Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS - <AUTHOR> http://jamesmcm.github.io/blog/2020/09/12/foss-government/#en <comment><USER3> Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever - citizens payed for it, gov employees were working with implementation team on shaping it, so it belongs to them. This doesn't have to be so for supportive domains such as databases but I would personally prefer that also (i.e. Postgresql instead Oracle db).

There are many more reasons for this then mentioned, including keeping more IT experts locally, better connections with academia, higher salaries for gov IT guys, less corruption etc.

The MAJOR thing is actually that gov companies and their systems are usually quite complex and not something that can be easily (or at all) correctly done by external team of any kind - you need to be there, on the spot, and live that system for years to know how to program it, improve it, and make it good for the country and its citizens. I worked for gov 15 years, and did many huge projects with various companies - IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco etc... almost all being complete garbage, especially for the usual multi billion price that is payed to those corps yearly. There is an illusion that big names mean big and qualified team, good responsibility delegation (there is the 'nobody got fired for choosing IBM' thing) and that high price means quality, but in practice it never works like that, reality is quite the opposite (except responsibility delegation/dispersion which is totally true).

The major reason that proprietary software is so prominent in gov is corruption.

<comment><USER4> > The major reason that proprietary software is so prominent in gov is > corruption.

I'd like to see more open source software in government, but the main reason we select proprietary solutions where I work is support. If more open source tools had support staff, maintenance agreements, etc. more government organizations (and businesses) would consider them viable. I may be fairly code-literate IT, but I don't understand a given product as well as the support staff from the company that made it.

<comment><USER5> You can also hire local Linux enthusiasts to create an in-house support team. That keeps the money for the support costs within the local economy and potentially they could even give back to the open source projects and represent your local interests within the open source community.

<comment><USER4> So I can tell my boss we should hire a six figure salary employee instead of buying a four or five figure annual proprietary product?

Honestly, as a taxpayer, I'd hope not.

And that's the problem, for more open source products, the available support is "pull requests welcome".

<comment><USER5> Usually the costs for proprietary software in government are much larger, usually in the millions.

<comment><USER4> This is a very bad assumption. You are ignoring the fact that government includes municipal, county, state, and federal levels of government, and entirely forgetting that most of the software governments use isn't custom- built through super expensive contracts.

Many are purpose-built for government use but are sold to a large number of organizations at pretty ordinary pricing models.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you are interested in this topic, checkout [https://code.gov/](https://code.gov/)

"The Federal Source Code Policy (FSCP) called for the establishment of the the Code.gov program office and corresponding technical platform of a website and application programming interface (API). The program office assists agencies with policy, acquisition, and code inventory creation. We are a small but mighty team with five members with expertise and beliefs pertaining to discovering, sharing, and open sourcing the People's code."

You may also want to read up on 18f.gsa.gov. They publish and share lots of open source code.

I started at 18F and now run [https://github.com/cloud- gov](https://github.com/cloud-gov)

<comment><USER7> Also have a look at the GOV.UK/GDS[0], which strongly influenced the US Digital Service. Pretty much everything digital that government departments do is open by default[1]

[0] [https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government- digit...](https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital- service) [1] [https://github.com/alphagov](https://github.com/alphagov)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I work for a government software development team (At least for the next week). I have other friends in other governments on other teams.

I can't see a government being able to build generalized software or contribute effectively to it. Governments don't tend to have people who say no to feature requests. The end result is not a generalized good solution, but extremely specific solutions built on a generalized platform of if statements and endless configuration setups with special cases weaved through.

Governments are used to getting to decree everything from the button shade to the location of the buttons (different departments might ask for different button placements and get it) to the database type used (for the same piece of software) to the cloud vendor to all manner of additional features that require threading them through the core software. They want piles of exceptions and special cases. They want every possible scenario from the paper based days to be included in the software or it is not sufficient for their purposes. They want to specify date formats. They want to have very custom reports.

To use OSS, you basically need a generalized thing many people can use. But each government department will rapidly make it far from generalized.

<comment><USER9> You're assuming the government controls the development process. That's not the objective (and frankly, FOSS licences works against control, as any party can fork the code). Rather, the suggestion is for governments to _support_ FOSS developers, just as they do the arts community, without directly dictating what work they do. If they want a project extended in a certain way they can pay directly for that development, but they should do it on the back of an existing product that serves the general community and feed useful development of the software from their extension back into the general development tree.

<comment><USER10> Standards may help commoditize the more fundamental parts. It was the government that created ASCII and SQL after all. At least back when they cared about competition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Government does use and create a great deal of open source software.

Github has this list of government and community organisations that use Github :

[https://government.github.com/community/](https://government.github.com/community/)

The organisation that I work for has over 200 Github repositories.

The Australian government alone from that Github list is literally supporting thousands of open source repositories. It looks like many other governments around the world are doing the same.

It would be worth going out and working out how many open source repositories governments are supporting.

<comment><USER11> Australia's CSIRO has their own bitbucket repo:

[https://bitbucket.csiro.au/repos?visibility=public](https://bitbucket.csiro.au/repos?visibility=public)

(CSIRO also has quite a few repositories on Github as well)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Citizen owned software."

Phrasing I used on the stump, both campaigning and as an activist.

Overwhelming support. One of those 90/10 issues.

People just get it. Resolutions, petitions, platforms practically write themselves.

Forewarning for any future advocates: Appeal directly to the rank & file, Jane Public, editorial boards. Organize bottom up. I can't recall any elected or appointed person supporting (publicly).

Free advice (and twice as valuable): You must have solutions. Real code. My topic was election admin. I couldn't resolve the chicken & egg problem. Any green field efforts would need $10m just to wage the legal battles (certifications, in every jurisdiction). So figure out a way to get existing code into the light.

<comment><USER13> How did you square this goal with nearly every election expert (I'm talking academics here, not politicians) being against using more technology in elections?

<comment><USER12> There's a lot more to elections than just the tabulators.

Maps, databases, candidate filings, calendars, ballot production, voter guides, signature management, poll books, reports, ballot tracking, translation services, etc.

Since the collapse of the touchscreen business, the new business model is rent seeking on steroids. Charging jurisdictions per unit prices for every single one of those tasks and artifacts. Every voter every election, whether the voter cast a ballot or not.

On the stump, I explained that "citizen owned software" applies to both the intellectual property and the business model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> just-juan-post No mention of what is the greatest government contribution which is SELinux from the NSA

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security- Enhanced_Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux)

SELinux is what keeps an attacker contained after they exploit and break into the system.

</comment><comment><USER14> See also the Dutch Ministry of Health has it's own GitHub account[1]

Their coronavirus tracking app is open source [2]

And their Minister for Health made the commit to send the app website live [3] (though he did push to master on a Friday. I guess you can do that if you're the Minister...)

[1] [https://github.com/minvws](https://github.com/minvws)

[2] [https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app- ios](https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app-ios)

[3] [https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app- websit...](https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app- website/commit/ce16c03b221c1ba1f18035f3a11907039c663871)

</comment><comment><USER15> In France this is exactly the goal of an association founded in 2002, see (in French) [https://adullact.org/index.php/association](https://adullact.org/index.php/association)

<comment><USER16> It seems they just focus on the cost while the real problem is of sovereignty, and need to include an European dimension. The US have been found spying on the whole world (including their own citizens), so it's warranted Europeans push back against US hardware and software the same way it's done with China (Huawei).

<comment><USER17> The problem is that to sort it out properly we need a complete EU based stack, starting from the hardware.

