schools? Urban school districts as far as I know have more money than the suburbs and worse outcomes as reflected in standardized test scores.
Students who commit or are accepted into 2 sand 4 year colleges: 90%+
- Compare that with just one school in the urban school system:
Cost per student: $37K/year
Graduation rate: 57%
Students who commit or are accepted into 2 sand 4 year colleges: less than 50%
Just to throw some more fire on this, the teachers in the last two years in those urban districts? They've gotten substantial raises and large increases in spending from the state legislature. The last standardized test results post C19? The kids in those schools were forced into lengthy closures during C19 and were the last schools to re-open (months after all the suburban schools had already been open with in person attendance) amounted to their students REGRESSING by multiple percentage points.
So no, after watching this first hand with myself and my sisters kids who were yanked out of an urban public school as freshman; urban students and schools receive considerably more than their suburban counterparts and are still lagging significantly behind them.
That's an anecdote, no? No idea where you live (guessing New Jersey?). But do you think there might be other differences beyond just the $/student that might explain some of those differences? What're the poverty levels of those urban children vs their suburban counterparts?
Its Minnesota. The numbers were off to from the last time I checked them.
Its now 13K for my kids school and 26K for the Minneapolis schools.
>> But do you think there might be other differences beyond just the $/student that might explain some of those differences?
Well yeah.
- Poor families can't afford to send their kids to private schools.
- Poor families don't have any vouchers or charter schools as alternatives
- Poor families cannot be bused to other, better school districts like mine or other suburban schools
- Most poor families are single parent homes which means driving kids to far off suburban schools is not an option
- Many suburban schools are closing their enrollment unless you live in the district now.
The educational SYSTEM is what keeps poor families without any options to give their kids a better shot at being educated and going on to a 2 year or 4 year college. When you have no options, then you're stuck. This makes no sense to me why this is a political issue. Don't you want kids to have the best opportunity to be successful? Why not open up to vouchers and charter schools? Why does the Minneapolis school system refuse to allow this? The answer is too obvious to require elaboration. Its because their enrollment (which has already dropped precipitously over the last decade) would drop off even more. This would then mean lose a ton of funding from the state.
At the end of the day, the MPS does not want competition because it means less money then from the state, even with the abysmal graduation rate, falling enrollment and tens of thousands of people moving out of the Hennepin County, they continue to refuse to change anything - which is pretty depressing when you think about it.
In my region the city's one massive school district has more money than any single suburban one, obviously. But funding per student is generally higher in the suburbs, and outcomes are better there as well. So I'm sure there are other factors but there is at least some evidence that more money would help.
why do people feel so strongly about this? presumably you're only engaging with those you follow, which is at your discretion. does it really matter what platform they're on?
