There's a simple alternative to the current web - <AUTHOR> http://hapgood.us/2014/08/14/the-web-is-broken-and-we-should-fix-it/ <comment><USER2> Clearly I'm a biased observer, but I really think people should take steps to archive stuff that is important to them. Of course it's terrible when large sites go offline and take vast swaths of the Internet with them, and we should continue to shame the ones that do it. At the same time, if something is really important to you, you shouldn't store it in the form of links to random third-party servers.

One problem we need to solve as coders is giving people better tools for saving stuff. It's really hard right now to save a webpage (or worse, series of connected pages) with any confidence that you've captured everything you need to see it again if the original server disappears.

A project that I think has struck a really good balance between permanence and retaining authors' control over their writing is the Archive of Our Own (AO3). A bunch of fanfic authors got tired of sites falling out from under them, and decided to implement their own system, along with sensible governance and a way to fund its ongoing operations. The only broken links I've ever seen to AO3 are ones where the author consciously decided to take the material offline.

<comment><USER3> Many people just don't have the clue to make usable local archives.

You're also proposing mass copyright infringement which - stupidly in this example - is not legal.

<comment><USER4> If the system itself is federated the same way as the rest of the data, then it doesn't matter if it's legal or not.

You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs and you can't fix the world without breaking a few laws.

<comment><USER5> >You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs and you can't fix the world without breaking a few laws.

Heh. The NSA should put this on a t-shirt and sell it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _It's interesting that Andreessen can't see the solution, but perhaps expected._

What a weird dig. It's neither expected, nor established that he can't see a solution. I'm not as smart as Andreessen and I could come up with half a dozen solutions.

Author's favourite is fine but far, far from obvious. How viable is it to run your own federated wiki anyway? Are there packages for popular systems? Are there plugins for major browsers? Is there any federation actually happening? I skimmed the resources[1] and don't know. Does anyone here run one? That would be a solution, this seems more like an idea.

And it's not like no one's doing anything. There are services like Pocket or Readability to store an article until you want to read it, Evernotes, Google Keeps... Our very own 'idlewords will archive the contents of your bookmarks for a fee[2]. Finally, there's archive.org.

[1] [https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated- Wiki#ho...](https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki#how-to- participate)

[2] [https://pinboard.in/tour/#archive](https://pinboard.in/tour/#archive)

<comment><USER7> What he seems to be getting at is a much larger, more revolutionary approach to not just "the web", but "the internet" as we know it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking)

<comment><USER8> Thats a very academic and static view of content - I don't see how that would work in todays hyper-dynamic environment, where the Ads that are displayed on a site are priced by millisecond real-time auctions before they are delivered to the user, and websites are single-page apps with REST APIs in the background. How would that work?

<comment><USER9> By transclusion. You'd cache the big, reusable chunks of content, and serve up a fresh transient little document that transcluded both the larger content chunks and the dynamically-included advertisements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been thinking about this for a while now. Please check out my web app to solve this problem: [https://www.purplerails.com/](https://www.purplerails.com/)

The main idea is to use a browser extension to _automatically_ save pages that you read to the cloud (including the images, stylesheets etc) in the background. Saved pages are searchable and sharable.

<comment><USER11> This sounded really great until I went to the website and saw that I can't use my own cloud storage, only purplerails'. As soon as purplerails disappears all my saved pages are gone. I already have this functionality with diigo and it makes me very uncomfortable not to have a copy of the data.

<comment><USER10> Excellent point. The ability to download your data in a well-documented format is coming soon. See also my reply to hollerith on a native client.

Time limitations are what is preventing me from doing this.

Thanks for your feedback! Hope you will use Purplerails. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The Tyranny of Print" has a nice ring to it, but mediums that give the creator more control over appearance+behavior are going to lend themselves to crafting more compelling experiences.

Sure, not disappearing in 10 years (or whenever the original server goes poof) would also be nice, but it's of little benefit if no one ever sees the thing in the first place.

And disappearing is the default, natural state of things.

If I see some people playing music on a corner and return the next night to see they've left, I may be wistful, but it would be silly to argue "playing live music is broken and we should fix it".

If you think of web sites as performances put on for a limited time by the server, it doesn't seem so terrible that they disappear after a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _And disappearing is the default, natural state of things._

Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against entropy. The same is not the case for information disseminated in a controlled manner from privately owned servers.

> _If I see some people playing music on a corner and return the next night to > see they 've left, I may be wistful, but it would be silly to argue "playing > live music is broken and we should fix it"._

> _If you think of web sites as performances put on for a limited time by the > server, it doesn 't seem so terrible that they disappear after a while._

Thankfully, the generations who produced and preserved knowledge on paper, clay and stone before the onset of digital technology - that is, every generation of humans that has ever lived, except ours - did not think of books and libraries as throwaway pamphlets. And it would take more than an arbitrary interchange of modes of cultural production to argue that we should be doing otherwise in the technological circumstance we find ourselves in.

The "tyrants of the server" are not thinking of server-centric aggregation and dissemination of as a performance put on for a limited time: they are betting on it as the future of all human literary activity. Google doesn't want to read you a paragraph, take your money and say goodbye; it wants to swallow all the world's books and information, chop it to tiny pieces, store and own it forever, and extract the maximum profit from each tiny piece, without having you pay a penny. And it wants you to come back for more. The persistence of the server-centric model of content dissemination is not an accident; it is dictated by the political economy of the web brought about by the Googles of the world.

<comment><USER13> "Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against entropy."

Only the ones that have survived. For every book or tablet we have, there are certainly tens of THOUSANDS of which every copy ever published has been lost - most of those are ephemera that wouldn't mean much to us anyways, but the lost also include things that would be nice: the majority of Livy, any of the original source material for the Gospels, etc.

Even considerably more modern material has been vanishing at a significant rate; for instance, most of the output of the silent film era has _already_ been lost.

<comment><USER14> You're absolutely right. Maybe it's a fool's errand to try and hold onto the past.

But many people consider those losses to be an immeasurable tragedy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I will pay good money for a Chrome extension that does the following:

1) I can select (or do select all) Chrome bookmarks that I want to keep offline page backups/archives of (saved to google drive or dropbox or some such).

2) Whenever I want, instead of seeing the current online version of that bookmarked page, I can look up the originally bookmarked archived page.

3) It allows me to choose the level of links to the bookmarked page to also backup/archive (e.g., every single page that is linked to that page, x links deep, is also automatically archived -- think httrack or wget).

As someone on Hacker News once said to me: my bookmarks are my knowledge graph. As important to me as any library.

<comment><USER16> Pinboard archiving costs about $25 a month. Not sure it does the deep link archiving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Coming up with architectures to decentralize servers is the fun part. Convincing people outside of our bubble to use the new system is the very hard part. It has to be able to do something the regular person really wants that the previous system didn't allow. This is why Linux never caught up on the desktop.

Now excuse me while I go curate my socks collection.

</comment><comment><USER18> This wouldn't work for any web page that has dynamic content stored in a database. If the database no longer exists a decade from now this doesn't solve that problem.

Also, wouldn't this break analytics and reporting for most websites too? It'll be much tougher to track user behavior to improve user experience. And debugging using log data? I get what the author is suggesting but "fixing the web" this way would break more things that large websites and companies rely on.

<comment><USER2> Well, as the Internet once said to the music companies, it's not our fault if our new technology breaks your business model. People would find new ways to solve these problems.

<comment><USER19> It's fine to be that stubborn if you can win. But against the world of business that needs analytics... I suspect their business model trumps your technology for now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Link rot is a serious problem: [http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#link- rot](http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#link-rot)

>In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al. (2005) discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse (Spinellis, 2003, Lawrence et al., 2001). Nelson and Allen (2002) examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.

>Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; the Internet Archive has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn't use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).

<comment><USER2> My own research (which I hope to publish soon) shows a slightly better link rot rate for bookmarked URLs (which are presumably ones people are most interested in keeping). The attrition rate I see so far is roughly linear and about 5% a year. Which is still shocking by any non-web standard, but a little better than the figures cited above.

<comment><USER21> You do research using bookmarks on Pinboard as your dataset? May I ask how this data is used and disclosed to others?