<comment><USER18> >starting from the hardware.

There's absolutely no need to start from the hardware. In fact, both hardware and software can and should be done in parallel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have said this for years: all the building blocks are here. What's missing is the integration, UX/UI polish, and of course, the resources to do so.

If enough public administrations are on board with this, then this could be game changer. We could have something that trickle down to the general population. Something on the same level of polish as Windows or MacOS.

</comment><comment><USER20> I work as a government contractor. We've fixed bugs in OSS that we've used, but been unable to contribute the fixes back. This is a huge hassle because we are now on a fork and have to deal with merges from upstream, it will get worse over time.

More recently I developed a missing (in my view) extension to a piece of software. Too make this OSS-able would take a few extra hours and I wouldn't mind doing that step on my own time. But that's a nope.

So we can use OSS, we can modify OSS, but we can't contribute PRs or new software. At least for the three letter agency I work with. Lots of the type of applications being developed in the public sector aren't really any different then private sector. They take data in, they do something with it, and they output data. If the software doesn't require a security clearance, you should be able open source it IMO or at least contribute PRs.

<comment><USER21> Why are you unable to merge your changes upstream?

<comment><USER20> I was given some nebulous answer and well I have my own OSS projects on the side that I care more about so I don't care to push that. WTS. I would be happy to do the last mile on my own, but I am not going to fight for it. It should instead be encouraged buts its not. So here we are. I have good contributions to make but don't. Some good OSS projects losing out and by a thin proxy, many other three letter agencies.

The most I do is contribute to OSS documentation on gov time and just don't bring it up. Also fix issues by replying to issues since thats not code.

<comment><USER21> Well I'd say it would be totally worth it to push back on that and insist that you be allowed to merge your stuff upstream.

Even if it's for no other reason than ease of maintenance, so you don't have to keep merging upstream to your fork.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have a question here. How do you combat lobbying when you have the likes of Microsoft so deeply entrenched in a government, the likes of Germany and Limux and the whole deal there. Same in India. The government has set aside a proper budget to spending towards buying Microsoft products for office use when 10% of that sum could build world class software but lobbying. I once pitched libreoffice to a head of a India government department and I was told in as many words "the central government gives us a proper budget for this. If we don't spend it, it will lapse. Let it be. "

Next, I use some taxation software provided by central government but its all excel based. Why cant they essentially switch to the likes of using Foss software because the chain effect of the cunsumers of these software have to stick to excel. On and on. If anyone can help pass the message, let me know

</comment><comment><USER23> I think one easy mistake to make is thinking about this as an investment in software as a technical artefact. Which is more valuable for deterring war:

A. An $80 million fighter jet with dysfunctional communication among its maintenance, logistics, and air combat teams.

B. An organisation which can resiliently perform effective aerial interdiction and communicate the resulting intelligence clearly and swiftly.

B, right? So too with peaceful investments.

Governments should invest in teams with the capability to:

1\. Understand the needs of the public, prioritised through some healthy democratic-representative process.

2\. Write and refactor high-quality software as that nourishes the public good.

3\. Empower members of the public to educate themselves on how to contribute to this public commons.

Open-Source code itself? Eh, writing code is fun. When you take care of the team, the team takes care of the code.

</comment><comment><USER24> 1\. I think many public sector organizations in Europe lack basic knowledge of FOSS and have IT managers that don't even know what it is.

2\. In many ways it is surprising that generic software like cloud office functionality in reality only have two suppliers, both from the US, in the public sector. The amount of money that is being paid by tax payers every year for that across the EU is staggering.

Maybe the Schrems 2 court decision will change #2 eventually but for the time being I see very few alternatives.

<comment><USER25> > 1\. I think many public sector organizations in Europe lack basic knowledge > of FOSS and have IT managers that don't even know what it is.

Confirmed. Source: I teach these topics in University, including in post graduate courses for public officials, and most of the students don't have a clue of what OSS means (the whole words), and don't even realize why the F matters. I usually explain what source code is, and from there all they way down to that F.

I am deeply convinced that one, if not the the most, worrying problem of our times is a general lack of proper education in all levels of societies, except for a small portion of the population.

<comment><USER24> I clicked the upvote on your comment but wanted to put a sad emoji...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> FOSS is a Commons, in my opinion every organization, government and company should use it as much as possible and invest in it a fraction of their IT budget, even if just 1%.

This would add up to resolve the current FOSS funding problems and the FOSS ecosystem would thrive.

They could do it by hiring developers or FOSS companies and/or funding targeted to the projects they use with a subscription like Tidelift.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wanted to share that my province, British Columbia, is pretty good about this. My team was hired to build BC's Digital Marketplace ([https://digital.gov.bc.ca/marketplace](https://digital.gov.bc.ca/marketplace)), which procures teams to build software for government that is licensed under the Apache 2 License!

</comment><comment><USER28> I agree. I've seen a few models work in other industries. MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) and edX initiatives relied on partnerships with other universities and institutions. They all pay in to fund the development of the underlying platform. OpenEdX has individual and institutional contributors that help improve it.

Smaller credit unions join forces to form credit union service organizations (CUSOs) that provide a service (e.g., IT support, or lending services) to all member credit unions.

I would love to see US state and local governments do something similar. Start with everyone's favorite state office: the DMV. I've lived in three states. The DMV experience for all three has been pretty bad. This is more frustrating as an software engineer because it is painfully obvious where a bit of software could have a huge improvement. It makes no sense that 50+ states and territories have 50+ systems for the DMV, business registration, taxes, etc. when the basic functionality is most likely the same across all of them.

<comment><USER29> > It makes no sense that 50+ states and territories have 50+ systems for the > DMV, business registration, taxes, etc. when the basic functionality is most > likely the same across all of them.

While this is likely true, this being the US, you are also very likely going to end up in an ideological (for the lack of a better word) rabbit hole about freedom and state's right to do their own thing.

<comment><USER30> This is why the _open source_ angle is so crucial. If the expertise is distributed well between the stakeholder states, it can produce _more_ state sovereignty, because it is at least plausible to fork.

It serves the best arguments of both nativism and globalism, without really harming the values of either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> IMO, essential FOSS projects should be seen the same as infrastructure. It is not unheard of to see millions spent on bridges, highways, etc.

Well, office suites, operating systems, and the myriad of FOSS projects used every day are as useful as that physical infrastructure. Especially in this day and age.

</comment><comment><USER32> GDS, a department of the UK government already advocates the use and creation of open source software: [https://www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open- source](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open-source)

Including publishing a lot here: [https://github.com/alphagov](https://github.com/alphagov)

A lot of the philosophy of their approach on this is around making the code public and inspectable given it was funded by tax payers. Not to say reuse isn't part of it but it is an interesting angle on why some code should be open sourced.

</comment><comment><USER33> So the reasons are: cost, contributions, and audits.

I'm playing devil's advocate here and think this could be an interesting thought exercise.

There is no evidence or proof any of the above are advantageous to governments.

1\. Cost - Does it cost more for an existing solution, that maybe other governments and companies have paid toward, than adding features to a solution without all the bells and whistles?

2\. Do you want other governments to receive the improvements?

3\. Do you want other governments to be able to audit your ("you" being the government) software? It is more effective to hire a specialized audit team or have random code readings by random people?

<comment><USER34> My toughts:

2\. Yes, in areas where other governments profit isnt your loss. I think there are lots of these. For example, if you have software which makes people more healthy, you wont lose if people in other countries get healthier as well.

3\. Yes, similarly in many areas others auditing the software is harmless.

