Censorship is bad even when it's done by private companies - barry-cotter https://necpluribusimpar.net/censorship-is-bad-even-when-its-done-by-private-companies/ <comment><AUTHOR> I have a wide view of what 'censorship' is, and I include spam filtering in the definition. For example, a while ago I saw an advert for some kind of erection-causing pill on a forum discussing C++. If the forum moderators remove such a post, they make the forum more efficient by saving other users (who are looking for C++ content) from themselves having to filter out irrelevant information / a sales pitch.

I also see far too many 'work from home' adverts in discussions in the Independent newspaper's comment section (on unrelated articles), and if they took a more censorious approach to such comments then the comment section would improve.

To an extent I support censorship, and according to what I believe censorship to be, almost everyone else supports it.

If this very comment had been about some unrelated topic, such as giving an opinion about who to blame or not blame for problems in the Middle East, it would be right for the comment to be censored from this discussion, and it would be censorship from a private company, censorship of a political viewpoint no less.

<comment><USER2> Here's the thing. On dedicated forums we know the protocol. We don't want spam and we don't want politics.

If it's a political forum we expect all civil exchanges to be treated equally. So a proponent for Owls and a proponent for sawmills both get their say and one doesn't get "deranked" or de-monetized because it's not the popular opinion or the au currant opinion. We don't expect one political candidate to be artificially ranked and another artificially buried in the results.

Now, if I'm on the Hillary blog, yes, of course I expect the org to manage the commentary to fit their narrative. I don't expect Zuckerberg or Pichai to turn their orgs into the Hillary blog or the Donald blog.

<comment> crooked-v > If it's a political forum we expect all civil exchanges to be treated > equally.

The problem here is that bad actors intentionally take advantage of this by supplying an endless stream of 'civil' arguments for entirely abhorrent stuff. This includes usually feigning ignorance and claiming they're 'just asking questions'† when objections are raised, even though it's the tenth or fiftieth or five hundredth time the same thing has come up.

† [https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions)

<comment><USER3> Given that there will always be an influx of new people; and that most people will not be familiar with previous discussions, I'm not convinced that most forums are being assaulted by bad actors. This seems to be more of a Eternal September problem.

Of course bad actors can abuse this; though I've always felt it would be good for the derailing comments to be removed with a polite dm message explaining that the topic had been discussed previously with links to said discussion.

<comment> crooked-v It's definitely an organized tactic among some groups. For example, there's a literal neo-Nazi handbook† that advises members of that group to disguise their sentiments in civility and/or 'jokes' in order to sneak it into mainstream discussion.

† [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/19/neo- na...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/19/neo-nazis-hatred- comedy-racist-daily-stormer)

<comment><USER2> Any movement can use those tactics. I wouldn't be surprised if they also read rules for radicals too. Any group looking for influence is going to use tried and true methods.

So while many vile groups like the nazis and others seeking power, there are many other groups who hold unpopular opinions even unpopular and illegal outcomes (as presently held by the public), I'm not sure we want to suppress that. Much of what we have today as acceptable discourse and so on is because we allowed those voices which were considered degenerate or unacceptable one way or another.

We don't need a new dogma telling us the way to think correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > For instance, if you're a journalist and you want to promote your work, > there is simply no viable alternative to Twitter at the moment. No other > microblogging platform comes even close to having the number of users > Twitter does, and most of the alternatives are hotbeds of extremism, so that > anyone who joins them is thereby disqualified in polite company.

IMO if you can't even _try_ to use an alternative microblogging platform for fear of being labeled an extremist by "polite company", that's indicative of a much more serious societal issue.

The quote included in this article from John Stuart Mill's _On Liberty_ explains the danger rather eloquently I think:

> Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong > mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it > ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many > kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such > extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more > deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

<comment><USER5> > IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging platform for > fear of being labeled an extremist by "polite company"

I downvoted you because this is a ridiculous claim. If you use a platform like Gab that embraces bigots and extremists perhaps, but that's not the only other platform.

<comment><USER6> What are some other platforms?

<comment><USER7> Mastodon comes to mind.

<comment><USER8> Gab apparently runs on Mastodon now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem that arises when you define censorship broadly is that the opposite of censorship is censorship.

If no one can restrict what gets published in their venues then as soon as a venue starts discussing stuff I don't like, I can spin up a shill call center or a guy with a thousand accounts and a copy of GPT2 and flood that venue with so much divisive moronicism that the voices that threaten me will be almost completely drowned out.

Worse, large open venues being flooded with low quality communications already happens even without any intentional censorship-by-flooding attack. ... providing great cover for these attacks. Especially savvy attackers can leverage the pre-existing populations of well meaning fools by shaping their messages to motivate fools into carrying on the disruption on their own.

If you think about it-- the classical view of censorship where someone outright silences you is nearly impossible online today in most of the world. It is extraordinarily hard to completely stop the spread of information that people want to spread. But at the same time, censorship that works by flooding out an idea or discrediting it by association with abusive nutballs has never been easier or more effective.

When we worry too much about private parties shutting down conversations in their own venues we risk improving the situation around an outmoded and somewhat ineffectual model of censorship at the expense of making a modern and highly effective model much worse.

The best I think we can do is foster an internet structure where everyone can have their own venues which they can operate under whatever rules they think are best, and everyone is free to move among them at the lowest cost possible. That way, effective moderation can shut down flooding attacks and voting-with- your-feet can shut down overly censorious (or overly passive!) moderation.

Unfortunately, the highly centralized world created by the popularity and network effects of sites like facebook, twitter, and youtube are the opposite of this. Instead of people being empowered to self-regulate abuse and migration being easy, people are disempowered and migration costs are high.

<comment><USER10> This is a rather common style of argument often used against civil rights: every person's civil rights should be restrained because criminals abuse those rights.

We can't have censorship free platforms because someone might spin up a thousand accounts. We need the NSA to monitor all communications because terrorists use the Internet. We should arrest 12-year olds for making finger guns because of school shooters.

But in this case as in so many, it's an off-topic argument, merely a distraction or an excuse for overreaching authority. No one here is arguing that someone who makes a thousand accounts shouldn't be restrained; that's simply not the topic under discussion, even if the word "censorship" can be stretched to include that topic.

<comment><USER9> Please. This isn't some hypothetical that I'm suggesting.

There are largely uncensored forums, like 4chan. That's actually what you get when you go there rather than having something that is heavily moderated but only in ways that you agree with, where you then pretend it isn't moderated.

And in fact, I'll fully support you having your own platform which is as uncensored as you want it to be. I wish you the best of luck.

What I don't support is you arguing that other people can't have their own platforms which restrict publication on their own platform however they see fit, including ways that you or I might disagree with.

People arguing that private parties can't limit the material posted on their own property are absolutely taking a position which is contrary to free speech. The power to exclude is just as important, if not more important, than the power to include.