<comment><USER2> [https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/08/researching_link_rot/](https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/08/researching_link_rot/)

<comment><USER21> _To run the experiment, I am going to be drawing a few thousand links at random from the entire pool of Pinboard bookmarks. This will include private bookmarks, which make up about half the Pinboard collection._

You chose to include everyone's private bookmarks in your research without asking their consent? What?

 _I will publish some aggregate information about what I find, and use it to seek glory, and persuade people to sign up for archiving. But I won 't release anything that could lead back to specific users or links._

There is roughly a boatload of evidence that anonymized datasets can be deanonymized in unexpected ways.

Even if you don't release any anonymized datasets, it's really not good that you decided to take such liberties with people's private links in the first place.

<comment><USER2> Why would I need consent to study the global link rot rate? Publishing it reveals no information about users, either individually or in the aggregate.

I've made an effort to let anyone who wants to opt out of the research, because I know people can have strong feelings about privacy.

I agree with you that publishing an 'anonymized' dataset would be a violation of privacy guarantees. I wouldn't even do it for public bookmarks.

<comment><USER21> "Private" means "private," not "private unless Maciej wants to study them."

I didn't get an email saying "There's a chance I might select your private bookmarks and examine them." A blog post doesn't count when you're messing with people's private data. Certainly it should be opt-in, and not opt-out?

You're doing this for a noble purpose, but for what it's worth, this is the first time my trust in you has ever felt violated.

People have entrusted you with years worth of private data, and you just asked, "Why should I ask permission to study their private links?"

Actually, as far as I can tell, your comment seems to implicitly assume that you already have consent to examine all private links, and that asking consent would only be necessary if you were planning on publishing something that might reveal some of their private links. Isn't that the opposite of privacy?

<comment><USER2> I think the tension between us is that you think 'private' means 'visible only to me', and I think private means 'never displayed to any other user, or on a public page'.

There are a thousand routine tasks that require me to have unrestricted access to bookmarks and URLs. I try to be as uninvasive as I can about it, but you have no way of verifying that.

If you want something to remain truly private to you—and I say this in full sympathy to your feelings—don't put it on a stranger's computer. Where there's a server, there's an admin.

<comment><USER21> It seems like "private" could be defined as, "This is my stuff, and if you want access to it, then come ask me. It's okay if you accidentally access it, but if you want to intentionally look through it, ask me first." It seems hard to argue that most people wouldn't feel that way about their own private stuff.

I fully understood the implications of giving you the data. I'm a fan of your work and your writing, and I had full confidence in your stewardship of my data. Essentially, I was totally okay with _you_ being the admin, or anyone you decided to hire, and I trusted you to take reasonable steps not to look through your users' private data unless it was to track down some bug, test some new feature, or some other incidental task that was unrelated to analyzing that private data.

What I didn't expect was that you'd specifically and intentionally create a program whose sole purpose was to analyze private user data and report on the results.

Why didn't I expect that? The only answer is that I should have expected that. I just didn't realize you were that type of developer. It was a bit shocking that someone who has trumpeted the benefits of sticking with businesses that haven't taken VC investment would explicitly break their users' trust like this.

In this case, you have both the legal right and the moral high ground. But intentionally seeking through your own users' private data without getting consent isn't something that can easily be forgotten.

<comment><USER22> You are on tilt. You lost it, completely, when you wrote "specifically and intentionally create a program whose sole purpose was to analyze private user data", a statement that is not only self-evidently false but deceptive. You've gone from "aggressive good-faith commenter whose points I often do not get" to "alarming and hostile" all in the span of a single comment thread.

Re-evaluate. You can often dig your way out of these stupid message board holes by simply apologizing. It's worked for me repeatedly.

<comment><USER21> You're right. I apologize. Both to you, for getting heated, and to Maciej, for misrepresenting his actions in this matter. The misrepresentation was accidental, but it happened nonetheless. My comments were also extremely disrespectful and totally uncalled for. I'm truly sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The fact that he thinks a federated wiki would be "simple" or "easy" leads me to believe he has not actually thought through the details of how it would work in practice.

<comment><USER24> It would not be simple or easy, but crypto-currency blockchains make it more possible than ever.

<comment><USER25> What does this mean? I can't understand the relationship between the two ideas?

<comment><USER24> In the most rudimentary form, this is how:

[http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks- photo...](http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks- photographs.html)

More reasonable ways of utilizing a blockchain for undeletable data are emerging, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I find Bret Victor's comparison between the internet and the LOC a little weird. I've always thought of the internet as a publishing/sharing medium, not an archive.

There are plenty of books that go out of print within ten years, we just happen to have infrastructure beyond publishers (libraries) that preserve published copies.

<comment><USER2> I think it's significant that the Library of Congress has funding, an official mandate, employees, a clear legal status, and stores complete copies of the works in its catalog. A similar model would work great for the Internet (and archive.org is doing its best to fill the role).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This would not work with dynamic content.

We already have systems like this (bittorrent, freenet, etc.), and almost no one sees them as a viable replacement for the web because they can't do 99.9% of the things we want (social networks, forums, email, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER28> > There's actually a pretty simple alternative to the current web. In > federated wiki, when you find a page you like, you curate it to your own > server (which may even be running on your laptop). That forms part of a > named-content system, and if later that page disappears at the source, the > system can find dozens of curated copies across the web.

This is a simple and very bad idea. If it were the norm, instead of one or no copies of a particular work online, you would have any number of "curated" copies of uncertain vintage, downloaded at different times in the lifetime of an original whose content might well have changed as time passed. You would have curations of curations, and curations of those, _ad infinitum_.

Pages that depended on remote Web content (increasingly common) and/or that linked to online references, would gradually become unreadable or incomprehensible as its links vanished into other offline "curations".

Not to mention the copyright issues. And I'm not crazy about the term "curation" either -- it's obviously meant to try to elevate the practice of downloading anything we please, without regard to copyright.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'd rather a page go offline than have it taken out of context. As if plagiarism wasn't bad enough already. (Yahoo Answers _cough_ )

These crooks will even steal your copyright notice. It's quite possible the original content producers are offline _because_ scraper thieves stole so much content that it's no longer possible to earn a living.

As an artist, this reminds me of the condescending attitude that gave us fake Rolexes, Facebook & North Korea's 28 state-approved haircuts. Either it's "just content" to stuff in a database somewhere or you understand the medium is the message too.

<comment><USER14> As someone with a teensy bit of film background, I have to disagree. The number of early Hollywood films that were lost is astounding. This is a massive part of our visual history that is completely gone. It will never be restored.

With the current environment on the internet, with DRM'd video, music and text, I have to assume that we will lose far more from this time period than we ever had before.

While I don't pirate things (I'd rather just consume Creative Commons and Public Domain content), I wholehartedly support people who are trying to archive the things that are part of our collective culture. When I have kids, I'd like to be able to show them where they came from.

<comment><USER29> I'm not against reproduction if care is taken to preserve what can be preserved, as close to the original as possible while giving credit, compensating creators, etc. In your example, I think reproduction/conservation technology was available but the studios couldn't justify spending the time/money it would cost to preserve their entire library. Who would have paid for that? I don't know. Supposedly, half of Van Gogh's entire lifetime output was burned because he was too poor to find a place to store it. At the same time, I'd rather see a bug-eaten Van Gogh with fugitive reds long faded away, than a flat, lifeless high-def copy. I suppose it's a complex subject and each work is unique. Sometimes I'm thrilled when I can find an old page in "Wayback Machine" but what they manage to save is typically broken and low quality.

<comment><USER14> I'm having a little trouble understanding your perspective. Copying films is good, letting bugs eat Van Gogh is good, but copying websites is bad?

Well, luckily, with digital technology, we can copy things flawlessly with very little cost. Unfortunately, most content creators are still stuck trying to adapt physical distribution models to the information age, which is why we're stuck with DRM. You can't say "The Medium is the Message" and then get angry because you're producing content for a medium that is infinately copyable.

We need to move to a model of perceiving data as holographic. Especially with the advent of blockchain technology, we're increasingly moving to a model where every node in a network contains the entire network. Trying to adapt 20th century Disney copyright to that paradigm is stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I like the idea of the federated wiki, but search engines rank copies of pages poorly, so it is not clear how visible copies would be after the original content disappears.

I used Evernote for years, but recently canceled the service because I spent too much time curating compared to reading old material.