<comment><USER35> I have found that not everyone in the public sector would agree with (2). By giving away the software you lose the ability to sell it and recover some of the money you spent on it. Similarly, funding the development of proprietary software involves less capital expenditure because the developer can charge less than they spend and still profit by selling to others. I don't believe that either of these arguments are sound, but it's hard to respond to them when the experts on how software development should be done are the contractors who benefit from these arrangements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> A lot of this discussion is thinking about government procurement, and yes absolutely, custom software that the government commissions should be OSS unless national security prevents it, and in that case, they and not the contractors should retain the copyright.

But there's another issue: government should approach funding OSS like funding scientific or medical research. If you want to cure cancer, you find a government grant, write up a proposal, get your proposal scored, and if all goes well get to conduct your research. The exact same process should apply for OSS.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is exactly how Europe (and other parts of the world) can avoid having their IT services monopolised by US American companies. And build up ecosystems of expertise around the free software projects.

</comment><comment><USER37> Oof, see the disaster that is regulated cannabis software. $3M for stuff that was hacked the day after launch and still routinely fails two years later. And the government has simply changed the definition of success so it looks like it wasn't. All the while the agency is rebuilding the reports the taxpayers paid for, and we're supposed to be delivered 24 months ago with Excel - <USER2> training LEOs how to ignore and filter out garbage data from the system to do their job.

</comment><comment><USER38> Iceland is doing this (in a big way). TypeScript stack, 18 teams from different companies working together in the same open source code base and design system. HMU if you want to know more. Was an advisor on it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Let's go further than this though. Governments should all follow the China model and have their own firewalls, support their own software industries, and splinter the internet.

Also support institutes that do work in FOSS.

</comment><comment><USER40> Lots of software commissioned by Italian govt is open sourced: [https://developers.italia.it/en/](https://developers.italia.it/en/)

</comment><comment><USER41> I think the largest barrier for FOSS is still that the greater public doesn't know about FOSS, at all, and even less at the concept level. Because FOSS largely is still not on the daily political agenda, there's no actual talk among the wider masses about the reasons why FOSS is important, or what it actually means. Without wider discussion it's harder for it to gain foothold, as it is very much a political question, when it comes to use of FOSS in government.

Although, this seems to be slowly changing. In Finland, YLE (the national broadcasting company) has recently been systematically bringing up the open source nature of the national Covid app in their reporting.

I think there's a larger cultural revolution waiting for its turn, behind the current open source revolution that has been happening so far mostly in the software field.

In its core, open source is a cultural thing, and maybe a political one, one that due to reasons that were, did found rooting and cultivation initially in the field of software. Regardless of its origins, it's a wider movement that could disrupt every aspect of content creation, if realized as such. E.g. the same discussion that is being had in this thread and in the original article, about FOSS in government, largely applies to a wide field of other types of content created by governments.

One of the larger, self created obstacles for open source lies in the definition itself. Open source is still being defined primarily in the realm of software, and through software. Names and definitions such as FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) reprise this problem by anchoring the concept to the world of software, and in this case, it happens already in the name. Instead of FOSS, maybe we should be talking about FOS software?

I think the world could do well with a concept of open source that could be unleashed on all types of content created [1]. FOSS could probably do well, with the larger umbrella concept of FOS hitting daily discussion.

Interestingly, open source as a term doesn't have this package, as source can mean more than just source code.

[1] Creative commons already exists, but that's mainly a license, to be used in certain fields of content creation, not a wider definition for the concept.

</comment><comment><USER42> You're looking for Germany and Suse Linux.

</comment><comment><USER43> Starting with voting machines!

</comment><comment><USER44> jamesmcm.github.io

The author criticizes a lot Microsoft and hypes FLOSS, while being hosted on a closed source, Microsoft-owned platform.

<comment><USER45> This has nothing to do with his point

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I hope some governments adopt my FOSS remote browser isolation product: [https://github.com/dosyago/OuterShell](https://github.com/dosyago/OuterShell)

</comment><comment><USER47> Unfortunately, that isn't how government works. Whether it's F35's or Microsoft Office, putting money into the pockets of political cronies is what drives the purchase. FOSS doesn't benefit anyone with power, so it's useless to the government.

<comment><USER48> I've got news for you dude, cronyism is a lot worse when selling to corporations.

<comment><USER49> When people complain about government inefficiency I always wonder if they've ever worked at a large company.</comment></comment></comment>


Aaron Sorkin asked by Sony to pen Steve Jobs biopic. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashfilm.com/sony-social-network-screenwriter-aaron-sorkin-pen-steve-jobs-biopic/

<comment><USER2> I'd love to see a new Jobs movie, but damn they'd have to be very selective with casting.

Having read the Facebook Effect and then watched the adaptation, I can see that Sorkin has a knack for twisting the story to create drama, and I'm not sure that would fly with Apple, but who knows. Is this something where Jobs' family would have to give permission?

<comment><USER3> The Social Network was adapted from The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. The screenplay followed the original book closely.

<comment><USER2> I stand corrected.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft brand in sharp decline - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2421/microsoft-brand-in-decline-080328/index.html

<comment><USER2> I well remember reading Peter Gutmann's "Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" [1], in which he said:

"The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history."

I'd say Peter's prediction is holding up pretty well so far. I mean, Microsoft is not dead, and they're not even near death, but they do look more like an invalid than an industry leader.

[1] <http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's a combination of Vista and XBox 360. When Windows 95 came out it used both game support and office applications to become the defacto standard in businesses and homes. XP brought solid compatibility and durability. Vista became Windows ME part deux. There's no need to buy a new computer when the 360 has shifted the hardcore gamers away from the PC. And although Office 2007 is the first significant improvement in 10 years, the fact that you don't need Vista to use it detracts from any tie in possibilities. Now throw on top of this the estimated 33% failure rate of XBox 360s and there isn't much to brag and toot their horn about.

<comment><USER4> The Xbox 360 has been amazingly successful. Not sure what similarities you see between it and Vista.

<comment><USER5> Amazingly successful? Perhaps for the game companies but not for Microsoft. It hasn't turned a profit since it was released 7 years ago (although there is some speculation that it _might_ turn one this year).

<comment><USER3> To be fair, the last I read they turned a marginal profit on the 360 (earnings report from the EDD divsion) in January, but that isn't what gives them a $260 billion market cap. Compared to the profitability Nintendo has raked in through the Wii and DS it's anemic.

<comment><USER4> You're comparing fundamentally very different approaches to the game console industry. Nintendo _must_ be profitable selling its consoles and software licenses in order to survive. The company ethos is letting people have fun and doing so in the most economically efficient way possible. Microsoft cares more about getting their hardware and software into America's homes. They don't want profit, they want a platform for content delivery.

Both companies are doing pretty good right now.

<comment><USER3> I realize they're going about it in different ways. The focus was on the damage to the brand. As a brand, when people think Microsoft products they generally think "hold back and wait for the first service pack, the hardware refresh, or the 3rd product iteration".

That's expensive when you rush something to market and the market doesn't bite because the product was rushed and the brand suffers. Under the Microsoft model that works because they have the cash reserves to burn through the flops and deadpans, but it damages the brand each time.

In contrast, when people think Apple, Nintendo, Adobe, Google they tend to associate those brands with strong cost/value.

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree in general. But.

The Xbox is one of the few products that actually break the Microsoft trend. The first one was great and the second one was better as far as value provided to the consumer goes. Manufacturing problems make me suspect Microsoft hasn't figured out this whole hardware production thing (and they haven't), but the brand itself would only be tarnished if the Xbox 360 were fundamentally broken rather that just failing more often than the industry average. Hence why I claimed the Xbox 360 is not really comparable to Vista.

