Puerto Rico's Health Care Is in Dire Condition, Three Weeks After Maria - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/us/puerto-rico-power-hospitals.html <comment><USER4> There's (almost) nothing of intellectual curiosity in this thread and a plethora of partisan battle. That's the inverse of the values of HN, so I've buried the submission.

Sometimes a politically charged topic has an intellectually interesting aspect and the discussion is able to balance itself with both. Such threads are ok; this isn't one.

All: if you haven't recently, would you mind learning about the values of this site by reading [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), then (going backward in time) [https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)<USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html)? Those will fill you in. The default tendency on the internet is so strongly toward entropy that we'd appreciate your attending to what kind of site HN is trying (and trying not) to be.

</comment><comment><USER5> Trump administration FEMA says it's "not our job" [1] to distribute food/water in PR. Trump administration has also declined to extend the Jones Act exemption allowing non-US built ships to send aid tariff/tax free [2].

Therefore non-US approved international aid incurs fees/taxes. So we don't treat Puerto Ricans as US Citizens but don't allow other countries to assist without impounding taxes and duties on the supplies.

Willful negligence.

[1] [https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/10/10/1705685/-FEMA- No...](https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/10/10/1705685/-FEMA-Not-our-job- to-deliver-water-and-food-to-Puerto-Ricans-Think-I-am-making-this-up-Wrong)

[2] [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dhs-will-let-jones-act- waiver-f...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dhs-will-let-jones-act-waiver-for- puerto-rico-expire/)

<comment><USER6> The Jones act only prevents cabotage[1], which is to say shipping something between two places in the same country. It in no way prevents the Dominican Republic from shipping supplies or people, or any other country for that matter in shipping stuff there.

It's my opinion that while the Jones Act probably does increase the cost of shipping goods two and from the island, its not a magic catchall fixit - <USER2> beyond that, every report I've read makes it clear we've enough stuff there to take care of people, but its not making it from the places where it landed, to the places where people are - and therefor complaints about the Jones Act seem mostly to be political haymaking - as the old saying goes, never let a good crisis go to waste.

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

<comment><USER7> Interesting thoughts but ...

> It's my opinion that while the Jones Act probably does increase the cost of > shipping goods two and from the island, its not a magic catchall fixit

No offense, but based on what? And then what is the impact of the Jones Act? If you have expertise in that industry to support the analysis, that would be great. Could you link to some of these reports?

<comment><USER8> The Federal Reserve thinks that it doubles the price of shipping between Puerto Rico and the US Mainland:

> _It costs an estimated $3,063 to ship a twenty-foot container of household > and commercial goods from the East Coast of the United States to Puerto > Rico; the same shipment costs $1,504 to nearby Santo Domingo (Dominican > Republic) and $1,687 to Kingston (Jamaica)—destinations that are not subject > to Jones Act restrictions._

Page 23 in the PDF (numbered 13):

[https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/regional/Puert...](https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/regional/PuertoRico/report.pdf)

Terrible for disaster relief but also on a daily level, terrible for imports/exports. How can you have a competitive economy with that type of anchor weighing on your Ex/Im?

<comment><USER6> It's probably not important for disaster relief (there doesnt seem to be a shortage of relief supplies, but rather a shortage of on-island transport to distribute them) - but I'd agree it is a huge drag on the local economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To give help: [https://hispanicfederation.org/unidos/](https://hispanicfederation.org/unidos/)

The Unidos fund has 100 percent of donations going toward relief for Hurricane Maria.

<comment><USER10> Wow, someone's on a serious downvote brigade tear on this article if _this_ is (edit: was) getting downvoted to grey.

<comment><USER11> Within the last few weeks especially the botnets have gone on overdrive on all touchy topics, very interesting indeed.

<comment><USER12> Botnets with >500 karma per account on Hacker News? Seems unlikely.

<comment><USER11> You might not be a bot, but it is definitely bot talking points, you just fell for them. You fell for the "whataboutism". People are dying in PR, but but what about ... debt and and .. kneeling.

<comment><USER12> What?

<comment><USER11> Botnets are out in force on touchy subjects in force recently. You cannot see private upvotes/downvotes so you don't know the user that upvoted or downvotes a comment. I think eventually we will have to see this on reddit/hn etc as the botnets are en masse now and mostly just brigading when there is an important subject.

I wasn't calling you a bot per se but I see lots of people puppeting botnet "whataboutisms" that is some hardcore propaganda and getting giddy when they are upvoted by these same fake users. Strangely the brigading is mostly when the news is political. Just based on what I have seen the last few weeks especially, they are ratcheting it up. It is making discussion of serious topics relegated to battling bot armies rather than individual opinions, a losing battle unless you have your own bot army.

<comment><USER12> Have you considered that they may be people with different opinions than you?

Reddit is one thing, but Hacker News does not allow downvotes until a user earns _500_ karma. That's a high bar to cross for a bot.

I also don't see where I subscribed to any "whataboutisms." My point is that you shouldn't attribute to botnets what can be adequately explained by the existence of people who disagree with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We need to make them a state finally and never allow this to happen again.

For people putting this on budgets/PR, lots of states are in dire situations with budgets/funds and healthcare on the mainland. If you swapped a few states with Puerto Rico in the "big water" you'd have the same exact situation. Many states are in the red. A country should stand up for their citizens in emergencies and tragedies and that includes Puerto Rico.

<comment><USER13> I think this is the intended effect. They operate in a special grey area created by generations past to great advantage. Then they have corruption and mismanagement in their politics until their economic wellness is a dumpster fire. They literally did this to themselves by selling bonds that they can't pay back that they are obligated "before even necessary services are provided for the citizens".

It's sad that they abuse their tax free status and made themselves into a tax haven that is abused without actually bringing much income into the country, then changed tax regulations and increased deficit spending before being forced into austerity.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_government- debt_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_government-debt_crisis)

I hope they will allow Congress to incorporate them into the USA as a state after this.

<comment><USER7> > selling bonds that they can't pay back

That is not at all unique to PR.

It's a widespread problem in U.S. government. That's the reason the city of Detroit went bankrupt. Many, many government entities have liabilities, especially pensions, that they can't afford. Many companies have the same problem; it drove General Motors to bankruptcy. The federal government toys with bankruptcy each time Congress needs to authorize additional debt, and now the leading tax legislation will drive up debt considerably more.

But the overwhelming example is the Great Recession of 2008, which was due to the exact same problem, on a very wide scale, on Wall Street. In that case, the bonds (and other financial instruments) were based on fraudulent housing loans.

In most of the above cases, the taxpayers of the U.S. stepped in and rescued the debtors. Also, in the West, debtors prison is no longer considered a good thing - bankruptcy lets debtors recover. There's no reason PR shouldn't benefit from the same support.

<comment><USER13> >That is not at all unique to PR. You cut off the part that is unique, which was that PR citizens are also US citizens but they do not pay federal income tax unless they come to the mainland. They do not pay capital gains tax either. They sold bonds with special clauses that they must be paid back, even before critical services are provided to the people. They defaulted and now they are being forced to pay it back even though they can't fund their emergency preparedness, hospitals, or infrastructure and emergency response.

PR was not at all prepared for something that was obviously coming and they are trying to use political pressure to get the huge anti-Trump sentiment in the country to think it was all Trump's fault when he has little to do with overseeing FEMA's response. I'm sure there are things he could have done better. His statements have been asinine and politically tone deaf for sure, but this isn't about him. This is about the mess PR made. If they want to be a state, then be a state. Otherwise, they offer nothing to the USA and in my opinion should be dissolved as a US territory.

<comment><USER7> > Trump's fault when he has little to do with overseeing FEMA's response.

Trump is the elected President and is directly responsible to the citizens for the Executive Branch, including FEMA. His job is, specifically, the performance of the Executive Branch. If FEMA isn't delivering, he needs to see to fixing it ASAP. He needed to see to it that they were prepared.

> PR was not at all prepared for something that was obviously coming and they > are trying to ...

Is there more to that then words typed in a web forum? That is all I've seen; nothing to support that story.

> Otherwise, they offer nothing to the USA and in my opinion should be > dissolved as a US territory.

Membership isn't based on contribution, nor is past contribution a prediction of the future. Should poor people be kicked out? What about Mississippi? The US has always been based on the belief that people, if given freedom and opportunity, can prosper and achieve.

<comment><USER14> FEMA is dealing with the aftermath of 3 hurricanes at the same time. Their entire staff is working hard to respond. They aren't failing to deliver; they're facing a unique challenge.

All while being condemned for their inability to wave a magic wand and fix everything immediately, and attacked by the media's endless anti-Trump campaign.

<comment><USER7> If you could provide any basis for any of that, it would be valuable. Otherwise, it's just characters someone typed into a field on their web browser.

<comment><USER14> As opposed to what? Characters someone typed into a corporate content management system?

Which part do you dispute?

The Pew Research center found that, excluding the right-wing media, only 5% of the media's coverage of Trump was positive.

[http://www.journalism.org/2017/10/02/covering-president- trum...](http://www.journalism.org/2017/10/02/covering-president-trump-in-a- polarized-media-environment/)

Edit: 6% of the centrist media's coverage, for those inclined to nitpick.