One option that I am considering is archiving really good web content as web archive files and saving them locally in folders indicating the year of capture. Local file search would quickly find old stuff and if I stored the yearly web archive folders in Dropbox, I would have them available on different systems.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hosting your own server might not be a scalable solution either. There's a reason why SaaS is popular: it's not that easy.

On the downside: stuff hosted by others might go away. Web pages, web services, apps requiring server side support...

Investing a lot in a service makes it more painful to lose, like the apparently discontinued Amazon Cloud Drive (supposed to be a cheaper Dropbox): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219257](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219257)

</comment><comment><USER32> Named data networking of some kind is likely to become popular at some point. This is that kind of idea but doesn't look like a really general protocol since he mentions a specific wiki.

I wonder if there are browser extensions that do p2p caching/distribution of content. Then you could standardize a protocol used for that type of communication.

I believe there are many efforts along these lines. The trick is as usual getting everyone on the same page or at least working together more.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd love it if browsers natively supported URI's derived from cryptographic hashes of content by looking them up in a distributed store _a la_ BitTorrent. Imagine if Chrome supported such a thing, for example. Perfectly reliable cache-ability (or archive-ability), P2P hosting, ... All the good stuff for any web content that its creator wants to so expose, albeit at the price of immutability.

<comment><USER34> Especially under the current copyright regime, finding some solution that preserves the intent of the creator to publish in a fixed format, would be a great component of a distributed publishing system. I don't think this proposal has as good a fair use defense as the Internet Archive wayback machine does.

In the world today, we often think of publishing online as providing access to something under our control. I think a technology that aims to solve these problems should embody a different spirit, one closer to "making public". The word "mine" doesn't need to imply ownership in the sense of exclusive control. I mean, "My children" is at least as meaningful a relationship as "my property". Some kind of copyright license ability built into a distributed document publishing system would be nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think the federated wiki is a neat idea, but in it's current incarnation, I find it to be exceedingly unlikely that a page I'm looking at there will stay around 10 years.

Even if I'm making a copy of every page I see, I'm not sure I'll still run a federated wiki on my server in 10 years.

I don't think this is a real solution to the problem posed by Bret Victor.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's a great idea for a real problem that needs to be solved. Still, for dynamic pages, what would be the desired behaviour? Updating it whenever possible, which could lead to the specific info we wanted to save potentially disappearing or changing? Leaving it outdated? It is really something that I cannot answer.

</comment><comment><USER37> The museums, libraries and cultural heritage institutions are working hard on digital preservation. I think there's a lot to learn from there. Check out this for an instance: [http://www.lockss.org/about/how-it- works/](http://www.lockss.org/about/how-it-works/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Right to be forgotten?

<comment><USER27> >Right to be forgotten?

A ridiculous concept of a "right". I do not recognize that anyone has a right to force other people to forget things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Y U no archive.org?

<comment><USER40> Archive.org doesn't have everything and their archives can be cleared of specific content on request of the copyright holder.

There is a big copyright issue here as in the UK we don't have the relatively liberal Fair Use exceptions that are in the USC - we only just got permission to format shift and make personal-use backups (so MP3 players [using tracks ripped from CD] are legal as of June this year!). Copying down a website, beyond caching, is generally speaking copyright infringement for those in the UK.

<comment><USER41> > their archives can be cleared of specific content on request of the > copyright holder.

Not only that. If a domain expires and is picked up by a squatter, the squatter can instruct Archive.org to delete ALL copies of content archived from that domain. Unfortunately many do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> We changed the title to the first sentence of the article because it is less linkbaity.</comment>


Hacker Needed:  CustomAnything.com - <AUTHOR>

Hi Hackers,
If this posting is inappropriate just let me know in comments.
I'm looking for a partner in this project.  Simply, I will complete the work necessary to make this website a proper business entity. Incorporation, finance, legal, revenue model, etc. You will create an online application that exceeds all industry standards.
Currently there is a reverse auction script running at customanything.com
Clearly this site is unacceptable in current form, it is just a mockup created by me.
Can you make this site look and feel like mint.com?
If you are interested in this project please contact me at email@example.com
Testing the waters.
Very Sincerely,
Matt

<comment><USER2> Your e-mail address does not appear to be working.

<comment><AUTHOR> arrghh, its firstname.lastname@example.com</comment></comment>


Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2017/04/11/twitter-delete-united-airlines-tweets/#.tnw_NIWU4Eup <comment><USER2> Surprised that people here are taking this at face value. Why would Twitter remove these tweets from random users while leaving the vast majority of negative tweets in place? No proof has been given. Indeed, this Jay Beecher's allegedly deleted tweet is visible as far as I can tell: [https://mobile.twitter.com/dancow/status/851808188567388161](https://mobile.twitter.com/dancow/status/851808188567388161)

edit: To be fair, Beecher says that my tweet refers to tweets he sent out after the original tweet was deleted. Indeed, his screenshot shows a different timestamp for the original tweet. Not knowing him at all, I have no reason to accuse him of deliberately making this up. But burden of evidence is still on him, and hard to accept claims of random Tweet deleting when, as I write, #NewUnitedAirlinesMottos is a top trend (as it has been all morning), and we have much more definitive evidence that Twitter manually shuts down controversial trending hashtags.

On a sidenote, how is it possible for a user to have a screenshot of an old tweet unless they took it before it was deleted? Other than a caching issue, I thought all Twitter clients (especially the official one) removed tweets marked for deletion? [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5955021/detect-tweet- dele...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5955021/detect-tweet-deletion- with-twitter-streaming-api)

<comment><USER3> My tweet from last night is gone. It's not "alleged".

<comment><USER2> Yes, it is still an allegation. Nothing has been proven beyond your assertion.

<comment><USER4> You could settle this by experiment easily if we're trying to prove this to you: go ahead and try posting one, in similar vein to the others. There'd be a false-negative rate if you do it too late so I would try it now.

<comment><USER2> I've been posting negative-sentiment tweets about United since yesterday. If we do accept the premise that Twitter would do something like this, we should also assume that they'd be selective in which tweets they've deleted, such as tweets that aren't likely to be noticed when gone.

There are too many independent variables and unknowns for there to be an easy experiment. In any case, I'd be happy for other kinds of evidence. If Twitter is silencing tweets about United, is it part of a corporate ad package, in which case, other folks would've heard about this kind of deal for other companies?

<comment><USER5> Of all tweets to delete, why would they choose ones that aren't likely to be seen anyway?

<comment><USER2> The premise is so unlikely (given what we know of Twitter's past behavior) that if we accept it, we have to accept motives that are beyond our understanding. That said, it's hard to conceptualize even just the metric that they might be optimizing for.

I mean, randomly pruning negative sentiment tweets for a given topic might allow Twitter to tell United, "Hey, we removed 12,000 negative tweets about your brand" (leaving out the fact that there are 12,000,000 negative United tweets total). Or maybe by removing these random tweets, Twitter reduces the overall spread and diversity of this negative sentiment, as many people are content to just retweet what the most popular Twitter users have said about United. But...what would that fix? Twitter already has algorithms in place that make it hard for you to see things either outside of your own filter bubble or otherwise not popular content.

For example, it's well known that many bots are triggered to auto-reply to Trump tweets, as the space devoted to tweet replies are seen as prime advertising space [0]. But I never see those merch-selling bots. The top replies I see to Trump tweets are either from my network, or are replies from popular (usually political) accounts. I have to dig very far to find those random bot replies.

For me, a major argument against Twitter deleting tweets is that it has many other effective ways to suppress content that would be virtually undetectable without wide-scale analysis of their data.

[0] [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/12/weird...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/12/weird- media-ecosystem/510911/)

<comment><USER4> > The premise is so unlikely (given what we know of Twitter's past behavior) > that if we accept it, we have to accept motives that are beyond our > understanding.

What you and I both know of Twitter's behavior is unlikely to be shared knowledge between us, unless it's been your job to follow the company for awhile in which case I would have to defer to you. But I still expect you to tell me what it is we should both know.

The Twitter I know is happy to shill for political reasons, that puts the possibility of money being given for damage control at corporate as being plausible to me, since there is more money in corporate than politics and Twitter itself is profit-driven with a shit business model. The Twitter you know is not? We could both be wrong. Without clarifying what you mean by "what we know" I wouldn't be so trigger happy with the rhetoric just yet.

