Sam Altman's Manifest Destiny - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny <comment><USER3> The brilliance of YCombinator, IMO, is HackerNews. It's turned YC into a self- perpetuating machine by getting smart people to congregate and talk about news YC itself partially generates.

I heard about YC, PG, and sama all through this outlet.

<comment><USER4> Makes sense. I personally read some of the comments before jumping into an article, mainly because comments most of the time loop me in on something that I am completely clueless or have little aware of. Also to see if the article is worth reading into because obviously if you read 20 people saying "The author of the article doesn't know what he is talking about" then its more possible that indeed the author has written about something he doesn't know or understand.

Also a lot of the times the solutions given or explanations are amazingly good and entertaining. Thanks to YC I've become a better person I'd say.

<comment><USER5> > Also a lot of the times the solutions given or explanations are amazingly > good and entertaining. Thanks to YC I've become a better person I'd say.

I couldn't agree more, on both counts. It's such a thrill seeing a link to a research paper or exceptionally well written essay, and have the author answering questions in the comments. I can't even estimate how much general science, history, and literary education I've received this way, almost by accident. No doubt I am a much more well rounded person as a result.

I rarely read TFA. I'm here for the discussion, and if the discussion is extraordinarily interesting, I'll read the article for clarification. To me, HN is the "guild" that teaches fundamentals, and keeps me abreast of the state of the industry (and many, many unrelated topics that are equally interesting!). Normally this level of access to illuminating dialog would be restricted to universities, but I can get it here for free, in my underwear. I've spent a good part of my life geographically isolated from centers of learning and industry, and being able to remain in the loop is priceless. I doubt my personal and professional growth over the last 10 years would be a fraction of what it is if I hadn't had this resource. Yes, I am a fanboy.

<comment><USER6> Amen to that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are great insights in this piece into how Sam thinks about AI and the future of YC.

But getting profiled in The New Yorker bears a risk, and the risk is that other media organizations try to tell the "down" story, because the down story is the only new thing to say after a subject is painted with such grandiose brush strokes.

Example: Marc Andreessen gets profiled in The New Yorker and a year later the WSJ publishes a hit piece on Andreessen Horowitz's returns. That's how journalists think: "what can I say that's different?" The whole industry plays a kind of ping pong, with one reporter telling an up story so the next can tell the opposite. It's a strange form of job security in an insecure profession. In a sense, you know you made it when they're publishing hit pieces about you.

A New Yorker profile is as good as it gets, and in a sense represents peak exposure, at least for someone in tech. (The Kardashians have other benchmarks...) It's doubly risky because at peak exposure, you get journalists who a) don't know much about tech because they don't specialize in it and therefore b) don't care if they get little things wrong, or subtly damage their source, in the telling of their story. They will move on to other profiles.

This comes out in small ways:

1) These sentences about Google and Facebook show that the reporter has misunderstood something fundamental about Google's history as it relates to the rest of the industry: "In the nineties, before the accelerator era, startups were usually launched by mid-career engineers or repeat entrepreneurs, who sought millions in venture capital and then labored in secret on something complicated that took years to launch. As the price of Web hosting plummeted and PCs and cell phones proliferated, college and grad- school dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page and Sergey Brin could suddenly conjure unicorns on their laptops." Google was building its own racks in the 1990s. And for that matter, Facebook didn't need an accelerator.

2) This passage will alienate most readers, because they simply can't relate to a world where a cushion like this somehow equates with a sacrifice: "Leery of tech's culture of Golcondan wealth, in which a billion dollars is dismissed as "a buck," he decided to rid himself of all but a comfortable cushion: his four-bedroom house in San Francisco's Mission district, his cars, his Big Sur property, and a reserve of ten million dollars, whose annual interest would cover his living expenses. The rest would go to improving humanity."

3) And this will piss off the DOD: "He added, "A friend of mine says, 'The thing that saves us from the Department of Defense is that, though they have a ton of money, they're not very competent.' "

Obviously there are positive passages in the profile, but a reporter like Tad Friend will report the negative passages with a straight face knowing that they will spark controversy, outrage or derision. He will tell a larger story of mad scientists and investors creating technology beyond their ken that spells doom for humanity. He will let his subjects hang themselves, subtly, because he can afford to do that kind of damage and pretend he had no part in it. Drop some little bombs, move on.

<comment><USER8> You're suggesting the reporter is doing something perfidious. Quoting a subject making a fool of himself to you on the record is not "dropping bombs", it's good journalism.

<comment><USER9> His motives could still be perfidious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My favorite part of the article (so far):

> "My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the > world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five > years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic > virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The > other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations > fighting with nukes over scarce resources." The Shypmates looked grave. "I > try not to think about it too much," Altman said. "But I have guns, gold, > potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli > Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."

Hahaha, that's so awesome.

<comment><USER11> > "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas > masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I > can fly to."

Imagine this coming from an ultra rightwing prepper nutball. Do you still love that quote?

<comment><USER12> I love that quote even it comes from a lunatic mule. Being prepared and being able to see the alternative endings is not a disability, but being completely obsessed and held hostage by that thought is. There is a difference.

I am not predicting impending doom, but when it hits the fan, better to have a plan than not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to > work on breaking us out of the simulation

I'm very curious who these two billionaires are and what exactly are they planning to do regarding this likely hopeless project.

<comment><USER14> One of them is obviously Musk. I could guess on the other, but it would only be based on the "wildness" of the other billionaire's imagination.

<comment><USER13> Musk strikes me as an imaginative but a very rational person who deeply thinks about stuff, so this is confusing to me.

His argument that our world is most likely a simulation does seem logical given our current knowledge. However, _breaking out_ of the simulation is completely another matter, more in line with Hollywood thinking than with anything that _scientists_ can be engaged to do, at least currently.

<comment><USER15> It's completely wacky, but if you've got a few mil to drop on wacky ideas, it starts to seem a bit less wacky in the grand scheme of things. It's basically a wager: "There's a small, but perhaps nonzero chance I'm living in a simulation. I've got the throwaway cash to fund an escape attempt. This investment has a massive chance of being completely wasted, even if this is a simulation. But if there is even a tiny chance of figuring something out, I might as well take it."

<comment><USER16> What would it even mean to 'escape' a simulation? In my mind I'm imagining when I write code to model a real process and even at some super high-fidelity simulation I can't imagine an 'escape'. Maybe if the simulation were so self- aware it could conduct local privilege-escalation attacks and replicate itself like a worm/virus?

EDIT: aside -- "Microcosmic God" [1] was a great short story along these lines

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

<comment><USER17> Assume a non omnipotent being, with non-infinite resources is creating a universe simulation. What decisions would we expect a person like this to make, when designing this simulation? Since they do not have infinite resources, they would likely take shortcuts, and make compromises and tradeoff when designing the simulation

For example, if light did not have a speed limit, and interacted with the entire universe instantly, this would be very hard to simulate. You would save resources by giving light a speed limit.

We also expect that they might abstract out the nitty gritty details of how things work at the atomic level. If you don't really care that much about how very small particles interact with each other, you might have these numerous calculations evaluated lazily, when they are "observed" by the higher level entities.

Things get really interesting when you start thinking about what kind of bugs a god programmer might be likely to make when designing their simulation.

Are there any weird natural processes, that would be much more elegant if our equations modeling them were changed very slightly, almost as if the equation was a mistake in the first place? Another attack avenue is to combine two natural processes in unexpected ways, to try and find "edge cases".

<comment><USER18> How do you know your own thought processes aren't a part of the simulation? Logic is a great tool to analyze the simulation unless it's been baked on purpose by our overlords.

On a different note, does simulation hypothesis strike anyone else as the idea God just explained in pseudo scientific/computing terms?

<comment><USER17> The difference is that God is an unfalsifiable claim.

The simulation argument is one that can be supported or argued against using evidence.

For example, if scientists find some new nature process that would be very difficult to simulate, (infinite speed of light is one such example) then that is strong evidence that we aren't in a simultion.

Of course, even if we keep observing things about the universe that would make it easier to simulate, that doesn't mean we actually are. It could just all be a coincidence. Or maybe it doesn't make any sense for a universe to be difficult to simulate.

The basic idea is to ask the question "Assume someone lives in a simulation. What would that person be likely/unlikely to observe?". and "Assume someone does NOT live in a simulation. What would they be likely/unlikely to observe?" And see how much this stuff matches up with reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I continue to be impressed by the quality of The New Yorker's reporting. This is so far above and beyond most media coverage about Altman and YC.

<comment><USER20> Golden quote:

"Launching a startup in 2016 is akin to assembling an alt-rock band in 1996 or protesting the Vietnam War in 1971—an act of youthful rebellion gone conformist."

<comment><USER21> Anyone who was aware of startups before 2010 already knew this.

<comment><USER22> Lots of people weren't aware of startups before 2010. This article isn't aimed at you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Only twenty per cent of the Inc. 500, the five hundred fastest-growing > private companies, raised outside funding.

I thought this was an interesting statistic. "80% of the fastest growing private companies did not need to raise capital to become one of the fastest growing companies."