<comment><USER3> I can agree with that, both as a consumer and a developer. Of the 3 consoles Xbox is the easiest/cheapest to develop for and the value of Xbox Live is certainly not to be overlooked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think I'm not alone in witnessing Microsoft and the BSA treat my corporate customers very badly over the years. The biggest deal at my biggest corporate customer's IT dept. is the "renegotiation" that happens every couple of years with MS in which they send their people in and see how much more they can grab this time around...

When you treat your customers like crap, they don't line you. Now there's a surprise.

I think after all I've seen, when the decision finally falls to me, I'm gonna be Ernie Ball'n it, even if it costs more up front.

</comment><comment><USER7> These guys will mint for as long as corporate America uses office (probably 10+ years) and mom & pop in Peoria buy PC's from Best Buy (probably 10+ years). Will they ever be front and center again? No. But give them credit. From 1981 to about now they _ran_ things. In this business, staying on top for 20 years is unheard of. And they will still be around, at near current revenue levels, for at least 10 more.

Name 1 tech company today that you think has a chance of matching their track record.

</comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately it's a slide into irrelevance. The execs and braintrust at Microsoft generally don't "get" the Internet.

PG, not BG's "The Road" is absolutely coming to fruition.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find this interesting, mainly because personally I'm less hostile towards the company than I was 4-5 years ago. I think that overall, the "evilness" of MS has abated somewhat, and I no longer feel it necessary to scrutinize every action they take to see how it might be screwing over the customer.

I wonder how much of the decline is based on the entertainment side of MS, such as their push of the Xbox platform. Perhaps the business-types see this as MS losing focus from what they care about, software solutions for their companies.

<comment><USER10> Could it be because MS' relevance has reduced drastically in a lot of places? Its monopoly is going away, slowly but surely. Office is still a killer, but indications are that we will get other powerful choices - one sunny day. (In fact, most light document editing is easily accomplished by Google Docs.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is more of a fluff piece for some market research firm than a story/article.

However, I do agree that their brand could be much stronger. Relatively few people know what the Zune is - tons of intelligent (often iPod-using) people have no idea that Microsoft has a music device. When they think Microsoft, they think Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, and Xbox.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thankfully, Johnny Knoxville will ride to their rescue as Crispin unveils their new consumer facing campaign!

</comment><comment><USER13> They needed a study?

</comment><comment><USER14> I find I'm less hostile to MS now (note that I didn't use M$, like I used to), because unlike many I feel that vista was a great security update (My family that uses vista has not complained of adware or viruses since), while I use linux.

However I must note, even as a person hostile to mac, I live in awe of the might of Steve Jobs and his influence on the masses.

"Look, its a thin laptop computer that sony made long ago but I decided to push!"

"Look its a phone, but not just any phone, it is an iPhone! You must buy it!"

"Look its a decently constructed but sorely overpriced piece of common technology that I decided to work on a little and brand with my company name! You must buy it!"

The next 2 years, Apple's stock triples.</comment>


YouTube is trying to reward "quality" content - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-11/to-answer-critics-youtube-tries-a-new-metric-responsibility <comment><USER2> Frankly, I hope YouTube (and Google in general) dramatically overdo it with the censorship, "curation", and deplatforming of "irresponsible" content, purely so that it forces an independent, non-corporate model to be developed.

Having one company be the sole gatekeeper for the overwhelming majority of the web's video content is _not_ a solution.

<comment><USER3> I don't think any new platform is going to be able to compete with YouTube at all with the current regulations. How will any new platform comply with new EU copyright laws, or remove unlawful videos as quickly as YouTube? (e.g the unfortunate New Zealand terrorist attack)

<comment><USER4> They won't. I suspect that that kind of regulatory capture is the point of these laws in the first place.

<comment><USER3> I don't think so. Most people ( and a lot of people on HN) really believe that online platforms should be able to suppress such unlawful videos. And it's not a completely unreasonable position.

<comment><USER5> _Most people ( and a lot of people on HN) really believe that online platforms should be able to suppress such unlawful videos._

"Such unlawful videos." So basically, the government should be able to declare content "unlawful" and it's okay so long as public sentiment goes along with it?

Basically, you've simply thrown out Free Speech. I can understand why someone would find the video of the shooting shocking. Personally, I've chosen not to view it. However, if Free Speech isn't an absolute right, then it's simply broken.

 _Habeas corpus,_ the Presumption of Innocence, and due process -- what if the government could just suspend those things when it felt like it? Those human rights would simply be broken.

The difference between a just society and an unjust one, is that the just society extends the same rights and protections to all its citizens, no infringements, no exceptions. A society with Free Speech extends the right of speech and the right to read/hear that speech to everyone without infringement as well.

The interesting thing about the Weimar Republic, is that almost all of the laws covering human rights had an "out" for the government, allowing them to suspend the right, "for the common good" in emergency situations. As a result, the subsequent regime didn't have to change many laws to operate as a totalitarian regime.

<comment><USER6> The Christchurch shooter had no more right of access to a privately-owned live-streaming platform with an audience in the millions than he had right of access to a broadcast TV network. Saying so (which I suspect is what OP intended) is not "throwing out Free Speech"

You can tease apart the right to say something with the right to have it signal-boosted along the way, and if you want to save Free Speech you're going to have to in case we throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

<comment><USER5> _no more right of access to a privately-owned live-streaming platform with an audience in the millions than he had right of access to a broadcast TV network_

If the government now has the right to say, "piece of content X -- not allowed" arbitrarily and with no process and rational standard, then Free Speech is simply broken. An event of that magnitude is now history. A free society should not be rewriting history. People are still free to not-view and not-read. That right can't practically be infringed. What can be infringed is the right to view and the right to read.

 _You can tease apart the right to say something with the right to have it signal-boosted along the way_

As the internet is currently formulated, "signal boost" is equivalent to discovery. Being able to manipulate discovery for 90% of the population is tantamount to the power of censorship.

 _if you want to save Free Speech you 're going to have to in case we throw the baby out with the bathwater here_

In a fair system which truly supports Free Speech, in the end, signal boosting a bad message becomes a good thing. If it's really bad and full of nonsense, then there will be a reaction and backlash which will bury the bad message. What we have in the years leading up to 2019, is a small group of activists supported by a cultural minority (academia+media+tech) who signal boosted messages, including those of bad actors who hijacked activist messages. Then, when the backlash came against the bad actors, there was an artificial campaign of suppression, which encouraged more backlash against the suppression.

Now, we are in a vicious cycle of censorship/suppression supported by government and corporate power versus the backlash to that suppression. If we want it to end, then we can let Free Speech do what it's supposed to, so the backlash can go to where it belongs: Against bad actors hijacking good messages and bad actors with really bad messages.

<comment><USER7> >If the government now has the right to say, "piece of content X -- not allowed" arbitrarily and with no process and rational standard, then Free Speech is simply broken.

The key part of this is the word arbitrary. You can't take 'anything down for no reason', but you certainly can take things down. Even the most robust version of free speech protections have carve outs.

The government can prevent you from branding your email product 'Gmail', they can censure you for shouting fire in a crowded theater, they can go after you if you issue a tweet which lies about how many cars your car company is going to build in the next quarter, etc.