If you'd like to argue that the dominance of a few platforms violates my assumptions and changes the tradeoffs, I'm not sure I'd disagree. But I think we should instead worry about fixing the monopoly problems rather than limiting private parties ability to exclude speech they disagree with on their own properties.

<comment><USER10> I think we should make a distinction between platforms and publishers. A publisher curates content according to their opinion, to the extent that when they publish outside opinions, they add a disclaimer like "Opinions expressed herein do not represent those of the publisher". There's no such disclaimer on reddit, Twitter, or Facebook because people understand that the posts aren't coming from the platform. These sites aren't a place for the owners to express their opinion; they're a mechanism for the users to communicate.

And when the mechanisms of communication are privately owned, freedom of speech can't exist if the owners censor those mechanisms.

Platforms (as opposed to publishers) should be treated like telephone companies or the mail or ISPs. They shouldn't even read the messages they carry, let alone censor them.

On the other hand, sites aren't required to be a platform, but if they choose to act like a publisher then they should be held responsible for the content they publish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So the author wants to protect "the marketplace of ideas" from monopolies caused by a different market. However, they don't want the government to do it. They also don't seem to think it's possible for smaller companies to challenge these monopolies.

What then is the author's solution? One is never given.

<comment><USER12> In my opinion, the solution is simple:

If any "platform" censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content or spam, they should have their "platform" status revoked, and they should be considered a publisher.

This prevents such companies from using "platform" status as a cost saving mechanism to help them become large monopolies. Companies like Facebook would not have been able to take over so much of the market if they had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on curating content to prevent lawsuits, etc.

I also don't think of this as some kind of punishment. It's perfectly reasonable to want to set up some kind of publishing company that has user- generated content; it's just not reasonable to expect such a company to grow to such a global scale as Twitter or Facebook.

Edit: added "spam" to reasons

<comment><USER13> > _If any "platform" censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content, > they should have their "platform" status revoked, and they should be > considered a publisher._

What about spam?

And would this extend to marketplaces? If a company allows users to sell educational resources for kids, what would happen if they start removing items that clearly don't fit?

<comment><USER14> They could have a checkbox "remove spam" that the moderators could turn on and off. There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue. I think the law should be "platforms should not tinker with their users' expressed preferences - you can't hide something that they 've chosen to subscribe to".

> And would this extend to marketplaces?

I believe these are already considered publishers ? In any case it's no different than how traditional bookstores work

<comment><USER15> > There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue.

People say this, I don't think it's true.

I think there is ambiguity around when marketing crosses into spam. If you look at different communities, even HN and Reddit, you'll find different opinions about what kind of promotion crosses that line.

Individual communities need to be able to make their own decisions on that, they don't need blanket rules applied across the board to all platforms.

<comment><USER14> reddit has already a "spam level" slider. They should allow subreddits to turn off spam filtering completely - although of course it doesnt make sense. But if they want to be classified as a simple carrier they would have to .

<comment><USER15> In your definition of censorship, would it be OK for Facebook to hide some political articles behind a "filter dishonest posts" setting that was on by default for users and groups?

Is it OK to do that to a marketing post?

<comment><USER14> I think facebook should be required to have controls to turn off their various filterings. And they should be held liable if someone can prove they systematic hide certain views from searches. That would be enough for me (having them on by default is also OK).

(Incidentally i started using twitter in "view latest" mode and i prefer it - turns out their expensive algorithms were pretty useless for me)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Instead of an ideological bias, what if it is just a demographic bias?

The author supposes that there are some mustache-twirling masterminds behind the scenes at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, picking and choosing what content is promoted. But the algorithms, at their most basic sense, promote what is popular.

Based on voting records, in absolute numbers, there are simply more left- leaning people (at least in the US) than there are right-leaning people. Gerrymandering and the electoral college, etc don't reflect this in the government, but it is the case.

The left-leaning viewpoints are more promoted then, simply because there are more people who want to see them. There's no reason to posit a nefarious conspiracy.

We could argue that it would be beneficial to promote less popular viewpoints more to expose people to new ideas. It probably would be a good thing. But these companies are in the business of making money and people generally just want to see things that confirm their own biases. Just look at how upset conservatives are that they can't find enough content like that ;)

<comment><USER17> >The author supposes that there are some mustache-twirling masterminds behind the scenes at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, picking and choosing what content is promoted. But the algorithms, at there most basic sense, promote what is popular.

Hardly. The algos have programmers thumbs on them heavily. A hilarious example was when Reddit was trying to deal with the_donald successfully spamming reddits hot algorithm. But someone screwed up the new weighting and instead of pushing td posts down it pushed them up, the whole front page was nothing but td posts for a day. They eventually fixed it, but never think that there isn't a human jury rigged mess of if else statements at the core of the algorithms.

<comment><USER16> That just proves my point. the_donald had to find an exploit and resort to spamming in order to get the algorithm to push them onto the front page. They couldn't get there on the basis of, you know, actually being popular because a large number of people want to read them.

<comment><USER17> >That just proves my point

It proves that reddit admins didn't like right wing shit posting and were willing to rewrite the algo to deal with it. Which is completely the opposite of the point you were making that these algos are somehow neutral.

<comment><USER16> It proves that reddit admins take steps to deal with people who abuse the site with spam, which is what one would expect of any forum administrator for any spam content.

If their content was so compelling, why did they have to spam it? Why wouldn't it just attract users organically the way other content does?

<comment><USER17> >Why wouldn't it just attract users organically the way other content does?

[[citation needed]] Would you like to present proof that t_d did not grow organically in 2015/2016?

So far you're heavy on claims and light on proof.

<comment><USER16> Citation? No problem. Here it is:

> A hilarious example was when Reddit was trying to deal with the_donald > successfully spamming reddits hot algorithm.

\- buzzkillington in Hacker News comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21463480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21463480)

You were the one who stated that /r/the_donald spammed Reddit to reach the front page. Are you changing your story and now saying they reached the front page organically? Are you confused about what spamming is?

If there really were a large number of people genuinely interested in the_donald, it would have reached the front page without spamming. The reddit algorithm is probably also biased against posts trying to sell penis enlargement pills. Do you think that is also oppressive?

<comment><USER17> If you haven't already, would you mind reading about HN's approach to comments and site guidelines?

>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Replace "censoring conservative viewpoints" with "censoring the nice people who tell me about how I can make $13,000 a week working from home". Which part of this argument changes? I can't find any part that does.

<comment><USER19> I can't speak for the article, but I can speak for myself. The difference is that I, personally, have control over the blocking of the "make money fast" communication. I think part of the right to free speech is the right to be able to choose what speech you consume, i.e., everyone has the right to free speech but nobody has the right to _impose_ upon you.

For me personally, since I run my own incoming mail server, there is no platform censoring those emails. I use my own tools, trained on my own emails and my own choices about what to block, to do the filtering.

When a platform entirely blocks some speech, that is not my choice; it is theirs. That is the critical difference.