<comment><USER7> > As opposed to what? Characters someone typed into a corporate content > management system?

I don't understand your point

> Pew Research center found

Some information at last! That's what I'm talking about.

First, "excluding the right-wing media" is a pretty major omission. Excluding my right leg, I have no easy means of walking. The right-wing media is enormous, including the leading media companies in many segments (Fox, WSJ, talk radio, etc.).

Second, reading the report, the number the parent quotes excludes both media with a right-wing audience and with a politically mixed audience (the report defines it by the political leanings of the audience, not of the news outlet); the number includes only media with a predominantly left-wing audience.

Third, the parent comment implies that 95% was negative, omitting that 39% of the coverage, even in media for left-wing audience, was neutral.

So here's the actual data, for media consumed by predominantly left-wing audiences: 5% positive, 39% neutral, 56% negative.

When right-wing media lambasted Obama day and night for over 8 years, opposing everything he did, calling him everything from Kenyan to Communist, I don't recall such an uproar about coverage. And the left serve as his propaganda outlet either, the way Fox et al serve Republicans - the progressives didn't like him, and there is no Democratic propaganda front with major reach.

<comment><USER14> > When right-wing media lambasted Obama day and night for over 8 years, > opposing everything he did, calling him everything from Kenyan to Communist, > I don't recall such an uproar about coverage.

Because that's expected from the right-wing media, just like HuffPo is expected to hate Trump.

The problem is that the "centrist" media is biased. Only 6% of their coverage is positive.

> just characters someone typed into a field on their web browser

Every post on Hacker News is just characters someone typed into a web browser. Every text post on the Internet is just characters someone typed into a text box. What was your point there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Given the incredible amounts the USA spends on 'defence' one wonders where all the assets the pentagon buys are to help US citizens after a violent attack by the elements. Why isn't the army mobilized to help with all aspects of infrastructure including healthcare?

<comment><USER16> They're at least somewhat mobilized. For example the "medical treatment ship" _Comfort_ is on the scene:

> There are urgent attempts to help. The federal government has sent 10 > Disaster Medical Assistance Teams of civilian doctors, nurses, paramedics > and others to the island. Four mobile hospitals have been set up in hospital > parking lots, and the Comfort, a medical treatment ship, is on the scene. A > 44-bed hospital will soon open in badly wrecked Humacao, in the southeast.

> But even as the Army Corps of Engineers is installing dozens of generators > at medical facilities, and utility crews work to restore power to 36 > hospitals, medical workers and patients say that an intense medical crisis > persists and that communications and electrical difficulties have obscured > the true number of fatalities directly related to the hurricane. The > official count rose on Tuesday to 43.

> Matching resources with needs remains a problem. The Puerto Rico Department > of Health has sent just 82 patients to the Comfort over the past six days, > even though the ship can serve 250. The Comfort's 800 medical personnel were > treating just seven patients on Monday.

I don't really know enough to say whether our military is doing all it can, but it's certainly doing something significant. And they appear to still be hobbled by the laws of physics and the limits of human resourcefulness and endurance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As much as the current administration deserves blame for the mishandling of this crisis, I think it's disingenuous to stop the conversation there.

The island was pretty much wiped out. Even with billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of people, you'd still have people dying. Right from the article:

> The Puerto Rico Department of Health has sent just 82 patients to the > Comfort over the past six days, even though the ship can serve 250. The > Comfort's 800 medical personnel were treating just seven patients on Monday.

They do have resources, but I bet it's just extremely difficult to move people and supplies around on an island that is barely above water. You just can't fight nature and expect to come out with no losses.

Also, the heartless cynic in me thinks that the powers that be are letting this get a little drawn out so the poor people on public health assistance die off and eat up less resources. If 6,000 people no longer need dialysis, you're saving $300,000,000/year.

</comment><comment><USER18> Supplies are still not being distributed across the island:

[https://twitter.com/lucianrandolph/status/917507001902665728](https://twitter.com/lucianrandolph/status/917507001902665728)

Power is still out for the vast majority of the island:

[http://www.status.pr/](http://www.status.pr/)

I have previously [1] suggested [2] crowdfunding the expatriation of Puerto Rican residents. If you know of someone in Puerto Rico, get in touch, get them a job on the mainland, and get them out of there on a commercial flight. If they're a retiree, consider taking them in.

EDIT: @ bueble

I suppose will throw out the statements and facts from the thread link about people dying from not getting the basic medical treatment they need due to power and facility shortages?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15412122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15412122)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15416635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15416635)

<comment><USER10> A part of the United States with more people than Kansas is 90% without power and 35% without water weeks after a disaster. Shameful, and disturbing how little attention is being paid to it by government and media.

> I have previously suggested crowdfunding the expatriation of Puerto Rican > residents. If you know of someone in Puerto Rico, get in touch, get them a > job on the mainland, and get them out of there on a commercial flight.

Preferably, to a swing state. The current lack of political power - <USER3> senators, no congresspeople, no electoral votes - will always mean PR is treated very differently than even the smallest state.

<comment><USER19> "Preferably, to a swing state."

Yep, move people who voted for the local governemnt that left them unprepared for a disaster like this and make them vote for the same government in a swing state.

<comment><USER10> The PR government may indeed deserve some blame (maybe even a lot!), but IMO it's _absurd_ to think that their disenfranchised status on a national level doesn't play a role.

Their debt is $72 billion. We authorized $700 billion for TARP to bail out failing banks, and $17.4 billion to bail out the Big Three automakers.

<comment><USER20> As to the debt (not the natural disaster): Let's be clear, Puerto Rico is a wealthy place. It's richer than Spain. It's $72 billion debt is from overly generous public benefits. It's basically Illinois or Detroit. The Federal Government isn't bailing those places out either, because unlike TARP (which we recovered with a slight profit), we'd never get that money back.

<comment><USER10> What are these "overly generous" public benefits?

They get substantially lower Medicare and Medicaid funding per capita, can't join the Federal healthcare exchange, and their citizens aren't eligible for ACA subsidies. [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/03/us/health-providers- brace...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/03/us/health-providers-brace-for- more-cuts-to-medicare-in-puerto-rico.html)

Puerto Rico's per-capita GDP is also lower than any US state.

<comment><USER20> > What are these "overly generous" public benefits?

Puerto Rico's debt arises from overly generous benefits to public employees and retirees and underfunding: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-puertorico- debt-budget/pu...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-puertorico-debt- budget/puerto-rico-budget-to-protect-pension-payments-governor-idUSKBN18R3C8). As in Illinois, Detroit, etc., this is purely a local issue, the result of local expenditures not matching local revenues. It has nothing to do with the federal government.

As for federal support, on the whole, Puerto Rico receives more in federal support than it pays in federal taxes: [https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Arthur%20MacEwa...](https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Arthur%20MacEwan%20and%20J.%20Tomas%20Hexner%20\(Submission%204\).pdf). It's sandwiched right between Louisiana and Vermont in that regard.

> Puerto Rico's per-capita GDP is also lower than any US state.

Yes, but on a purchasing power adjusted basis, it's higher than South Korea, New Zealand, Italy, Spain, and other countries that manage to have solvent public services without relying on outside support.

<comment><USER18> It seems like the options available are:

1\. Default on pension obligations, put those retirees on social security and eat the cost (transfer from general fund to SSA) if they haven't contributed in via FICA

2\. Bail out their underwater pensions

3\. Default on pension obligations, allow retirees to die in poverty

I put them in my preferred order of operations.

<comment><USER20> I agree the first one is the best option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And Trump's administration has even released a video showing everything is fine.

<comment><USER22> I don't know. Mark Zuckerberg teleported there and it still looks pretty messed up.</comment></comment>


HN Bug: Title field can be 80 characters, but error message requests  - <AUTHOR>

As is evident from this title. <comment><USER2> There is a Hacker News bug tracker here: [https://github.com/HackerNews/HN](https://github.com/HackerNews/HN)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing evident from the title, it is 68 characters long.

<comment><USER4> It would appear that the title may be cut off, as "error message requests" seems like it would be followed by another word - as in, what is it requesting?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. I think I forgot to paste in the real offender. Here's something though. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6519628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6519628)</comment></comment></comment>


Social Media Endangers Knowledge - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedias-fate-shows-how-the-web-endangers-knowledge/ <comment><USER3> If you want Wikipedia to have more contributors, maybe the editors ought to stop being so caustic toward new members?

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

Created an account, created a barebones skeleton user page just to make the red text link go away, immediately flagged for special deletion. Even when the person agreed with my point, their tone was mildly hostile and lectury.

(Epilogue: I ended up not really contributing much since then simply because of how I was greeted.)

Behavior like this _drives new contributors away_.

<comment><USER4> This drive-by criticism comes up every time Wikipedia is mentioned on HN. I've written a few articles on computer science topics and haven't been bothered at all by the roving gangs of bureaucrats. It's always a lovely experience.

If you write quality, researched articles on topics beyond those belonging to common knowledge and pop culture, your Wikipedia experience will be very pleasant. Since the HN readership is skews educated and technical, they are very well-equipped to write such articles.