<comment><USER2> We know these things about Twitter relating to censorship:

They have shut down Twitter accounts for abusing the TOS, and this process is on a case-by-case basis, and can affect well-known users such as Milo Yiannopoullous and Martin Shkreli:

[http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/19/breaking-milo- suspe...](http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/19/breaking-milo-suspended- twitter-20-minutes-party/)

[http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/08/pharma-legend- marti...](http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/08/pharma-legend-martin- shkreli-suspended-twitter/)

Twitter also deletes content in response to valid legal requests and copyright claims, according to their own transparency report:

[https://transparency.twitter.com/en.html](https://transparency.twitter.com/en.html)

We also know that Twitter has applied crowdsourcing/human editing to search query analysis:

[http://blog.echen.me/2013/01/08/improving-twitter-search- wit...](http://blog.echen.me/2013/01/08/improving-twitter-search-with-real- time-human-computation)

I suspect that Trending Topics also has some curation, or at least a manual blacklist, but couldn't find official mention of that.

We also know that Twitter has been sensitive to the tension between being an unfiltered source of information and a platform that amplifies abuse. In January, the company admitted that it "didn't move fast enough" in dealing with abuse complaints:

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/01/twitt...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/01/twitter-hate-speech-abuse-crackdown/)

In March, they announced new measures for reporting abusive tweets/accounts. Under a heading "Leveraging our technology to reduce abusive content", they describe new ways in which an abusive account can be limited, including suppressing the visibility of tweets: [https://blog.twitter.com/2017/our- latest-update-on-safety](https://blog.twitter.com/2017/our-latest-update-on- safety)

So we've seen that Twitter will shut down accounts and tweets based on an interpretation of TOS (i.e. what constitutes "abuse") in ways that not everyone agrees with. At the same time, Twitter knows that its special sauce is unfettered speech, so much so that it was slow to even act on shutting down accounts openly associated with ISIS: [https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/tw...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/twitter- isis/460269/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's really bad is that technically this flight wasn't overbooked at all. United decided to fly one of their crews when the plane was already booked to capacity and had _paying passengers_ 'voluntarily' (what a funny way to use that word) give up their seats so they could move their employees around.

It's a totally ridiculous situation and their media messaging doesn't help at all.

<comment><USER7> Are you sure it wasn't also overbooked?

They pulled passengers to fly crew, but that doesn't mean it wasn't overbooked.

<comment><USER6> They claimed it was overbooked but that has not been substantiated with any evidence other than the company making that claim and using it to pre-empt those passengers in favor of their dead-headers. The proof that they are bullshitting is that the passengers were already on board when suddenly the plane was declared overbooked.

Which to me sounds like UA using an excuse to bump passengers off a flight they are already confirmed on in order to fix some kind of crew scheduling issue.

<comment><USER8> That's exactly what they did. Someone up the chain made a mistake. Other airlines board must-ride passengers (i.e. crew deadheading to the next destination) before passengers, but this did not happen.

Due to FAA regulations, the movement and sleep requirements of crew is enforced big time. In this case, they had a higher priority than a full-fare passenger (Must Ride), and even though it's morally wrong, it is well within the airline's right to remove any passenger at any time for any reason.

<comment><USER9> "airline's right to remove any passenger at any time for any reason"

1\. Absurd.

Flight attendant: Sir, you farted, we're going to remove you. Passenger: Umm, we're at 42,000 feet?! Flight attendant: Too bad, we can remove you at any time for any reason.

2\. Citation for this "right"?

In the airline's contract of carriage I see explicit reasons for being removed from an aircraft, and none of them apply to this case.

<comment><USER10> If I understand correctly, odor is in fact one explicitly-stated valid reason for being removed from an aircraft. (Not at 42,000 feet, of course.)

<comment><USER9> Yes, for United it's contract of carriage rule 21, H, reason 16: malodorous condition. It's funny that this is under the auspices of safety though. I guess the logic is if someone stinks enough it might cause disorderly conduct by other passengers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Given twitters track record upholding user privacy in the face of lawsuits and the like [0] I'm somewhat skeptical that they'd play ball with United in this way.

I'd suspect it's more likely that United and their twitter drone army are "reporting the tweet(s)" as "abusive or harmful" and if enough twitter users do that it would make sense that twitter would auto-remove / moderate said tweet.

Of course, it's strange that the originators of the tweet don't get notified or see their tweet after moderation - so I'm likely wrong.

[0]:[http://time.com/4731403/twitter-donald-trump-alt-uscis- lawsu...](http://time.com/4731403/twitter-donald-trump-alt-uscis-lawsuit/)

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure I'd take Twitter's refusal to unmask an anti-Trump account as purely upholding privacy. I'd consider Twitter to be pretty anti-Trump, so politics likely play a part there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm also a little skeptical of this. It seems too random. If it were an algorithm, it's hard to know what the parameters were that it was looking for. And if it as a person, it's hard to know why it was so sporadic and limited.

I wonder if it can just be explained by user error? Do we /know/ these tweets were actually ever on twitter? Perhaps the tweet about united failed to post. (It's happened to me). And if that happens to a few people who posted about United, you then get a conspiracy. But if the same thing happens to the cat picture you tweeted, it's chalked up to a bug and forgotten.

Though given Twitter's recent track record with "ghost-deleting" and "shadow- banning", this sort of thing - if true - wouldn't be surprising.

</comment><comment><USER14> The main threads on Reddit were deleted also: [https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/comments/64jbfq/1458098779...](https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/comments/64jbfq/1458098779_doctor_violently_dragged_from/)

Many more: [https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/](https://www.reddit.com/r/undelete/)

<comment><USER15> Jesus Christ, what's going on?

How can we counteract this? They absolutely deserve the bad publicity they're (or would be) getting!

<comment><USER16> Let's not act like this is some massive conspiracy. It's one /r/videos thread was deleted because it broke the sub's rules. There were literally dozens of other /r/videos posts on the subject upvoted to /r/all. It's not like the sub's mods were hiding the incident.

<comment><USER17> The /r/videos rule that was broken is "No Police Brutality/Harassment". They specifically allow videos of police who "have not over-stepped the limits of the law". Let's not pretend that isn't a politically-motivated rule.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_4_-_no_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_4_-_no_police_brutality.2Fharassment)

<comment><USER18> I love[1] how police brutality is so common nowadays that a random subreddit must create rules basically saying "Yeah we've all seen these shit; I know it's bad but please take it elsewhere because otherwise we'll be swamped."

[1] By which I mean I hate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Twitter had a moment filled with negative tweets about United at the top of its curated Moments tab for the entire day yesterday. Even now I see a trending hashtag and moments about the incident. If their goal was to suppress this story, they couldn't have done a worse job. These accusations sound like paranoia to me.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, looking over my timeline for yesterday, there are still tons of angry tweets about the incident. This article kind of appears to be jumping to conclusions.

<comment><USER21> Perhaps they are targeting astroturfing campaign(s).

r/TodayILearned has at least 6 TIL United horror stories ATM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's an update on the page:

 _Update 2, April 11, 11:15ET: Some readers have suggested that the allegedly deleted tweets might have initially appeared as replies to now-deleted tweets, which would explain why they are missing. However, numerous users contacted by TNW rejected this premise, claiming the missing posts were standard tweets._

I'm betting it is something like this, or a related "Twitter did some weird UI change which no one understands again".

If it's not, then it's going to be a bug, and Twitter will apologize and attempt to restore the tweets.

Deleting these tweets isn't in Twitter's interest, no matter how much United pays for ads.

Edit: looking into this a bit more, it looks like it only affects Tweets which have @united mentioned. I suspect it's triggering Twitter's anti-Troll flooding measures, which is clearly wrong.

It'll be interesting to see how Twitter responds, given how slowly they ship any changes.

<comment><USER22> Replying to myself. A number of the accounts listed by thenextweb do have Tweets to @united visible (now?) prior to them complaining about Tweets being deleted.