This is still not a bright shining line, because there isn't one. But it's sufficiently clear to be a guiding principle. If you _want_ to lock yourself in some particular filter bubble, that's your choice, but nobody else has the right to _force_ you into one.

<comment><USER20> > The difference is that I, personally, have control over the blocking of the > "make money fast" communication

Have you never encountered a phpBB forum, or a wiki, or a social network, that doesn't have spam blockers? In my experience, such sites are inundated with spam, occasionally to the point that signal is hard to find over the noise. Your "solution" only touches on email. Filtering spam from such diverse sources would require a much more intrusive technology. Also, you're putting a wholly unreasonable burden on website owners to preserve abusive content -- if somebody uploads a flood of junk data, are you legally required to retain and redistribute it all? And are you forcing users to download gigabytes of garbage, and filter it down to a kilobyte of content?

<comment><USER19> As a pragmatist on this matter, I believe the solution here is scale. The control I have over a phpBB forum is that if I don't like their spam policy, I can leave, and either join another or form my own.

We're not talking about a phpBB forum or a little blog with a few thousand commenters. We're talking about single companies with very significant fractions of the total discourse flowing through them. If Facebook blocks something, it affects a massive number of people, and "just go make your own Facebook" is not a suitable recourse. Scale matters. Small entities can do things without being a threat to the body politic that large entities can not.

As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced that something the size of Facebook can actually work in the long term [1]. Trying to jam everybody into one set of rules may simply be infeasible, for reasons not entirely related to "rights". If you look at the current conflicts over Facebook through this window, you may find it makes sense over the conflict. Especially if you are one of the majority here on HN who are kinda lost over the idea of why so many have become anti-Facebook, when you just see Facebook imposing your perfectly sensible, obviously correct values on the world, why is everyone complaining? Well, it's that whole diversity thing you may have heard rumors about. It's real. It may not be the case that you can get everyone into one community with one set of standards, regardless of how "obviously right" those standards are.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146868) \- in fact, I'd amplify the original post I made by also pointing out Facebook is _international_ , so we're not just trying to stick the diverse cultures of the US in there, but trying to stick all the diverse cultures of the _world_ in one big pile. When I put it that way, does the idea that such a thing could work in the long term even pass the smell test?

<comment><USER20> > We're not talking about a phpBB forum or a little blog with a few thousand > commenters.

I listed examples including "wikis" and "social media sites" which categorically contain the largest websites in the world. You'll find websites of all orders of magnitude from tens to millions of users -- where do you draw that line? But more importantly, are you under the impression that large-scale sites are somehow immune spammers?

> As a pragmatist on this matter, I believe the solution here is scale. The > control I have over a phpBB forum is that if I don't like their spam policy, > I can leave, and either join another or form my own.

I'm not understanding something here. You think that it's okay for spammers to implement a "heckler's veto" by de-facto shutting down every single niche website that (by law, presumably) accepts/rebroadcasts any and all submitted content -- that you'll be able to "vote with your feet" and move/create a site or forum that will somehow be immune to this onslaught? At what point is "scale" the answer? Bigger is better?

> As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced that something the size of > Facebook can actually work in the long term [1].

I'm suffering whiplash. You gotta help me here. You're happy to feed small websites to the spamwolves, yes? But you're not convinced that big websites are good either. Do we just cancel the entire internet?

I'll grant that I'd probably get more work done.

<comment><USER21> It's easy to write laws such that totally blocking automation is allowed, totally blocking human written content is 'censorship', and categorising/hiding by default/ranking content is allowed.

Yes, this doesn't deal with things like "is YouTube ranking biased" but it's a start. You posit that sites would be obliged to publish onslaughts, but many spam filters are pretty good at filtering such attacks. For instance that's where CAPTCHAs came from (there are better technical solutions than CAPTCHAs but you get the idea).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The article is good, but it could do with a lot less ad hominem and calling people 'idiots'.

You can do better than this:

> you may think that you're very sophisticated, but actually you are just > being ridiculous.

> Sure, you can say that if you want (though I don't think that's how the word > is actually used by ordinary people), but only idiots think it shows that > it's not a problem.

> I know that some people, especially among libertarians, think it makes them > smart to believe that, but they clearly have not thought this through.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm always surprised when articles like this don't mention reddit. Isn't it a top 10 website that was once top 3? I've read quotes saying one in three americans has visited reddit. Anyway, reddit is a great resource for studying moderation activity.

<comment><USER24> That is because it oozes pretense of refusing to accept that their "silent majority" is really a noisy minority. Not recognizing freedom of association is one of the big warning signs along with not realizing the impact of what they want on /themselves/. Personally at that point I mentally mark them as spam.

Annoyingly they conflate actual corporate censorship concerns with their persecution complex. DMCA abuse is actual corporate censorship for instance. Same if say Comcast blocked Netflix. The government using a cudgel to make corporations do their censorship when laws would be struck down in an instant is censorship and a messy semantics arguement of corporate vs government origin. These complaints boil down to "they aren't giving me an audience how dare they!". There is a world of difference between not given any attention and cannot publish.

<comment><USER23> I don't see how this relates to leaving reddit out of articles about moderation in social media.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article starts with an unsupported premise that the platforms these companies operate favor liberal over conservative speech so my natural inclination is just to dismiss the rest of it; however, even if true the solution to improving freedom of speech is not suppressing someone else's freedom of speech.

<comment><USER26> I probably can't supply data that would convince you liberal speech is favored over conservative speech. However, within the past month my personal Facebook account was curiously disabled within an hour of typing the word "Christian" in a comment. I would not identify as conservative or liberal. I certainly can't prove that merely using this word was what triggered the permaban, but Facebook absolutely would not reinstate my account, even after I supplied a valid driver's license as proof of my identity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's hard to take this argument seriously when the only companies mentioned are left-leaning tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google.

I suspect that the author's concern isn't censorship per se, but censorship of viewpoints he happens to uphold. If Twitter's suppression of conservative content is bad, then so is The Federalist's suppression of liberal content.

You're about to argue that one of these is a social media platform, while the other is a news outlet. In that case, what do you think is the essential difference that makes it okay for one to censor certain ideas but not the other?

<comment><USER28> Isn't it more likely that the author chose Facebook, Google, and Twitter not because they're left-leaning, but because their traffic is vastly more significant than The Federalist? The three are all top-50 sites globally. The Federalist doesn't even make it into the top 10k.

It's pretty rational to focus more on the sites that have the most traffic when discussing bias, isn't it?

<comment><USER27> > It's pretty rational to focus more on the sites that have the most traffic > when discussing bias, isn't it?

I feel that if a person is making an argument from principle, then that principle should apply everywhere and not just where politically convenient to them.

<comment><USER28> The author does:

> ... although it can be leveraged against big tech companies that are biased > in favor of liberals, this line of argument also has implications that > conservatives may less readily welcome. For instance, it means that how rich > people use their money to promote their ideas may also be a problem, insofar > as it distorts the marketplace of ideas.

