Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content "against their policies" - <AUTHOR> https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hddnml/the_warnings_have_changed_into_bannings/ <comment><USER2> I don't really get reddit's efforts to clean their site.

They sometimes come up with measures like this, while routinely ignoring the development of horrible communities that they're aware of (since some users take any possible opportunity to mention them to the admins and are met with silence or half measures).

They even came up with the concept of quarantined subreddits. I honestly can't think of a single honest reason for them existing. Once you've deemed a community so harmful that you don't want people accidentally stumbling into it, why go out of your way to allow it to exist behind a curtain, instead of just outright banning it (unless you want to support it discreetly).

To be clear, I'm not accusing reddit admins of shadily supporting horrible communities. I'm just saying that, from the perspective of a user that sees them fight the battle, they're doing it so badly that it almost seems they don't want to win, and I wonder what's happening behind the scenes for that to happen.

<comment><USER3> My take on quarantined subreddits is that it's just a tool to remove certain communities from the mobile app so they don't get in trouble with Apple / Google (mostly Apple, I'm sure).

<comment><USER4> And also how to deal with communities that should absolutely not be spilling over into the rest of Reddit. Reddit, I think rightfully, quarantines a lot of ED related subreddits.

<comment> the-dude What does ED stand for?

<comment><USER3> Eating disorder, I'm sure. There are pro-eating disorder forums around on the internet just like there are pro-suicide forums.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reddit admin message:

> Your account has been suspended from for breaking the rules. Your account > has been suspended for 3 day(s).

>> You recently upvoted a post or comment that was determined to be against our policies. Abusive content is not acceptable on Reddit nor is engaging with it. Please be thoughful about the content that you interact with.

Interestingly nothing in the Reddit policies seems to mention voting or engaging with content: [https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content- policy](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy)

<comment><USER6> This is super stupid. If they're so against the content why allow it to exist in the first place?

<comment><USER7> Whether they intended it this way or not, users will now be worried they're upvoting the "wrong" thing and will be less likely to vote unpopular opinions and political views, just in case.

<comment><USER8> Arguably in 2020, you _should_ be very careful about expressing any opinion that is in any way unpopular. Or that even could be construed as such.

<comment><USER9> I feel like people have forgotten what free speech is.

<comment><USER8> I grew up in a very fundamentalist (Christian) area, so the lack of it feels _very_ familiar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There seems to be a divide between people who think discourse is a progressive art of the exchange of ideas, and those who use language as a pretext for political struggle where the role of ideas is to act as provocations that yield a persons "true," alignment and identity. The latter view means engaging ideas compromises your ethical purity, where the former one means people can express abhorrent ideas without physical consequences.

There isn't a short answer to what's probably an eternal conflict, but I do know a lot of people in tech who might benefit from reflecting on the question of, "are we the baddies?"

<comment><USER11> The dichotomy is seems to be reflected in the growing divide between rational, scientific inquiry, and modern progressive liberal arts which are rooted in critical theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think Reddit should be able to censor lawful content and also claim protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. If they want to police lawful content that is fine but then they are no longer an open platform and they should forfeit their Section 230 protections. I dislike the ability for online platforms to have their cake of protection against lawsuits and also eat their cake of policing lawful content they don't like.

<comment><USER13> So no site should be allowed to have moderation policies that include things like "no trolling," "no flaming," "no swearing," or anything like else like that for things that don't cross into "illegal" abusive speech? Without becoming a target for filling up with illegal shit to overwhelm the moderators and cause legal trouble for the owners?

So HN is gone, too, then.

<comment><USER14> > So no site should be allowed to have moderation policies that include things > like "no trolling," "no flaming," "no swearing," or anything like else like > that for things that don't cross into "illegal" abusive speech?

Any site can have any rules they want. But they shouldn't expect to be able manipulate and control discussion and face no backlash from users.

> Without becoming a target for filling up with illegal shit to overwhelm the > moderators and cause legal trouble for the owners?

'Trolling', 'flaming' and 'swearing' are not illegal, and honestly, most complaints about 'trolling' I see are just people who disagree with what they're reading.

<comment><USER13> > But they shouldn't expect to be able manipulate and control discussion and > face no backlash from users.

You're saying they should face backlash from _government regulators_ not from users.

If there's a big user backlash, those users are already free to move to whatever site they want, or make their own.

\---

Re: your comment about trolling, etc, not being illegal: yes, exactly. So if a site wanted to enforce some sort of "family friendly" policy, you could simply bomb them with truly illegal shit instead and get them in trouble with the regulators for not being able to keep up as they would be liable for that, since they aren't a "anything legal goes" platform.

<comment><USER14> > You're saying they should face backlash from government regulators not from > users

I never said that. But it's probably a good idea to have some sort of oversight for a massive platform that censors and manipulates discussion of millions of people. You may think their policies are totally justified and correct (they aren't), but the specific opinions they choose to promote may change to something you are against.