<comment><USER24> ...which makes this statement seem awfully silly:

"Democracy only works in a growing economy. Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail. And I have to think that YC is hugely important to that growth."

<comment><USER25> > "Democracy only works in a growing economy. Without a return to economic > growth, the democratic experiment will fail.

Someone care to explain that because I don't see economic growth as a dependency to democracy.

<comment><USER26> In this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27Tf8RN3uiM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27Tf8RN3uiM) Milton Friedman does a great job of explaining how capitalism is a necessary condition for democracy to thrive but not a sufficient one for the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Altman, who will personally oversee this initiative, believes [Startup School] is the fastest, easiest way to bring ten thousand new founders a year into the network."

In the YC scenario, once its network hits a certain size it ceases to become a useful network and is just the world.

</comment><comment><USER27> Thinking democracy's success is tied to economic growth is a pretty dim worldview. I hope he's wrong about that.

<comment><USER28> "Economic growth" can exist on a computer screen completely decoupled from the "real world" and independent of a strong middle class.

IMHO An economically strong middle class is needed to maintain social order. This mitigates the public from hunting and and killing the rich and keeps the public from displacing their social frustrations on to each other and creating riots. Generally its a better existence for everyone.

<comment><USER29> Historically speaking, I don't feel like the basic way that society fails is by "hunting and killing the rich." I mean, you can MAYBE gloss the communist revolutions of the early 20th Century that way. What else?

<comment><USER30> What if you view riches in the form of power instead of just money?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31>
        Altman worked so incessantly that summer that he got scurvy.

You have got to be kidding. So much food has enough vitamin C in it to avoid scurvy that you _have_ to be eating pretty much nothing but ramen noodles to get it.

I don't need to be rich that badly.

<comment><USER32> Seemed to have happened. I guess diet's not something you think about when otherwise distracted. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314804](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314804)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > "Most people want to be accepted, so they won't take risks that could make > them look crazy."

This is a highly dissonant statement, so it's not surprising it's coming from a VC.

Innovation _is_ exploring the crazy and coming back with something that can be shoehorned into reality without upsetting reality's tea cart too much. The problem with VCs is that their jobs consist of spending time investing in crazy things that have far reaching drawbacks that nobody sees until everyone is using the product and the founders and investors have already exited their position.

</comment><comment><USER34> I found the most interesting point in the whole article the publicly stated consideration of establishing a China presence.

It would appear to make a lot of sense given current capital availability in China, world-leading mobile payment penetration, and US/SF issues with visas, overheads, component sourcing. Get over here!

<comment><USER35> How is China with 'innovation' though? The portrait we seem to get so often in the West is that China excels at imitation and fails at original thinking. Maybe innovation isn't needed for domestic success, but it is for creating things that penetrate the rest of the world (and, these days, dare I say universe?).

<comment><USER34> Well we have perfect mobile payment penetration, the only significant electrical vehicle fleet in the world, and the world's most successful social networking platform. None of these things are copies.

What's stopping these things penetrating the west? For payments, mostly incumbents. For e-vehicles, mostly protectionist levels of government regulation that make small vehicles too expensive to approve as roadworthy or illegal to drive, and foreign SNS platforms have outright announced they are planning on emulating WeChat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wth, the no asshole rule is the only way to keep out posers and assholes.

The expansion plans don't work because if you build a community which includes a few assholes they eventually overpower the system and being an asshole becomes the norm.

The last 3 paras of that article are worrisome.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's all about real AI today (not based on words and rules - lookup CTM - <USER2> real bots have this and its based on vector space). Get the companies and groups that are making very small breakthroughs in this area. The days of regurgitated cut-n-pasted text entry boxes and js (geocities, friendster, myspace, facebook) are over. Time for the new Googles of the world that will solve things bigger than SpaceX like extending human lifespan which is a requirement for space travel.

<comment><USER38> +1 on the CTM stuff. I recommend Jeff Hawkin's book "On Intelligence" if you're looking for a quick read.

<comment><USER39> Hawkins' memory-prediction concept is quite more specific than general CTM, and not borne out by evidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I never realised that Dotcloud/Docker was a YC project. That will be another home run for YCombinator.

<comment><USER41> They also have at least part of CoreOS (S13).

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Congrats, Sam! That's a really nice article.

Now, please ignore it, and go about your business. The worst thing to happen to a person's acceleration would be belief in having success. The only person you race in life is yourself, and you always need to catch up.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm not convinced Sam Altman is as brilliant as claimed to be. I've not seen anything particularly outstanding that he's done. Not hating. Facts only. I think this is simply hype and it reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes.

<comment><USER43> I too am wary of too much gushing praise onto someone still rather young with a limited track record.

The difference from Holmes is that Altman does not have to be particularly brilliant at something specifically, he just has to be the soul of the YC, ie life of the party.

From all accounts he is very good at that and that is of huge value to YC. Being a big ideas guy is an important and valuable position for an organization such as YC.

Holmes couldn't be such a generalist and life of party. She had to execute on a specific niche and failed very very late(I'd say about 10 years late). Holmes epitomizes the "fake it until you make it" taken to the extreme.

If Holmes had admitted defeat earlier maybe she could have been such a life of a party person at Draper's firm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Can someone explain what is referred as "Golcondan wealth"?

<comment><USER45> > By the 1880s, "Golkonda" was being used generically by English speakers to > refer to any particularly rich mine, and later to any source of great > wealth.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golkonda#Diamonds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golkonda#Diamonds)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift."

I think that circuit exists and is functioning quite well. It seems to me there's a lot of glory embedded in YC's plans.

<comment><USER46> "The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift."

... opined Altman in his New Yorker PR piece.

<comment><USER47> Attention everyone! Attention! I just wanted to make sure that you all know that I don't care what you think of me. As you were.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I love Sam and just wish they would have used a different metaphor than "Manifest Destiny". Isn't manifest destiny what led to the genocide of native american populations?

<comment><USER49> That's iteresting. I was not aware of such a connotation - to me the term manifest destiny just meant "a destiny that can be clearly seen and that cannot be changed" [1]. Maybe the article's sub-editor was equally ignorant of 19th century US history.

[1] [http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/manifest%20destiny](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/manifest%20destiny)

<comment><USER50> No way. That's a deliberate choice of words and the parallel is actually pretty striking. From Wikipedia:

> In the 19th century, manifest destiny was a widely held belief in the United > States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America. There > are three basic themes to manifest destiny:

The special virtues of the American people and their institutions

The mission of the United States to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America

An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty

<comment><USER51> And just to add to this, Manifest Destiny had some very concrete related beliefs. Such as "the rain follows the plow", the belief that if you settle and farm somewhere, the climate will magically change to make this workable

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

This led to people settling in unwise places. And you know what, even though the Wikipedia page says that climatologists now regard this as mere superstition, these areas of the US are now well-populated: A critical mass _did_ settle, so in a way it's all worked out.

<comment><USER52> > This led to people settling in unwise places. And you know what, even though > the Wikipedia page says that climatologists now regard this as mere > superstition, these areas of the US are now well-populated: A critical mass > did settle, so in a way it's all worked out.

Sounds like a classic case of survivor bias though? Where would Chicago be today if it wasn't for the trains? What would be the state of Phoenix Arizona if not for things like CAP? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project)

You mentioned this but I wanted to spell it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I have no connection to YC (except for reading HN daily) and I don't know Sam personally.

These longer profiles invite assumptions, praise and critique based on a sentence or two and they are often way off base.

My takeaway and you may disagree, without getting too heavy: Sam Altman is one of a very small handful of people in the history of the world who has the resources, the awareness, the intelligence and maybe the motivation to do important, mankind-changing things. Sound exciting? Actually to most people who get what that really means, that is very very scary and a bit sad.

This group of people is not limited to SV, but for comparison: Elon and Zuck are also in this handful of people with Sam. Musk has chosen his "inter- planetary species on planet Mars" and he has a plan. Zuck (and his wife LLC) seem to have chosen eradicating all diseases ASAP - his plan is starting now.

I don't think Sam has found his "Planet Mars" yet and that can be really hard on someone. He knows the odds of finding it and the odds of success even if he does find it.

I also think the YC startup thing that pg and Jessica started is of secondary importance here. Sam has the skills to run YC of course, but I'm not sure that's why pg handed it to him...

Sam might have office hours and can spit off advice like "talk to your paying customers more" or "understand the problem being fixed" which new, lost founders always seem to need to be told. This stuff is so easy for someone like Sam and most natural entrepreneurs it's almost laughable and might even get annoying after a while...

I think pg handed YC to Sam not for YC's sake. Many people could have taken over YC. I think one reason that pg did it was to give Sam something else to work on so Sam's search for meaning, for his "Planet Mars", didn't consume him to the point that it broke him and the promise he has. He did it to save Sam's life.

These are all assumptions and personal opinions. As someone familiar with earning a relatively large amount of money at a young age and then wanting to do something more important to me than just make more money, but not knowing what to do, Sam is among those I look to and I am following his career.

I wish him a lot of success and happiness.

</comment><comment><USER54> The most, we are here to understand where to put our technological hands in order to succeed, this because SV (and Y Combinator as one of its coveted stars) still has the gist, the money and the ability to deliver. If we in Western Europe could have something similar in Berlin or Amsterdam, now that London is going, I would be even happier.