<comment><USER5> _The key part of this is the word arbitrary. You can 't take 'anything down for no reason'_

 _The government can prevent you from branding your email product 'Gmail', they can censure you for shouting fire in a crowded theater, they can go after you if you issue a tweet which lies about how many cars your car company is going to build in the next quarter, etc._

All of those things have due process and objective standards attached to them. None of those are arbitrary. Those are all following established law. That's a far cry from only saying, "Okay, these messages are 'bad.' We're now de- platforming them."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Trending page has been listing the same people over and over and over again for the last 3 years. It's shameful, pathetic, and makes the platform feel extremely biased.

Seriously though. This is unacceptable and overly controlled. Not to mention that those people over the last 3 years post borderline brainwash content without _any_ connection to a real audience.

It's pretty sad to see YouTube turn into something like this.

<comment><USER9> The Trending page makes me feel really old, and pretty "get off my lawn" w/r/t what's popular, or being promoted, right now.

A lot of the channels I've followed have gone fallow. No new content.

That said, I think the arguments around this topic are pretty disingenuous.

1) There's nasty content being uploaded to Youtube -- YouTube isn't making the nasty content.

2) YouTube promotes some content, people are pissed - it's all about the moneti$ation.

3) YouTube creates a system to stop promoting some kinds of content, people are pissed - censorship, slippery slope to de-platforming, etc.

There's no real alternative to YouTube (Vimeo isn't it, and the blockchain YouTube isn't it) for:

a) creators,

b) creators who want to make money.

And looking at what Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have to deal with in the social sphere, who'd want to inherit those problems? This is why we're still going to end up with aggregated media empires, because they'll accept the overhead of running the network, and it will simply get even more shallow in terms of who supplies "content".

<comment><USER10> > b) creators who want to make money.

The only platform I've seen so far for this one to compete with YT outside of porn is Patreon, and the videos that get monetized there without also being posted and/or monetized on YT tend to be... less than wholesome in a lot of cases.

<comment><USER11> Patreon only really works for people with an audience so enchanted with the creator that they would follow them anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> These companies focusing so much on algorithms, when the best solution is to simply use actual humans.

I've done a fair amount of work on trying to detect and deal with spammers, fraudulent activity and such. _Nothing_ beats a human eye.

My most successful approach has been to filter out the super obvious stuff, then send the rest to a queue that is kept an eye on by humans. A small staff can easily fight back against bullshit. Yes, YouTube is orders of magnitude above what I've dealt with, but I'm sure their smart engineers can filter out the majority of stuff.

It's painfully obvious that YouTube lacks human eyes on things. That, or they lack direction and empowerment of their employees.

<comment><USER13> > best solution is to simply use actual humans

Gee, how many humans might it take to review the >400 hours of video uploaded every minute? (source: [https://www.tubefilter.com/2015/07/26/youtube-400-hours- cont...](https://www.tubefilter.com/2015/07/26/youtube-400-hours-content- every-minute/))

<comment><USER14> 400 hours/minute is 24,000 minutes of video per minute, or 241,920,000 minutes of video per week. Assuming a human can review 8 hours of video per day, 5 days a week (too high, but not by much), and that YouTube engineers can create an algorithm that automatically marks 95% of video (probably low, 95% correct labelling is easy to get; 99% is usually necessary to outdo humans), then you would need 5,040 humans.

Automatically labelling 97.5% would halve that. If employees can only review 6 hours of video per work-day, then it would increase by a third. Both, you'd need 3,360 humans.

<comment><USER10> And multiple that by let's say 50K/year fully burdened cost per employee (assuming locating them in low-cost areas) and we've now added a minimum of $125 million per year in overhead for a service that already probably doesn't make much money.

<comment><USER15> > we've now added a minimum of $125 million per year in overhead

Which is <1% of the revenue that YouTube generated last year? Still a meaningful number. But, not unmanageable.

<comment><USER10> At what profit margin, though? I've never seen actual YouTube numbers broken out in a financial statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like the intention, and I hope to see more of this... but it's kind of hard to imagine that the end goal here is "Responsibility", when the business goal is "how many ads can we sell?"

<comment><USER17> Valid concerns. What does Google gain from putting genuine effort into stopping the spread of these kinds of video? Perhaps more "responsible" content and an eventual turn-around of the platform... But that's a big gamble - may take years, may never happen.

In the meantime, they're bleeding man hours, money, ad impressions, perhaps advertisers targeting the audiences which are being culled.

Now examine the question: What does Google have to gain by _appearing_ to put a genuine effort into this while not actually addressing the problem?

They gain a whole lot more than in the first scenario - new users hopeful of an increase in quality, support from privacy and attention-span advocates, insight into how they can influence, suppress, or promote certain themes going forward, more metrics to become more entrenched in the data harvesting machine learning game...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if they could look at groups of users who up vote "bad" videos (as marked by their own internal reviewers), see what else they up vote, cluster those videos, and down promote them in their algorithm.

IOW use the users who like "bad" videos to help find other "bad" videos via an algorithm.

<comment><USER19> That sounds easy to abuse. Just create some users, have them like obvious bad videos, then have them like videos of <insert competitor>.

<comment><USER20> Literally any algorithm that simple is easy to abuse, you need to integrate any algorithm with fraud detection and user trustworthiness assessment.

<comment><USER21> Either Twitter figured that they don't care enough, or it's not that easy. Mass-flagging is still a thing they haven't solved, and what are you going to do? Kick out your users because they're trying to manipulate your powerful algorithm to do their bidding? There's easier ways to make your audience find a new platform.

<comment><USER20> It's not that easy, the cost of doing it right is astronomical and most users don't care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Quality content takes time to create; many of the past changes in YouTube algorithms explicitly pushed for churning out low-quality content frequently and rewarded it, while seriously disadvantaging irregular quality content (that moved elsewhere in the meantime). You get what you reward.

<comment><USER23> This can be seen easily if you go to Youtube and search "fortnite", with every single top video being just over 6 minutes long, full of vapid nothingness related to the title, and perhaps 20-30 seconds of content related to the title it originally baited you into watching. The majority of what can be found through searching/filtering on YouTube is also hot steamy garbage, or large corporate channels. The recommendation engine sometimes throws in some gems, but rarely. The only video length filters are "short <4mins" and "long >20mins". Why on earth? It's like they randomly tried those values in 2008 and never looked at it again.

<comment><USER24> Kids watch that stuff and don't yet know how to sift through the trash to get to the good videos. They're like us in 2007 when we'd all get Rick Roll'd by blindly clicking on YT links placed on forums.

By setting their KPIs arund "view time", YT created a product which caters almost exclusively to kids and conspiracy nuts, aka the only 2 demographics that have seemingly unlimited time to watch cartoons or people talking into a camera.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Please just give us the ability to blacklist channels. That'd increase usability by 10x for me.

<comment><USER26> AFAIK you can do that? Hit the menu on a video recommendation, "Not Interested" -> "Tell Us Why" -> "I'm not interested in this channel".

IMO, though, blacklisting has been mostly proven to be insufficient. If you block, say, noted chud Sargon of Akkad, that doesn't mean that another half- dozen "Rationalist" "Thinkers" Who Just Happen To Be Chuds won't be recommended to you as well.

<comment><USER27> If you are getting suggested these things it's because people with similar viewing habits as you watched them. I get suggested riposte videos to such content without ever seeing the original "bad" video. I'm assuming this is based on my own habits on the site. I would prefer getting neither, but here we are.

To claim that blacklisting would be ineffective because there is always more trash is disingenuous. If everyone blocked (e.g.) PewDiePie, surely they would get less YouTube talking-head content.