> If there's a big user backlash, those users are already free to move to > whatever site they want, or make their own.

Yes, they are also free to shit on the website and point out it's flaws.

> So if a site wanted to enforce some sort of "family friendly" policy, you > could simply bomb them with truly illegal shit instead and get them in > trouble with the regulators for not being able to keep up as they would be > liable for that, since they aren't a "anything legal goes" platform.

Trolling is not illegal, it's not even a specific thing. It's a very ambiguous term used to describe 'comment's that make me feel bad'. Trolling and posting illegal shit is completely different, sure ban illegal stuff - you kind of have to, but don't use 'trolling' as an excuse to ban stuff you disagree with.

<comment><USER13> Separate reply for the other side of this thread. I honestly don't know where you're getting it with your comments re: trolling.

Do you honestly believe that a discussion forum site that wanted a family friendly policy shouldn't be able to have any liability protections? That if someone started flooding them with child porn, say, at a rate they couldn't keep up with, they should have to shut down because they'd otherwise be liable for all that content due to their having a content moderation policy that forbid certain types of legal speech (say, swearing)?

<comment><USER14> Dude, I honestly don't think you understand what 'trolling' means. You already agreed that trolling is not illegal, why do you keep trying to use examples of illegal content to demonstrate why 'trolling' should be banned?

And what does child pornography have to do with swearing?

> Do you honestly believe that a discussion forum site that wanted a family > friendly policy shouldn't be able to have any liability protections?

Again, I never said that.

<comment><USER13> You keep bringing up trolling as a term in general, I tried to make it specific.

The pitch being made in this subthread was "I don't think Reddit should be able to censor lawful content and also claim protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act."

So you lose liability protection if you censor lawful content.

So if you want to ban swearing, you become liable for your user's content. Which makes you a WIDE OPEN target for bad actors who could post whatever illegal content they want faster than you could moderate it.

I'm trying to illustrate why I think `cwhiz took an absurd position, and am not using the term "trolling" in general now. I've given a specific example of "legal content some communities might want to prohibit" as well as "illegal content that bad actors could use to get the owner of that site in trouble in this proposed world."

<comment><USER14> Okay, to make it clear - I don't think sites should lose 230 protections for having a moderation policy. I do think that the excessive manipulation and censorship of dissenting opinions on sites such as reddit is a bad thing however.

<comment><USER15> I do. If you moderate your site, you endorse its content and should be held responsible for it (i.e be treated like other publishers).

If your laws permit speech you don't like, either fix your laws or fix yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I used Reddit a lot back in 2013ish but went off of it.

Looking at it now, it feels like that in general the site is really mean spirited.

Also upvoting means that you're just seeing whatever the majority of voters want you to see. It works on a smaller community like HN because comments get 10s of upvotes at most. It's not a site for good discourse.

However there's communities where there is interesting discussion still and often if you want an opinion of a product or an issue you might find a thread on it from a real user.

But generally they've done nothing to stop the nurturing of racist/sexist/bullying content over the years.

Now you can argue about free speech being important for an internet platform.

But Reddit trying to change the community attitudes of their site now seems a little late.

Also there is a real sense that some users believe that Reddit is the Sheppard of society and they're fighting on the forefront of society. Which I think stems from the millions of apparent subscribers to subreddits.

But it's just a fancy internet forum.

Like this linked post is on a subreddit called Watch Reddit Die. Apparently something about free speech being stifled in Reddit.

People need to realise they shouldn't waste their life on a website they don't like.

The internet hasn't been fully consolidated by Facebook and Google just yet, they can find or make a different community.

<comment><USER17> I have been a redditor for a decade and have a few remarks based on my experience.

I feel like reddit has always had recurring and overlapping cycles of mean spiritedness. For instance, during the summer holiday period it becomes notoriously harder to have a reasonable exchange of ideas there (don't ask me why; I'm not quite sure). This year, since the beginning of the COVID19 isolation period in March, we've been in a period of very high mean spiritedness. It could be a consequence of users' high stress levels.

Reddit does still have several excellent communities. I find that there's one thing in common between them: They have real, dedicated, human moderators enforcing strict, rational policies. Also: There are some weird cliques of power moderators on reddit who control dozens if not hundreds of subreddits. A good subreddit is usually not run by those cliques. Not to discount the hard work that some grunt moderators put into trying to run the large, clique- controlled communities, but the commonalities are hard to ignore.

On upvotes: Reddit should have clear policies enforced equitatively and transparently at the company level, by a human staff, and downvotes shouldn't be presented as the opposite of an upvote. I don't see a complete alternative system that can replace the upvote, though. They do provide different sorting options; what else could they do, there?