<comment><USER55> YC alumni are in all those cities and YC only requires relocation for the 3 months of the program. So YC is already global.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is a strange profile of the sort of hero and status/wealth worship that only seems to have currency in the USA. The more I read the article the less I came away thinking of Altman as a genius and more of a babysitter and teacher.

I'm not really looking to attack Altman's character or competence, he seems to have both in spades, but the whole thing was just...creepy. And cultish.

<comment><USER57> Totally agree. I had to stop reading as the cult worship stuff started to get thicker and thicker.

<comment><USER58> Are you sure that you are in disagreement with the article's author? I think both you and te_chris may have missed some of the irony in the article.

<comment><USER57> This is a thought provoking question. I didn't miss it, but I didn't read it as irony, I read it as a sort of awe-struck breathlessness on the part of the author... or at least, the slightly emotionally distant (aloof, not really ironic) version of that that the New Yorker is very good at.

The idea of writing this sort of piece about someone whose grand ambitions have not yet been realized is both to make the reader aware of the grandeur of the ambitions, and also to draw a line in the sand so that his accomplishments can be judged later, aided by the glimpse into his unfettered idealism.

This is not a criticism of the New Yorker (I love it). Just a phenomenon of the unique genre of personal profiles that the magazine produces. The same tone would also work if writing about an artisanal butcher in Maine, for example.

<comment><USER58> I think you describe the tone quite precisely -- it is the same tone the author may have used to describe someone who built an Eiffel tower out of matchsticks -- the premise being that we get an objective description of a subculture (SV technologists) somewhat alien to the main readership of the magazine. But I do think that this objective tone is somewhat fake, because by the choice of examples and their juxtaposition the author does seem to occasionally take sides and actively (and subtly) parody certain attitudes. It is telling how many in this forum seem to have missed this and saw the article as unilaterally flattering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I hope the _Silicon Valley_ writers are paying attention, there's some really good material in this article.

<comment><USER11> The scurvy thing stands out to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I've been trying to put my finger on what bothers me about Sam Altman ever since he was named President of YC in 2014. Now I know. It's less to do with him; more to do with this narrative of Sam Altman as some visionary, world- saving, future-builder. The story just doesn't fit the character. There's no comparison between him and true visionaries like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, etc.

Unlike Sam, these guys can dive deep into whatever industry they choose with a very obvious clarity of thought. Watch any of their interviews for examples. Even though Steve Jobs wasn't "technical" he was able to speak about the technical aspects in detail. On the other hand, Sam seems to stand at a very high, superficial level. I have yet to see him dive deep into any of the frontiers he's focused upon: AI, energy, biotech, etc.

But it's not just that, these visionaries let their track record speak for itself. I don't seem to understand Sam's track record. A Stanford dropout whose claim to fame is selling Loopt for $43M (at a loss to investors) after raising $30M in total at a $175M valuation, and pocketing $5M for himself? Then goes on to tout YC's runaway success as due, in part, to his leadership when >60% of YC's portfolio value is due to ~15 companies from pre-2014 YC batches.

To top it off, as proof of his ambition, a silly comparison between YC's portfolio value being 14% of Alphabet's market cap is made. That's apples-to- oranges.

Bottom line, the results we see today are largely due to PG & friends. I wish people would stop forcing this narrative of Sam Altman as a visionary. Right now, he's more Tim Cook, less Steve Jobs. There's nothing wrong with being an operational genius. YC, the company, has a manifest destiny.

<comment><USER61> I find it odd that you'd criticize Sam Altman in this way then go on to call Steve Jobs a "true visionary". I see Jobs as being more a managerial type that managed to get a few things very right. He wasn't able to dive deep into technical things and grok them as you said. I have read comments on hacker news from people that worked directly under him, talking about how he forbid using object orientation in programming. So programmers had to hide it from them that they were actually using it, which was easy because he could not read the code.

Additionally, Sam Altman is now in a position to achieve greatness and he probably will do so whether or not he has already. Someone in that position would not even have to be particularly exceptional (once again, whether he is or not) to do so. So whether he has or not so far is a moot point. I'm just pleased he has ambition and apparently isn't focused on the lime light. Compare that to how most billionaires use their funds (ie, big yachts etc) and you should just be pleased that anything is happening.

Anyway, my main point is that I guess that an appreciation of "genius" is a highly subjective thing. And the instant someone would mention Jobs as such is the same moment I'd intensely disagree with them. It can probably just be left at that.

<comment><USER62> > I have read comments on hacker news from people that worked directly under > him, talking about how he forbid using object orientation in programming.

Steve Jobs talked incessantly about object-oriented programming after he left Apple, and built an entire company (NeXT) and operating system (NeXTStep) using a new object-oriented programming language (Objective-C). He didn't write the code himself but he funded and led these efforts.

<comment><USER61> This was probably before NeXT

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This was a pretty good article -- certainly one of the better portraits I've read of SA.

However, I usually see better writing in the New Yorker. Take "as a result, the once nerdy Y Combinator is now aggressively geeky." What the hell does that mean? (Nothing.)

OTOH, a few memorable quotes:

> Growth masks all problems. (Steve Huffman)

> Despite having raised a robust $1.6 million after Demo Day, the founders > were ridden with angst. Fredrik Thomassen said that they wanted to make > their war chest last forever, and Sondre Rasch mentioned that he'd frugally > chosen to live in a twelve-entrepreneur collective in a nearby forest.

<comment><USER24> and "upload"?

"what intrigues him is their potential effect on the world. To determine that, he'll upload all he needs to know about, say, urban planning or nuclear fusion."

<comment><USER64> I read it as somewhere between "skim" and "learn" \- it's probably a term sama used himself in the interview. If you think of yourself as a machine it's probably a term than makes sense; it doesn't feel particularly aspirational to me :)

<comment><USER24> Even so, wouldn't you use download?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Has anyone identified the Rickover quote that is alluded to at the end of the article?

"At the end of his life, when he may have been somewhat senile, he did also say that it should all be sunk to the bottom of the ocean."

<comment><USER66> > I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. > Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a > necessary evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played > in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country. > That's why I am such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of > war.

From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Willingness_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Willingness_to_.22sink_them_all.22)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> _"We're good at screening out assholes," Graham told me. "In fact, we're better at screening out assholes than losers. All of them start off as losers—and some evolve."_

I find this oddly reassuring.

</comment><comment><USER26> >Launching a startup in 2016 is akin to assembling an alt-rock band in 1996 or protesting the Vietnam War in 1971—an act of youthful rebellion gone conformist.

This right here amounts to false equivalence. Suffice it to say that it is relatively easier to launch a start-up today, this doesn't change the fact that it is just as hard to keep one alive. The risks associated with launching a startup are all too real and I think they will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Call it conformist, I call it hard and as such, not for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER24> I do admire all the ambition. But does it really have to be mixed in with views such as "Democracy only works in a growing economy. Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail. And I have to think that YC is hugely important to that growth." I'm sure Sam (and other SV types) is well aware of the complexity of reality and that YC, as one company, cannot be hugely important to that growth. In other words, if YC simply stopped functioning tomorrow, I can't imagine the GDP growth of the United States would be at all affected. Guys, what you're doing is very, very impressive, but, c'mon, let's get off the idea that you're instrumental in saving democracy for all of us (and all the other delusions of grandeur).

<comment><USER68> And if you think about it, most of these disruptive companies are not offering real growth. Both Über and Air BNB, for instance are diverting dollars from the legacy provider. And they're doing this by offering better service and/or lower prices. There is no value creation to see here.

<comment><USER69> Well they are funding very ambitious stuff like nuclear power startups and AI initiatives, which most others usually shy away from. This is potentially extremely disruptive and a massive boon to the economy.

And your assessment of Airbnb of just "diverting dollars from the legacy provider" is wrong in my opinion, it turns an unused space into cash (creating a new market/enabling an underserved market), just like early-eBay turned unwanted stuff in your house into cash. I'm not fully sure where I stand on Uber, but they're certainly offering a much better customer experience than traditional taxis.

<comment><USER68> AirBNB turns my unused space into cash but also keeps me from staying at a hotel. These businesses are certainly adding value for their shareholders and customers. They are not generally expanding the economy. I should also admit that many existing business models should be disrupted.

<comment><USER69> It doesn't keep you from staying at a hotel, that's a choice you make. Also, I've stayed at AirBnb locations where there was no other accommodations options, so it's difficult to argue it's taking business from a hotel in these scenarios. Additionally, I wouldn't be surprised if bigger hotel chains legally evade loads of tax like virtually all large multinational companies do, which isn't an option for most AirBnb hosts, who must pay full tax on everything (or face the consequences, e.g. the situation in New York).

<comment><USER68> "keeps" was a poor word choice. I've never stayed at an AirBNB (or VRBO, etc) on the same night I also stayed at a hotel, so if I choose one, then the other (in general) isn't getting my business.