<comment><USER3> > This drive-by criticism comes up every time Wikipedia is mentioned on HN. > I've written a few articles on computer science topics and haven't been > bothered at all by the roving gangs of bureaucrats. It's always a lovely > experience.

That's all fine and well, but I literally only created an account and got attacked. I wasn't even given the opportunity to contribute yet.

Unless your intent was to imply that I'm unwilling or incapable of writing quality, researched articles on topics beyond those belonging to knowledge and pop culture, your comment does not logically follow from the stated problem.

<comment><USER4> Your stated problem is that caustic behaviour toward new editors drives away potential long-term editors. To support this assertion, you used your own experience. As a counterpoint, I related my own experience, which was different. I'm not sure where it fails to "logically follow" as though this were some mathematical chain of reasoning rather than an informal conversation.

<comment><USER3> The way your post above was structured served to imply that I'm incapable of writing quality, researched articles on topics beyond those belonging to knowledge and pop culture, which was the component of your post above that I stated did not logically follow. My description of "illogical" was toward your back-handed remark.

I'll note that you did not attempt to deny, retract, amend, or correct this interpretation after being presented with it, which leaves me to believe that was your intent all along.

In which case: No, that's not acceptable. Personal attacks do not belong on HN, let alone baseless ones.

<comment><USER4> You seem really fixated on the logic here, and I'm feeling bored and unbelievably petty, so let's break it all down.

Logical structure of your original post, in your voice:

A.P0: If existing editors behave poorly toward new editors, it will drive new editors away.

A.P1: Existing editors are behaving poorly toward new editors, based on my anecdotal supporting evidence.

A.C: Existing editors are driving away new editors with their poor behaviour.

Logical structure of my reply, in my voice:

B.P0: Existing editors behave poorly toward newcomers in certain domains such as common knowledge and pop culture.

B.P1: Existing editors don't behave poorly toward newcomers in domains such as creation of new technical articles, based on my anecdotal supporting evidence.

B.P2: Many HN readers have the capability to write new technical articles.

B.C: HN readers will not experience poor behaviour from existing editors if they use their knowledge to write new technical articles.

Logical structure of first reply, in your voice:

C.P0: It is possible you are implying I am unwilling/incapable of writing quality researched Wikipedia articles.

C.P1: If you were not implying C.P0, then your reply does not logically follow (ed. note: probably meant "address" rather than "logically follow") from conclusion A.C.

Logical structure of my reply, in my voice:

(clarifying restatement of previous)

Logical structure of your second reply, in your voice:

E.P0: Since you did not explicitly assuage my concerns in C.P0, my concerns are valid.

E.P1: If my C.P0 concerns were valid, that constitutes a personal attack.

E.P2: Personal attacks are unacceptable on HN.

E.C: Your reply to me was unacceptable.

Now that we have a nice pseudo-logical representation of our conversation, I hope all ambiguity is cleared up. Anyway, your propositions C.P1 and E.P0 are both incorrect.

<comment><USER3> You're forgetting something: _They were hostile to me before I had a chance to contribute._

Here's where your logic falls apart: B.P1 is demonstrably false, in at least one occurrence. (i.e. Mine, where the hostility existed irrespective of my writing skills or the value of my potential contributions, or the lack thereof, because they were acting with zero information which shows their tendencies. If you've already established social capital, you're part of their in-group and therefore will not be attacked.)

But from the overall tone of the other comments here, and the sheer upvote/downvote ratio of my top-level comment, it's probably not a rare event.

I didn't think you overlooked this detail. I misinterpreted your statements as a personal attack based on the fact that I already explicitly made this clear and you appeared to have enough mastery of the English language to possess basic reading comprehension. But clearly I was wrong somewhere.

I apologize for giving you too much credit.

Hopefully spelling it out here, again, makes it clearer. If not, there's no point continuing this conversation because it's only going to get nasty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fundamentally though, the article fails to engage with whether these phenomenon are really a problem.

As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia progressively moves from a no information recorded, to a most information recorded state, we would actually expect contributor growth to fall.

Additionally, with the increase of the "great unwashed" online for lack of a better term, yes, the density of intellectual and worthwhile thought online goes down. But does that matter, or more accurately, is that cause for concern over and above the general phenomenon of an "appearance" focused culture? Does social media cause, or merely reflect the values of our underlying culture?

What I do know is that I have been born into a time where I have the most access to knowledge of any human civilization ever. I can download Wikipedia. I have e readers. I don't even need to pay the university any more because I have so much access to libraries, knowledge and communication and computation.

While I am of course concerned about our societies values and their consequences, it is hard for me to take seriously the concern on the face of it that social media is destroying knowledge, when it is available in amount, redundancy and accessibility in greater amounts than it ever has been before. Period.

Perhaps there is also some anxiety on the separation of knowledge from the "appearance of knowledge" industry as well :p

<comment><USER6> I'll disagree with your statement because there's a hidden variable/assumption that has now changed.

There is a great amount of information available today compared to before - __all else held constant __.

All else is not constant. Assumptions on signal vs noise have been upended and getting to good information to an average person is now perhaps more of a task than before.

Given an average joe, none of them will be on the level of informational awareness as a member of HN.

They will not know or try to check the links on a Wikipedia page, be aware of various turf wars, or the credibility of a page.

This is if they approach a page directly, as opposed to being diverted or distracted from information.

In short- by measures both malicious, intentional and accidental, signal is now swamped with more noise than ever before.

So I disagree with that statement as it is true only in a general, unspecific and intractable sense.

(The rule of thumb is that all noise is signal to someone, and a lot of this is signal for our hindbrains which are better customers than our rational, non-impulsive minds.)

<comment><USER7> Quite frankly, I think you give even the average HN user too much credit. We are awash in information and there just is no good method for properly vetting it in a timely manner unless you are prepared to devote a not-insignificant amount of time to doing so, and even reading the material presented past the headline is often asking too much of many readers; how many discussions here have gone on for hundreds of posts for hours as people who just want to get into an argument banter back and forth?

We live in a wonderful age full of lots of information, but we're all pretty poor at sorting it, and the informatoin we do receive tends to be less about informing and more about persuading. I occasionally see the discussion threads from our Marketing/Sales guys and I see the "fightcards" they pass back and forth with highlights for winning out over competing products; while I see the value in a sales situation, I can't help but see many similarities in think pieces and the fightcards, in that they don't aim to provide deep and indepth information on any particular subject, they're meant to be highly persuasive towards a specific idea while diminishing another. I understand this in a competitive sales situation, I suppose - you're more or less fighting memes and myths from someone else, so you fight back with the same since the audience doesn't understand the raw data anyways, or the raw data is incredibly subjective. But for Thinktanks or other such outlets, I think this is an incredibly dishonest way of discussing and presenting information, regardless of the source behind it. Infographics, ByTheNumbers, AtAGlance, all such methods are just coy tricks to avoid actual data and instead present an opinion as fact. We see it with various news media too where the authors conflate the number of references with validity, and you end up with news blogs where every other word is referenced or a link to a reference, and the references often contain so much information there's no reasonable way you could validate even one of them in time before the article has taken off as viral.

We are drowning in information and poor information sharing in general - <USER2> when you have the cognizance to know to check things like the history behind how a piece of information was assembled, there often is just too much data for any one person to sort effectively, and tracing such data to a reliable source is darn near impossible.

Our major media outlets failed us the moment they decided to try competing with clickbait headlines and rapid, poorly researched stories, and we failed them when we started falling for it hook, line, and sinker. Media outlets should be on the ball with cameras and people and concise reporting, but the actual information should be the result of slow, intentional, cumbersome, and concretrated effort. We luckily still see this a lot from magazines, luckily enough, but the rest is pretty dire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having done a lot of data mining and analysis of Wikipedia (scanning its entire corpus several times, machine learning new representations, studying traffic and article growth stats, studying its ontological structure) I would like to make two suggestions: (1) In its current structure, Wikipedia is "almost complete". For the way that articles are written, embellished with media, and organized there doesn't appear to be much room for change to most of them. This should be concerning, because in reality Wikipedia is always only the tip of the iceberg for everything. (2) In order to inspire a new growth of editing and contributions to Wikipedia, which can expand the corpus by another order of magnitude, new systems for organizing and communicating knowledge need to be developed that can allow orders of magnitude more information to be elegantly incorporated into existing articles. If anyone is interested in pursuing this, I don't suggest waiting for the bureaucracies and crowds to develop it (although would obviously be thrilled if they did); what's in your power now is to fork the corpus yourself, and start a new open source initiative on its back. This is the classic case of how hard it is for big organizations to adapt in big ways (almost impossible), versus a small startup enterprise.

<comment><USER9> Do you have links to your analytical work?

Bonus for links to your thoughts on how to fork and expand another order of magnitude. This is something I'd love to work on at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As much I think Debord's theory on the _Society of the Spectacle_ [1] is as prescient as ever today, this article doesn't go far enough in making that case. It even casts Google as some great democratizing force:

> _Wikipedia was a fruit of this garden. So was Google search and its text- > based advertising model....They effectively democratized the ability to > contribute to the global corpus of knowledge._

Google completely changed how people access information, true, but they also did way more to centralize the web than almost any other company, ever. That's not the best news for objective knowledge. Yet they get a pass while "social media" gets indicted with an anecdote about narcissism on Instagram?