On alternatives: People attempt to leave on a regular basis. The problem is that there's a much higher incentive for the people who are ostracized not only by reddit as a platform but by the associated community to leave than for people who are, for the most part, comfortable, even if the administration acts a little weird on occasion. All alternatives are quickly colonized by people that the majority of the reddit community (if there is such a thing) would rather not be immersed in: White supremacists, conspiracy theorists, fanatic nationalists, etc. For the more moderate people to be willing to move, they want to feel surrounded by a majority of people like them, not a minority.

<comment><USER18> The phenomenon you are describing is called "Summer Reddit", and that term comes about yearly because schoolchildren are home for the summer, with the average age of Redditors participating during this time lowering from 24 to 16. It also heavily correlates with an increase in edgy commenting and shitposting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reddit has been compromised with actors who do not have free speech in their best interest. The other day there was an illuminating ask reddit post about transexuals who decided to transition back and their experiences. That post got promptly removed by moderators; even though there was no hateful content within it at all. They effectively silenced the transexual population due to an ever so slight conflict of ideology.

To think that the reddit administrators would go so far as to ban people for even interacting with content that THEY deem problematic.

Reddit is dead and no one I know uses it anymore.

EDIT: \- In case anyone is interested; here is the censored post that I was referring to [https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/h9ctho/serious_a...](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/h9ctho/serious_are_there_people_within_the_trans/)

<comment><USER20> >Reddit is dead and no one I know uses it anymore.

It's not dead, and I say thankfully because it not being dead retains its state as a containment mechanism of what is easily the worst group of internet users in internet history.

I fear for the day Reddit falls and its userbase spills out looking for another avenue to be comforted with groupthink, newspeak and feel goods for the Brands We Love.

<comment><USER21> Reddit is a collection of communities. I like several of them, and think they are generally good and uplifting, /r/pixelart for instance. Some communities have some pretty bad people in them, but it is impossible to create a social media site at scale without like-minded bad users creating and/or flocking to bad communities.

People are in different stages of life and seek solace in other people having similar experiences. Thus, the sexually frustrated congregate, the depressed congregate, drug enthusiasts (and abusers) congregate, disgruntled ex-<insert organization> congregate, you name it, and angry/sad/anxious people with a shared condition will congregate in search of validation/confidence.

But the opposite is also true - people with a shared hobby/passion/vision congregate as well and create some really fun and uplifting communities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Considering how much of Internet culture is currently being formed on reddit it's amazing how opaque the site is to history. The archival is low-quality and missing a lot.

I sometimes browse by /r/all/gilded, which gives you a weird, weird, WEIRD cross section of the Internet. One time I found a heavily gilded post memorializing a recently deceased contributor to /r/cripplingalcoholism -- which appears to be an important but saddening community for people with a serious medical problem -- then followed a few links on the profile of the deceased and their associated until, a few minutes later, I ended up at /r/opiaterollcall.

Wow oh wow, what a subreddit that was: [https://web.archive.org/web/20130904195509/www.reddit.com/r/...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130904195509/www.reddit.com/r/opiaterollcall)

That forum died pretty soon after I found it (and got national press coverage at [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/opioid- reddit.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/opioid-reddit.html) ) but wow, oh wow, there was a lot going on there which is now essentially lost to readers of history, because existing archives don't go deep into posts and comments.

</comment><comment><USER23> Gizmodo addressed this in February, though just as Covid-19 news coverage began overwhelming everything:

 _Yesterday, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (or "Spez," as Redditors affectionately know him) published the platform's annual transparency report, highlighting how the platform took down more than 200,000 pieces of offending content over 2019, along with nearly 56,000 accounts and nearly 22,000 subreddits—the site's communities, most of which are moderated by volunteer users. He also flagged a "company update" regarding the way Reddit thinks about "quarantined" communities..._

[https://gizmodo.com/reddit-will-start-to-punish-users-for- up...](https://gizmodo.com/reddit-will-start-to-punish-users-for-upvotes-as- it-eye-1841907899)

That policy, in a Reddit post by Huffman:

 _When we expanded our quarantine policy, we created an appeals process for sanctioned communities. One of the goals was to "force subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivize moderators to make changes." While the policy attempted to hold moderators more accountable for enforcing healthier rules and norms, it didn't address the role that each member plays in the health of their community._

 _Today, we're making an update to address this gap: Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities._

[https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin...](https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/spring_forward_into_reddits_2019_transparency/)

According to that statement, bans (apparently temporary) are for voting only in already quarantined subreddits.

WatchRedditDie's discussion is not especially nuanced, considered, or balanced.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't understand why you would even publicize this. Just stop counting those users' votes, if that's what you want to do?

There's enough fuzz in the vote counts that no one would notice, and you wouldn't have any controversy on your hands.

<comment><USER25> The point is that the users who are upvoting this kind of content will stay on the site if they think their votes matter. Reddit clearly would rather they leave entirely, and this is a good way to encourage racists/misogynists/incels/whoever to find another platform.