The principle he's arguing is that when an organization that has a de facto monopoly on a type of information stream (search, microblogging, and social circle media) uses that monopoly to favor one political viewpoint, that is harmful to society because it "distorts the marketplace of ideas" by preventing equal access to said marketplace.

The Federalist is not in this position. For every conservative magazine like The Federalist, there's a liberal one like Mother Jones. This is the "marketplace of ideas" that the author refers to in action, not a distortion of it. So the author is, in fact, arguing from principle, just not the principle you're using.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How could a private company impose censhorship when none of them are allowed to use violence? They could only ban certain types of behaviour on their premises, right? Which is not really censorship as one could just go to someone else's premises or found their own.

<comment> crooked-v The real problem here isn't that companies are allowed to control what content goes on their platforms, but that companies are allowed to get so large that they're a de facto monopoly for much of the world (e.g. Facebook).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Regulating private companies for the benefit of society? I didn't think that idea was still within the current Overton window at this point.

The phrase "hoist by their own petard" seems appropriate here.

</comment><comment><USER31> > For instance, if you're a journalist and you want to promote your work, > there is simply no viable alternative to Twitter at the moment. No other > microblogging platform

Microblogging platforms aren't the only venue for journalists to promote their work.

But, even if that wasn't the case, that's not an argument that private censorship is bad but that private monopolies are bad, and that censorship by monopolies on essential communications mechanisms (public or private) is bad.

</comment><comment><USER32> The problem I think is that we let these companies grow so big, and let society grow so dependent on them that their policies become a worldwide public issue. If we become dependent on Twitter or Facebook to participate in democracy, regulation should follow.

</comment><comment><USER33> There is outright censorship, or rather removing topics that the owner of the platform doesn't like, and then there is the much more serious problem of creating echo chambers for the users where dissenting opinions are not deleted, but hidden.

</comment><comment><USER34> Censorship is awful, sometimes even worse through large tech corporations, i.e. Google, Facebook, etc.

</comment><comment><USER35> Politicized flamebait, flagged. Call it censorship if you want.

</comment><comment><USER36> _For several years, conservatives have expressed concern that big tech companies, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, are suppressing right-leaning content in various, more or less direct ways. Even though conservatives often exaggerate it, I think there is no doubt about the anti-conservative bias of these companies, but that is not what I want to discuss in this article._

You don't want to discuss it here because you don't have a detailed analysis backed up by solid data. If you did, you'd lead with it.

Trust me, most people here can handle an article full of graphs and stuff.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've been flabbergasted at the number of _universities_ that have recently stifled speakers.

I agree with much of what the author wrote. It's time for change. Classic liberalism may be best.

</comment><comment> d--b See but that's a libertarian issue here.

If you value freedom above all else, Google being an independent entity, should have the freedom to ban / veto whomever they want.

You can't have it both ways: let people be free to say whatever they want AND force the owners of communication channels to spread all information.

<comment><USER38> Freedom comes with responsibility. The idea that they are not responsible for the content (i.e. you can't hold Youtube/Google legally responsible for the content they have on their platforms) while at the same time they make profit on the very same content and can censor it as they see fit -- this is idiocy in its purest form.

We hold newspapers or TV station legally liable for the content they serve. This is fair. Situation in which they couldn't be sued for the stuff they air still making money on it -- that's the current situation with them. It's even worse because they can somehow censor the content they don't like for their own political reasons.

It's like with banks. Yes, we can make money. And yes when times are bad we can get money from the government/tax payers too. This is not freedom this is fascism.

<comment><USER24> That definition of responsibility negates freedom in itself. I have literally seen it used by dictators who set libel laws to crush any negative stories.

The stance is absurd - tt is akin to saying that Kinkos should be liable for anything printed beyond "they knowingly used ink laced with weaponized anthrax" \- and should be charged with terrorism because a customer who quietly printed a bomb threat formatted to look like a resume - just because they kick you out for openly printing Goatse.ck and every other old shock site which scares away the other customers.

<comment><USER38> Exactly my point. But for this to work, they need to be regulated by Government as utilities.

No one has the right to turn off electric grid on your house because they are "private company". No one has the right to turn off "running water" from your sink because they are "private company" and if you don't like it, you can go somewhere else or open your own. The same way, no one has right to censor me because they are "private company" and if I don't like it I can go ahead and open my own Youtube. They should be and will be regulated as utilities.

<comment><USER39> What precedent are you using to imagine that if Facebook/Youtube/etc were to become public utilities, that they would be barred from censorship? Public broadcasters are currently regulated by the FEC:

[https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and- broadcasting#OBSC...](https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and- broadcasting#OBSCENE)

> _Indecent Material. Indecent material is protected by the First Amendment, > so its broadcast cannot constitutionally be prohibited at all times. > However, the courts have upheld Congress ' prohibition of the broadcast of > indecent material during times of the day when there is a reasonable risk > that children may be in the audience, which the Commission has determined to > be between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Indecent programming is defined > as "language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms > patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the > broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities." Broadcasts that > fall within this definition and are aired between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. may be > subject to enforcement action by the FCC._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Know what else distorts the marketplace of ideas?

Money.

Money allows for buying advertisements, essentially allowing you to buy a platform to spread your ideas.

Having money typically has a pretty clear bias: protecting the money of those who have it. This comes at the expense, many times, of those who do not.

That typically equates to conservative policies.

I'm not convinced that the market distortion caused by supposed bias in social media moderation is even close to the distortion created by allowing money in politics. In fact in many (not all) cases of purported bias, the true impetus for action was due to hateful or otherwise harmful speech.

Nor do I agree that if we disagree with state censorship, we should disagree with Facebook censorship.

Being thrown into the legal system with threat of monetary penalty, jailtime, etc. is worthy of much more scrutiny than speech that gets you banned from a social network.

<comment><USER41> This was a big part of why I enjoyed Jack Dorsey's comments on Twitter removing political advertising.

The Internet was supposed to be a democratizing force, and it was, for awhile. To an extent it still is, but as the convergence of content continues to pull people into the various Platforms™, all of which are supported by advertiser dollars, the content itself is diluted. Some not so much, some so much it's not recognizable, others so much that it's no longer there.

YouTube is a great example of this. Once a monument to the power of democratized content, it's slowly but surely pushing out real creators in favor of advertising companies producing advertiser-friendly and oh-so- clickable content, much of which is complete and utter trash. It's not just marketing companies though, a new breed of creator has spawned since roughly 2010, determined to soak as many advertising dollars out of the platform as they can with as much vapid and soulless content as it will suffer.

And all of this is sponsored in turn by equally vapid and soulless corporate advertisers, determined to make sure their precious brands are not associated with anything as uncouth as an opinion or a real person.

Hell, there's a great argument to be made of how the "pivot to video" and the resulting catacombs full of gutted and destroyed media websites can be laid at the feet of corporate marketers who wanted video ads. Nay it was not any Internet citizen who claimed the future was video, we didn't ask for it, and we certainly didn't like it.