Reading the rest of your comment, I don't really think we disagree except that you seem to think AirBNB is driving additional revenue into the economy ("Also, I've stayed at AirBnb locations where there was no other accommodations options") - before AirBNB was there, what would you have done? You would have either stayed at a hotel that was further away than you'd like, or stayed home.

The consumer is definitely winning though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So, Sam's been at this for 2 years, inherited an extremely well oiled machine, and hasn't, as far as I know, accomplished anything extraordinary. Not sure why there's an entire New Yorker piece on him, instead of, say, I dunno, a few paragraphs in the Talk of the Town section.

Has there been a New Yorker piece on PG? I googled and didn't find anything. He's the one that put all this together and seems far more deserving of such a thing.

<comment><USER70> > So, Sam's been at this for 2 years, inherited an extremely well oiled > machine, and hasn't, as far as I know, accomplished anything extraordinary.

What accomplishments did you expect in 2 years?

Working towards OpenAI, YC Research, the upcoming MOOC, basic income project, the private city project seem very impressive to say the least.

After he has taken over, YC is expanding into new areas, mentioned above, whereas earlier they were focussed on getting the startup program right and expanding to accomodate larger batches.

<comment><USER24> The things you list are plans, not accomplishments. And I certainly didn't expect extraordinary accomplishments. I just don't understand what in Sam's history warrants a New Yorker article over, say, that of CEOs who have competently run their business for the last 2 years.

<comment><USER71> You'll probably have an easier time understanding it if you get rid of the idea that publicity/press/attention/investment/anything is based on merit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Radiation hormesis is one of those junk science topics that persists in the literature despite many thorough efforts to debunk it.

<comment><USER19> Could you support that with references?

<comment><USER73> Isn't the null hypothesis sufficient?

<comment><USER74> What about the building with the recycled radioactive girders showing a decrease in resident cancer incidence?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> How do we avoid becoming McNamaras and Rumsfeldts in our hubris?

</comment><comment><USER75> Why two McLarens?

<comment><USER76> Because he can.

<comment><USER75> He can do lots of things. Why that thing?

<comment><USER76> Oh. I thought you meant: why _two_ MacLarens. But you meant: why two _McLarens_.

The answer to _that_ is: because McLarens are awesome. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Go get em' Ahab!

<comment><USER78> Now _that_ is an interesting parallel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Reid Hoffman makes clear like I suspected that SV power players are skeptical about Sam Altman. YC is becoming Jack of all trades master of none. Jury is still out on YC under Sam's leadership. By 2020 I think we'll start to see the wheels fall off.

<comment><USER24> It does seem there's a lot of flailing around. As someone mentioned, this [http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/) went from 6 under Graham to 21 under Altman. Altman mentions laser like focus at time when referring to how startups should function. The same doesn't go for YC?

It's really easy to get fame and plaudits by associating yourself with a cornucopia of big ideas, it's a lot harder to actually follow through.

<comment><USER80> While I respect that they claim not to be about accumulating wealth (and it does feel as if this is genuinely true compared to more traditional VCs), this looks a bit like the Google X of VC. I suspect that they have generated enough returns from their seed investments that they no longer have outside LPs for a lot of the stuff they do, allowing them to freely pursue off the wall ideas (the exception here is probably their continuity fund). I'm not sure how sustainable this is in the long term. They would have to keep churning out Airbnbs, which is not guaranteed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This quote from a YC Partner:

> It's all about founders. Facebook had Mark Zuckerberg, and MySpace had a > bunch of monkeys.

The kind of ubermensch/Ayn Rand rhetoric that makes me cringe.

<comment><USER81> Do you think it's wrong?

<comment><USER50> To call people monkeys because they didn't accomplish as much as Mark Zuckerberg? Yes it's very wrong! And ironic given that MySpace had a much better exit and impact than FriendFeed (the company created by the partner quoted)

<comment><USER82> It's particularly unfitting when you're asking people to run startups with an uncertain future. It might boost moral in the short run, but doing so on other peoples expense always comes back to haunt you. To quote the article:

> _Graham wrote an essay, "Mean People Fail," in which [...] he declared that > "being mean makes you stupid" and discourages good people from working for > you._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> _> Nothing came of Paul Graham's plan for tech to stop Donald Trump, but Altman, after brooding about Trump for months, recently announced a nonpartisan project, called VotePlz, aimed at getting out the youth vote. Looking at the election as a tech problem—what's the least code with the most payoff?—Altman and his three co-founders concentrated on helping young people in nine swing states to register, by providing them with registration forms and stamps._

Doesn't this confirm that VotePlz is mostly just a smokescreen to "get-out- the-vote" for a favored candidate?

<comment><USER84> Get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats, because the young and poor tend to be the ones who don't vote and tend to vote Democrat. Back in the 90s MTV had "Rock the Vote" (actually it was a progressive non-profit who partnered with MTV) and their goal was the same.

<comment><USER85> Interestingly, 538 ran a piece recently that implies that that's _not_ the case this election, and that Trump actually has far more upside from unregistered voters than Clinton does:

[http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/missing-white-voters- cou...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/missing-white-voters-could-elect- trump-but-first-they-need-to-register/)

The summary is that by far the largest unregistered cohort is those who are young, poor, and _uneducated_. And this election, the poor and uneducated group is largely in Trump's camp, while in past elections they may have split roughly evenly between Republicans and Democrats depending on other issues.

The other interesting thing is that the Trump campaign has done fairly little with voter registration drives, perhaps because of this image of it largely helping Democrats. Would be an interesting example of how hewing to common wisdom rather than data can end up hurting a candidate, if 538's analysis is true.

<comment><USER84> This is fascinating. And I definitely trust data more than common wisdom. Good thing for the Democrats that Trump doesn't. :)

<comment><USER86> Citation?

<comment><USER85> About the missing Trump voters or about the Trump campaign not paying attention to data? I gave a citation for the former above - as for the latter, well, the evidence is contradictory. Trump said in May that he considers big data overrated [1][2], though he reversed himself in August [3].

The tricky part about using data is that it takes time to build an effective data operation. It takes time to collect the data, it takes time to analyze it, and then you need a large ground organizational effort to actually turn that data into votes. The last day for voter registration in most swing states is Oct 11, barely a week away. Even if he's recently had a change of heart, it's likely too late to do anything effective.

[1] [http://elections.ap.org/content/ap-interview-trump-says- big-...](http://elections.ap.org/content/ap-interview-trump-says-big-rallies- his-key-campaign-weapon)

[2] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-big-data- gamble-146939531...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-big-data- gamble-1469395312)

[3] [https://www.wired.com/2016/08/trump-cambridge- analytica/](https://www.wired.com/2016/08/trump-cambridge-analytica/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Interesting article giving more of an inside look to the organization and its people. Some choice quotes and comments from a random dude on the internet:

> After conferring with the accelerator's sixteen other partners, Altman > launched an initiative to support startups even earlier in their life span, > and a fund to continue investing in them as they grow.

> "Sam said, 'Take all the "M"s and make them "B"s.' "

Badass. Reminded me of "Drop the 'The'".

> A 2012 study of North American accelerators found that almost half of them > had failed to produce a single startup that went on to raise venture > funding.

It's very much a "me-too" endeavor, almost political at the universities local to where I live, aimed at appearing to "foster innovation" and justifying huge continued government loans for their "customers".

> YC provides instant entrée to Silicon Valley—a community that, despite its > meritocratic rhetoric, typically requires a "warm intro" from a colleague, > who is usually a white man.

Yes the meritocratic aspect of networking is far overblown. Intros or bust in my experience, unless someone gives you a lucky break. If they do, be grateful and be damn sure to impress that person.

> All the early arrivals at the party were men; the batch's female founders > were attending a presentation on the challenges of being a female founder.

Anyone else find this kind of ironic and counterproductive?

> "But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas > masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I > can fly to."

This is funny, he almost sounds like one of those awful Trump supporters! :P

> In 2012, he and the other founders sold the company for forty-three million > dollars—a negative return for their V.C.s.

This isn't as bad as it sounds. Losing a few million dollars vs. around $50M is a huge difference. In fact I'd say it's harder to salvage a failing company that exit a successful one.

> "you want to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies. You can treat the > warts on top, and because of the warts the company will be hugely > underpriced."

Value investing, absolutely. I tend to apply this principle on a smaller scale, to individual people. For example, I've had the opportunity to hire and work with extremely intelligent and hardworking people who simply lacked some basic English skills, and had shit cover letters. But who cares if they can program a robotic system the way I need.

> "hard things are actually easier than easy things. Because people feel it's > interesting, they want to help. Another mobile app? You get an eye roll. A > rocket company? Everyone wants to go to space."

So incredibly true. I have a startup with very few resources but no problem recruiting because the field is exciting hard tech.

> "Most people do too many things. Do a few things relentlessly."

The best advice for life success, hands down.

> "What's it looking for?" I asked Altman. "I have no idea," he replied. > "That's the unsettling thing about neural networks—you have no idea what > they're doing, and they can't tell you."

Well I find this response - which someone in the domain would tell you isn't even correct - to be unsettling. Yes, we can see what lots of neural networks are doing, and understand it [but you often need a PhD].