<comment><USER26> It happens for far left content as well. I don't think it's limited to hateful content. At least, that's what I've read from the chapotraphouse subreddit. Example being upvoting some far left stuff in r/politics.

<comment><USER27> 'Far-left content' and 'hateful content' are not mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite, really.

It is amazing how people will redefine hating Trump supporters, men, white people, "the 1%", western civilization etc as somehow 'not hateful'. "My hate isn't _hate_ , I just dislike things that are bad." Right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Eventually reddit will go the way of digg and fade into irrelevance.

<comment><USER29> Can't happen soon enough. The days where forums were the defacto place for discussion were just better. The communities would self-police and alternative opinions weren't suppressed nearly as easily. Reddit is a meme slideshow, not a place for discussion.

<comment><USER30> I don't want to register zillions of forums and manage my passwords. I contribute to hundreds of subreddits. If reddit dies I'll find a replacement like reddit and move on.

<comment><USER31> >I don't want to register zillions of forums and manage my passwords.

and I don't especially want the admins of any one site to be able to erase my entire existence off the net on a whim.

single/token login from known net authority agents is common. I'd rather embrace that kind of thing than the idea that any one site should be our de facto forum and communications standard.

I was reminded of this recently when a personal favorite BB forum disappeared , taking years and years of niche automotive data with it. Data that was rare from the get-go, and un-replaceable now.

I'd rather decentralize my 'data-stores'. Reddit will disappear one day, and it's up to them to be a good actor towards the archival group, providing data bandwidth during a time when investors have become disinterested, and paying the light bill is near impossible.

I wouldn't count on that.

Keep archives, repeat information elsewhere , and most importantly : don't embrace adding and relying on centralized structure where doing so inherently adds weakness and fallibility.

<comment><USER30> I don't think any "irreplacable" data or conversation should be on reddit. If I lose my conversations about funny cats, or factorio, or why I love a programming language, I'm not gonna lose any sleep over it. I agree with you for critical stuff, I don't think they belong to reddit. But please understand that for consumers like me, reddit is an incredibly convenient social media. I can login now and spend hours talking about hundreds of different things. There is no way in hell I'll be able to register to so many different forums and not get frustrated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Reddit once being a haven away from large corporate interests, has continually succumbed to the mainstream narrative of what's appropriate.

Sure, there are communities that are horrid, but then there are those that are on the line. And inch by inch that line moves from moral goodness, to corporate interest.

Reddit is no different than Twitter/YouTube/Facebook, only they haven't covered the same amount of ground.

Given another few years, if that, we'll see the same censorship practices on Reddit, with the same magnitude, as youtube, facebook, and twitter.

This is essentially account entrapment. Show content they know is in bad faith, then punish them. Or, once a post is deemed in bad faith, retroactively punish them for not having the correct opinion.

1984

<comment><USER33> > 1984

1984 and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race. Read another book

<comment><USER34> I've read many books in my time and I liked 1984 both for its entertainment value and as a warning about government power and limiting free speech. What is wrong with 1984? Is there a similar but better book I should read?

<comment><USER35> What's wrong with 1984 is people sign up for a private service, post something against the ToS, get their account banned by a volunteer user-moderator, then call it "punishment" and cite 1984 as if "piss off, troll" from JimBob moderator of /r/WhippetFanciers is exactly the same as living in North Korea and being forced to speak NewSpeak on threat of having caged rats eat your face in Room 101.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> My long time reddit account (same name as my hn account) was shadowbanned 2 weeks ago. I sent them an appeal and they responded really quick (it was sunday night I believe) saying that my account "got caught by Reddit's spam filter" and unbanned the account. A few days later my account was banned _again_. I sent an appeal and this time they haven't responded in over a week. Is this possibly related?

<comment><USER37> Probably not, but my reddit account of 10+ years have been shadowbanned too with no explanation. As a Digg immigrant, I can't wait to migrate away to the next reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm a daily redditor. On Saturday I logged into reddit and found "Your account has been permanently suspended from Reddit." across the top banner. The mod message says I was permanently suspended for repeated violations of the content policy.

The last time I posted ANYTHING on reddit was 21 days ago when I commented on a Schwarzenegger post and said I'd love for him to be president. I appealed it and haven't heard anything.

<comment><USER39> Do you share your internet? I read today that someone got banned because his roommate got banned

<comment><USER38> I don't. I'm not sure what the reason is. I generally only post nerd stuff in r/sysadmin or r/networking. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Reddit has two conflicting aims.

First, it tries to be a "community hub", like Forumer in the old days, where anyone can set up an "autonomous" messageboard (subreddit) to support discussion among a particular subculture. Consider e.g. /r/smashbros.