Eg: complaining about Tweet being deleted: [https://twitter.com/iknowimbitter/status/851640007500718081](https://twitter.com/iknowimbitter/status/851640007500718081) Original(?) tweet, 7 hours prior: [https://twitter.com/iknowimbitter/status/851544321564323841](https://twitter.com/iknowimbitter/status/851544321564323841)

Complaint: [https://twitter.com/TalkIBC/status/851604796113129476](https://twitter.com/TalkIBC/status/851604796113129476) Original, 1 hour prior: [https://twitter.com/TalkIBC/status/851581587967934464](https://twitter.com/TalkIBC/status/851581587967934464)

Complaint: [https://twitter.com/MickFerry/status/851564908915437568](https://twitter.com/MickFerry/status/851564908915437568) Original, 6 hours prior: [https://twitter.com/MickFerry/status/851474942789079040](https://twitter.com/MickFerry/status/851474942789079040)

I tend to think my theory about spam/troll filtering might be close to correct, but I look forward to finding out exactly what happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wonderful, so Twitter is now a tool for corporate propaganda, Google is providing Censorship-as-a-Service API, Facebook is removing links classified as "Fake News(tm)", Reddit is deleting whatever mods don't agree with etc. Seems like we are going full steam into a dystopian society. I think I should start reading Solzhenitsyn to prepare for what is coming...

<comment><USER24> > Wonderful, so Twitter is now a tool for corporate propaganda, Google is > providing Censorship-as-a-Service API, Facebook is removing links classified > as "Fake News(tm)", Reddit is deleting whatever mods don't agree with etc.

This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large part - by ads. When it came to choosing between serving the users vs. the advertisers the latter would always win in the long run because they were the _paying_ customers.

What's needed is some sort of "public" space on the internet that's not controlled by corporate (and increasingly advertising) interests. Non-profits like Wikipedia and archive.org come close, but aren't meant for real time communication. Ironically, technologies like SMS are also somewhat neutral because they were conceived before advertising became the dominant business model on mobile and have no hooks for "curation" and "engagement".

<comment><USER25> "This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large part - by ads."

Unsustainable situations always seem to go on for longer than you expect, but I wonder if we're finally getting to be just a year or three out from Adpocalypse, when the ad-supported internet companies finally end up having to face head on that you can not serve two masters.

I wonder if there's going to be a market developing for services that look like current services, but actually cost money somehow. Probably a billion- dollar-level opportunity for figuring out how to charge for a Facebook or Google or Twitter a couple of bucks a month.

(If you are seriously inclined to take this on, which I would support, bear in mind that the answer to these questions, for all sorts of reasons, is never "It's just Facebook, with a subscription." Facebook, to take one example, has been deeply structured around advertising for years now. You can't take the end result and just remove advertising from it. You need to start back at the beginning and rethink the whole thing, figuring out how to get people to spend some money on it. And I can all but promise "It's Facebook, but cares about your privacy" is a dead letter too, as that has been tried. I don't know what the answers are, just some of the problems. It'll take some serious thought to solve this.)

<comment><USER26> >I wonder if there's going to be a market developing for services that look like current services, but actually cost money somehow. Probably a billion- dollar-level opportunity for figuring out how to charge for a Facebook or Google or Twitter a couple of bucks a month.

You're really overestimating people's willingness to pay for a service that's already free and convenient. There's really no good comp for tens of millions of users switching from a free service to a paid service just to avoid ads/conspiracy theories.

<comment><USER27> There are tons of alternative social networks to Facebook, I run several of them. People are more than happy to pay a few $$ a month to not be tracked, censored or advertised at.

Even completely free you can be profitable just selling 'credits' to send e-gifts etc. Facebook is functionally crippled, they still don't even have a dislike button.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _There are tons of alternative social networks to Facebook, I run several of > them._

Would you care to tell us more about this/these ??

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Huh, kinda surprised - looks like they deleted my tweet asking United about this incident.

</comment><comment><USER29> The real outrage in the airline industry is the fact that we allowed security theatre in the form of TSA to get so damn powerful in the first place. There is no reason to be allowing naked x-ray vision scans, pat downs that border on or actually are assault, etc.

As Bruce Schneier said, the one thing they did right after 9/11 was to make the cock-pit doors reinforced and locked from the inside.

Do you think rich people on their own jets get TSA patdowns the same way? No. What we are creating is a state of freedom for the rich, and compliant abuse for the majority of the citizens.

Since the new TSA regulations, I have only flown twice, for these very reasons. The first time I was so outraged at the scanners I was going to protest, but they just sent me through an old school metal detector and I was on my way. The second time, I only got the scanner leaving London, and being in a different country I knew I didn't have the same rights of protest as in the US.

I once called in to NPR while in D.C. when they had a TSA guy on the air. I asked if it wasn't an obvious conflict of interest for the guy at TSA who approved the scanner purchase to immediately go to work for that scanner company, and referenced the above Bruce Schneier quote. I got some deft wiggling out of an answer and my number was blocked the next time I tried to call into an NPR show. (not calling too much, had called in maybe 4 times in the past six months)

It's like someone somewhere said, "the terrorists can't take our freedoms if we take them away first!" (Of course, the real terrorists are the bankers and financiers)

We need to rethink the patriot act, the TSA, homeland security, NDAA, AUMF, and every other peice of legislation the corrupt and/or blackmailed congress allowed to pass (in violation of their oaths) in the clamor post 9/11.

<comment><USER30> >(Of course, the real terrorists are the bankers and financiers)

You lost me at this point. That's hateful populist rhetoric.

<comment><USER31> He's saying they are more likely to hurt you.

<comment><USER30> That's not the definition of a terrorist

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder why Twitter is doing this? What is their incentive for deleting negative tweets about another unrelated corporation? It's not like Twitter has a stake in United. And would they do it just for money? I know they are turning at a loss but this does not seem like a scalable business model...

<comment><USER33> Maybe somebody high up on twitter has a stake in united

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If overbooking ever happens, here is what they should do: Ask a representative of each atomic passenger group to write down a number of dollars on a napkin, and the number of tickets they represent. An individual flying alone might write down $1000-1. A mother of 2 kids might write down $2500-3. Collect the bids, and sort them. Then if you need to swap 4 seats, select the four lowest bids, and give them cash.

Overbooking probably makes sense in general - it should lower costs for everyone in theory. If they used this bid system that I proposed, they would be less afraid of overbooking, and do more of it - until an equilibrium of opportunity lost to empty seats equals the expected payout to napkin bidders.

Even if there is no economic benefit to this system, the voluntary aspect will save some heartache.

<comment><USER35> This system they have in place is the reason you can find flights for extremely low fares that were once unheard of. Obviously this could have been handled better, but I think people should bear in mind that these inconveniences are the very reason they're saving so much money. This is a rough instance of it, but if you buy a first class ticket you can bet this won't be happening to you. All that said, everyone has the right to show disapproval and take their money elsewhere.

<comment><USER36> I think there's a few tragedies here that people seem to be missing.

1\. A man not clearly identified as a man of authority was empowered to physically remove a passenger from an airplane. I've seen 3 videos so far and while it's not obvious that the passenger questioned his authority, he should have. Given how things unfolded, I wouldn't be surprised to hear next that the man who removed the passenger was actually a nearby manager who was not trained or experienced in removing passengers from airplanes.

2\. I think people are actually repulsed by the revocation of permission to fly. Compliance of a passenger denied boarding simply implies that the passenger continues to be in his present location. Here compliance required the passenger to perform work on behalf of the airline. While it's a pretty minor amount of work, I think people are more accustomed to restrictions of their actions. They are understandably more sensitive to giving control to others over what actions they must perform, particularly since it was unexpected in this scenario and the man in question had no frame of reference for determining if his actions were reasonable or not.

3\. The execution by the "office" in question was abysmal at best. He showed no patience or sensitivity and the doctor showed no sign of aggression. The force used to remove the man was unquestionably extreme. Someone like that probably would have responded very well to a uniformed police officer. The other two men had uniforms but they didn't look that official and they weren't the ones removing the man. Simply bringing out your handcuffs is likely enough to get compliance. The "officer" should be fired here for performing poorly.

<comment><USER35> I couldn't agree more with you when it comes to the authority and his execution. I've just seen a lot of people railing against the system of overbooking and the general shitiness of modern air travel. I spent most of my childhood flying as a non-rev thanks to my dad, so I got very used to flying when there was empty seats, and on occasion I was asked to get out of the plane after already seated because a higher priority showed up late. It was always a heart breaker, but that's the life of a non-rev. So I guess I have a different perspective, and think people should appreciate cheap air travel. Again, all of that having been said, people should voice their opinions and hopefully this will change how these incidents are handled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This seems extraordinarily unlikely.