It's like saying that we shouldn't/can't avoid candy because people are always making new candies.

<comment><USER26> It's well-documented at this point that YouTube's recommendation algorithms enjoy feeding fascist chuddery to people who like things like video games or history, yeah. But I didn't say you shouldn't do it. I do it, because one fewer garbage channel is one more chance for something less garbage. But it certainly seems like it's bailing against the tide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Honestly, it's pretty ridiculous that YouTube is being pressured to police the content on its platform. What worries me far more than extremist videos on YouTube, is the idea of a mega-corporation exerting outsized influence over the opinions we are exposed to. Is our democracy really so fragile that it cannot survive an open marketplace of ideas?

<comment><USER29> > _Honestly, it 's pretty ridiculous that YouTube is being pressured to police > the content on its platform._

It's not "ridiculous", it's table stakes. If you ever run an open community, you'll find that bad actors are inevitable.

<comment><USER28> What are these bad actors doing that requires top-down censorship and marginalization?

<comment><USER30> If you have to ask that question, then you've never been a moderator or ran a platform before.

There is a lot of content that is invisible to you, the user, because it ends up being filtered out by moderators because it consists of overt racism, calls to violence, outright trolling, stalking and more. Even as a moderator of a small private platform there was a user that was stalked by someone who would attempt to reregister accounts solely for the purpose of harassing them or finding any personal details that they could dig up about them

Eventually you have to establish a certain level of moderation for your platform or those bad actors can and will chase off all of the other users for one reason or another. This gets worse as a platform scales and the level of malicious content your platform is exposed to grows exponentially.

<comment><USER28> None of the problems you've raised are related to YouTube's proposed changes in the linked articles. They already have rules against most of the things you mentioned. The proposed changes go far beyond them.

[https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community- guideli...](https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guidelines)

> _Starting in 2012, YouTube rebuilt its service and business model around > "watch time,'' a measure of how much time users spent viewing footage. A > spokeswoman said the change was made to reduce deceptive "clickbait" clips. > Critics inside and outside the company said the focus on "watch time" > rewarded outlandish and offensive videos._

YouTube's engine is currently ranking content based on the amount of time other users are spending actively watching that content. Unwanted videos are already de-prioritized by the current algorithm. The proposed changes are explicitly intended to de-prioritize videos that people are actively watching.

It remains to be seen how they will measure "quality". If they find a bias- free way to measure it, I'm all for it. Most likely though, it will be driven by top-down notions of "outlandishness" and "offensiveness", as opposed to bottom-up user engagement.

<comment><USER30> You asked what kind of bad actors an open platform might have to deal with and I gave you an example with a very small platform.

Now you scale that up to match YouTube and it becomes a nightmare. YouTube is being pressured to take action by it's users because what's happening is exactly what I was talking about: They have bad actors taking advantage of your platform. That's where Elsagate came from or the more recent reveal of pedophiles using the platform to groom kids.

There is no unbiased way of solving this problem. Because you have to establish certain things as being bad for your platform, which means you are going to be biased against them. Youtubes reaction is in turn them trying to solve issues at scale when they clearly didn't consider how the platform would scale in the first place.

<comment><USER28> The "bad actors" that you're referring to on YouTube aren't harassing anyone or inciting violence or breaking the YouTube community guidelines in any way. They are simply espousing opinions that you dislike and disagree with.

Sure, YouTube is allowed to do anything they want. But suppressing an open marketplace of ideas isn't in society's best interests. If unpopular opinions were suppressed in the past, the movements for women's rights and gay rights and civil rights would have faced a massive setback. And let's not even get into the question of whether it's in society's best interests for a handful of corporations to arbitrarily decide how to censor the marketplace of ideas.

<comment><USER30> I'd like you to take a minute and go visit sites like Voat or Gab. Just, hover around there for a bit if you haven't. Those are sites that are exactly what you want: A pure and open marketplace of ideas without any sort of censorship or rules. This is to prove a point.

Which is that an open marketplace of ideas has no value in itself, because the marketplace can be very easily taken over by bad actors if you don't exert some control over your userbase.

<comment><USER28> Clearly YouTube has been extremely valuable even before they felt the public pressure to penalize "low quality content".

Your comment about an "open marketplace of ideas having no value in itself" is very curious. The very idea of freedom of speech being a good thing is predicated on the idea that an open marketplace of ideas is a good thing. If it isn't, you may as well lobby the government to ban any and all speech which you consider corrosive.

" _When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas--that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. "_

― Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

<comment><USER30> Did you actually visit Gab or Voat? I'm asking you this because if you haven't, then you can't actually argue in favor of the 'marketplace of ideas' very well. Either that or you're not willing to argue in the defense of such sites. Or you're possibly being disingenuous, considering we've switched from corporate curation/censorship of their content towards government censorship which are two very different topics.

As I mentioned, places with zero censorship and zero moderation can and are very quickly overtaken by malicious actors. Either way, if you're willing to defend Gab and Voat on their merits of being an 'open marketplace of ideas' after having gone there then we can continue our argument.

<comment><USER28> The concept of "marketplace of ideas" goes far beyond Gab and Voat. Two bad apples and cherry picked examples do not make for a counter argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> whatever gets them to stop recommending me BEN SHAPIRO [EVISCERATES / DEMOLISHES / LEAVES SPEECHLESS] LIBERAL [PROFESSOR / SMART PERSON / SPEAKER] OVER [SOMETHING BEN IS CLEARLY WRONG / TROLLING ABOUT] videos.

<comment><USER24> Majority of my YT view history is music. 90% of my recommended videos are similar genres of music, but there is nearly always some political/culture war/conspiracy video sitting there as well. The other day it was "The REAL truth about the Vietnam War". Super relevant in 2019.

Fortunately, I can block channels from my Recommended, but there are hundreds of similar channels out there, so killing one just means it'll be replaced by the next nutjob channel in the queue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think when critics accuse YouTube of "stepping on the scale" here, they under-consider how warped that scale is already. The existing YouTube algorithm isn't neutral or fair, and is laughably easy to game. It's already biased—it's just biased towards extremes.

YouTube waded into this moral quagmire a long time ago. Being biased towards "engagement" is just as troubling as having a more human-relatable bias.

Now they're starting to take responsibility for the recommendations this algorithm spits out. I think that's a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER33> How about metrics that NOT automatically takes down videos on requests, no questions asked?

</comment><comment><USER34> There are so many simple rules that would improve their recommended content. Examples:

1\. Lower rank for clickbait titles

2\. Lower rank for listicle / compilation / clip videos

3\. Delist listicle / compilation videos with stolen content (most of them)

4\. Lower rank for clickbait thumbnails

5\. Lower rank for YT drama videos

6\. Increased rank for 100% original videos

<comment><USER35> Channel blocking, with recommendation weighting.

If I get recommendations from a channel producing shit, I should be able to block the entire channel.

Sufficient good-faith blocks dock that channel's recommendation weighting.

The fact this isn't available even when logged inremoves all incentive I have to log in to YT.

(Which is already near nil.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This seems like a re-implementation of television ratings and survey (Nielsen) methods. In this way, it's interesting how strategies on the commercial internet gravitate toward business models with a century of momentum (and student loans) behind them. Business chips away at the revolution.

</comment><comment><USER37> > The video service generates most of its revenue through advertising and the > business works best when as many people as possible are spending as much > time as possible on YouTube. Hence executives' obsession with engagement > stats. Adding murkier metrics to the mix could crimp ad revenue growth.