At the time of this writing, searches related to _The Walking Dead_ are the top trending ones. You need to present some much more compelling evidence that social media is behind this shift away from "knowledge," and that Google is somehow not, for me to believe they're not just as much part of the Spectacle.

All that is to say that this article takes too narrow a focus, and misses the larger point because of it. The web isn't the solution or the response to the Spectacle: it's a natural extension of it.

[1] The Spectacle is the idea that in popular culture people relate to each other not directly but indirectly, through the "images" presented by culture itself, i.e. "the Spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by images."

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't think the problem is with social media. I think the problem is the competence of the average person.

How many communities start out full of reasonable, productive discourse, like HN, and then go downhill once they become popular? How many endless summers has the internet suffered?

Mediocrity is the enemy of progress.

Edit: I also take strong offense to the nonsense that the desire to aggregate knowledge began with the Islamic Golden Age. People have been centralizing knowledge for far longer than Islam has existed[1]. Frankly, the inclusion of Islam in this article comes off as forced and unnecessary. It doesn't surprise me that the author is from Iran, although his wikipedia page doesn't list any information regarding religion...

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_the_ancie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_the_ancient_world)

<comment><USER12> Look at public schooling in the US, how organizations are working to cut it down with charter school diversions, corrupting history and science textbooks with religious concepts, and forcing teachers to be parents, police, social workers, and underpaid teachers, and to do it with a smile on their face. Higher standards than police and politicians.

Add all this up and you start to see the educational system looking like it's being sabotaged.

</comment></comment><comment> not-sbrin Social Media as an idea was great when it started. But like any idea, when taken to an extreme, it tends to do disservice to its many participants. It seems often some product ideas are just better when they are not scaled. Craigslist, HN news, Basecamp - are good examples.

<comment> white-flame I think you should replace "taken to an extreme" with "monetized in the pursuit of mythical unbounded growth". It's usually not the concept itself taken to the extreme, it's all the other crap bolted on because otherwise it's merely profitable, and that doesn't suffice anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When it comes to articles like this, part of me agrees with the whole "attention economy" problem. Companies want to suck away our time, etc etc.

But another part of me also realizes that this problem is going to be very, very hard to get rid of. As long as social media keeps feeding our brains with "things you might like" and endless junk notifications, it's going to be near impossible to stop.

<comment><USER14> Just stop using it. It's really not that difficult. Admit you're addicted and browse impulsively and then give it up.

<comment><USER15> That's like saying, "just stop smoking" in 1960. Ok, there's a handful of us that recognize the danger here, and have ceased using social media, but what are we going to do to help everyone else?

<comment><USER16> What are we going to do? Accept that it is not our job to stop people from doing things we don't like? I have no social media accounts, I never have, but I don't begrudge others their pacifiers.

We all do harmful things to ourselves. I find it easier to accept if I just accept my own negative acts. It's easier, for me at least, to accept that other people enjoy different things. I'd probably make a piss poor evangelist, but the reward is I spend less time being unhappy with other people's choices.

<comment><USER17> You have no social media accounts that must be liberating! I suppose you wouldn't know though as you haven't "been through the looking glass" as it were, the dark side of Facebook.

I removed my accounts for a few months and whilst it was liberating it wasn't as life changing as I thought it would be. Horse for courses I suppose.

<comment><USER16> I've never had one. At least not one of the ones people consider social media. HN and Slashdot are both social media, but nobody seems to call them that. So, no Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc... G+ may have made me a profile. The others may have data about me, but they aren't my accounts.

I never saw a need for one. If people want me, they know where to find me. It's not some secretive thing. It's just more inertia. I can't be bothered to make accounts and they'd just take away more of my time. I am not even all that private, people know who I am. I've had many, many Internet friends in my home. One stayed for about five years, as she and I decided to date. Similarly, I haven't ever used online dating sites. That just kind of happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >You cannot think with images

I disagree, and I think the way computers have made us regress to a purely textual interchange format as the common denominator is an unrecognized tragedy.

My notes in school used to be richly layed out, mixing diagrams, symbols and formatting as needed, which was trivial on paper. Now I'm typing to you through a predictive text engine because tapping or swiping out words is itself too error prone on this device.

We've created a massive gap between what can be produced and what can be consumed easily, information-wise.

I think the GET/POST nature of the web is also responsible. Rather than make it easy to collaborate in a shared space, we all have to write on little immutable post its and paste them side by side.

<comment><USER19> Wittgenstein would have argued the precise opposite of the quoted point. Ideas _are_ pictures in our minds.

That particular point within the article is one of numerous specious and vapid objections it raises.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article portrays a very distorted view of the past vs the present.

It portrays the push for encyclopedic collation of textual knowledge, in the past, and social media, in the present, as if they were complete, representative pictures of all the attitudes within societies towards information and knowledge in the respective time periods.

As if low epistemic-quality discussions and communication mediums weren't widespread in the past, and as if there were no other ways that knowledge is treated these days.

</comment><comment><USER21> There are hundreds if not thousands of social media platforms designed for learning and intellectual collaboration, many of which are as or more effective than universities. Wikipedia itself is a social media platform. I think there is some truth in what the author is saying, but it's also completely lacking in nuance.

<comment><USER22> Can you name a few of your favourites? I'm interested in participating and building communities like this. I feel like certain subreddits are as close as I've found.

<comment><USER21> So many/most professional associations have one, and they usually have pretty good mailing lists and often other functionality as well. So if you Google for whatever professional associations exist for your industry you will likely find some stuff.

There are a lot of academia-related ones also, e.g. researchgate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ok, so the article lists a litany of things I personally don't like: videos, like buttons, facebook. But so what? I don't like them, so I avoid them.

Other people are different. Why get upset about it? Why the urge to decide how other people spend their free time?

<comment><USER24> It is not about hobbies, it's about the addiction that so many are unable to leave because everyone they know also does it. Never leading to insight or realisation, but hate and depression from unrealistic expectations and stress to find the next thing and never reflect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Wikipedia, one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized > web, is in existential crisis.

Wikipedia is decidedly not "decentralized"; it is a centralized system that people are allowed to copy: that is not at all the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER26> In every other sentence, the author proffers an unsubstantiated claim, and the article is premised on these.

</comment><comment><USER27> "[Online social networks] reduce our curiosity by showing us exactly what we already want and think, based on our profiles and preferences."

I hate to defend the world's largest algorithmically-enforced echo chamber, but is this a really strong claim - is this _seriously_ true? Like, a measurable reduction in curiosity across the board for Facebook users? What about if your friends are thoughtful and use Facebook primarily as a means of textual interchange?

And if the inverse is true - that being shown what we do not want and do not think makes us _more_ curious - how does the author explain polarization? And are those irrelevant Youtube ads supposed to make me more curious about the world?

</comment><comment><USER28> With all do respect there is no surprise (level of intellect and human sensitivity) that Mr. Trump is also president... because of social media.

Almost nobody reads what they share and get only the title based on the sheep following model.

Social media became a sense of belonging and replaces analog socializing.. we became more and more shallow and incapable of solving simple tasks while we delegate to externals, either a machine or other app, simple life tasks.

<comment><USER29> I'd be careful characterizing Trump as only being elected because of social media. Not everyone who disagrees with you are idiots. Misplaced hope and conscious bias against the "other" (aka non-whites; women) are as much factors to his success as memes. It's a fundamental problem (if you believe it's a problem) that will never be tackled if it's characterized as outright stupidity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I really like this article, especially its point about typographic vs. photographic information transfer and the mental pathways that are activated when we process each respective medium.

</comment><comment><USER31> It endangers not only knowledge by the mere sanity of many people...

</comment><comment><USER32> Social interaction endangers knowledge.

Social media just exacerbates the problem further.

</comment><comment><USER33> Wow, this article's claim that text is what enables us to think is incredibly elitist. Are illiterate people incapable of rational thought? Oral traditions are deep wellsprings of human knowledge and culture.

<comment><USER34> _Wow, this article 's claim that text is what enables us to think is incredibly elitist._

But is it true?

 _Are illiterate people incapable of rational thought? Oral traditions are deep wellsprings of human knowledge and culture._

Knowledge and culture is not the same as rational thought. Of course you can reason without writing, but the manipulation of thoughts is much easier when you can write them, the same as you can make calculations much more easily when you can write the operations.

<comment><USER27> _But is it true?_

You wouldn't know from the article, because the author of the article doesn't cite any studies and just sort of takes Neil Postman's word for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does a day go by without the traditional media pushing an article about how bad social media is?</comment>


The Cowardice of Brave - <AUTHOR> https://practicaltypography.com/the-cowardice-of-brave.html <comment><USER2> It seems like you have to opt into their ad network.

If you are already planning on blocking ads, I don't see an ethics issue with allowing people to volunteer to watch ads in exchange for fake internet points.