The whole thing is gross, and far from isolated to YouTube, it has plagued them all, save perhaps for Twitter and I think the only thing saving Twitter is that it's just not as easily monetized. But, Twitter has a different problem, which I believe Jack is trying to solve; the influx of automated bots, bought and paid for by other marketers, more often trying to sell politics than products. But it's just a different kind of feces from the same anus and indicative of the same core problem: advertisers suck, at everything. And they have more power than ever on the Internet, and so the Internet sucks more than ever.

<comment><USER42> We need to think about why advertising is winning.

A big reason is that advertising is a tax deduction. If I fund my content with advertising, the advertiser gets to deduct the money they spend from their income tax. If I sell content to users, the users don't get to do that. Between the employer and employee halves of FICA, federal withholding and state income tax, that's typically more than half the money. To make it even we would either need a tax deduction for purchasing content or to get rid of the one for buying advertising.

Then you have companies like Apple taking a 30% cut of the creator's revenue. The customer has to pay $1.43 in order for the creator to get $1. That's obviously making direct purchases less competitive against advertising -- and it multiplies with the tax treatment. If you're paying 50% in tax and then 30% to Apple, the customer needs to earn ~$2.86 for every $1 they want the creator to get. If two content creators start with $1 and use it buy each other's content, by the time the money goes to the other person and back one time, what's left is only ~$0.12.

It would be a lot easier to _sell_ content if the creators actually got the lion's share of the customer's money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Private companies should be able to censor political speech, period. If it's my desire to build a platform that is favorable to certain types of speech, that's my right and the government shouldn't be forcing me to modify my platform to rebroadcast speech I disagree with.

In terms of conservative complaints about leftist censorship, I have to simply roll my eyes. The conservatives complaining about big tech don't care about censorship, they only care about the dominance of their own political messages. This is obvious when you ask them about "democratizing speech" on platforms they already dominate like cable news and talk radio. Remember the fairness doctrine? They hated the idea of having the government dictate the political composition of the airwaves, but when it comes to big tech, suddenly they want to nationalize the platforms to their own benefit. I find the effort extremely disingenuous.

Also, something something downvotes something something censorship!!

<comment><USER44> I think you are right. But I would also argue that such censorship should be as transparent as possible.

Though the real question is, at a certain size of user base, does a private space not become a public one? Or rather, if there is no alternative of not having censorship, no place else to go, does the censorship not become a problem then?

I am not sure what the solution here would be, actually, but while I think if people don't like facebooks/twitters censorship they should just go somewhere else, I would not hold the same view for example on email providers.

<comment><USER43> I would be willing to pay taxes to fund a government run online "public square" that could not be legally censored, but I am fundamentally opposed to taking control of privately owned websites and forcing the owners to host content that they disagree with, especially political content. I disagree with the idea that the number of people visiting a website is an important metric in determining the owner's property rights.

> _at a certain size of user base, does a private space not become a public > one_

I think that's a question worth exploring, but I think any honest discussion of this idea has to acknowledge that most of these social media companies are essentially trivial entertainment sites and that if we are really trying to designate access to twitter as a basic human right we must first consider why life saving drugs, housing, and healthcare are not human rights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Not that impressed with this article. It states as it might be a fact that the "right is suppressed" and "left" is "in favor". Then it never really explains why censorship might be bad or not. It doesn't get really concrete, just something vague about "marketplace of ideas".

IMO it's bad to have places where only one side is heard, the other is not. Further, there are too many places where people might feel they're a majority in their opinion, while they're not. Usually people would notice they're the odd one out. That's not the case in various places (e.g. subreddits).

Note that I'm from the Netherlands and do not agree with freedom of speech above everything is a good thing. There should be some limits to it. These reasonable limits should be in place.

Making distinctions between right/left and complaining that more of your stuff is questionable.. yeah.. so? The "left"/Democratic party I consider pretty conservative and not looking out for its people. As such, it's always strange to see the complaints, what is right/left for e.g. US to me is "right wing" vs "even more right wing".

I also do not see the restrictions; there should be way more limits on reddit/twitter/facebook. Further, I think the companies should be held responsible for this.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is such an own-goal. Before worrying about censoring unwanted content, companies should spend their time on stopping _promoting_ it (and building client side filtering controls) which is just as huge a problem and not anti- American to fix.

The problem is that companies _want_ the flamebait and toxic content to drive enragement engagement ad impressions, but don't want to be accountable for the stuff that's just too edgy for advertisers.

<comment><USER47> "Companies want the flamebait...." The moderation system on reddit seems to heavily promote group think. Actually promoting controversial comments as a default would be interesting.

<comment><USER36> * Actually promoting controversial comments as a default would be interesting.*

Controversial is subjective. Would you like FB/reddit to promote holocaust denial?

<comment><USER47> Reddit has an option to sort on controversial on a group and also on comments. I suspect the algorithm is probably looking for things with a combination of upvotes and downvotes. Take a look at any reddit group or the comments and sort on controversial if you want to see what it looks like. If you defined controversial as any thing that has a 15% to 55% down vote ratio that would be fairly specific. Maybe over 60% downvote it may be off topic or spam? It would be an interesting experiment, for a few days, to change the default from "hot" to "controversial".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


UChicago doctors see 'remarkable' success using ventilator alternatives - <AUTHOR> https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/uchicago-medicine-doctors-see-truly-remarkable-success-using-ventilator-alternatives-to-treat-covid19 <comment><USER2> One of the most interesting parts of this press release, following it on other boards, is the immediate "We already do that. Nothing new here."

That kind of reply would immediately lead me to think it was just a useless release, but then I see people posting comments along the lines of "No, we don't do that. In fact, we have a policy against doing that because of the danger of aerosolization"

For my hacker/systems wonks, this a great example of group learning happening world wide. I imagine there are many ICUs that do this, and many that forbid it. In such an environment, releases like this aren't submarines or spam; they're recurring prompts to administrators elsewhere that they might be missing something important.

I hate to sound cold, but damn this is an interesting example of how organizations learn. One commenter asked "I wonder how many of those hospitals who forbid intubation are doing it to patients with good insurance"

For the record, as far as I know this is a horrible thing to suggest. But the overall point, that large organizations have incentives that are many times removed from the actual work being done, is a good one.

This kind of conversation facilitation across borders is what the internet was supposed to be doing. I think this is the first time I've seen it working the way we had hoped. What's especially interesting to me is that many of the signals we look for in social forums, like "this is just a spam press release", "nothing new to see", or "there's some ulterior motivation here" voting up or down, etc., are actually counter-indicators and inhibitors of overall progress.

<comment><USER3> Even better would be randomized experimental data that this was better than an alternative... 'It works' can mean lots of different things...

<comment><USER2> It's an excellent point. Learning is not the same as science, and we need randomized trials to actually be sure of anything.