This is the core point of it. I've been critical of youtube for some time, but if they are willing to forgo some revenue growth in to deal with the current problems, I applaud them.

> The YouTube channel Red Ice TV broadcasts political videos with a "pro- > European perspective," which critics label as promoting white supremacy.

Bloomberg, you can call them Nazis. This is not a racist uncle that everyone needs to deal with, who can sometimes be reasoned with. These people are literally Nazis.

> YouTube declined to share details on how it uses metrics to rank and > recommend videos. In a January blog post, the company said it was hiring > human reviewers who would train its software based on guidelines that > Google's search business has used for years.

It's going to be tricky to get this to work, and I'm sure google will make many mistakes by automating decision making to a degree where it will prove to be meaningless, but finally there's going to be some human moderation. Thank you.

<comment><USER38> I think a key thing overlooked is "human reviewers who would train its software..." which usually means throwing out it as a human interface task to mechanical turk and retrieving the result, then throwing the data into the input of the machine learning algorithm. This is not the same as having a human look at videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Well the reality is that you don't get quality content generally when you allow people to publish whatever they want. Everyone has an opinion and viewpoint. That doesn't make them qualified opinions or viewpoints, and definitely doesn't make them worth considering. People have significantly mistaken and waaay over estimated the benefits of mass media in the hands of your everyday person.

It's becoming pretty clear the cost is not worth any _perceived_ benefits (because I don't think you can really point to any benefits such models have given us).

And no, moderating and editorializing content is not dystopian. Whenever someone has that talking point it's really a case of someone read 1984 (and sometimes didn't actually read it) and decided to apply it to everything with absolutely no discretion and absolutely no respect for what the book actually said.

</comment><comment><USER40> > _Creating the right metric for success could help marginalize videos that > are inappropriate, or popular among small but active communities with > extreme views._

So, deplatform what's not mainstream, accepted by the establishment, favorable to Google...

<comment><USER41> I don't think that deplatform is the right idea here. Presumably, the videos will still be present and watchable. However, the algorithms used to sort and present videos must be seen as playing an editorial role, and that brings a different set of questions.

<comment><USER42> That is the equivalent of deplatforming in a lot of ways, especially on youtube where millions of videos are uploaded daily. If your videos are not suggested, and do not show up high in trending or search results, then they practically don't exist except from word of mouth and outside promotion.

<comment><USER43> Then by definition most videos on Youtube are already "deplatformed," since the space for recommendations and the front page is limited. Why is this suddenly a problem?

<comment><USER42> False. The trending pages and suggested pages are filled based on google's algorithm that determines which video the user will like/ watch the most. That is the only fair way to determine trending and suggested videos.

<comment><USER43> How is that fair? Google's algorithm is biased towards what brings revenue for google. Content that isn't easily monetizable is suppressed, and content creators are punished for not conforming their content to what the algorithm wants.

<comment><USER42> I never said google should rank pages based on monetization value. I only said based on watch time and how well they predict a user will like that video. That is the only fair way imo. Youtube mostly ranks based off of watch time and machine learning to determine how well a user likes a video, monetization seems to only play a small part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> What a dystopian nightmare the internet is turning into. Anything that isn't in line with "right thought" isn't Responsible and is therefore hidden away? How did we end up here? How did Silicon Valley go from a place focused on ideas and building the future to generating systematic censorship and endless puritanical moral panic? We badly need some new blood guiding tech development.

<comment><USER43> Why is it a dystopian nightmare for Youtube to curate its content according to "quality", but it wasn't a dystopian nightmare for Youtube to curate its content to maximize engagement for ad revenue?

<comment><USER45> both are pretty bad options. Better to let users curate and allow popularity to dictate visibility, surely?

<comment><USER43> User curation and popularity are, arguably, just as much forms of censorship as any other, although a "trusted user" curation system similar to Steam might be interesting. The only truly unbiased system would be random.

<comment><USER45> that only really holds if you consider "not promoting" to be a form of censorship - at the end of the day, as long as they're not actively hiding content that YouTube finds to not be "quality" (while still being reasonable content), it can still be found by someone looking for the subject. I don't see an issue with that - there will always be limited space for "promoted" content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It this point, they should just be regulated by the various world governments. Though I don't like a world where google can override a given countries law, or googles tries to solve the issue for union of all the worlds government laws. I also don't like the possibilites of hidden metrics driving things that have such huge social implications.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. If things keep going at this rate Google and Facebook will be _shaping and distorting reality_ for a large portion of the population.

If 95% of your internet traffic goes through a search box or algorithm... And you spend 6 hours a day on the internet... And you're not savvy to these issues (as our readers are)... That's almost 50% of waking life spent consuming manufactured data which your brain (on some level) interprets as "real" without question. Terrifying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> In theory this sounds a little better. Obviously there is some distance to cover in implementing it in reality.

</comment><comment><USER48> On a side note, the creators of YouTube ought to [at least informally] unionize. There's no reason Adam Neely should be getting copyright "strikes" for explaining music to the masses, or Cody's Lab should be forced to take down videos on mining with explosives [on his family's ranch]. YouTube needs to have a hotline for problem solving for their most profitable content providers, and until the creators collectively hit the pocket book, they'll face these disruptive yet easily solvable problems.

<comment><USER49> MCN's are basically the private version of this.

Content creators join MCN's "Multi-Channel Networks" with the idea that the MCN will handle some of the more administrative and legal tasks while the content creators focus on content.

MCN's try to help with the copyright striking and often do have a direct line to youtube due to their size and importance.

<comment><USER50> Except MCNs sit as a middleman to you getting paid. The Defy Media debacle taught everyone a hard lesson.

For those unaware, Defy Media went bust and had taken out substantial loans to operate. A large number of big creators are still unpaid while Defy Media's creditors carve up the company's assets.

All those creators are going to get left unpaid.

<comment><USER49> Fair enough, but to bring this case up without mentioning mandatory union dues and the costs of unionization feels disingenuous.

Unions very much are a middle man between labor and management, and the collective bargaining agreement that this potential Creators Union would sign would hamstring a creators freedom in this space pretty significantly as well.

Is what it is, both choices have positives and negatives from my perspective.

<comment><USER50> Yeah, but at least unions don't take your entire paycheck up front before giving you your cut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> So wait, they're trying to be Vimeo now?

</comment><comment><USER52> How designed responsibility isn't censorship?

</comment><comment><USER53> Yeah, we'll see how well that goes. I can't help but suspect that YouTube's definition of "quality" and mine are not quite the same.

<comment><USER54> YouTube's (and Google's) management has been very openly left-leaning, so it's not a stretch to imagine that "quality" as defined by their editors will also be left-leaning or at least not right-leaning... so, yeah.

<comment><USER53> From my perspective "quality" is unrelated to political bent.</comment></comment></comment>


What is the point of Color (Mark Hughes, screenwriter) - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-point-of-Color/answer/Mark-Hughes-1

<comment><USER2> After installing COLOR on my phone and being linked to Some Dude And His Cat Somewhere A Couple Blocks Away, I realized what COLOR will become:

A total, complete, utter Cockshot Tsunami.

See: Chatroulette.

Unless they have some elegant Phallic Recognition And Elimination Algorithm (Phalgorithm?) much like facebook's nipple-liminator, they're about to unleash a $40,000,000.00 Dick Tractor Beam onto everybody's phone.

<comment><USER3> Here's a Phallic Recognition and Elimination Algorithm that will work for COLOR (but not for Chatroulette) (note: I am not endorsing this--just suggesting that this is what might develop naturally):

1\. Girl in bar gets cocked on COLOR.

