gambler
Joined 15 years ago
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5,521
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1,165
Member since
Feb 19
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 3 years ago
So, in essence, you don't have anything meaningful to respond with. You're perfectly fine with using centralized platforms when it's convenient and their ownership aligns with your ideology. You might say you don't like them, but you like them well enough to put links to them on your personal website.
Comment · 3 years ago
When your revolution against "platforms" is led by people who host all their code on GitHub and have a public LinkedIn profile, you're not paying attention to your surroundings and will inevitably be taken advantage of.
Comment · 4 years ago
>Many of us learned HTML and web technologies by reading the source code of websites
HTML is an extensible language. Markdown is not.
Comment · 4 years ago
You didn't link to data, you linked to an opinion from Vice laundered through another outlet.
Here is some actual data, which (predictably) shows that conservatives are targeted significantly more for suspensions:
But that's besides the point, because it's much simpler than that. You don't need elaborate analysis to see that people tired of Twitter "moderation" filled 4 other platforms: Gab, Parler, Minds and Truth Social. Literally all of them are characterized as right-wing by the same left-wing media outlets that claim that Twitter is impartial in moderation.
I'm tired of gaslighting around this issue. Just within replies to my above comment I've gotten two contradictory statements. One, that there is no bias in Twitter moderation, because conservatives are actually targeted less. Two, that there is no bias because conservatives are more likely to break rules, so they should be banned more often. We have two diametrically opposite descriptions of reality that nevertheless converge on the same conclusion. This is ideology-driven reasoning at its worst.
Comment · 4 years ago
He is half-correct, but not in a good way. When people on the left say something that goes against new-left agenda, they get suppressed too. That is not a redeeming quality of the system or an indicator of fairness. It simply shows that the ideology driving moderation is even more narrow-minded and intolerant of dissent than most observers assume at first sight.
At the same time, it's trivial to demonstrate that YouTube and Twitter (easy examples) primarily target conservatives with their "moderation". Just look at who primarily uses major alternative platforms.
Comment · 4 years ago
>No one argues that speech must have value to be allowed (c.f. shitposting).
>Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam.
The whole threads seems like it revolves around this line of reasoning, which strawmans what free speech advocates are actually arguing for. I've never heard of any of them, no matter how principled, fighting for the "right" of spammers to spam.
There is an obvious difference between spam moderation and content suppression. No recipient of spam wants to receive spam. On the other hand, labels like "harmful content" are most often used to stop communication between willing participants by a 3d party who doesn't like the conversation. They are fundamentally different scenarios, regardless of how much you agree or disagree with specific moderation decisions.
By ignoring the fact that communication always has two parties you construct a broken mental model of the whole problem space. The model will then lead you stray in analyzing a variety of scenarios.
In fact, this is a very old trick of pro-censorship activists. Focus on the speaker, ignore the listeners. This way when you ban, say, someone with millions of subscribers on YouTube you can disingenuously pretend that it's an action affecting only one person. You can then draw false equivalency between someone who actually has a million subscribers and a spammer who sent a message to million email addresses.
Comment · 4 years ago
It's not a mistake. It's a PR strategy. Social media companies are training people to blame content and each other for the effects that are produced by design, algorithms and moderation. This reassigns blame away from things that those companies control (but don't want to change) to things that aren't considered "their fault".
Comment · 4 years ago
Crazy conspiracy theories, eh? People running those companies routinely talk to one another. When it seems they act together, it's often because they actually do act together.
Comment · 4 years ago
This is just 2nd order gaslighting. For many, many years Google was denying obvious problems with how their search system worked. Denial and gaslighting was clearly their marketing strategy. It kind of worked too, at least in terms of public opinion in tech space. Now something has changed and they're suddenly pretending to care. Problem is, this effectively gaslights people about their prior gaslighting.
Why was the company blatantly denying obvious issues for so many years? What has changed? Why should I trust their judgment all of a sudden?
It's kind of like someone who is a pathologic liar having been caught in various lies for many years, swearing to tell you the truth, but not admitting to the past lies.
Comment · 4 years ago
Hm, after reading the title I monetarily thought the article would talk about the implosion of Union Pacific and complications of switching to a different provider. FYI:
https://www.manufacturing.net/labor/news/13118134/union-paci...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/union-pacific-to-cut-nearly-3-0...
https://www.thepacker.com/news/transportation/union-pacific-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/sd9kqw/union_paci...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/s6c04a...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/14/los-angeles-...
https://www.cfindustries.com/newsroom/2022/union-pacific-shi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxp8lUXDz0
Meanwhile at the top:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF_5jng3RYM
TLDR version. UP switched to some fancy "efficient" system several years ago, laid off thousands of employees. At the time many people predicted collapse of the company in a couple of years. Three years later it is plagued by rampant theft and trash on the tracks. This year it refused to ship fertilizer during planting season. It also refused to ship additives to diesel fuel earlier this year (amidst general truck shipping issues and skyrocketing fuel costs). Meanwhile the CEO is smiling like a Cheshire Cat and giving out Bloomberg interviews about efficient management.
Comment · 4 years ago
There is a difference between "Google does not censor anti-war content" and "Google does censor anti-war content, but usually has an excuse I find acceptable".
When a company puts Jon Lennon's Merry Xmas (War is Over) behind age restriction banner[1], the question stops being "Is there censorship?" and becomes about the logic of such censorship.
>The third one was temporary until Google stopped operating in Russia altogether.
They've censored other things on behest of the Russian government for years[2]. Again, I cannot fathom how people on a tech website like HN can be unaware of such things. This is common knowledge broadly covered on mainstream websites.
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[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-john-lennon-war-is-over-wa...
[2] https://www.rferl.org/a/google-censors-search-results-after-...
Comment · 4 years ago
Software enegineering is not the kind of field that should require adoption of some universal coping mechanism. The fact that you're suddenly bing told to adapt to something harming you should raise all kind of qustions and red flags.