Second, it tries to be a "community-in-itself", complete with its own demonym "redditor", and a shared set of values, etiquette, and jokes/memes.

These goals are fundamentally at odds. A community of competing factions -- some of which openly hate each other -- is hardly a community. A board for Super Smash Brothers players which must hew to the diktat of reddit at large is not really a community of Smashers. When a norm on Reddit at large is violated by a subreddit, the general population is incensed. When a rule is handed down from the admins to the moderators of a subcommunity, the members of that community feel they are being manipulated by outsiders -- even if they might have decided to enforce that rule on their own, if they had been left to their own devices.

Reddit splits the baby and nobody's happy.

</comment><comment><USER41> Is there any evidence this is real? The image specifies /r/reddit.com, which was discontinued about a decade ago.

Obviously this practice is/would be awful. But it's really surprising and the image seems a little fishy.

<comment><USER23> From 24 February 2020:

"Reddit Will Start to Punish Users for Upvotes as It Eyes Ad Cash"

[https://gizmodo.com/reddit-will-start-to-punish-users-for- up...](https://gizmodo.com/reddit-will-start-to-punish-users-for-upvotes-as- it-eye-1841907899)

"Spring forward… into Reddit's 2019 transparency report"

 _Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities._

[https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin...](https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/spring_forward_into_reddits_2019_transparency/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> They've got so many moderation related issues.

Amidst all this accounts that randomly spam the site with collections of articles and etc run free. They don't participate in discussion (maybe a handful of actual comments... with more links), they just push a particular point of view and inundate every sub they can find with article after article....

A simple query "hey is this user just spamming submissions" could deal with some of them.

If you search new you're presented with repost after repost of these spammers, sometimes reposing their own content, just from another news source.

If you're part of a location based sub that is in the news, it's just an AVALANCHE of distantly cause related submitters spamming it up.

<comment><USER43> That's the most obviously problem I see with section 230 freedom of speech maximalists arguments. Who's right is it to curtail the freedom of someone to announce their love of a some sexual performance enhancing supplement in every thread and comment section on the internet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Here is what people mean when we say we don't like Section 230. And we mean it whether or not Section 230 is actually responsible.

\- Advertiser uses our trademark on Google Ads? Google makes money and has editorial control. But we can't sue them.

\- Somebody posts something libelous about us on Twitter? Twitter makes serious money and has editorial control. But we can't sue them.

\- Fakes on eBay? Can't stop them. eBay not liable.

If Twitter is going to have a "fact checking" department, then they also need a "retractions" department. And if retraction aren't forthcoming when reasonable, then we need a cause of action against them.

</comment><comment><USER45> > Abusive content is not acceptable on Reddit nor is engaging with it.

This is such a fail for Reddit. If the content isn't allowed on the site, it's on Reddit to remove it. The existence of the content on the site implies Reddit's approval of the content, so engaging with that content is a wholly innocent act.

<comment><USER46> Please explain by what mechanism you would expect abusive content to be unengagable before being recognized (and treated) as such. Preferably one that does not involve Reddit having to travel back in time.

<comment><USER45> I don't have a way to programmatically detect abusive content, and for users the content's presence on the site implies it's legitimate. Just remove it when it's found, and shadowban the people who posted it. It isn't rocket surgery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cde-v This was announced back in February....

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8044337/Redd...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8044337/Reddit- start-suspending-users-consistently-upvote-rule-breaking-content.html)

<comment><USER23> Gizmodo is cited, and gives better info:

[https://gizmodo.com/reddit-will-start-to-punish-users-for- up...](https://gizmodo.com/reddit-will-start-to-punish-users-for-upvotes-as- it-eye-1841907899)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> An obvious concern of this would be just silencing content which isn't violent or morally wrong but just not wanted in a large commercially viable website. This is obviously polarizing but something I'll be watching is what happens to /r/chapotraphouse.

CTH has some posts that violated a rule but most don't, the admins claim their quarantining was never well communicated and intentionally vague, posting screenshots of lack of communication from mods.

If people get suspended for just participating there without any clear violations of calling for violence/brigading/etc then that's not really a great sign for transparency.

<comment><USER48> >CTH has some posts that violated a rule but most don't

I'm not familiar with the CTH situation, or super familiar with CTH in general besides knowing them to be pretty far left on the political spectrum.

But based solely on this line, if their admins are not making enough of an effort in Reddit's eyes to clean up and discourage people from making these rule breaking posts, then the quarantine makes sense. Even if only 1% of .1% of the posts are violating the rules, if the subreddit isn't policing that small minority of posts, what is Reddit supposed to do? Ignore it because most posts aren't breaking rules?

<comment><USER47> I don't follow them enough to personally have an opinion on if they warranted that treatment or not, but did follow enough to know it really couldn't have been most posts. So really can't argue with you on the validity of the banning.

but... that if the fraction of bad posts lead to mass suspensions on CTH then I'd say it is a creepy/not-good direction for Reddit.