I also don't see why they would bother to opt into it.

<comment><USER3> Many users want to financially support the sites they visit, but don't trust those sites' ad networks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can only aspire to build something worthy of such a waffling, incoherent takedown.

The author seems confused about what Brave does (it doesn't inject ads into websites), confused about how its ads are different (private because the targeting happens on your device), and confused about the point of the attention token (combining ad-supported and patreon/tipping models). I love to get mad about things I don't understand as much as the next guy, but even so this is a remarkable display of weaponised long-form ignorance.

I'm not even sure they actually disagree with Brave's model. One of the linked posts on the same site advocates for "voting with your wallet" by blocking ads, but contributing to the sites you visit monetarily. Gee, I wish someone could find a way to systematically do that and build it into a browser.

I'd like to end with this quote, from the same author: "But as often happens on the web, most of the energy so far has been focused on griping about the bad thing, rather than making productive steps toward replacing it with something better. The only thing that can really put a dent in web advertising is a better economic model."

Perhaps the truly brave thing to do would be to put down the boxing gloves and learn to read.

<comment><USER5> The author is correct that Brave is substituting one set of ads for another. The details of how Brave introduces these ads aren't relevant to the author's main argument, which is economic not technological. He does address problems with the hybrid ad/tipping model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure if the author reads this but I would really really like if he would write such an article about Coil.com. IMO they try to actually fix the problem but with a completely different approach. Would be great to read about that and about possible flaws in their system.</comment>


Our weekend app build. Scratch Off - Photo Sharing With a Suprise - <AUTHOR> http://getscratchoff.com

<comment><USER2> I really love this concept. Simple and beautifully executed, I can see this kind of application taking off in some circles. This kind of reminds me of an app I found a while back called Nudify which lets you add pixels over an image to make it seem as though you're censoring nude parts of an image. Great app, it'll be the talk of the office for the next day or two for sure.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> App store link. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scratch-off-photo- sharing/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scratch-off-photo- sharing/id630728912?ls=1&mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great concept. Provides a great element of surprise.</comment>


CoinTent: A Sustainable Ad-Free Web - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cointent/cointent-a-sustainable-ad-free-web-c77e3381788d <comment><USER4> I've been fighting ads since the "punch the monkey" days of the web. Advertisers have progressively gotten worse over time. I have seen very few attempts to self-moderate their aggressiveness. Instead, they track us around the web and sell our data, and sometimes infect our machines with malware. Because of this, I aggressively block ads. They had their chance and they dropped the ball, and have no intentions of picking it back up again.

I don't want a service that blocks ads for a price. I want a service without ads. If websites can't find a way to sustain themselves without ads, then they can die off for all I care. I can live without the content harvesters and the news reposters and all the other extraneous fluff out there. There will still be companies that sell services and advertise their own stuff on their websites, and there will still be people that pay for their own web hosting to put up content they are interested in.

If the pushback against ads becomes extreme, there will still be a web after natural selection has finished running amok.

I stopped using free web email, as one example, because of the ads. I now pay for email services from a company that does not run ads and does not track me around the web. There is no free version with ads. This is what I'm after.

I wouldn't mind something like CoinTent _after_ the die-off though. Paying money in one place that would be distributed as I see fit adds value for me. I don't want to be followed around the web though, that's a deal-breaker. Let me select the websites my revenue goes to and with what weightings. Sites that impress me will get added, sites that disappoint me won't. Also, let me determine how much I wish to give. Do this for websites that don't post ads, and you've got a winner for me. I will gladly pay for a useful web, and advertisers can go extinct for all I care.

<comment><USER5> Everyone's bought into the bullshit that ads give us stuff for free when it in fact it costs all of us a LOT MORE. Rather than dismiss my claim as lunacy, I beg you to take the time to read my explanation (and reply with rational counterarguments if you disagree):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237)

Our industry has made a selfish deal with the devil in the name of getting rich quick: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706)

On our failure to focus on finding alternate solutions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761)

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure what your goal is? Advertising is never going away because there will always be companies that want to increase the visibility of their products and are willing to pay for it. How that advertising is implemented will continue to shift overtime but it's always going to be there.

Your second post for example is advertising for people to contact you about some project you want to start.

<comment><USER5> > Advertising is never going away

See fowlerpower's originally top ranked comment ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805998)) and then see my reply to it ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12806687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12806687)).

And no, my second post is not advertising by any reasonable definition, and certainly not the meaning of "ad" in "ad blocker". By defining "advertising" so broadly that in includes all announcements and solicitations, such that even a love letter is considered advertising, you have "won" the argument by rendering the term meaningless. I believe there is a technical term for such specious reasoning, such as there is for "straw man" arguments, but I can't remember it.

Sure, advertising will always exist, but it can be made mostly if not entirely irrelevant. Just as littering will always exist, but is now pretty minimal because anti-littering is now deeply ingrained in our culture. That's what cultural evolution is all about: overcoming our base natures.

<comment><USER6> Your reply to his comment is pointless. You're equating advertising to slavery? Going after the shock factor to make your point. Sounds a bit like the click bait you rally against.

It is advertising you are telling people about a service you are working on and soliciting participation. That's not using a broad definition of advertising by any means.

Advertising will always exist because there will always people people who want to tell others about their products and services and there will always be people who want to find out about new products and services. How do you propose people find new products and services in your imagined future without advertising?

<comment><USER5> > Your reply to his comment is pointless.

No, you missed the point. I'm criticizing his "Advertising is something that has existed for at least 100 plus years." and therefor "is here to stay" logical fallacy.

No, your definition is so broad as to be meaningless.

What do I proposed? For example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10398290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10398290). But more importantly go back to my "On our failure to focus on finding alternate solutions" link above. This website and the culture it worships touts its creative and problem solving ability. So it is not just a moral failure but also one of imagination.

 _" The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."_

– Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera

And honestly, I believe you are so armored against my ideas, that you haven't given them (my comments here and my links) a truly honest, reflective read. You keep challenging me but you haven't answered all of my points or challenges. jrcii's comment's being down-voted to oblivion represents how upset people here get about anything that challenges their golden goose.

 _" It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."_

– Upton Sinclair

<comment><USER6> >No, your definition is so broad as to be meaningless.

Advertising: the act or practice of calling public attention to one's product, service, need, etc.

As in "eevilspock was advertising their new project to rid the world of advertising".

So how do people find the collaborative filtering systems in your proposed world without advertising?

All the alternates lead back to advertising.

>You keep challenging me but you haven't answered all of my points or challenges.

What points or challenges? You have just posted quotes and said that everyone is lazy for not thinking of a world without advertising.

As long as there are people with services and people who want services there will always be advertising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting idea. I hope to at least see more like this, even if this fails. What I'd really like is to be able to tip articles, posts, apps, and websites. I don't frequent the New York Times enough to justify a subscription, even despite the annoying nagging full-page interstitials. I don't think giving them a percentage of my ad revenue would be worth it, but if I could tip a few quarters when I came across an article that I thought was really well done, I would gladly do so.

I think if you gamified a system like this, it could really do well. It'd need to be cross-site, since it'd be cool to compare to my friends and see who they tended to support the most. It wouldn't have to directly show the donation amounts; it could be translated into some arbitrary other point system and include other incentives to get bonus points. Basically, make it a high-score / prestige thing.

<comment><USER8> > What I'd really like is to be able to tip articles, posts, apps, and > websites.

For articles, this already exists (at least in The Netherlands). It's called Blendle and lets you 'buy' separate articles instead of needing to get a full subscription. Works super easy as well.

<comment><USER9> I heard about blendle, signed up for it....and than never used it!!!

As per my comment on this thread, I think the switching costs of finding other content to occupy my time is to low to cause me to even think about paying for actual content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I created [https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/173](https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/173) last weekend in response to my first experience of CoinTent.

At the time, I was mostly offended by the insultingly large (72KB _after_ GZIP) JavaScript file that the system caused me download to facilitate the wrecking of my experience, and felt a little guilty for recommending them for inclusion in uBlock.

Now that I realize their entire business strategy is based on creating a problem – reaction – solution scenario for their own benefit, at the expense of publishers and readers.

The concept is basically, "We don't like ads and you shouldn't either, so here's an ad to tell you that while ruining your web experience. Now give us money."

<comment><USER11> Isn't any non-free, non-subscription service going to have to either put that barrier up or show ads? I may be misunderstanding your complaint, but it sounds really bizarre to me, akin to:

"Jesus every time I want to go watch a movie at the theatre there's this obnoxious guy blocking my way asking to see my 'ticket'. I don't have to deal with this bullshit when I watch TV at home, I just turn it on and start watching content"/

<comment><USER10> I think you need to go read the whole article. These guys are offering an ad blocker that ruins the ad revenue of websites and then offers the solution by also being a paywall.

<comment><USER11> I assume from your condescension that you read the article (or at least think you did), so the problem is presumably with your reading comprehension.