Unfortunately, in the middle of a pandemic, that's not going to happen with enough speed to prevent a lot of people dying.

The perfect can be the enemy of the good enough. We don't have to guess or learn about the mass of an electron; that's been well-established through great lab work. But not all decisions are like that. Many times the hardest decisions are those you make with incomplete and contradictory information ... and not making a decision is, in effect, making a decision. This is one of the things that's so interesting here. If it were simple yes/no, what's science and what's speculation, there wouldn't be much interesting learning or decision-making happening.

<comment><USER4> > _Unfortunately, in the middle of a pandemic, that 's not going to happen > with enough speed to prevent a lot of people dying._

How are you sure that this method is not worse than the ventilator method and will kill even more people during the pandemic?

How many death did they get with this method? How many death would they had got with the ventilator method?

<comment><USER5> This is "decision making under conditions of uncertainty." [0]

It's not that your questions are bad, it's that in practice medical professionals have to operate without answers to them. Doing so involves communication with peers about their own observations of what may work better/worse, such as in this article. Double-blind randomized trials are not the only source of actionable information: Case studies also form a significant pillar of knowledge, especially pending results from more systematic studies.

[0] [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4757-2068-6_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4757-2068-6_3)

<comment><USER4> One of the lesson of the physics lab is that unless you have calibrated very carefully all the equipment and experimental setup, you can't mix the measurements of one day with the measurements of another day.

For example one day we have very weird results trying to compare two measurements of the same day about something related with the speed of sound. After a lot of time trying to understand the problem we notice that one measurement was from 9am when the temperature was like 10°C(50°F) and the other was from 1pm when the temperature was like 25°C(77°F). The following days we tried to take all the measurements as close as possible.

The same applies to benchmarks in computers. A few days ago I got an improvement for a program that reduced the runtime from 85s to 59s. Until I noticed that one was with the notebook plugged in an the other with the batteries. I tried again both with the notebook plugged in and the improvement was only from 65s to 59s. Still a nice improvement but not fantastic.

Quoting again part of the original comment I'm repliying

> _Learning is not the same as science, and we need randomized trials to > actually be sure of anything. Unfortunately, in the middle of a pandemic, > that 's not going to happen with enough speed to prevent a lot of people > dying. The perfect can be the enemy of the good enough._

Without a randomized control group it is very difficult to be sure if a small improvement of the survival rate is real. So you can't learn if the new method or the old method is better.

<comment><USER5> Yes, absolutely correct. We just don't always have time to wait: Doctors must take action now. Knowing a majority of people that end up ventilators will die means the balance of risk weighs at least a little more heavily towards novel treatments than in less critical cases.

Case studies of those attempts are exactly the kind of data points that can provide a great deal of information and hypothesis generation for more systematic studies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the most active figures in this debate has been a New York doctor named Cameron Kyle-Sidell. He frequently posts interesting sources on Twitter:

[https://twitter.com/cameronks](https://twitter.com/cameronks)

<comment><USER7> Yes, rather absurdly, I learned about him like a month ago on ZeroHedge when they started following him; he was brushed off for weeks, his message being, "Look at patient behavior, this is not actually ARDS, our ventilator strategy is probably wrong."

Crazy to think that so many doctors around the world, experts, and policy makers didn't really question the fundamental nature of the disease, and perhaps telling that it took an ER doctor in NYC posting on youtube for a month to bring it proper attention.

<comment><USER8> Dr Ignaz Semmelweis had this ludicrous theory, back in 1846, of "cadaverous particles" causing high deaths in women who had just given birth. Despite evidence that it _worked_ , he spent the rest of his life trying to get people to listen. The doctors of the day were so threatened by the possibility that they were the ones killing their patients that they rejected the practice.

We haven't culturally evolved much further it seems. "Wacky" ideas are routinely rejected by mainstream science; eg ulcers being caused by germs rather than stress, and can be cured as such. What societal changes need to come about that this doctor _doesn 't_ have to make YouTube videos for a month?

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2015/01/12/3756639...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2015/01/12/375663920/the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved- women-s-lives)

<comment><USER9> There's a saying, "progress is made one funeral at a time", especially in science but also in other areas; smbc had a good comic about it too a whole back (am in mobile and can't find it now).

Linus Pauling famously and successfully used all his night to reject the idea of quasicrystals. The Updated concept of crystals was adopted shortly after his death; i can't say I was able to track the history - there is an enormous amount of whitewashing - but it seems initially everyone rejected quasicrystals, but eventually people started to look at ahechtman's evidence - and accept it, except not publicly because the luminaries of the field led by Pauling rejected it. And then Pauling's funeral allowed the science to finally advance.

<comment><USER5> When I studied computational linguistics, my professors told me that a great deal of promising research on linguistics in the US had been similarly stifled by Noam Chomsky and his adherents, the result being a relative stagnation in "continental" linguistics compared to that seen in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't doubt that this works well but there is a good reason that other hospitals are not using this approach. As the article mentions:

"This approach is not without risk, however. HFNCs blow air out, and convert the COVID-19 virus into a fine spray in the air. To protect themselves from the virus, staff must have proper personal protective equipment (PPE), negative pressure patient rooms, and anterooms, which are rooms in front of the patient rooms where staff can change in and out of their safety gear to avoid contaminating others."

"UChicago Medicine's Emergency Department recently doubled its number of anterooms, thereby doubling its capacity to give ?high-flow nasal cannula to patients. The main hospital also added negative pressure rooms on two floors, making it safer and easier to take care of COVID-19 patients."

Not all hospitals have the ability to double the number of negative pressure rooms or even provide needed PPE to all caregivers.

A ventilator on the other hand allows for a HEPA filter in-line that prevents the spread of the disease within the hospital.

</comment><comment><USER11> Related:

"The respiratory distress appears to include an important vascular insult that potentially mandates a different treatment approach than customarily applied for ARDS." [https://twitter.com/jama_current/status/1253722428053823492](https://twitter.com/jama_current/status/1253722428053823492)

</comment><comment><USER12> The article mentions 40% O2 sat to 80 or 90%; aren't the latter still really low? I'm certainly no doctor, but wikipedia[1] claims "Prolonged hypoxia induces neuronal cell death via apoptosis, resulting in a hypoxic brain injury" and suggests that 80-85% is considered _severe_ and 86-90% moderate.

Granted, both are a hell of a lot better than 40%!

It adds, "Mild and moderate cerebral hypoxia generally has no impact beyond the episode of hypoxia; on the other hand, _the outcome of severe cerebral hypoxia will depend on the success of damage control, amount of brain tissue deprived of oxygen, and the speed with which oxygen was restored._ "

So I guess my questions are:

* How does this stack up against an intubated ventilator, assuming one is available?

* My understanding is the patients needing respiratory support are often on ventilation for 1-2 weeks; how much damage would one expect from having severe hypoxia for that duration?