<comment><USER48> I pulled the fractions out of thin air, so I have no idea what they actually are.

But you have to do something about people refusing to enforce site policy, even if it's only on a small portion of the content.

For an extreme example (and to be clear I am not saying anything like this happened at CTH), if 99 posts out of 100 on subreddit fall within the rules, but that 1 post that doesn't is promoting killing everyone of a certain race, and the subreddit moderators refuse to do anything about that one post, then they 100% need to have something happen. And that doesn't change if it's 999 out of 1000, etc., either.

Now, it's unlikely that anything on CTH was at that level of toxic and hateful, but the same overall concept applies - they have to take care of posts that are against policy, even if they're a small minority. If not, it seems like getting quarantined or even removed completely is a reasonable course of action.

<comment><USER49> The thing with reddit's rules is they aren't applied in a consistent way. You can go to /r/justiceserved (which is basically a violence porn sub) and talk about violence all you want. Look at [https://www.reddit.com/r/JusticeServed/comments/hdvsy2/dayli...](https://www.reddit.com/r/JusticeServed/comments/hdvsy2/daylight_robbery/) as an example, look at the people there that are saying they think it's a good thing that a guy was shot (and killed) for attempted robbery. This was the top post on /r/rising for that sub when I made this comment.

You can go to /r/politics and say that we should go to war with Iran, or say that it would be great if Putin died and be fine.

/r/chapotraphouse has probably the same amount of calls for (or glorification of) violence as /r/politics (and less then /r/justiceserved), but for some reason reddit has it out for them. Also, how is /r/cth supposed to fix their rulebreaking if the admins aren't very clear on what content is breaking the rules?

<comment><USER48> Yeah, Justice Served definitely looks like it needs to be looked at.

I think there's two separate issues here:

1) There's probably not enough manpower to be able to do this evenly and consistently across all of Reddit. They're not ever going to be able to do everything all at once. If efforts are ongoing, I don't think it's fair to penalize Reddit for not having taken care of everything that needed to be taken care of all at the same time. If we get to the point where Reddit says "ok we're done we've taken care of all the bad communities and are scaling back down the moderation team" and we see that it still is uneven, then I think we're at the point where it's a problem.

2) The mega subs are tough to deal with in general. Politics is absolutely massive, and from a practical standpoint as one of the core subreddits, is going to be handled differently than a non-core one. Reddit is ultimately a business, and even if from a moral absolutist standpoint it should be treated exactly the same as any other subreddit, realistically it's not going to be.

I do feel like CTH might have been targeted a bit specifically because so much of this has been focused on far-right subreddits, and there was some desire to "balance" it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> There is an alternative to the group think/hive mind called [https://gab.com/](https://gab.com/) but it's also a cesspool or horrible people sharing horrible ideas.

Not sure what makes sense.

<comment><USER51> So it's a hive mind and group think but with terrible people instead?

<comment><USER52> Yes that's right. They won't ban you for having non-terrible opinions, but they'll downvote you into non-existence. I tried participating in voat for a couple of days before leaving forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Interesting approach. Assuming no bots, doesn't that change actual sentiment among the population. How can you measure what people are thinking if dissenting voices are banned?

</comment><comment><USER54> Every time we have a conversation about why Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit shouldn't be allowed to"censor" content, I ask what would become of Hacker News if it was not permitted to moderate spam or threads that do not follow the HN guidelines.

I think it would quickly devolve into 4Chan. Almost all of the current community would decamp, and the trolls that infest other sites would take over.

<comment><USER33> "Devolve into"? This website is just the "sounds educated" arm of imageboard users.

HN is entirely filled with right-wing to far-right sheltered techbros. Half the accounts here that are constantly complaining about "free speech" and "consequences to their actions" are really one bad day away from calling everyone they disagree with various slurs, and the other half are so insulated from any sort of actual injustice in the world that they sit atop of their smug towers of indifference, cawing at the peasants below who have things such as "opinions" (that disagree with theirs, of course) or "motivations".

<comment><USER54> You are not wrong, but don't forget Sturgeon's Revelation: "90% of everything is CRUD."

What makes something valuable is the 10% of the thing that is not CRUD, and whatever measures put into place to make sure that the 90% CRUD doesn't poison the 10% that's worthwhile.

To me, that's having clear guidelines that are consistently applied through moderation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Nice I wonder how many comments that go against Reddit's policies I've upvoted over the years unintentionally on the mobile app.

I up/downvote posts/comments at least couple of times a day when trying to scroll on my phone or just hitting the screen to wake it up after being distracted.

This is ridiculous policy.

</comment><comment><USER56> This seems like a good way to suppress bots that upvote posts that incite violence or severe verbal abuse or gingoist. However, I am afraid if they start doing this for discussion on COVID-19.