> "Sam's program for the world is anchored by ideas, not people," Peter Thiel > said. "And that's what makes it powerful—because it doesn't immediately get > derailed by questions of popularity."

But "Why do these fuckers get to decide what happens to me?"

> Paul Graham cheerfully acknowledged that, by instilling message discipline, > "we help the bad founders look indistinguishable from the good ones."

This would make me a little unsettled as an external investor but I understand the incentives and dynamics at play.

> So we used accounts protected, a number that showed roughly thirty-per-cent > growth through the course of YC—and about forty per cent of the accounts > were YC companies. It was a perfect fairy-tale story."

Yeah this never made too much sense to me. As an investor I'd be wary of a startup using alumni connections to secure a large portion of their customers, because that eventually runs out - meaning the acquistion strategy is still essentially untested. As a founder though, I really like this strategy and would readily replicate it.

> The truth is that rapid growth over a long period is rare, that the repeated > innovation required to sustain it is nearly impossible, and that certain > kinds of uncontrollable growth turn out to be cancers.

I forgot exactly where I learned this, but I like the story of "multiple S curves" over a single "J" curve. Businesses innovate and attach new markets, launch new product lines, secure new customer segments, etc.

> Peter Thiel, the forty-eight-year-old libertarian who co-founded PayPal and > Palantir, secretly funded the lawsuit that drove Gawker Media into > bankruptcy, and has sought to extend his life span by taking human growth > hormone.

Damn so is Thiel gonna get jacked? This makes me feel less bad about wanting to do a steroid cycle when I'm older.

> The fear is that YC will soon provide cradle-to-I.P.O. funding for so many > top startups that it will put a lot of V.C.s out of business.

Well this is why I find them remarkably pro-founder: they are creating competition at the VC level even if the later stages.

> two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to > work on breaking us out of the simulation.

Who knew, even billionaires get high and watch The Matrix.

> recently announced a nonpartisan project, called VotePlz, aimed at getting > out the youth vote.

Encouraging youth voting will absolutely be partisan, let's not kid ourselves here. Why not just pay people to vote, or give them deals at retail stores? I'm sure these things will happen.

> As I considered this, he said that he'd sacrifice a hundred thousand. I told > him that my own tally would be even larger. "It's a bug," he declared, > unconsoled.

It's a feature.

> the cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and > electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the > cost of electricity flows through to water and food.

Here's my controversial theory: a "great life" only exists relative to others. Once all needs are provided for and people don't need each other (and here's the real controversial idea: most women won't need most men, something that I would understandably expect Altman to miss), they won't be incentivized to create and maintain strong family units. We won't love like we used to. But maybe they see this as a "bug" too.

Maybe I'm wrong and a few centuries of tech will solve the problems of human nature created by a few million years of evolution.

> More generally, he observed, "The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit > that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift. Most > people want to be accepted, so they won't take risks that could make them > look crazy—which actually makes them wildly miscalculate risk."

A gift and a curse that I wrestle with constantly.

> "At the end of his life, when he may have been somewhat senile, he did also > say that it should all be sunk to the bottom of the ocean. There's something > worth thinking about in there."

This was a great read and it made me think a lot, it was a pleasure.

</comment><comment><USER88> I had to change the font so I was able to read the article.

<comment><USER89> I agree, and it's very frustrating that most articles are unreadable unless I change their font or colour choices. I should have to have an extension installed that makes text readable. And, unless people speak up the people who create these broken designs will never know that they are choosing to say "fuck you" to a sizeable proportion of their audience.

But: it's about the least interesting thing that can be said about this article. And whoever is responsible at the New Yorker will never see these comments.

I think dang has said these kind of comments are off-topic.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9236332#9238739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9236332#9238739)

I personally don't think "The choices you've made exclude part of your audience, and may not be compatible with laws around accessibility" is bike- shedding, but I have stopped commenting on design choices.

<comment><USER88> I can understand dang's comment. It was just my very first impression and it annoyed me but I agree that it doesn't add any value.

How should the extension work? Maybe a simple blacklist of fonts so the fallback font kicks in?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Not to mention it allows them to control negative comments/articles through implicit threats/incentives and direct (and hidden) moderation/manipulation.

There's an annoying fakeness about YC/HN that gets old after a while. Lots of founders willing to tell YC folks whatever they want to hear and YC folks happily slurping it up like it's authentic. Genuinely gamed. And worse they treat anyone who isn't a sycophant (people like @pinboard/idlewords) as crazy assholes who they actively seek to filter out of YC/HN as possible.

It would be really good for the world if HN was replaced by a neutral platform.

<comment><USER91> Although we banned this account for abuse elsewhere in the thread, I'm unkilling this comment because it's so patently untrue. It doesn't resemble the Hacker News I look at, and I look at HN a lot.

It's also factually incorrect, both re idlewords (whose latest piece spent most of the day at #1 on HN) and everyone else who uses this site in the intended spirit.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625852) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER24> "It doesn't resemble the Hacker News I look at, and I look at HN a lot."

Given your position, do you think that you can look at HN objectively?

<comment><USER92> It would not be wise to argue with someone who can hellban you. Even if it is purely logical and factual in nature.

Lobste.rs is also a good HN-alt. A bit more groupthink on common topics, and less groupthink on VC stuff.

<comment><USER91> No, we don't ban people for arguing with us.

<comment><USER8> Not anymore. :-)

Whatever faults dang may have, he's not a capricious moderator, and he works hard to be fair.

Since I got called out my name, let me say that no one has tried to "filter me out" of HN since Paul Graham stopped moderating the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Other than being very interesting, this article provides one of the funniest instances of the crazy humor generated by the Cloud To Butt Plus extension ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt- plus...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt- plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai?hl=en)):

> "The merge has begun—and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a > merge will have conflict: we enslave the A.I. or it enslaves us. The full- > on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into my butt. > I'd love that," he said.

I had to disable the extension to verify that it was its work and not the actual quote.

</comment><comment><USER93> > _At Graham's table, he [Altman] and others discussed how to stop Donald > Trump_

> _If the pandemic does come, Altman's backup plan is to fly with his friend > Peter Thiel_

Is this true? How does it work?

Thiel is a very vocal supporter of Trump and yet he's Altman's friend, a friend so close they would want to spend the rest of their life alone together, in the event of a catastrophe.

Altman can certainly have all the friends he wants; but he shouldn't get to pretend he opposes Trump at the same time.

<comment><USER91> Friends can disagree. Pretty sure it's as simple as that.

<comment><USER20> Of course, but we're talking about opposite world views here.

I actually read a bit of an insinuation to the fact they're both gay, but maybe I'm overreading into the article.

<comment><USER91> You guys surprise me. Obviously friends can disagree, including about important things. I'm trying to think of a sublime historical example but I'm tired and all that comes to mind is Camille Paglia and Rush Limbaugh. Oh well.

<comment><USER93> If the article is to be believed, this is not just "some friend", it's someone Altman would want to spend the rest of his life with in the event of a catastrophe: it's his favorite human being on the planet.

And it's not just one's opinions or even party affiliation; Thiel is working very hard and very publicly to get Trump elected.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


YouTube Moving Toward Paid Content - <AUTHOR> http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3837681/YouTube+Moving+Toward+Paid+Content.htm <comment><USER2> Also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802016></comment>


More complicated than you think - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/17358573

<comment><USER2> Here's the article: <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/10/15/1007615107>

Paywalled, but even just the abstract gives a little additional detail, and the appendix with data tables/figures is open access: [http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2010/10/18/1007615107.DCSu...](http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2010/10/18/1007615107.DCSupplemental)</comment>


The Journey of a 999 Call - <AUTHOR> http://youtu.be/ktXEcKinhHU

<comment><USER2> does 112 work in UK ?</comment>


Obama is upset that China wants tech companies to undermine own security (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/03/03/obama-is-upset-that-china-wants-tech-companies-to-undermine-their-own-security/ <comment><USER2> But I can hate on Obama and the democratic party and the Chinese can't do the same against the Communist party.

Functionally I don't know how being able to criticize the government actually changes anything. In terms of corruption or abuse, the Chinese government is more than happy to listen.

It's just when you starting hating on the only party that is allowed to exist that they have a problem with you for the potential of causing social unrest.

How much functional difference that makes in my opinion is not much.</comment>


Show HN: The NextJS Spotify Powered Jukebox - <AUTHOR> https://hangthedj.online/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty great. Why the hell didn't I think of this.

</comment><comment><USER3> this is free ? nice !</comment>


Facebook's Piracy Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/07/freebooting_stolen_youtube_videos_going_viral_on_facebook.html <comment><USER2> I have a friend/acquaintance who had a similar experience on YouTube itself. He had created a large number of instructional videos on his YouTube channel, and from them he was deriving a significant passive income (admittedly from the overbearing amount of ads he enabled). One day he received a takedown notice suggesting that _his_ videos were illicit copies. His investigations led him to believe that another YouTube user had downloaded all of his videos, re-uploaded them under a different account (with even more, similarly-ripped videos) and then used the YouTube machinery to have the originals flagged. This did, indeed, appear to be the case when I checked out the other channel - there was a block of videos in this other user's history that all clearly originated on my friend's channel, even with the original author identifying himself in the voiceover.