As I said, some sort of wall is inherent to the solution (seamless micro transactions would have people, perhaps unfairly, claiming that they didn't realize they were spending money). The whole premise behind this project is to replace ads for people who don't like ads. It's laughable to claim that the banner informing people of that is an ad. Your complaint about ruining the web experience seems to be that it puts barriers in front of your browsing, and my point was that almost any solution that compensates content creators is going to suffer from this.

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry I triggered you.

I think that, if the purpose of the popup is to inform me about CoinTent, then can it be anything other than an ad?

If the goal was to solve a problem, then CoinTent would be only the paywall, since ad blockers are already prolific.

<comment><USER11> > I'm sorry I triggered you.

Lol, you're adorable. I'm starting to believe it's not even reading comprehension issues with you, it's just functional illiteracy.

<comment><USER12> I totally understand his point. I think you're the one with reading comprehension issues here...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While I support the general idea, it irks me that this concept also includes tracking of my browsing history ("distributes the money from your subscription to the sites you visit based on the time you spend with them"). I would like to see more transparency with regards to how this information is used and how much of it is actually exposed to the developers of this plugin.

<comment><USER14> Brad with the CoinTent team here. Glad you believe in the general idea of what we're doing!

I understand the concern around the tracking of browsing history, as that's obviously one of the main drivers of ad blockers in the first place!

We definitely need to make sure we deliver on transparency around what data is tracked, how it is stored, and how it is used. We will be releasing this in more detail on our site when we launch.

One key point for you to be aware of is that we do offer the ability to turn off tracking of browsing history. In that case, we'll give you the option to support sites automatically based on sites everyone else spends time with.

<comment> irq-1 Here's an idea I'm not sure would work, but I want to put it out there.

Browsing history and/or time spent has to be tracked so the money can be distributed to the right sites. To protect the browsing history:

1) (on the client) Take the domain name (or URL, IP or data point) and add a salt

2) Hash it

3) Add it to a bloom filter (or another type of filter)

4) After enough URLs have been added, submit the filter and salt

5) (on the server) Run the list of participating domains through the filter (take the domain, add salt, hash, and filter)

Some thoughts about this type of scheme: No exact history data would be submitted. You may need multiple filters for domain, time spent, type of interaction, etc... The selection of filter and optimal number of domains (or encoding of data points) might be problematic. Submission can be done at any time (no schedule). The loss of a few submissions won't matter (no need for every domain or a complete history.) Submissions can be delayed until there is enough obscuring data, and filters provide plausible deny ability (about browsing history.) Submissions could be made to trusted 3rd parties (browser makers, large company networks, non-profits like the EFF, etc..) and only the results sent to a central authority. Some websites that were not visited will benefit, but the salt will stop gaming of the domains. Running the list of participating domains might be to demanding to be practical. Groups of domains could have their own payment/subscription filter (news domains, GNU endorsed domains, etc...) distributed to the clients like blocklists.

The biggest problem: Advertisers and ad networks will fight against loosing personally identifiable information and analytics data.

<comment><USER15> nice to see someone with a similar idea to mine!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Advertisers have been building profiles of users for 20 years now with the promise that relevant ads aren't annoying and can be valuable. I think it's time to give up.

Billboard companies and People magazine are able to sell ads without knowing who saw the ad. Why do advertisers online suddenly need to know everything about me? Billions have been spent building crappy ad-tech and to assemble profiles and I'd be surprised if it's been a net gain overall when you factor in the externalities of it all (tracking, power consumption, bandwidth usage, malware, etc...).

I feel no ethical issues with using my DVR to skip ads, u-block to stop tracking in my browser, or changing the radio station in my car when an ad starts playing.

/rant

<comment><USER17> Advertising in my experience as an end user has been very ineffective.

The ads that I see on Facebook are very obviously based on my browsing history/cookies - I look at a mechanical keyboard on Lazada and decide to not buy it. Next I go to Facebook and get ads about a keyboard on Lazada - <USER2> discounts, exact same model. It could've shown me similar keyboards, gave me a lower price, or anything that adds value than just showing me the exact same thing I just decided not to buy.

Advertising for the sake of letting people know something _exists_ is not particularly valuable to the end user, and most of the time they are not even able to predict correctly what people are interested in.

Has anyone actually bought something because of an advertisement?

<comment><USER18> There's the worse (and very common) case: you decide to buy it, and still see ads about that keyboard you just bought, in case, you know, you'd want another (and even if you did, isn't having it in front of you and liking it more efficient than an ad?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm a bit pessimistic as to whether this will work, because the crux here is getting the publishers to agree to this model and that's going to require a ton of face-to-face deals.

That said, I've had this idea myself and this is how I want the web to work. I should just be able to pay to make ads go away if I don't want them and that money should go to the sites I read. I currently use Google contributor, but that only works on some sits, not all.

I also kind of like the "threat" that people are adblocking anyways on your site (which CoinTent will know, as their plugin is an adblocker) and you are losing this much revenue because of it. Seems like that could work if they reach enough critical mass.

So I supported this, though with skepticism. Godspeed!

</comment><comment><USER20> Taking 20% on top of 5-10% processor fees seems high compared to Flattr's flat 10%.

Something doesn't sit right with me ethically about this concept.

<comment><USER21> This is a problem that _badly_ needs to be solved. Advertising revenue is the incentive for news organizations to provide a conduit for malware onto your computer, and there isn't anyone who thinks that's a good idea.

If these guys can solve this problem, get buy-in from publishers, and provide revenue to support good journalism while solving the problem of needing many subscriptions to multiple news sites, perhaps they deserve their 30% vig.

But if they are successful, it's more likely that someone will come along, do the same thing, and only charge 2%.

<comment><USER22> _This is a problem that badly needs to be solved._

The problem that needs solving is to make ad networks and advertisers do a better job, not to transfer the payment model of the internet from companies that want to pay for marketing to users who have comparatively very little money. Approximately $70bn is spent on digital advertising in the US alone. That's _hundreds_ of dollars per person. No payment model that relies on direct payment is going to maintain that sort of funding level, so no one who makes money from adverts is going to accept it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ah, another competitor.

There's Google Contributor, that thing that Flattr launched, Webpass.io and forget the rest.

I've been working on the same model: take a subscription, divvy it out according to usage.

The problem is that, apart from Google (who can just block their own ads), there is no easy way to prevent falsified visits intended to inflate revenues of bad actors. Most schemes have either relied on wishful thinking or working within walled gardens (Contributor is closer to the latter).

It so happens that I patented a protocol for preventing exactly this problem. It can show that a user made a request for a resource without either of the user or the publisher being able to forge the record.

My mechanism requires a browser extension, simply because there needs to be a secure environment.

By design, the publisher is unable to track you based on the protocol.

Also by design, the protocol allows access through paywalls without needing to reveal user identity.

Interested folks are invited to email me: email@example.com

<comment><USER24> Can you clarify what bad actors you're talking about?

The $5/month goes to whoever I visit the most (I am assuming this is not collective across all their users).

Are you're saying that sites will try to falsify who I'm visiting by redirecting my traffic?

<comment><USER23> > _Are you 're saying that sites will try to falsify who I'm visiting by > redirecting my traffic?_

By pretending to be you. Capturing your visit and replaying it. Tweaking details. Redirecting. Performing unseen requests in the background. Most notably, trying to override the tracking code by side-injecting their own to capture your identifying tokens (which is why you need an extension).

There are countermeasures to all the attacks and to some as yet unanticipated, but it takes a single integrated protocol that cryptographically verifies and compounds in each step from the request to the response.

And that's what I did.

<comment><USER16> > a single integrated protocol that cryptographically verifies and compounds > in each step from the request to the response

Sounds expensive. Does it scale?

<comment><USER23> Horizontally scalable, but it's expensive in two ways. The first is that I put asymmetric encryption in at some steps where I could, arguably, have settled for symmetric encryption (which is much faster). My reasoning being that I don't want a single compromise to require me to rotate everyone's keys simultaneously.

Secondly it requires communication between the publisher and a tracking server. The expensive part would be placing those tracking servers as close to publishers as possible, meaning that wide physical distribution would be necessary for best performance.

But otherwise, no shared state is required _between_ transactions. There are no sessions. Each request-response cycle can be handled independently of the others, so an arbitrary number of trackers in arbitrary locations are possible.

Information gathered by the tracking server is uniquely signed and sent to a classifying system which reassembles the records into an aggregate view of what happened. Notably, the classifier cannot forge transactions either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This looks about the same as Google Contributor [https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/](https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/) but Google has the advantage of owning the ad network and the ability to communicate with website owners.

It will be interesting to see where companies spend more on advertising if they can't reach their whole audience online. Maybe more in the form of product placement and such.

<comment><USER16> Contributor is great for people that just want to avoid ads, but lots of people also object to being tracked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Brave is also testing micropayments, with a 5% cut, [https://blog.brave.com/introducing-brave- payments/](https://blog.brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/)

<comment><USER27> This is a great project and it seems further ahead. Checked it out and was surpised to see that it's headed by Brendan Eich.

PS: This is why I like HN: I discover great alternatives in a fraction of the time I would have elsewhere. Thanks for posting this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Quote from the kickstarter video: "there are adblockers out there, but they make money by selling your data".

Citation needed. Which adblockers are selling my data?