</comment><comment><USER57> The main issue is asymmetric rule enforcement more so than the rules themselves. This is probably true for most if not all social media platforms.

</comment><comment><USER58> If you told a reddit user from 5 years ago that you would be banned for upvoting content, they'd call you a nut job.

</comment><comment><USER59> If this submission gets flagged/killed (it's already gone from the front page) will I be penalized for upvoting it?

</comment><comment><USER60> Seems a little extreme, but the overall logic seems sound from a moderation perspective. If you have users that consistently upvote content that violates the TOS inside of quarantined subreddits its probably a sign that they're a trouble-maker with respect to the site guidelines.

</comment><comment><USER61> What would it take to bring back pre-Eternal September Usenet?

</comment><comment><USER62> On the one hand, I can understand them not wanting to be a platform for content they do not like (find offensive, believe legally dangerous, &c). On the other hand, presence of porn and nazis is an indicator of a healthy community — banning these things leads to decline in other areas (see Tumblr). You can't have partial freedom of speech.

At least the porn is still there.

The problem with 'social' sites is that they allow cross-contamination between the seedy bits, and r/woodworking and the like.

The open web — with separately hosted forums — is a lot better, but less convenient. I hope to see a solution sometime, but the odds are not good.

</comment><comment><USER63> The thought police strikes again.

It's not anymore about simply censoring unwanted content, punishing the users for engaging with will be way more effective in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER64> No jedberg comments on this post?

</comment><comment><USER65> Is this any different than making Shadow Banning visible to the user who has been Shadow Banned?

</comment><comment><USER66> I feel safer already. Thank you Reddit for protecting me from my bad opinions.

</comment><comment><USER11> At this point reddit is arguably a social danger, in that it is made to look like organic content, while in truth everything is heavily censored and opinions are implicitly and explicitly approved in an absolute top down manner.

Opaque vote display and ranking algorithms, keyword based shadowbanning, ideological mods and admin - combined with an organic facade you have a platform to manufacture consensus and push propaganda onto millions of unsuspecting users, young and old alike.

Frankly it's scummy and I hope they fail.

</comment><comment><USER67> You can vote any way you want. As long as you vote the right way.

</comment><comment><USER68> Why do SO MANY pretend-libertarian tech bros pretending to be libertarians and liberty-loving freedom fans think that free speech applies to private property?

And why have they let themselves be tricked into spewing the Section-230 nonsense that conservative hate-mongers are using to threaten online service providers?

Section 230 protection is irrelevant to service providers policing their site. It is very relevant to service providers who are being told by conservative hate-mongering politicians "hey we'll strip your protections unless you allow our hateful content even though the protections are unrelated to our content and comments".

You're carrying water for malicious actors who don't care about you.

By your own logic, not mine (I think it's bullshit) YOURS if you downvote this comment to the point that it is hidden or automodded then you are infringing on my "FREEZE PEECH RAIGHTS" because you are "removing" constitutionally- protected freeze peach from the public sphere.

</comment><comment><USER69> No one complained when folks voting on an unpopular forum were kicked out late last year. Everyone laughed and said "good riddance" then. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

The adage of the "fascists will next come for you" continues to remain true.

</comment><comment><USER70> For years reddit stood by and did nothing while certain groups exploited and spammed the front page with their hate speech, im glad to see they're finally doing something about it.

</comment><comment><USER71> The idea that the "vote" is not just counted but judged is new, it seems. It is the next step in the trend of hyper precise tracking of peoples thoughts and actions, and their judgement in a transparent and opinionated global social sphere with extreme consequences.

Overall, a worrying trend.

</comment><comment><USER72> Of course "voting" should be something you are accountable for. If you are pushing nonsense and banned content up, you become a part of the problem.

Even on HN there have been many anti-science nonsense stories on the front- page where the site would benefit from letting people indicate that they want anyone who enabled it to have no weighting in the curation of their own personal view. This may be a sort of filter bubble, but it's an anti-idiot filter bubble. I don't need to have my world clouded by the noise of conspiracy fanatics and idiots.

</comment><comment><USER73> So, if people don't vote the way the Reddit admins want, the Reddit admins will replace the voters. That is definitely _a_ way to get only the things the Reddit admins want upvoted, upvoted. But it seems to me to be the opposite of free discourse.

I can sympathise with the admins, because a) there are a lot of terrible, toxic people b) there are a lot of bot armies. The latter is probably easiest to combat, but it is still a tough nut to crack. The former is even worse: I imagine that the most engaged users are quite often the users one wishes were _least_ engaged.

It's a tough problem, but Orwellian punishment of wrongthink seems the wrong direction.

<comment><USER74> How so? Calling for someone to be murdered is understandably against their policy. As is doxxing someone. The user accounts that upvote the call for murder or upvote the doxxing details _KNOW_ that the post is against their policy and decided to participate anyway.