<comment><USER38> Care to explain why?

<comment><USER37> And argue with people who badly want it to be true? No, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Twitter presumably just 're-accomodating' these tweets, nothing to worry about.

</comment><comment><USER40> Assuming this is true (which I don't believe it is), why would they do this? I doubt UAL is paying them enough in advertising dollars to justify something like this.

This isn't like silencing/promoting selective political speech where the personal ideals of the heads of the company are being pushed forward. Unless Dorsey _really_ likes flying United.

<comment><USER41> Even if it's not intentional, they may have some algorithms that "throw the baby out with the bathwater" as the saying goes.

We're already seeing Google's recent "extremism curation" hit a lot of youtubers that shouldn't be anywhere close to being impacted by it, and yet they still are. If Google's DeepMind/Brain AI can't properly curate this sort of stuff, I can't imagine Twitter is any better at it.

After governments keep pushing them to "deal with extremism" I wouldn't be surprised if they took overly aggressive actions to be on the "safe side." I also think they're wrong to do that, but in Google's case they are obviously concerned about more advertisers dumping them.

<comment><USER42> I am curious about DeepMind/Brain's role in the curating search results. Would you mind explaining more?

Also, I am not sure I understand your reference to Youtube. Is this specifically about Youtube recommended videos in the sidebar?

<comment><USER43> Not sure if it's only about the sidebar, but many youtubers were apparently deemed 'unsafe' by google and their videos stopped appearing all over youtube.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I would like to see more proof before I believe anything. People on the internet (especially Reddit) love to invent conspiracies. Is it likely that both Twitter and Reddit admins are somehow in cahoots with United Airlines?

</comment><comment><USER45> Tools such as Akasha[1] and IPFS[2] and ZeroNet[3] can't arrive on the scene soon enough, imho.

I think we're on the cusp of seeing these corporate-tools lose their grip on the populace, once Akasha becomes usable by the common man.

[1] [https://akasha.world](https://akasha.world) [2] [http://ipfs.io/](http://ipfs.io/) [3] [http://zeronet.io/en](http://zeronet.io/en)

<comment><USER46> Hooking it onto blockchains provides what advantage over pure IPFS?

<comment><USER45> Think: ownership.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Do not ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or in this case probably engineering oversight. No affiliation or affection to twitter.

<comment><USER48> Is it stupidity to think that twitter wouldn't try to monetize itelf by selling "reputation management services" to corporate customers? I guess one can get away with a lot of malice if they just affect the outward appearance of stupidity.

<comment><USER47> Do you know for a fact that Twitter monetizes using "reputation management systems"? I am just suggesting keeping an open mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> error-code 1) Twitter is a company that owes you, and the public, nothing. The same goes for Facebook and Google. There is no law I know of that prevents them from running their platform however they like. So what if they sensor or take sides? It is their right. If you don't like it, use or build a competing service (as long as Net Neutrality exists).

2) Negative tweets about United could be considered "Fake News" in my opinion. Not because I am some "shill" for United. But because the facts are it was Chicago airport police that escalated the situation to excessive force. The United employees were not involved in that part at all whatsoever. In fact they will probably hesitate to call the authorities for help ever again.

</comment><comment><USER49> This may serve as an example of a lot of the things wrong in society. First, as a show of how good faith has broken down. Then, to demonstrate the logical contortions performed by people who are otherwise perfectly capable of critical thinking, but really want to see their mistrust in every institution, or human, be true.

This alleged conspiracy would involve

(a) some rather rapid negotiations for a sum that wouldn't be much below the market value of Twitter,

(b) the believe that now, 24h+ after it broke on Twitter, it has not made the jump to many other distribution channels already, and

(c) the complete idiocy of United and Twitter in thinking such a scheme would not be noticed or, if noticed, would not result in coverage orders-of- magnitudes worse than what they deleted. Oh, and

(d) apparently they forgot to delete the original tweets, which were the one actually being shared.

All that is quite implausible, even though it may be possible. Here's an alternative theory: Twitter has, in an attempt to combat spam, implemented a filter that registers a sudden rise in certain keywords, maybe within a negative context. Once triggered, it throttles new tweets that match automatically, until someone overrides it manually. This system just failed spectacularly, because it had never before seen such an amount of tweets with such an imbalance of sentiment.

I'm not saying that the latter theory is true. I just believe it's much more plausible than Twitter just throwing its business away. And while I don't care much about this specific company, I believe something larger is amiss when every single event is always interpreted in the worst (barely) possible way.

If everyone and everything is assumed to be corrupt, pretty soon that's how it's going to be–either because it doesn't make a difference for the pitchfork-people if I'm really corrupt (or just incompetent/unlucky) so why bother? Or because those with pitchforks don't see problem with becoming corrupted themselves. Everyone is doing it, after all.

So, in an attempt to stem the tide of corruption, people scream for transparency, and everyone is accused, everyone is a subject, everyone is under investigation. That, however, cannot work: a liberal democracy does not have the means to audit and control everyone. A free society, and an advanced economy, is sustained by 98%+ doing the right thing even when nobody is looking. That, and the trust it brings, and the institutions it makes possible, is basically the difference between Canada and Somalia.

So I'll delay my scorn for a day and see what Twitter has to offer, and I'll needle the guy I know there with jokes and watch him turn red, and I'll know that moment of shame is (for him) more of an incentive to do better than a million hateful tweets would ever be.

<comment><USER50> I was in the same camp until I personally witnessed administrative-level collusion to block certain topics on Reddit. I observed the entire event, from the initial breaking story, to its meteoric amplification, and finally to the censorship and aftermath. I didn't believe it was possible, or that such things were happening, until I saw it happen for myself.

Since then, I have seen it happen many times on various platforms. Twitter is particularly guilty of suppressing hash tags that go against their politics. Google does the same by manipulating their trending topics report.

<comment><USER51> I don't see why this comment was killed. The comment does seem to be relevant to the broader discussion, and it isn't aggressive or hostile in tone. I don't fully agree with all parts of it, but it should be allowed to stand in the conversation.

<comment><USER50> I believe they shadowbanned me for that comment. Can you see this one?

<comment><USER51> Yes, I can see it, so if you were shadowbanned then you aren't anymore. (For the record, I'm not sure if HN issues shadowbans for anything other than obvious spam.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Interesting sidenote:

Last Thursday, after Trump illegally bombed Syria, #HandsOffSyria was becoming reasonably popular on Twitter. I remember making a few offhand tweets with the hashtag and the app on my phone suggesting it.

Last Saturday, I happened to be photographing the #HandsOffSyria protest which was going on in Toronto. I made a tweet about it and noticed that, oddly enough, the Twitter app was no longer suggesting the tag.

Seems to be working again now fwiw ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Perhaps the (presumed human) moderators at hasty (or unpopular) decision makers?

</comment><comment><USER53> If there was a large-scale quiet-down campaign in force at Twitter, it would almost certainly be a shadow ban. Offending tweets would still be visible to everyone, they would just simply not show up in feeds.

Considering Twitter Moments ran a wildly negative story for the whole day yesterday about this, I think we can safely rule out collusion.

Someone else mentioned an army of flaggers marking these tweets as offensive and automatically get pulled, which makes more sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER54> 1) Tweets should be immutable (since they are in essence immutable anyway as soon as a single Internet copy is made)

2) The evidence here is slim

</comment><comment><USER55> I'll definitely not be flying United or Delta ever again after this incident. Over-selling spaces on a plane is a scummy practice and shokldn't be allowed. When someone needs to cancel they still pocket the change fee or keep tne entire fee if they miss the flight. Seems like borderline fraud.

<comment><USER56> Overbooking is an extremely common practice. In fact, I don't know of a single airline that _doesn 't_ overbook. On a plane with hundreds of seats you almost always get cancellations; the small amount of times you don't, you almost always get people volunteering to be pushed to the next flight in exchange for money (I've done it myself a few times as I don't mind working in airports).

Cases like these are exceedingly rare. There's a million fucked up things with how they handled the situation, starting with assaulting the passenger. Overbooking itself is the last thing you should be worried about.