<comment><USER29> I assumed they were making a reference to Adblock Plus selling ads through their new marketplace and decided to express that in the most dishonest and self-serving way possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just got a thought ~ So I got a startup which I am aiming to grow to a million users spending a fortune on paid advertising online, but the cointent solution helps me get a small cashback by not helping me grow my business!

Or I pay a high traffic site to display my ad, and they sign-up with cointent to make their site clean, eventually the hits/impressions decrease and no one pays the site for displaying their ads! and they re-think they made a mistake signing up with cointent in the firstplace!

Could some-one please explain how this model is going to sustain/ be successful?!

</comment><comment><USER31> Why not just web payments? Chrome can access Google Wallet, Safari can access Apple payments, all from JS. I haven't played with the tech much but I understand it's pretty a solid way for a website to ask you to pay for something and then get a token they can use to see if you have or not.

<comment><USER32> It isn't standardized yet, but yes Chrome and Safari have made huge steps towards making web payments a reality.

Luckily, both Google and Apple have expressed strong interest in standardizing web payments making their implementations compatible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I really like this idea. Ads are some of the most distracting elements on the web, but at the same time we all understand the need for them due to no better monetization strategy for much of the valuable content on the web. Said as such, since content is not free to produce. When Hulu, for example, came around offering a higher subscription cost for ad-less shows I was eager to use it since I value my time, and as such I value my attention on the web.

Would love to see this extend to things like online music / video as well - especially in the realm of music, a way for musicians to monetize passive plays would be terrific.

<comment><USER34> >we all understand the need for them due to no better monetization strategy for much of the valuable content on the web.

This just isn't true. There are plenty of other monetization schemes on the web that work for different types of content. (Subscriptions, donations, subsidies (both corporate and governmental), patrons, etc.)

>Would love to see this extend to things like online music / video as well

It pretty much already exists in the form of Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.

<comment><USER33> Content creators get effectively zero income / revenues from any of the services you listed. Patreon is attempting to do some cool things there and I think are getting some great results, as are crowdfunding approaches. However, people I know who have gotten syndication of content on any given video platform don't really get much in the way of return unless it's a huge hit - so it's hard to get quality content which is why a lot of those guys are producing exclusive content, or funding it. In terms of music, yeah - <USER3> are making nothing, and the services are making nothing too, but that's a whole different story.

There has been a failure, in my opinion, of successful monetization of valuable content on the net. I don't disagree with you that there are a plethora of monetization schemes that are very effective on the web. However, given the cost of content creation usually content is a loss leader for a separate business model / or business entirely. I think it just leads to crappy content, since now pretty much every article has some kind of agenda and there's little journalism actually taking place. I actually really like Vice for this reason - I think they've found a niche where people are willing to pay for quality content. Same for the Information, which produces terrific journalism and great long form stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> my 2c:

I know I'll get a lot of flack for this...but this is definitely not an end all, be all solution for services that depend on ads.

That said, this tool does have a place - to be the platform that provides content producers/publishers a way to fairly charge a subset of consumers to experience the product adfree.

* publishers/producers decide how much to charge / minute of use

* this neutral tool shows that transparently to the user and the user can decide if he/she would prefer an paid ad-free experience or not. - maybe over time, this price fluctuates based on how users across network use the content etc. (to ensure quality does not fall etc.)

As for publishers/creators that charge exorbitant rates / minute - the market will take care of them - users would just adblock and they'd just loose $ (basically their loss - either they have a fair compensation or not at all).

BUT this tool is NOT the only way for producers to make money. Ads does have a place but this tool just helps those who want to pay and help producers and avoid ads at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd happily display ads on websites that aren't incredibly obnoxious. I think ad-blockers need to have some sort of ad-policy or vetting system in place that when websites conform to them, I as a user get prompted with the option to turn ads on to support the website.

I'd much rather that than essentially have to pay out money to browse online.

<comment><USER37> This is exactly what AdBlock Plus started doing a couple years ago, and it was met with mass outrage and jumping ship to muBlock.

[1] [https://adblockplus.org/acceptable- ads#criteria](https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads#criteria)

<comment><USER36> I was under the impression that AdBlock Plus started selling whitelist places and that's what user's became outraged over. I may be misremembering though, I only ever scanned post titles

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Cut out the middle-men. This is the perfect use-case for a cryptocurrency based micro-payment model.

</comment><comment><USER39> Excellent idea, I've been waiting for something like this to happen for months! It is clearly obvious that the system like this needs to exist, and I'm sure that the company that succeeds at implementing it will be huge.

I really love how you are going about doing it, and I wish you luck!

The big challenge of a system like that that I see, is getting users on board. To me it seems that the best solution is to allow publishers to "reward" subscribers with additional premium content. Are you planning to implement something like this?

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the positive feedback! Glad to hear you believe in the idea and want to see it be successful.

I agree that getting users on board is the biggest challenge. Premium content is certainly one additional way to get more users on board (and we've actually built a product that let's websites gate access / sell premium content, too!). I think there are actually a few ways we can give users more value by connecting them with the sites they love even more, so we're definitely thinking about how to bridge that connection! Let us know if you have other ideas or specific things you'd want to see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The more I think about services like this, the more I think everyone is thinking about this problem the wrong way.

People are thinking about the problem, as a)it costs money to produce great content, b) great content should be supported by people who enjoy that content, and c) ads and other current monetization efforts are annoying/bad/potentially dangerous for users.

So, the obvious solution, which from my perspective (has not and will not work at scale) is, "have people pay to block ads and give the money to publishers, or have publishers offer premium ad-free content.

The thing that all of these ideas are missing is the switching cost to find other interesting content is next to nothing.

There is already too much content bombarding us, and I have no problem reading someone elses content for free. Even if it means missing out on a headline that caught my attention. All I need to do is go back to my facebook newsfeed, or HN, and find 50 other articles I am interested in reading.

I do think there is a solution out there, but I don't think it will come from paying to block ads (which feels like an exortion racket) or paying for article you like.

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, I think a great solution for everyone involved would be to charge money to share the content. Charging for distribution and licensing content has always been a money maker for publishers, why not charge for social distribution.

My idea: Donate between $0.05 and $100 to share an article. Your post would say, "I just paid $1.25 to share this article, it's that good!"

This solves multiple problems. a)the quality of what gets shared will go up, which in turn would make the shares much more valuable in terms of building an engaged audience and your own social cred and validation that you are seeking when you share.

b)the amount you pay to share would reflect how much you liked the content. (i.e. an incredibly funny video that I want all my friends to see would be worth a few bucks to share, whereas a semi interesting one would be only $0.05...and in turn, my friends will learn to only watch my large donation shares... and the ratings of the content can be quantified by the audience. (i.e. this article generated $3450 in shares tells me much more than 34,500 people shared it.)

Making this frictionless would be difficult and getting publishers to risk their "virality" would be hard to sell...but, it's a crazy enough idea it just might work.

After all, the switching costs of not sharing an article you really want to share is much greater than paying to see content in the first place or paying a monthly fee when the problem is not gnawing at you in the moment.

<comment><USER40> That sounds like an interesting alternative revenue stream for Facebook to try. The cynic in me suspects that it'll only work if they start reducing the quantity of content shared by your friends that they _don 't_ pay to share, in favour of charitable, pseudo-charitable or political messages that they are willing to pay to share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Like the simplicity. Maybe flattr could create a similar plugin? Their support buttons didn't get enough traction, unfortunately.

<comment><USER23> Flattr have teamed up with one of the ad blockers to do something similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> we did a consumer survey in April (adblocksurvey.com) that suggested a range of 10-15% of people would pay for a subscription for content. Based on that we think that adblocking should be monetized by a subscription/tip combo (optimal.com is kind of a hybrid + we also have a really good iOS 10 ad blocker that uses DNS) AND we need to fix ads. there are several companies in this space and we all talk to each other about how to solve some of these problems - I hope to speak to Brad at CoinTent soon and share some of our ideas. I think there are many of us that want a sustainable solution (and obviously feel we can play a part in building that, but I'm also realistic that none of us can do it by ourselves, this includes getting publishers on board!) that is less prone to abuse than some of the 'whitelisting' schemes we see out there today.

</comment><comment><USER43> So we are paying to remove ads?

<comment><USER44> Paying for the content, instead of ads paying for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> You can't get me to enable ads unless I'm assured they are not delivering malware. If you can't do that, count me out.

</comment><comment><USER46> A "coin tent", is that something you get when you have too many coins in your pocket? :)

</comment><comment><USER47> This is a terrible idea.

I know I will take a lot of heat for saying this on hacker news.

Advertising is something that has existed for at least 100 plus years. TV is supported by it, radio is supported by it and it is no coincidence that the internet is also supported by it. Fact is we as users may not love advertising but it exists because companies want to reach us, it provides revenue to companies that would otherwise need to charge a ton of money for those services.

As more and more media and content including TV Shows and Movies move to the internet do you really truly believe they will remain AdFree? Where would companies that want to reach an audience advertise? Where would that 100 billion dollar show, movie, article get its money from? Purely from the user? Do you think we can go back to the ways of charging 300 dollars for a word/google docs app?