He was unable to get YouTube to reinstate the original videos nor block the illicit new copies. After several months of shouting at the wall that is YouTube administration, he gave up and transferred his energy to creating numerous ad-laden blogs saturated also with Amazon affiliate links and embedded affiliate stores. On the one hand, it is possible that his original channel looked more like the channel of a spammer than the one that stole his videos (from my recollection of the old channel, not entirely implausible). On the other, it is possible that YouTube itself doesn't care much for its content creators outside of the few super-rich/popular/powerful users with enough influence to get their attention.

<comment><USER3> When did this happen?

In my experiences, Youtube these days are pretty responsive to even the small guys in settling out problems of this nature.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this would have had to have happened two or three years ago or more. After a ContentID claim you file is disputed the video is restored and you have to file a real DMCA takedown notice. If that gets disputed, the video is again restored (though you'll likely end up with ten days of it taken down) and you have to file a lawsuit, same as any other DMCA takedown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A radical idea: Maybe our model of intellectual property is wrong, or outdated. When IP was tied to a physical object, it made some sense to restrict and explicitly license each reproducer.

Now we have incredible machines that can reproduce intellectual property almost infinitely, distribute it anywhere on Earth, and find it almost anywhere on Earth. Wow! Maybe we should embrace that innovation, and find a model that encourages the spread, use and re-use of IP, for the betterment of society. Yes, motivating creators is a problem, but there are many possible solutions.

Another radical thought: The notion of IP created from whole cloth obviously was always a fallacy; we all "stand on the shoulders of giants", "good artists borrow, great artists steal", etc. Now that our IP machines make finding, copying, and distributing IP so easy, we can expect even more of that wonderful, creative larceny. As IP creators are benefitting from these amazing IP finding/copying/distributing systems and so much of their own product is stolen, perhaps they have less claim on the profits from those things they put their names on.

A third: Many creative people are motivated to do great things withhout payment. Remember, all those FOSS creators, from RMS to Linus Torvalds to Tim Berners-Lee to every little FOSS project on Github. Remember also Van Gogh and millions of other starving artists you have and haven't heard of (quick, name a poet who cashed in on their life's work). Perhaps financial renumeration, while fair, isn't entirely necessary (and perhaps we'd have less crap with less of it).

<comment><USER6> "Perhaps financial renumeration, while fair, isn't entirely necessary"

Is it that in your world, eating and paying the rent isn't necessary either?

'Many' creative people sounds like some programmers, which is somewhat small subset of all creatives. I'd be surprised if the majority of creative people — artists, writers, actors, and more — would happily go about saying that financial renumeration doesn't matter to them.

Destin, for example, puts a lot of effort into his videos and his work. Financial renumeration not being necessarily inevitably means Destin does something else for the majority of his time and does Smarter Ever Day less (if at all). This is almost certainly the same for every other artist out there. Sure — maybe all art isn't necessary. Maybe some of it is crap. But saying that being paid to be creative isn't necessarily means that you get very little art, if at all.

<comment><USER7> _But saying that being paid to be creative isn 't necessarily_ [sic] _means that you get very little art, if at all._

Humans have always created art. Modern conceptions of intellectual property have not always existed. Why would art depend on that?

<comment><USER8> Because here, in the post-industrial world, it's _very_ hard to make a living from one-off works of craftsmanship. That didn't used to be the case, when that was the only way to get things made. It happens today, but the economics make it an unusual situation. The labor involved forces the per-unit prices to be stratospheric, vastly limiting the market.

But we have an alternative: leverage digital technology's nigh-zero marginal costs and charge very reasonable prices to large numbers of people.

The idea that because the _marginal_ cost is zero that the _cost_ should be zero is a horribly greedy devaluation of creative labor.

So I'm all for new economic structures, but AFAICT no one's stepped up with a better way that's actually proven to allow creative folks to continue to make a living. (Or that even has a snowball's chance once tried outside of armchair philosophizing.)

One last thought, since it's universally sizable corporations who control those digital distribution channels... do we REALLY want to cede even more power over content to these entities? If we just drop IP laws, that further enriches these corps at the cost of individual and/or small creators. That makes no sense to me whatsoever.

<comment><USER5> > If we just drop IP laws, that further enriches these corps at the cost of > individual and/or small creators. That makes no sense to me whatsoever.

A good question, but I'm not sure. Those large corporations produce a lot of IP; maybe the small guy will benefit more than the big guy. Remember we're all stealing from and building on each other's IP. Imagine if all the proprietary software was open source, from OS X to Office to SunOS to SAS to Mathematica to Photoshop to AutoCAD to Google's search algorithms.

It would be a dream for many to be able to study, learn from, and reuse that code. It would be like the IP of the academic world, which generally is open and reusable by others.

<comment><USER9> > Imagine if all the proprietary software was open source, from OS X to Office > to SunOS to SAS to Mathematica to Photoshop to AutoCAD to Google's search > algorithms

Most of this wouldn't even exist if it _had_ to be open-source from the start.

<comment><USER5> I agree that's a possibility, and it's the obvious concern. I'm trying to challenge our (mine included) common notion.

My 'radical idea' is that maybe they would exist. What if we had a system that provided a payment mechanism but did away with IP restrictions, for example? Consider how most of science is funded and shared, for example. Massive projects like the LHC and space probes are funded, and their data is openly shared. I'm not saying that the exact same system would work for software, but that there are other systems that work very well.

I'd expect that with 'open' technology, innovation would be faster and products would be better, as everyone could use and learn from best-in-class tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ironically, at the end of the tattoo video that was pirated, Destin Sandlin, the host, is seen wearing [a shirt]([http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Going- Science-T-Shirt-Scientists...](http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Going-Science-T- Shirt-Scientists/dp/B006FCNWNY/ref=sr_1_1)) that is a blatant rip off of an Randall Munroe's (XKCD) [shirt]([http://store-xkcd- com.myshopify.com/products/try-science](http://store-xkcd- com.myshopify.com/products/try-science)).

<comment><USER11> That always made me wonder, the people who sell shirts with logos/pop references shirts in mall booths, do they pay the artist a license fee to sell them?

<comment><USER12> The people who sell the shirts? No.

The people who manufacture the shirts? Yes, at least in theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is super interesting - it seems like facebook's more likely to get away with it too because the people being ripped off are smaller independent YouTube Channels.

It seems like YouTube's main incentive to build out copyright infringement tools was all of the record labels that had songs being uploaded and re- uploaded on the platform.

I can see YouTube getting really aggressive in fighting FB on this legally, because they need to defend their own content providers before they move to Facebook (or start uploading to both facebook/youtube).

<comment><USER14> I wish Google would start fighting dirty.

Want to access Facebook mobile? Hope you have an iPhone, because Google pushed a mandatory update last night which banned Facebook from all Android devices.

Want to access Facebook through Chrome? Sorry, it seems that site has been flagged as a malicious piracy hub; however, you might enjoy this 302 redirect to an automatically-generated clone of your Facebook profile hosted on a safer alternative called Google Plus.

<comment><USER15> That's when you get slapped with an antitrust lawsuit.

<comment><USER16> I could maybe see an antitrust lawsuit if Google dropped Facebook from search, because of their dominant market share there. But neither Android nor Chrome is a monopoly, so it's unclear to me how much legal risk they have if they stopped playing nice with Facebook there. Am I missing something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> All of this outrage at Facebook doing what Youtube already did[1] is difficult to fathom. Don't get me wrong, Facebook is not a site I use, am affiliated with, condone, or recommend.

But screaming bloody murder because they are doing to the site what that site did to others seems a bit of a stretch.

If hating on Facebook needs to happen (probably does, BTW), how about it's done for reasons such as their laughable "Terms of Service"[2] and how it blatantly states they instantly own anything passing through them without any consideration?

Now that's a bitterness I can get behind.

1 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._YouTube,_Inc).

2 - [https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms](https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms)

<comment><USER18> Back in the old YouTube days, people couldn't understand why big players wouldn't allow them to watch music videos on YouTube, when it was literally the only place to do so.

There was no legal Netflix alternative, so people felt much more okay with watching shows there as well.

Now it's the little guy not only getting hurt by two big players cooperating, there even is a well functioning alternative!

I'm not saying this is different from a legal point of view, but for small content consumers it definitely feels different.

<comment><USER17> I get what you're saying. And I agree that _any company_ which profits by the uncompensated works of others is wrong.

My point is that there are many comments here which are along the lines of "string Facebook up on the nearest tree because they allow people to put stuff up which is owned by a content creator who published it on Youtube!!!" The logic being, as you imply, that the content creators on Youtube are not being compensated.

And how is that different from Youtube profiting from _their_ users ripping off content creators and putting it up on Youtube?

My closing point was that I believe there are better reasons to take the pitchforks and torches out regarding Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't understand what Facebook is supposed to be guilty of...

Is Facebook supposed to somehow know the video was uploaded to YouTube before? That would require Facebook to have an index of all the content on YouTube (an unreasonable proposal).

The next best thing is to allow takedown requests which they do!

The same thing can be done by reposting on Vimeo or any of a million sites. There just is no technologically and legally sound method to detect this sort of behavior.