<comment><USER57> As with you, I'm not opposed to overbooking, but:

1) Overbooking should be handled at the gate.

2) I'd like to see an incredibly high legal ceiling for compensating passengers who voluntarily reschedule. $800 (4x the ticket price) or we'll drag some of you out of the plane is ridiculous. And let's not forget that the ceiling is only a legal limitation; it was United's discretion to stop the bidding at the legal ceiling and use force.

<comment><USER56> > _Overbooking should be handled at the gate_

It generally is. No idea why it wasn't in this case.

United completely fucked this up in so many ways. Like you said:

1\. The overbooking issue should have been handled at the gate. Deplaning should only be done in extreme circumstances, this was not one.

2\. The extra crew should have been boarded on a different flight when they didn't get enough volunteer leavers.

3\. A much higher ceiling should be placed on the ticket compensation for the extreme cases, through an auction. I don't know if this is legally possible though, but if it's not I'm sure something can be worked out in miles/free future tickets/etc. Pre-flight deplaning costs a lot more in wasted time/delays and even more when it's forced with extra costs in bad press/publicity, security calls, etc. This is a classic example of wasting millions to save hundreds.

4\. Security obviously used excessive force. The entire ordeal should have been halted and the CEO should have immediately spoken against their actions rather than come out supporting them.

It's one thing to make idiotic decisions, follow idiotic policies and cost people money. Physical assault is in a completely different ballpark. We have video evidence of what happened -- I hope to see the officer fired and prosecuted. I'm not holding my breath though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Can Twitter just die already?

</comment><comment><USER59> Facebook deleted my post with a link to the post the man's wife made that had a video of it, also deleted were the comments I and my friends made about it.

I posted the video again from YouTube as soon as I found out.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm with fennecfoxen and matt4077 on this one: it's a bug in a spam filter.

Or maybe a hate speech or terrorism filter. Does Twitter have those?

Meanwhile, it's a good time for Mastodon (and secure scuttlebutt).

</comment><comment><USER61> Without the strictly chronological timeline anymore they can do whatever the hell they want with your timeline and chalk it up to "the algorithm".

</comment><comment><USER62> If this is Twitter's new "PR management" service, I guess they're in for a whole new level of Streisand effect.

</comment><comment><USER63> Twitter is already in a bad state as is - I wonder why they decided to turn it's back on the public now.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is true. I just checked mine from last night and it's gone.

I have posted a new one. Let's see if it stays.

<comment><USER6> Without a link to your new tweet this coming from an account that was made just to post this comment does not carry a lot of weight.

<comment><USER3> You want a link to the deleted tweet? Which by definition of "deleted" is no more.

<comment><USER6> No, to the new one, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> That's what happens when yoy decide to censor "hate speech" or "fake news".

<comment><USER65> That's a lesson that's been a while in coming, and I'm not under any illusion that people are going to learn it any time soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Would not at all surprise me. Twitter regularly censors popular right-of- center Twitter accounts.

<comment><USER67> Was sceptical of this myself until I experienced it. Scott Adams completely disappeared from my feed for, well I'd like to say months but can't pinpoint when it started. I assumed he had just given up his account/been banned. Until one day I searched for him, and there he was still posting. He had actively tweeted while I was logged on yet it was no-where on my timeline! I scrolled back a bit collarating tweets that appeared for me on the homepage versus times that he had posted, he was no-where to be seen and presumably under some sort of shadow block by Twitter itself. Before someone comes in and says it was due to preferences etc, I don't follow a huge bunch of accounts, I don't like/retweet or even tweet.

<comment><USER68> Beware the filter bubble

<comment><USER69> The entire point of Twitter was that there was no such filter, it would just show the tweets of everybody you followed in a chronological order. That's why we are all pissed.

<comment><USER70> I don't know if that was the "entire point" of Twitter. I am certainly glad that there is a bit of filtering. I recall the old days where most of my feed consisted of noise, today I actually get some value out of it.

<comment><USER69> If there was too much noise in your feed it was because you followed the wrong people, simply.

<comment><USER70> Sure. But my Twitter feed is not important enough for me to do something about that. As it is, it's somewhat entertaining (I check it perhaps once a week) whereas if it was unfiltered I never would. So I am at least one person for whom it makes business sense for Twitter to filter in order to keep me engaged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Let's say that Twitter isn't doing this; I do know a _lot_ of companies however that will bend to clients $$$, which is really unfortunate.

The reason we're willing to believe that Twitter is doing this, is because so many other companies would absolutely delete a few posts in order to appease a paying client.

Money wins.

</comment><comment><USER72> My tweet got "re-accommodated" , just confirmed. What's going on???

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm pretty skeptical this is true. I don't think this has to do with Twitter censoring left or right wing accounts.

<comment><USER73> I did not think this was about politics. I am not sure this is true either but I thought twitter was trying to curb abusive tweets lately. Perhaps the tweets towards United were trollish/abusive etc?

<comment><USER74> You can see a great many tweets calling for the death of Trump as well as white people in general if this is a algorithm problem it seems someone's bias slipped in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Why is everyone so outraged about this, I mean twitter is a private company...

<comment><USER76> Sure, private companies can do what they want with their own platform, blah blah blah. But there's no law against being outraged at a private company. Just because something is legal doesn't mean I forfeit all rights to be mad about it.

<comment><USER75> My previous comment was supposed to be sarcastic, guess I failed.

<comment><USER76> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law) strikes again

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> This is ok, what we need is transparency. Twitter should publish price list and list of its clients...

</comment><comment><USER78> Why was this downvoted?

<comment><USER79> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087236) and marked it off-topic since the guidelines ask us not to do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Twitter's not deleting the tweets, they're just "reaccommodating" them.

</comment><comment><USER81> Does twitter shadow ban also?</comment>


Mocked and insulted, scientist wins a Nobel - <AUTHOR> http://www.pressherald.com/2011/10/06/mocked-and-insulted-scientist-wins-a-nobel-and-vindication_2011-10-06/ <comment><USER2> How does such a thing happen? One would think science is evidence based...

Or is the evidence dismissed because it broke with the old rules? At some point it should be possible to convince a collegue to check the weird findings with you, no?

<comment><USER3> Groundbreaking science is done at the edges of knowledge. Typically the first reports of new phenomena are rather sketchy and not very convincing. What happens is either 1) people can't replicate the results or find a way to explain the results in a more conventional way or 2) Later results support the initial findings and the original discoverer is hailed as a visionary, maybe even winning a Nobel for it. But the first case is far, far more common than the second, so it makes sense for scientists to be _very_ skeptical of new findings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is hardly surprising. It seems many Nobel Prize level discoveries, are for significant shifts in the understanding of a topic or field.

As a consequence, other scientists are going to be sceptical.

Just ask Barry Marshal ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall))... uncanny similarly in some parts of their stories, particularly

> Marshall has been quoted as saying in 1998 that "(e)veryone was against me, > but I knew I was right."

</comment><comment><USER5> Should have a (2011) in the title.</comment>


Handy Service Professional Terms - 1099 - <AUTHOR> https://www.handy.com/pro_terms Handy.com just updated their terms & conditions for cleaning professionals. <comment><USER2> Completely illegal terms. You can't take money from an independent contractor for canceling within a particular timeframe. Even if you employ W2 full-time employees, this isn't legal. Looks like a horrid place.

<comment><USER3> Yes, they are charging 1099 contractors if they show up late, remove a job with less than 36 hours notice (the entire amount they were supposed to be paid and a penalty), and many other horrific ways to nickel and dime cleaners. Horrendous.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I do a Masters Degree? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I am currently coming to the end of my Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and should (fingers crossed etc...) be getting a fairly good First from Newcastle university.
I am looking to work as a software engineer in the  sphere of web development (though I have also taken some Games Dev modules to gain experience of the Graphics pipeline and pathfinding algorithms).
I am keen to continue my learning, but also keen to get into industry. Would, in your collective opinions, I be better off continuing my studies (on this course: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/undergraduate/degrees/i120/courseoverview/#.USJqLqXvhVk) or applying for a job this summer?
Thanks for reading - much appreciated :) <comment><USER2> Dont do it unless you want to make inroads into academia or better your chances for working at Google/Microsoft/BigCorp. I have a BS with about 5-6 years of experience and I lead/manage a couple people with MS degrees. In other words Ive found that having an MS makes little difference as a signal to an employer in most cases if you already have a BS in CS. Your ability and connections seem to be the most important thing so if you think an MS will enhance either of those it might be worth it but it also could very well end up being money down the drain.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not looking to make inroads into academia - I had considered it for a while but I don't think I could handle more long term exposure to academics. Many of them (at least the ones at my university) operate completely by their own rules - its unendingly frustrating at times. On the other hand I would love the opportunity to work for a larger corporation - why would their focus be on a higher level of degree rather than experience?