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

<comment><USER13> Being on a ventilator is traumatic. So much so that they generally put you under. Can you imagine waking up with a tube through your mouth and down your throat forcing you to breathe? It happens and people panic and have to be restrained. People get PTSD.

[https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/ptsd_com...](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/ptsd_common_in_icu_survivors)

If you can get the O2 up to a livable level without a ventilator so that the patient is supported enough to get well, that that is a good outcome.

<comment><USER14> I suppose I'd rather risk the 1/4 chance of getting ptsd vs the guarantee of moderate/severe brain injury if it was a choice

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how they decide which patients would get the cannula instead of a ventilator?

Otherwise, intubation w/ a ventilator generally requires some form of sedation-- I wonder if that sedation has an impact on the body's ability to fight back.

<comment><USER15> By seeing what type of damage is being done to the lungs through CT scan or X-Ray, according to this article on a similar topic from two weeks ago: [https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200407/doctors-puzzle- over...](https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200407/doctors-puzzle-over- covid19-lung-problems)

More and more it's starting to look to me like we have two different novel viruses going around.

<comment><USER5> Two viruses may be possible, but other diseases certainly can have similar ranges of problems: The Flu might case different type of lung problems-- pneumonia, bronchitis, exacerbate asthma. Or it might hit your stomach, or result in ear infections by allowing other opportunistic infections to fester, or seizures. It may cause pericarditis or other heart problems, or strokes. So it is not unreasonable to assume that Covid-19 might cause the same symptoms through 2 different mechanisms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So about CPAP / BiPAP? If all one needs it to push air down the lungs a CPAP can produce a lot of pressure. Anyone knows enough about it?

<comment><USER17> First-- and I'm sure you weren't suggesting this, but I feel I need to mention-- it's extremely dangerous to pressurize a person's lungs above the surrounding environment[1]. Not to mention that pressurizing the inside of the throat could pressurize the middle ear and blow out your eardrums.

Second, I'm not a physician, I'm a physicist. What follows is for curiosity's sake.

I suspect that the goal is to maximally enrich the patient's airstream in oxygen, whenever it is that they happen to breathe in. In a patient with fluid-filled alveoli, the surface area available for diffusion of oxygen into the bloodstream is greatly diminished. Additionally, the distance that oxygen needs to diffuse before it reaches hemoglobin is increased: rather than just the lining of alveoli and capillaries, it has to first dissolve into the fluid gunk filling the space, then diffuse through the fluid, then pass through the lining of the alveolus and capillary. To top it off, water doesn't have great solubility for oxygen, and atmospheric air is mostly nitrogen anyways.

Each of these passive transport phenomena occurs at a rate that depends on the gradient (roughly...) of available O2. This concentration is greatest in the air, and lowest in the bloodstream adjacent to the alveoli, where hemoglobin binds up oxygen. One way to increase the rate of dissolution and diffusion is to increase the concentration gradient. That means enriching the airstream in O2.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barotrauma#Pulmonary_barotraum...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barotrauma#Pulmonary_barotrauma)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like a promising strategy to manage patients, assuming the hospital has the necessary negative pressure rooms, etc. Especially since ventilators don't even seem to be very effective. We've been seeing stories last few days that the large majority (88%) of folks put on ventilators in NYC, end up dying.

<comment><USER19> Be careful with that number. It's 88% of the cases that had resolved after ~4.5-5 days, which was only 25% of the cases included in the study.

If there is some bias in the study population, the overall rate can change quite a lot (for example, a possibility is that the weakest patients succumb in that period, with stronger patients coming off the ventilators after a longer period...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I heard on Reddit that Medicare pays 3x more for intubation. Can anyone find a source?

<comment><USER21> It's a far more complicated procedure, of course it pays more. A five year old can install a nasal cannula.

<comment><USER22> and it could be done at home, using an O2 cannister, that should be cheap even for those paying out of pocket without medical insurance.

no wonder why the medical establishment would be opposed to a simple work around that would remove the need for hospitalization or ICU

<comment><USER21> These patients still need the care and monitoring you'd get in an ICU, and there's zero indication the "medical establishment" is opposed to it - high- flow oxygen is used regularly in hospitals in a variety of scenarios.

<comment><USER22> define care and monitoring.

\- care, like taking the drugs they have been prescribed and regularly take at home? Any family member can do that.

\- monitoring that the saturation does not fall too low... so that patients can be intubated with a 90% risk of death? I'd rather opt out of that one.

To be clear, I'm talking about de-medicalizing covid: no ICU, no hospital. Just O2 nasal canula at home.

It seems unimaginable, but a large number of in the world deal with no hospital healthcare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm an intensivist based in Sweden. From my perspective there is absolutely nothing new in this article. We have been using HFC for years if not decades.

<comment><USER3> Our* guidance has been HFNC only in negative pressure rooms because of the aersolization risk.

We've converted a huge number of beds to negative pressure in order to maximize use of HFNC. Anecdotally, I feel like it works, but would be great to see a trial.

*major nyc health system

<comment><USER24> Is management of an HFNC patient simple enough that it could be done outside a hospital? I'm imagining a converted stadium or similar area in which patients use HFNC and everyone who isn't a patient puts on serious PPE before entering and takes it off only when they're quite far away.

<comment><USER21> Or staff it with recovered healthcare workers.

<comment><USER25> 'No evidence' that recovering from Covid-19 gives people immunity, WHO says

[https://www.france24.com/en/20200425-no-evidence-that- recove...](https://www.france24.com/en/20200425-no-evidence-that-recovering- from-covid-19-gives-people-immunity-who-says)

<comment><USER21> There was no evidence of human-to-human transmission early on, too.

"No evidence" is not "evidence against immunity". It means we don't know yet.

<comment><USER26> > There was no evidence of human-to-human transmission early on, too.

I have two comments about that:

1) Like somebody else said, if you don't look, you won't find evidence, even if it's there.

2) Wuhan officials were incentivized to say it wasn't contagious, ergo, no lockdown needed.

However, it clearly was being transmitted to non-wet market patients in late Nov./early Dec., and Disneyworld Shanghai was closed Jan. 24, so you have to be wilfully blind to say it's not contagious.

<comment><USER21> Yes, the WHO is not a spy organization. They rely in large part on cooperation from member nations.

Sometimes that's an issue, but it doesn't mean they were lying when they said they didn't have the evidence yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder how this technique differs from CPAP. CPAP doesn't use pure O2, but perhaps the pressures can be similar?

</comment><comment><USER28> Sound a lot like the devices people criticized Tesla for delivering.

<comment><USER26> Yes, it turns out the Tesla devices were actually more practical than first thought.

The caveats are:

1) Would US hospitals accept or recommend them?

2) If US hospitals accepted them, was there an acceptable solution to the aerosolization problem? Wuhan hospitals were segregated into corona and non- corona locations, so aerosolization wasn't a problem for other patients, but I don't know if US hospital systems got that organized.