If you don't want your video to be reposted by someone else, post it yourself. That's not to say it's okay for pirating to happen but this isn't Facebook evil, it's people.

One might blame Facebook for prioritizing it's native videos over embedded YouTube content but their policy on that is very public and the user experience IS better.

Why is Facebook being demonized?

<comment><USER20> Because they make their takedown process incredibly longwinded and kafkaesque. Not only did Destin promptly file his claim, but many of his fans repeatedly contacted facebook and Bauer about it.

The fact that it took so long for either to even acknowledge the problem existed is evidence that facebook has little incentive to speed up the takedown process to a reasonable bureaucracy.

<comment><USER19> didn't the article say 2 days? That's not exactly horrible response time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This should be a fairly open and shut piracy case for the video maker. Zoo is a British magazine with a real company behind it. Facebook is a US-based company and is redistributing the video (and likely making money from the adverts). The video maker is based in the US. He can start with filing a case against FB (seems he has a US lawyer lined up already), and once he collects from that, he pays a UK lawyer to follow up against Zoo's parent.

<comment><USER22> Wouldn't DMCA protect Facebook from legal action here?

<comment><USER23> It would if they promptly removed offending content.

I'm not sure what the exact timeline in the DMCA is (72 hours?), but the 17,000,000 views that went by before removal is something... (Not sure where the counter was when the removal request was received.)

Not sure what that status of money made on material you've been told was infringing and haven't taken down is..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This seems to be shades of aggregate content farm business models. Is HuffingtonPost Comedy's recutting of cute cat videos without credit okay? How about BuzzFeed's use of stock / flickr images? What about memes -- someone took those photos once upon a time, now they don't even get a credit. How about the dumb radio station's non-original video clips circulating on FB?

<comment><USER25> No. Yes. Yes. No. :)

The meme background of e.g. not sure Fry doesn't substantially detract from the value of an episode of Futurama. The video reposts by various radio stations are exactly the same as the behavior in question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Facebook not only added native video support, but their news feed algorithm blocks YouTube links in favor of native videos all of the time. They created the freebooting problem themselves on purpose to keep people (and ad revenue) locked into their own site.

As far as piracy is concerned, I fail to see how Facebook is any better than MegaUpload. You might even say it's 1000 times worse, considering its alexa ranking is 1000 times better than MegaUpload's ever was.

Why hasn't Zuckerberg's house been raided yet, and all Facebook servers confiscated?

<comment><USER26> The answer is always the same in America, Facebook has a better legal team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is absolutely rampant in the blackhat marketing world, (where I used to dabble, but still stay up on mostly out of curiosity).

The model goes like this: Watch a few different pages and try to identify something that's bubbling up - that can be different viral facebook pages, reddit, whatever... there are a few different ways, but basically you constantly ping and scrape and try to identify stuff that's going viral as early as possible.

Once you've done that, you have an automated script that downloads the video and uploads it to your Facebook page or scrapes the content and throws it on your wordpress site with a _really_ weak "link back" to the original content. You build up a Facebook page that has a few million likes, cover your wordpress pages in ads, and profit. It's not incredibly difficult to create an automated-if-unethical Buzzfeed.

It's incredible to watch one viral post or video spread throughout the web. It spreads out on different sites and platforms as quickly as it spreads on social media. Few end users really care what the original source was (especially since it's usually click-baity BS anyway), and the winners are the ones who can find the content the quickest and have the biggest reach.

I talked to a guy a couple of days ago who is making $60,000/month using this exact process, and has very little programming ability. He is, however, an absolutely shrewd and ruthless marketer with no ethical qualms about much of anything.

The content producers send him DMCA requests on occasion, and when that happens he or Facebook takes it down. But that's just a cost of doing business, and 95% of the content stolen never sees a DMCA request, so who cares? (Assuming you have no ethical compass). Content creators aren't constantly searching and scraping and trying to find other places where their content is hosted. That's hard enough to do on one platform alone (i.e. YouTube), let alone monitoring other platforms (Facebook) and a bunch of wordpress sites.

It's a game of content creators vs. "marketers."

It gets even more difficult for the content creators as the "marketers" get smarter - heighten the pitch of a video a little bit so sound matching software can't find it, reverse the video and choose different thumbnails so reverse image/video searches don't find it, spin the text content (visitors aren't really there for the great writing anyway), and you beat the vast majority of software. It's up to the individual content creators to play the same game Google is playing to kill the spammers, which is not their core competency. Unless Facebook does something on its own platform, this won't change. And even if they do, the best spammers will continue to outsmart the system.

The only way Facebook (and the content creators) win is if it becomes a core competency, much the same way defeating spam is for Google. I still know guys who can beat Google, but the level of sophistication is high enough that 99% of people can't keep up.

There are a few simple ways you can beat the vast majority of the content theft though; if anyone is interested feel free to email me and I'll point out some of the breadcrumbs the marketers leave behind.

<comment><USER28> If there are a few simple things to beat a vast majority of content theft, I feel like you should author a blog post instead of keeping it private to an email conversation.

<comment><USER27> EDIT: on second thought, I'm not so sure telling spammers exactly how you're policing them isn't always the best thing to do. Emailing me is best, and if I think it's appropriate I'll publish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why can't YouTube users just send a DMCA takedown notice to Facebook? If a video makes someone a decent amount of money, then just sue for damages as well.

I'm not sure I understand what the problem is.

<comment><USER30> They probably don't have anyone on staff whose responsibility is to do that but it seems it would be in their best interest to create a department that defends their top contributors with DMCA takedown notices.

<comment><USER31> If that's true, it feels like willful negligence. They have a video platform that has access to a billion people. These are views in the tens of millions.

There's companies with order of magnitudes less traffic who have people fielding DMCA requests full-time. If FB doesn't, that's completely unacceptable, full stop.

<comment><USER32> The suggestions was the it could be in YouTube's interest to create a team that sends out DMCA notices on the behalf of their top contributors.

This would give YouTube a unique feature that would keep their content producers hosting content on their platform.

However, the mechanics would be somewhat tricky. I'd guess it would work something like the following: submit a URL for a Facebook post/Wordpress post, that prompted YouTube to ContentID against your existing videos, and if it found a match, it put your flagged violation in a queue for human verification, and subsequent automated DMCA takedown gets sent to the hoster, along with a report of if the content is still available. Of course, that becomes open to the sort of abuse mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

FaceBook certainly have a team responding to DMCA requests. They are just slow.

Ideally, someone like YouTube licenses their technology, and opens up their contentID DB to the licensee for consumption... But again, I can see many avenues for abuse by licensee's (for example, automated "content capture" of content not currently in the DB), that would need good policies to help prevent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> But is it Facebook or the magazine that ripped and modified the video the one at fault? Issue a DMCA to Facebook and sue the magazine for copyright infringement. And next time post it yourself.

<comment><USER34> The problem with posting it yourself, is unless you've spent ages cultivating a fb page with heaps of followers, you won't get any traction or views at all. And posting it yourself won't stop a larger fb page taking it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This seems pretty common in British newspapers, even outside facebook. Videos often appear on newspaper's own sites instead of embedding the YouTube video. For example this from the Guardian ([http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/apr/29/ed- mil...](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/apr/29/ed-miliband- russell-brand-video-highlights)). Others are similar and often even have their own pre-rolls.

Channel4 has whole TV programme, Rude Tube ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rude_Tube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rude_Tube)), devoted to internet clips, which are all from YouTube AFAIK. I wonder if the creators get any money from that.

<comment><USER36> FYI: When a video goes "viral", one is quickly contacted by agencies(happened to me). They have standard deals with big media corporations, and handles the licensing. It frees the creator from having to make deals with hundreds of news papers. So, at least some of the big pages that use other's videos have paid to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why they don't post to Facebook as well? If they have some good content and they don't push it on some market then somebody else will.

I know, I know. Piracy, copyright, "I made it, they just remixed it by cutting me out". "It's mine, where is my money?!" Internet apparently doesn't care.

Either you serve the market your content or the market gets served your content without ever knowing about you.

Is Facebook profiting from this? Sure. Was/is YouTube profiting from the same thing? Yes. Do internet providers profit from piracy in general? Of course. Same as writable DVD manufacturers were. XEROX owners and whoever.

Is that bad? It's way better than if it was to be made absolutely sure that they don't.

</comment><comment><USER38> It sounds to me like part of the problem is that the people making popular videos don't share them on facebook themselves, which results in the modern internet native's primary reaction to media being unavailable in their preferred venue and at their preferred comfortability level: Piracy.

Sure, you can fight back by appealing to the public about facebook's evility, or by spending lots of resources in legal action. Or you can roll with the punches and figure out the myriad ways in which even the currently broken facebook system can work for you.

<comment><USER39> How would those videos monetize for the author when posted on Facebook? The article says Facebook's ad revenue sharing is in the works but not quite there yet .

<comment><USER40> Probably not directly at the moment, but they could do something similar to what the people who are ripping them off are doing: create a FB page for exposure, and hope that exposure turns into views on their YouTube channel.