Fact is things cost money to make and people need to make money to keep making things. Advertising whether you like it or not is here to stay.

Edit: I also think adblockers are a terrible idea. All we have done with ad blockers is started an arms race where the ads now come in the form of sponsored content so you have no idea what's an ad and what isn't. We need to just accept that advertising will exist and the premium for non advertising content is just too high to afford by the vast majority of users.

<comment><USER48> Just because advertising existed before, doesn't mean it has to continue to exist.

Advertising is not a law of nature, it is a human invention and should be replaced by a new invention.

Advertising is a very bad thing. It's a form of brainwashing in which people are manipulated or provoked to consume way beyond their needs. Its goal is to plant ideas into your head, without you even being aware of it.

Curiously, the law of supply and demand in economics doesn't even mention the concept of advertising, yet it plays a huge role in demand creation.

This 'inflated' demand provokes inflated supply, which creates even more demand (because everyone wants a popular thing), the feedback loop being limited by the speed of extraction of the natural resources and the capacity of the human body, but that can be augmented by increasing human population.

There's too much shit produced in the world, too much waste created, too much useless information on the web and too many shitty websites and ecosystems, which exist solely due to advertising.

I don't mind at all if they disappear or reduce in numbers.

Good content and good products will find ways to survive.

Bill Hicks [https://vimeo.com/36651896](https://vimeo.com/36651896)

George Carlin [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtK_YsVInw8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtK_YsVInw8)

<comment><USER49> Honestly that sounds like a pretty terrible world to me. New products, services, and experiences would come in at a trickle. Competition would take a nosedive, and incumbents could begin to price at whatever they please as the barriers to entry grow ever taller.

<comment><USER50> Not only that, but advertising is a way for the few to subsidize the many. For every person who responds to an ad, 100 do not. That means people of little means get access to free content paid for by companies betting they can find other people to pay for it.

I grew up poor. We didn't have cable TV, or any kind of subscription service, because we couldn't afford it. My parents would never had justified micro- paying for online content. But through advertising, a world of content beyond what was available in public libraries was made available to me.

Advertising will never go away anymore than money or prices will go away, because even in post-scarcity goods world, people's attention span is still scarce, and anyone seeking to scale any business or organization in this world will need to reach people, and with so many people vying for attention, undoubtedly, differential time-preference and privacy-preferences between people will mean some people will trade one for the other, human diversity practically guarantees it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Im going to be frank. I block ads, and will not start paying for content. I have had an advertising free web for a long time and will not: a) accept ads b) pay for content

What will you do for people like me?

<comment><USER52> How long do you expect that to be sustainable?

<comment><USER51> frankly; dont care. not my problem, i am a consumer. its been sustainable for the last 20 years. the same 'sustainability' arguments were made 10 years ago, yet here we are.

<comment><USER53> We are in a different place today; arguably worse.

And if everyone ad-blocking is not sustainable then there will be less for you to consume.

<comment><USER51> I appreciate that and it makes sense from a business perspective. However, many many people outside SV (which is most of the planet) have the same views as myself and will happily 'steal' content. Attempts like DRM are trying to solve the wrong problem.

Rather than trying to shoehorn these 'user pays' models as an alternative to 'advertiser pays', we need a totally new paradigm.

Invent it pls SV

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Visiting their website main page consumes 2.2 MB of bandwidth. This is a basically a blank page with some small icons. If these guys can't build a lean website then how are they going to build cross-site tracking technology that will improve my browsing experience?

<comment><USER55> It's sort of like asking if you can't raise an objection without invoking fallacious logic, how are you going to make interesting contributions to this community?

<comment><USER54> I don't think it is poor reasoning. I was making an observation about their technology prowess. And where most people were expressing their opinion about whether or not ads are bad which has been discussed at length, I thought I'd make a different point. My argument is that if improving browsing experience is the purpose of their service and removing ads is one of the ways they do it then I hope they pay attention to page bloat. I wanted to point out that they hadn't paid much attention to javascript page bloat in their own web page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> a great idea

</comment><comment><USER56> Micropayments, again.

Someone tried a broad "pay for all the good sites" scheme around 15 years ago, in the first dot-com boom. Anyone remember that?</comment>


Xobni VP Engineering leaves for own startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/07/new-company.html

<comment><USER2> There are some strange sentiments in the announcement on [http://www.xobni.com/blog/2008/07/23/xobni-is-growing- adding...](http://www.xobni.com/blog/2008/07/23/xobni-is-growing-adding- technical-teeth-and-saying-goodbye-to-a-good-friend/)

"And while we are sad to see Gabor go, his departure is a big opportunity for Xobni." It's spin to present the loss of a technical founder as an opportunity. The fact that they couldn't keep him in a CTO role, distinct from a VP of Engineering role, speaks volumes. And it's an insult to characterize it as an "opportunity."

The blog entry goes on to list requirements for the new VP "The right person will:

       champion our engineering ethos, [CTO]
       deliver a fantastic product, [product manager]
       on-time. [product manager]
       be an able manager [vp engineering]
       who excels at rapid company growth. [vp engineering]
       know how to ship desktop software [product manager]
       know how to add or remove process [CEO]

This is probably at least three people: a VP of engineering, a CTO, and a product manager. And I think the last is more properly the province of the CEO. Their detailed position description at <http://www.scribd.com/doc/4062717/Xobni-VP-Engineering> has this sentence: "they must contribute as an architect, but still get their hands dirty coding." Those skills don't normally come in a package with an excellent manager who understands process and rapid company growth. This is the VP Eng vs. CTO split in a rapidly growing technology driven company.

<comment><USER3> > deliver a fantastic product, [product manager]

Yes.

> on-time. [product manager]

> know how to ship desktop software [product manager]

No, no, hell no.

Product managers define what they think the customer wants (scope creep). Project managers get something that is good enough out of the door (scope supression).

It's possible for one person to do both jobs, but that doesn't make them the same thing.

<comment><USER4> "Product managers define what they think the customer wants (scope creep). Project managers get something that is good enough out of the door (scope suppression)"

Brilliant, speaking as someone who has worn both hats at different times, that is the dichotomy in a nutshell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The real story behind this: The top management at Xobni does not want to implement much needed changes to the flawed product. Gabor has been making suggestions, but the company has already become slow and sluggish, and there was a lot of conflict between the two. Some words were exchanged, and now Gabor is leaving. The real story is that internally, one other person (at least) is no longer actively involved in the project...

<comment><USER6> Is there any way to substantiate your claim?

<comment><USER3> There hadly ever is, but as this is what life is like at 95% of companies (including small companies) the probability of this being correct is pretty high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why would he leave at the zenith of Xobni? What is a year or two more? Would you leave -- even if you had aspirations of doing your own startp?

<comment><USER8> It seems that there is some kind of conflict in between. I see no other reason for somebody to leave. Maybe hiring somebody from yahoo as "adult supervision" was not such a great idea. Who knows?

Ps. I'd love to hear more on what happened. Maybe in few months, after his trip, Gabor will write some more about this, and the real reasons he left. Maybe we can all learn some more from his experience.

<comment><USER9> _I'd love to hear more on what happened_

Wouldn't we all?

But I suspect all these people have too much class to give us the real dish.

<comment><USER10> there are classy and non-classy ways to say "fuck you".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Those who know don't talk. Those who talk don't know". I simply hope that his shares were vested.

</comment><comment><USER12> He is also an angel investor in Xobni. So he will see some payout when they flip.

</comment><comment><USER13> I dunno if anyone else saw this when it was first posted but I noticed that there was a comment that said, "Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out". forgot who it was posted by. it's been deleted since then...

<comment><USER14> It's worth pointing out that the comment was clearly a joke from a friend of Gabor, and that it was probably deleted because it could be misinterpreted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Whatever the reasons, good for him (and it is very likely that he already owns some equity so he gains even if xobni gets bought out later though not so much).

<comment><USER16> He mentions he is taking some substantial time off, likely he sold his equity to others in the company and will live off of that for awhile.

It is a hard transition from a "scrappy start-up" to a more mature start-up. I could imagine at one point he is super important, in every meeting, helping direct the focus of every little thing, then as the company expands you get pushed out to the side a little and treated more like an employee. The fact is he was/is an employee, but it is hard to not think of yourself as a little more then that when you have had so much involvement for so long.</comment></comment>


Capitalist Workplaces Set Bosses Up to Be Authoritarian Tyrants - <AUTHOR> https://truthout.org/articles/capitalist-workplaces-set-bosses-up-to-be-authoritarian-tyrants/ <comment><USER2> I'll take capitalist tyrants over socialist tyrants any day. At least there is a tenuous correlation between hard-work and talent in a capitalist economy. Socialist and Communist utopias ultimately devolve into systems where you are rewarded for towing the line.</comment>


GitLab is a free project and repository management application - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq

<comment><USER2> Is the idea to get a kind of github style project management that you can host on your own server?

<comment><USER3> Yes, as is the case with anything similar.

I think it's admirable, but it would be nice if the community could congeal around one choice so that I can actually convince an employer to use it.</comment></comment>