2\. Girl shows this to slightly inebriated boyfriend in bar. He's had enough to drink to lower his judgement but not impair his ability to deliver an ass stomping, especially when he's got backup.

3\. Boyfriend says to his buddies "hey, let's go find this ass".

4\. Ass is located, and they explain why what he did was not polite. The explanation is done non-verbally.

5\. Ass stops offering cock shots (assuming cock still attached).

6\. We discover why COLOR needs all that money they just got--lawyers to defend against lawsuits from people like the ass, trying to blame COLOR for what happened to them after they posted their cock shots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't decide if this is a brilliant piece of Gruberesque writing, snarky to the point where it just teeters on the brink of parody, or if this guy is for real.

<comment><USER5> Given that he was previously asked if it's possible to become Batman in this day and age ([http://www.quora.com/Given-our-current-technology-and- with-t...](http://www.quora.com/Given-our-current-technology-and-with-the- proper-training-would-it-be-possible-for-someone-to-become-Batman/answer/Mark- Hughes-1)) , and he answered that in earnest as well, I think he's answering to the best of his ability here too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The worst part, to me, about the mobility of photography technology and social media is that a lot of people feel a compulsion to experience everything through a medium. If they attend a concert, they must experience it by snapping photos or videos - they completely forget to enjoy and experience the music and atmosphere by themselves.

I don't know if this stems from some innate "collector's eagerness" human trait or a desire to document and immortalize everything for posterity, but a lot of people tend to forget to enjoy things on their own, in the very moment.

I don't know if this is a gimmick some people just are guilty up, and which hasn't been directly created by technology, but it's a shame that a lot of people don't stop for a minute and take in the entire experience without any intermediate lens. Try to enjoy the sight and sound of Niagara Falls, before you try to figure out how to crop the vista and when to upload it to Flickr.

<comment><USER7> There is always a balance. I do too little to document, and often find myself wishing I had something to remember an event by.

<comment><USER6> Sure there is. If you love photography, you obviously have to geek out, but I imagine that good photographers are also capable of turning photographer mode on and off.

And Mom needs to get a digital postcard at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really? Color.com is going to help me avoid being crushed by a falling skyscraper? _Really?_

The point of Color is to extract money from the next set of idiots who invest. Or, exploit your privacy in a _different_ way. Or both.

<comment><USER5> I think the point made in the answer was that the kind of passive social networking that Color is going to provide is a step beyond seeing a friend's facebook wall or twitter upload in the situation of a 'fire alarm' emergency.

These are going to be, for the most part, uploads by people unknown to you that will inform quickly and completely on a situation you cannot grasp as well alone.

In his September 11th example, perhaps you would see pictures from nearby of smoke and people moving away from it and gather enough information that you yourself will react as you will with a better sense of the world around you.

There was no skyscraper evasion skill mentioned in the answer. Really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author, Mark Hughes, is correct in his write-up and comes up with a few suggested scenarios where it would be "ideal". Unfortunately for Color those ideal situations where a critical mass makes the app useful are few and far between. How could Color have demonstrated themselves better? Maybe by launching a SXSW where a tech savvy and experimental crowd would give it a go, see the benefit, and continue on using it. Come to think about it, that is exactly what Twitter did. Now, imagine if twitter launched like Color did. You are posting with no followers, no one you knows sees any reason to use it so your feed is empty. Now add that you are anonymous, can't "follow" anyone, and wait until some random stranger in your vicinity post something but meanwhile your stream is empty. That's Color.

Oh, and as for the group event image sharing thing... didn't Posterous launch Events at SXSW? Yes they did (and for $41m less). [http://blog.posterous.com/introducing-posterous-for- events-a...](http://blog.posterous.com/introducing-posterous-for-events-a- place-for)

</comment><comment><USER10> It would be hard to come up with a vision of the future that freaks me out any more than that description.

</comment><comment><USER11> I kept sincerely hoping this was extremely dry satire, but I think it's for real.

My favorite piece of ridiculous: "...you're in Time Square taking a photo of the M&M store, but everyone else has fed images to the experience network of the rabid grizzly bear running up the street behind you. Hmm, time to change your relationship to your surroundings right now, isn't it?"

Or maybe if I weren't navelgazing and taking pictures for a stupid "social network" I would be more aware of my surroundings?

Every use case he states for the "geolocated social network" is already served (and better served) by Twitter. Hey a skyscraper is falling. Someone is going to stop take a picture? Don't think so. They won't tweet while running either (probably), but what's more useful after the fact? A bunch of pictures of dust and random people running, or a text tweet that says "Hey something exploded"? The use cases here make no sense whatsoever.

</comment><comment><USER12> Granted, I haven't read all of the critiques of Color, but here's my issue with camera apps: For any given moment, people are going to choose one app to document that moment. Are people going to start with Instagram, take a photo, switch to Color, take the same photo, then perhaps go to Path, and take it again? No. Apple et al needs to create a photography pipeline that apps can tap into and users can choose which apps are in that pipeline. Not an easy problem to solve given all of the capabilities, but worth trying.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think we like to let our imagination and the vision of all the possibilities it brings us take reign, and that is good. Because of that, I can definitely throw a handful of monetary speculations into the air concerning this service.

To get this level of funding before even exploring the utility of these services just leaves me marveling, and suspicious.

</comment><comment><USER14> It feels a little silly to be arguing/explaining this now - won't we know whether Color has a "point" over the next few months/years as it either succeeds/fails in the marketplace?

</comment><comment><USER15> Color strikes me as the pets.com of 2011.

</comment><comment><USER16> Once you go past the filtering (naked pictures) issue Color has a huge potential. I personally think if they tackle this one issue they will build something more powerful then Twitter (a snapshot is easier to take then writing 140 characters), Groupon (I can get deals just buy walking past a restaurant and looking at their photos), and many other big social startups. I hate to say this here, but I would bet on the idea. Now I am not even talking about social news. Can you imagine what this would mean for CNN and similar news outlet on breaking news. They can find and buy videos from all the guys capturing straight from the source.

In short color will be the most accurate way to answer "What's happening at?"</comment>


Show HN: A collection of 600 tech articles by developers at French companies - <AUTHOR> https://guriosity.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN! My name is Ari. I've worked as a data engineer for three French startups. The first, didn't have an engineering blog. The second had one, but i never took the courage to write. The third, didn't consider it a priority.

I believe that all tech teams have tremendous value to share. With Guriosity, I want to encourage and support more teams to write about their work.

So, I gathered 60 software engineering blogs by French companies and classified 600+ manually picked articles in 10 categories: Backend, Data, Frontend, DevOps, Product...

For candidates, it can be a great window to know how is it going to be working for a company before joining.</comment>


We built a comments feature for all arXiv papers, let us know what you think - <AUTHOR> http://librarian.fermatslibrary.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

Librarian is a Chrome Extension that allows anyone to comment on any arXiv paper as well as get the Bibtex of the paper and links to its references. The place where a lot of scientists post their most recent findings before publishing on Journals should also be a place where open discussions around papers take place. Papers are usually dense and hard to read and there's so much information that can be added to a paper to make it more accessible: further explanations, data, presentations, videos, code etc. We think this is an important step towards open science and public collaboration/discussion about papers.

We wrote a blogpost about what led us to build this: [https://medium.com/@fermatslibrary/comments-on-arxiv- papers-...](https://medium.com/@fermatslibrary/comments-on-arxiv- papers-20d2b048cf92)</comment>