<comment><USER41> But why should I go watch the video on YouTube when I just watched it on Facebook? Even better, the Facebook video doesn't have ads.

<comment><USER25> The classic pirate answer is that after you torrent an album to try it out, you go buy a copy to support the artist. So after you watch the Facebook video, you'd go watch it again on YouTube to support the creator.

<comment><USER42> That works quite well for music because you usually want to listen to it more than once - I actually started buying music again because of Grooveshark. It doesn't make sense for videos and I suspect you know that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Youtube became exactly because of pirated videos in its early days. Viacom and others fought for a long time to keep their videos off of youtube but eventually gave in. Now FB is doing the same thing.

<comment><USER17> > Youtube became exactly because of pirated videos in its early days.

I think this is the quintessential definition of "Quid Pro Quo"[1].

1 - [http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/quid%20pro%20quo](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/quid%20pro%20quo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Didn't youtube start the same way?

<comment><USER45> Sure but from my understanding of the article youtube isn't really the aggrieved party it's the creators that are.

<comment><USER46> YouTube is an aggrieved party since they are losing money too, but there's far more popular sympathy for the individual creators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Every company having its success is paid by having shitty practices. It is a standard. I even wonder if this is correlated with social darwinism, that, for some cultural reason, you must be bad so be successful.

Maybe the technologies of internet will improve up to the point there will be no multinational group able to reap the benefit (a more decentralized internet with bitcoin-like architectures), but I don't see it happening very soon. I can guess consumers could understand the complexity of technology only so much, I wonder if improving those technologies and making them also as much accessible is really possible.

Facebook is really the low hanging fruit of the web. They might have open sourced stuff, but they're really evil in the google sense of the word. I can already remember 2 examples: the click farms and internet.org, and I'm sure there are so many other examples.

All of this makes me really sad, because the internet is the #1 tech tool that is improving the lives of so many people, and there is already so much greed involved.

</comment><comment><USER48> Yes, Facebook is a piracy heaven. It's not just for small video producers. Sport videos (which are really expensive) can be found for free in Facebook.

Example:

[https://www.facebook.com/SuperHighlightsCom?fref=ts](https://www.facebook.com/SuperHighlightsCom?fref=ts)

</comment><comment><USER49> So what Facebook needs to implement is an ultra simple content claiming mechanism.

Offending video: My Video (can include youtube/vimeo/other link):

No, not automatically scalable. Facebook started this, they're gonna have to staff up to handle the problems associated with it.

I see Facebook has only recently started allowing people to monetize their uploads, so the primary benefit the "freebooters" got was traffic to their site. Maybe Facebook should take a page from porn and link-skim an equivalent number of page views from the freebooter to the victim. Talk about restitution!

(incidentally, I've found Facebook far more responsive than Twitter. Imagine what happens when the big T gets into the video game in a big way)

</comment><comment><USER50> It is actually quite simple to combat this, technically. Embed an (invisible) watermark into the video that encodes the domain for which the movie can be played, and have all browsers refuse to play content with watermarks that are of a different domain than the one shown in the url bar (throw a security exception or something).

<comment><USER51> Using the example in the article, we're already dealing with companies that are willfully violating copyright (not some dummy kid uploading tv clips to youtube with "no copyright entended" in the description).

How do they not also work around this system?

Say I go on youtube, download Destin's video, cut out his talking and advertizing portions. I'll just change the watermark while I'm there and then slap it on facebook.

Even if we go cryptographic, and replace the watermarks with public key signing, does facebook only host properly signed videos? Then how does the chain of trust work? For automated transcoding by youtube and the like work? How do I get a trusted public key for cute videos of my cats that doesn't create an infinite well of keys for freebooters?

So maybe we can't just sign, we have to add in DRM so that only authorized player widgets can even decode the video in the first place. That doesn't stop piracy of hollywood material, why would it stop a media company from freebooting?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Let's not pretend YouTube didn't become big by the same way; it was from the start a giant platform for "illegally" sharing copyrighted videos. It got better in this regard lately but the fact that it was full of copyrighted stuff helped them bootstrap.

</comment><comment><USER53> Would there be any reason why the content creator couldn't sue Facebook and/or Zoo RIAA style using the same copyright laws? Unlike music sharing, this situation probably does have a specific, tangible amount of revenue losses to the videographer.

</comment><comment><USER54> Doesn't the YouTube terms require that you allow some reuse of your video as long as its on there? The same thing goes on on YouTube itself where people create channels and aregate other popular videos.

</comment><comment><USER55> I think the issue that the article points out is valid. But it expands to a bigger face than just Facebook. Namely, any content on the Internet, by virtue of being easily accessed, is easily duplicated. Sites like 9gag and Buzzfeed are full of reposts from Reddit and 4chan. "But wait!" you say, "those aren't the same. Those aren't making money like videos!" But the value of any content is to drive views and growth, and in that sense the text or image posts are worth just as much as video. We don't generally make the same big deal out of these as music or video because it is more difficult for creators of small content to complain.

<comment><USER56> The difference is that text and images do not have a native platform on which a context creator can publish AND monetise their work. For video there exists YouTube and music Spotify and YouTube again. The opportunities for monetising text and images are miniscule in comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Like usual, currently Facebook doesn't think they have much of a "problem" at all. It only becomes a problem if someone calls them out on it - probably in a court.

</comment><comment><USER58> A more accurate title: Youtube's Facebook Piracy Problem

</comment><comment><USER59> I don't understand how this is "Facebook's" piracy problem. It sounds like the British newspaper's piracy problem.

<comment><USER24> If the tooling isn't there for reporting. Youtube, for example, has worked really hard with Content ID to be able to automatically report and repoint infringing content.

<comment><USER25> This may be the first post in the history of HN that isn't completely negative about content ID.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> It seems like it would be easy for Facebook to support takedowns since it could remove the video from feeds.

<comment><USER61> Takedowns suck. Content creators don't want that and people driving traffic to their page don't want that. The crucial thing about YouTube and ContentID is that you can leave the videos alone but choose to monetize (take all ad revenue) from a re-uploaded video instead of just showing a black box and a takedown notice. It works and it is seamless on YouTube but I don't know if Facebook has built anything similar. More interesting will be how Facebook and YouTube handle content exclusively uploaded on one platform or the other but re-uploaded cross-platform.

Shameless plug: we (FullScreen) have a video uploader service that uploads to both platforms with several custom options such as staggered release on the two platforms or say putting a short preview clip on Facebook that links to the full video on (monetized) YouTube: [http://www.fullscreen.com/2015/05/21/fullscreen-uploader- is-...](http://www.fullscreen.com/2015/05/21/fullscreen-uploader-is-here/)

<comment><USER62> "Takedowns suck."

No, stealing (yes, stealing) people's work sucks. Unjustified takedown requests do suck (and what makes them suck so much is platforms' craven response to frivolous requests). But we're talking about real, willful infringement here.

"Content creators don't want that"

You probably shouldn't try to speak for all of us, because you are wrong.

<comment><USER63> What does the content creator gain from the user seeing a black box? That's way worse than them seeing the content and the creator getting money for it, from both the user and the creator's perspective.

<comment><USER62> Firstly, the copyright holder gets to decide what's in his best interest, not you.

Secondly, just playing along, what he gets is his audience going to the legitimate source for the content, where he will get his full measure of remuneration, where the work will be seen in its proper context, and where he can ensure that it's not tampered with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> It seems like the major issue is that attribution was removed. The reposting stripped credit for the guy.

I think everyone can agree that putting a movie up on the pirate bay, and putting a movie up on the pirate bay after stripping out the credits and putting your own name on it are two different kinds of things.

<comment><USER65> The major issue is the revenue stream to the creator was removed. Someone (facebook and/or the page) was profiting directly or indirectly from the work, and not the author. That's copyright infringement and theft. The removal of the attribution is insult added to injury, but far less immediately important.

I sometimes wonder if the tech startup crowd really believes "eyeballs," "exposure," and "active users" are inherently valuable. Maybe if you're shopping around to investors or patrons. Not if you're the other 99% of the population. For them, exposure is just a chance to grow the modest revenue stream they already have, or nothing at all. MAYBE you could get lucky and parlay it into a book deal or something, but probably not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I think a better term for this would be "facebooting".

</comment><comment><USER67> Wow, Facebook is a bunch of assholes, screwing people over for a quick buck. Who would have thought...

<comment><USER68> Someone stole the video and reposted it on Facebook. Facebook didn't do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Why is this a surprise? Facebook was founded on theft -- starting from when Zuckerberg stole the business from the Winklevoss twins.

<comment><USER69> OK, check the IM messages at the bottom of this post: [http://gawker.com/5486554/mark-zuckerberg-will-personally- ha...](http://gawker.com/5486554/mark-zuckerberg-will-personally-hack-your- facebook-account)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> This title seems (a bit) like blaming the stock exchange for insider trading.

<comment><USER71> Do the stock exchange earn money on insider trading? If not then thats a key difference when it comes to incentives and encouraging such activities.

<comment><USER72> I'm not an expert, but I assume the exchange takes the same cut of the bid ask spread on an insider trade as it does on any other trade. So the answer to your question is an unequivocal yes.</comment></comment></comment>