I highly recommend reading the Wuhan accounts and papers. They really moved fast on improving their response, which the US totally ignored. Only now, Apr. 26, are we catching up to what they found in Jan./Feb. I doubt if it affected the body count much, but time was wasted.

Instead HN wasted months on endless navel-gazing and "IFR vs. CFR" chatter. Really a new low for HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ha yes, the good old Louis Pouzin runcom #frenchtech

</comment><comment><USER30> With treatment so simple, we have effectively removed the healthcare system as a bottleneck on the rest of society.

I think we can safely reopen fully now and treat any serious cases using our existing healthcare systems in combination with this kind of new knowledge.

The longer we 'suppress the curve', when we are already far below hospital system capacity, the more economic and social damage we cause unnecessarily.

<comment><USER20> Not sure why you're being downvoted. Here's an article that puts sources and numbers on your thought:

[https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data- are-i...](https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-in-stop- the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation)

I'd be curious to hear counterpoints. I could be wrong. It does anyone think this will go away with a long enough lockdown? Or is there any solution other than herd immunity?

<comment><USER31> We don't know if people have long term immunity.

<comment><USER20> If we didn't have immunity it would be unlike any other respiratory virus known to man. All other corona viruses have non-insignificant periods of immunity.

Further Fauci himself says it's very likely there is immunity: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/fauci- really-c...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/fauci-really- confident-people-recover-coronavirus-become-immune-infection-1494612%3famp=1)

There was also a study performed on monkeys showing immunity: [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.13.990226v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.13.990226v1)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Bot Attempts to Crawl Shortest URLs First - <AUTHOR> http://russell.ballestrini.net/google-bot-attempts-to-crawl-shortest-urls-first/

<comment><USER2> It's probably just a short URL is a heuristic for an important site. www.site.com/section is probably more important than www.site.com/section/subsection/detail/page/5/comments. A good move for the crawler - don't get distracted by "deep" pages - try and stick to high level ones first.

Edit: this would also encourage webmasters to use short URLs, which benefits users by being easier to remember, too.

<comment><USER3> I don't agree with the last point; seems like it would encourage things like foo.com/1hu83FG2 or lead to excessive abbreviation.

<comment><USER4> If I remember correctly, your page ranks better in Google if the search terms are in the URL (even more so if they are in the hostname).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is probably some highly non-obvious reason that sorting your queue of URLs by length is optimal, which was arrived at after a lot of modelling and testing.

We're unlikely to ever know the answer unless someone from google explains it to us.

<comment><USER5> Thinking about it more, its probably just a breadth-first search. Duh.

<comment><USER6> Breadth-first search means crawling all of the links on the page and adding all of the links on the child pages to the queue at once rather than drilling down on one link-path first before moving to the other links on the first page. There's probably some highly non-obvious reason for crawling by url length.

<comment><USER7> The thing is, the deeper you are, the longer are the urls, so if you do a breadth first search, you are more likely to visit short urls first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The site adheres to a strict url structure. /state/city/id/schoolname - entering from the homepage, the only way to crawl the site 1 level at a time would be crawling the shortest urls first. this structure is also emphasised in the breadcrumbs on every page, the shortest urls are also the ones with the most internal links.

why would you crawl the site in any other way?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you look at a particular city page you will notice that the cities are in alphabetical order, however google bot still crawls by length of url...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I did a more scientific analysis of the googlebot requests in the provided log (graph! <http://i.imgur.com/uMoUT.png>) and it definitely looks like it is taking shortest urls first. Anyone else with a large site want to check as well for further data?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the graph, I've added it to the blog page

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's probably because short urls usually tend to be static pages while long ones tend to be dynamically generated content.

<comment><USER9> His entire site that he observed this behavior on is static.

<comment><USER11> But Google doesn't know that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I imagine that in these specific case is because longer URLs represent deeper pages on the site that are less "important" (in terms of internal incoming links and pagerank) than the shorter ones. It doesn't seem logical that google order the URLs by length and then crawl them in that order; probably the URL length can be a factor that the bot takes into account, but not the only one in the manner this article suggest :)

Anyway, good point, that deserves more testing to extract some conclussions

</comment><comment><USER13> The question that I have is whether this is a relative behavior (i.e. whether, for a given domain 'domain.com' Google prioritizes domain.com/short-url over domain.com/longer/url.html) or a global one (i.e. prioritizing short.com/url over very-long-domain.com/nested/pages/hierarchy.html, all else equal).

I can definitely see the local/relative effects being a natural consequence of prioritizing by pagerank, but the global part sounds more like a separate signal.

Does anyone have insights?

</comment><comment><USER14> I noticed this behavior also when I was following Googlebot's crawl of my old pages after I had done a redesign.

it's not because of sitemap or because of url structure or because of dynamic content.

Mine were blog articles in the same format. This is how it was crawled:

sitename.com/year/mo/day/stub

sitename.com/year/mo/day/stub-one

sitename.com/year/mo/day/stub-one-two

sitename.com/year/mo/day/stub-one-two-three

sitename.com/year/mo/day/stub-one-two-three-four

</comment><comment><USER15> A poor mans PageRank algorithm, assuming nothing else, would assign a higher PageRank to shorter site links on a page. Presumably the crawler visits pages with a higher PR first.

<comment><USER16> Pagerank determine crawls rate amongst other things. I find it is also likely that short URLs (especially in the case of a directory-type site) are seen first by the spider and that this order is respected by the crawler (FIFO).

You can also ask in #seo on irc.freenode.net I know there are knowledgable SEO people in there who might be able to provide you with a decent answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pagerank determine crawls rate amongst other things ([http://techpatio.com/2009/search-engines/google/matt- cutts-g...](http://techpatio.com/2009/search-engines/google/matt-cutts-google- crawls-pagerank-video-bloggers)).

I find it is also likely that short URLs (especially in the case of a directory-type site) are seen first by the spider and that this order is respected by the crawler (FIFO).

You can also ask in #seo on irc.freenode.net I know there are knowledgable SEO people in there who might be able to provide you with a decent answer.

</comment><comment><USER17> It starts at the top of your sitemap - which are likely shorter URLs

<comment><USER18> cant confirm this - sitemaps are used for discovery -> the urls listed in the sitemap get pushed into the 'discovered urls queue' then this queue is prioritized for crawling- and - if there are no other factors - the shorter urls get prioritized higher (as there is a bigger chance that a shorter url is a canonical version of a longer url - well, the chance is bigger then the other way round

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe because that's how they are sorted in the hashtable/database they use to queue urls? Or maybe because they want to index the shortest pages first, so that they are processed before any duplicates with longer urls (i.e. get /articles/ before /articles/index.php)

<comment><USER20> I suspect you're on the right track with your first guess.

Most people posting here are looking for some sort of deep meaning in this when IMO it is more likely just due to a localized side-effect of doing something such as storing the urls in a trie-like structure and then iterating over it breadth-first.</comment></comment>