<comment><USER2> Eh Id say its somewhat of a minor point - I think the only business that will recognize an MS in any real way (salary/title/etc) is perhaps a big company like Google. I believe some positions within Google require an advanced degree (if coming from the outside). I have to say though that I personally have never seen anyone get a thumbs up based solely on having an MS. From a financial perspective Id imagine an MS will rarely pay off if you already have a BS in CS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Especially perhaps, as (detailed in my most recent comment below) the degree I would be coming out with ( MComp ) is instead of my Bsc rather than as well as it. Effectively the course content is the same as the Bsc course for the first 3 years and then you perform an additional year of study (deferring your original graduation).

Some people have warned me off the MComp course on the basis that people who apply typically got 2:1 (60%+) at Bsc level and need the degree to improve their employment prospects. They went on to say that if you would be receiving a first (70%+) anyway then the MComp would do nothing to enhance your employability, and might even harm it. I am attempted to validate/invalidate that claim. I Think perhaps I apply for a job and look to do an MSc in future once I have a clearer idea of a specific area of study that I would like to pursue. Thanks for all the comments!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think given current internet world and the direction most of the software giants are taking, it is a good idea to take the time and study further into distributed systems. I agree that you learn a lot on the job but there is something to be said about the importance of having sound fundamentals. I went through a similar phase and ended up going for a MS in distributed systems and have never regretted that decision. It makes you think more concretely and exposes you to things that make you think of scalability, complexity, high performance, high availability and other aspects that are the essentials of any complex (more importantly - any system of importance) that we think of.

So, bottom line, go for a Masters but choose your subjects/areas of concentration wisely and remember that you are there for digging deeper not wider.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - "Deeper not wider" is a nice expression for a feature of my current course that I find frustrating. Most of my in depth knowledge is garnered from personal side projects of interest - and only rarely even has its roots in something I covered whilst doing my course. Spending time with the people has been the most valuable experience for me so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Work for few years (around 3-4) then do Masters. You would have a better idea about the topic you wish to pursue in depth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right - but would my employability be such that I could get a job where I might gain that information? I've been given the impression by a few employers that unless you have a lot of experience then a bachelors degree isn't sufficient for a software engineering position.

<comment><USER5> A masters degree isn't sufficient either - engineers are people with "hands on" experience and even the best Masters programmes simply cannot deliver that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand that - but you have to start somewhere. Its a catch 22 situation if you can't get the job without experience and can't the experience without the job.

<comment><USER5> Are you afraid that you won't be able to get a job? I mean, at all?

I have no idea about Newcastle or the Midlands but from what I understand Edinburgh, Dublin and London have a lot of opportunities for you to chase, either at small to medium companies or at startups. Same applies to Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin.

If there was ever going to be a time for software developers I think it is our time right now, don't worry that much.

Unless, as someone mentioned above, you want to be an academic or work for very big companies: in that case an MSc is a must and I believe you should aim for a higher ranked university.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Degree is technically an MComp not an MSc - and I understand that Newcastle is not the highest ranked University (it seems to sit around 13th for Computer Science) but financially it is not viable for me to switch to another University at this stage. I would like to work for a large corporation - but I accept the reality that that may not be possible straight away. Thanks for all the comments by the way - peoples varied opinions have been very instructive.

<comment><USER5> For the record, I asked the same question 680 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441751>

What happened after that is a some interviews (most of the successful) that, in a turn of events, led to a very well paying job in Greece (yes, that collapsing economy), a very short internship in Berlin, a 3 months gig as an iOS developer in one of Berlin's most upcoming startups and a few more offers for jobs.

With that "average" mark from that "average" university and that "average" skillset. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for coming back and helping me out!

I think the difficulty I am having is that despite anecdotal evidence of people doing fine without it (which is fantastic) people continue to underscore the fact that an advanced degree is a plus for larger corporations (Google etc...).

Whilst I am not someone who is married to a dream of working for MS/Goog etc... I certainly wouldn't want to rule it out entirely and would perhaps even like to aspire to it one day.

A key concern for me is that the MComp course itself is 'deferred graduation' which means that I wouldn't leave University with a First class Bachelors and a distinction class MComp - just the MComp.

This has often been the recourse for people who achieved less than a First at Bsc level to improve their employment prospects.

I do not want employers to perceive it in that light as that would not be the case for me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Power the World without Fossil Fuels - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-power-the-world

<comment><USER2> Here's a link to the original paper (PDF):

[http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NewYo...](http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NewYorkWWSEnPolicy.pdf)</comment>


Cash is King: 8 tips for Optimizing your Startup Financing Strategy  - <AUTHOR> http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/cash-is-king-8-tips-for-optimizing-your-startup-financing-strategy/

<comment><USER2> A great article--never seen #6 discussed before, and as an angel, I can attest it is an important discussion</comment>


Ask HN: How do startups manage their systems, policy and procedures? - <AUTHOR>

What do companies like Google, Microsoft or Apple do to manage their systems ?
There is alot of talk about the methods to improve systems like Theory of constraint, Six sigma and lean thinking, how does that goes into all of this systems approach and managing them from a startup perspective ? According to the book E-Myth by Michael Gerber and The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt; these folks advocate systems thinking and creating systems in your company.
But what if I'm a small startup with 10-20 employees, do I really need systems ? What if nobody cares about these documents and just do what they think is worth doing according to them ? And how do these systems/documents will help me in case of some disaster e.g. marketing failure or no revenue from products ? How do I get most out of these systems ? <comment><USER2> Creating systems is an excellent way to standardize simple, repeatable tasks so that you can delegate them. A system, process or procedure can be reduced to a checklist or diagram that shows each step that happens in series and/or in parallel. Using an iterative approach you can improve these over time.

Many aspects of a startup require deep knowledge and expert judgment and intuition about customers, markets, trends and products. These creative, strategic and technical challenges such as customer development cannot be delegated - the founders must execute them.

The premise behind E-myth by Michael Gerber is to 'franchise' your business model by standardizing all possible aspects of it. I think Gerber would agree that you need some initial level of traction with customers before you start. Standardizing too early would be waste unless you have figured out what customers want. My best guess about the time to standardize would be once you have achieved product/market fit, and your business model is ready to scale. At that point, you can invest $1 into your business and know that it will generate a customer lifetime value that's some multiple higher.

Some takeaways:

* Don't spend too much time too early on systems, processes, and policies beyond those which relate directly to customers and sales. * Standardize any task you have mastered that's time consuming, simple and repeatable, and taking you away from mission critical tasks such as raising capital or gathering customer insights. Invest time in creating a simple checklist someone else can follow for any given process/procedure/task/activity (whatever you want to call them), and free yourself up for other high value activities. I have delegated/outsourced/offshored certain tasks such as data entry overseas with some success.

I would be glad to answer any additional questions you have about this - hodgins dot dan at g mail dot com.

</comment><comment><USER3> A "system" can help formulate a better way of doing things.

For example, look at this website (not affiliated), they have a system in place that takes their leads through different steps: <http://devfu.com/get_started.html>

By documenting it and in this case by publishing it to the client, they save a lot of time because the client will be better qualified, more prepared when it is time to meet, and will already understand how they work.

So documenting how your people do things is useful because it will help find ways to improve the way they do them. You will be able to identify flaws or redundancies.

Or if the way they do it is perfect, at the very least, by documenting it you have a way to reproduce it in the case they go away with their savoir-faire.

I was considering developing an app to help a small business manage their processes (<http://documnt.com>) but I think <http://howtracker.com> is on the right track already.

An example of system you might be using would be the Scrum methodology. By writing down what process devs should use, you will legitimate the Scrum Master and make his work easier ("Hey guys, please send your daily scrum email").

Cheers,

Aymeric</comment>