I hate how these conversations always devolve to "well they're just trying to control what everyone says!" as if it's black and white and not shades of gray. No, they're trying to prevent assholes from spilling over into people's real lives, because the alternative is becoming 4chan. Where all that "upvoted" content results in ACTUAL PEOPLE BEING KILLED.

I hope most people on HN don't agree with the train of thought that websites have no duty to their fellow man to not normalize hate speech. "Where does it stop" \- it stops at not doxxing people and not calling for people to be murdered, per their TOS.

<comment><USER75> Theres no upvoting on 4chan and bumping a thread (or on reddit upvoting) does not kill and cannot kill anyone. The people making the threads end up killing people (very rarely) not the randoms that reply (or upvote).

You don't even know what the account upvoted, and upvoting isn't hate speech (or calling for someone to be murdered). Do you have a bunch of unknown information on this or are you just defending reddit's continued slide to dystopian horror for no reason?

<comment><USER76> "Slide to dystopian horror"? For banning a bunch of garbage subs and the people that upvote the garbage? Hyperbolic much?

<comment><USER77> The problem is that there's no reason to believe that this policy will be limited strictly to obvious garbage. Unpopular, but not garbage views will inevitably be hit too. Maybe that's worth taking out the garbage, but collateral damage is still a negative.

<comment><USER76> It's amusing how much HN mocks the police for their stance that everything that enables privacy could enable child exploitation imagery while at the same time insisting that anything that resembles moderation will end in dystopian thought policing.

Sometimes slopes just aren't that slippery.

<comment><USER77> Everything that enables privacy absolutely could enable child exploitation imagery. But privacy as a whole is too fucking valuable to give up to make prosecuting some crimes easier. In the US, that's the whole point of the fourth amendment -- warrants with probable cause and specificity requirements are the proper escape hatch, not bulk data sifting. Not all crime can or should be caught at any cost whatsoever.

Moderation need not end in dystopian thought policing. Reddit has had moderation for quite some time. Indeed voting was there from the beginning, and is a primitive crowdsourced form of moderation, with many obvious flaws, including groupthink.

Forum moderation's whole point is to constrain what can be said. It can be used for good or ill. Extending it to bans from agreeing with wrongthink is a step beyond the status quo. Maybe it'll balance out to be good on net, maybe bad, but don't pretend it's not novel or that it's obviously good on balance, and no one should be concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> For those of you who aren't familiar, the "watchredditdie" subreddit is a "safe space" for alt-right users to whine about not being able to brigade, astroturf, and otherwise manipulate reddit to their own political ends the way they did in the run-up to the 2016 election.

</comment><comment><USER79> This isn't a ban, it's a 3 day suspension. And we don't know what content was upvoted, or why it was a against Reddit policy. We do know, however, that Reddit indeed _has_ policies about acceptable content, and most of us seem to agree they're fairly reasonable. So I don't understand the use of the scare quotes in the title.

Why exactly should an upvote, which is publicly visible approval, be different than a comment? I mean... they're both content posted to the site. It's not unreasonable that they be subject to the same rules.

Is the outrage here that votes are supposed to be "anonymous" and this feels like an unmasking of something people felt more comfortable doing "in private"? Is that something we want to protect per se?

This seems like more outrage than meat, honestly. I'd really like to know what the comment was before deciding.

<comment><USER80> Well for one it makes every user individually responsible for identifying content that breaks the rules, and this is very hard given Reddit's history of arbitrarily enforcing the rules.</comment></comment>


I wonder if China managed to steal Google's ssl certificates? - <AUTHOR> http://friendfeed.com/paul/cae98f58/i-wonder-if-china-managed-to-steal-google-ssl

<comment><USER2> No, they couldn't decrypt anything.

They'd need the private keys. And the passwords for the private keys.</comment>


Nintendo, Please Switch to iOS - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/12/23/nintendo-i-love-you-but-its-time-to-switch-to-ios/ <comment><USER2> It's a matter of time before Nintendo develops for iOS, as computer hardware is converging into phones and tablets. Although I love their hardware, but would never buy Nintendo hardware again, because my iPhone, iPad, Macbook, AppleTV are the center of my entertainment.

Once Apple TV starts to better integrate with the 'app' environment, imagine the possibilities. I would love to play Mario Kart with a couple friends, iPhones, and an Apple TV. I just came home for Christmas, found the N64 in the attic, dusted it off and was playing with my brother, wishing we could just download it and play each other on the TV with our iPhones, instead of actually having to plug in a cartridge into with wired remotes, although I did appreciate the nostalgia.

And about the price question, I would also gladly pay 40 dollars or more for a full ported Zelda game, and Nintendo could sell iPhone accessories that have buttons, that make the gameplay experience that much more solid.

There is no question Nintendo knows how to innovate with hardware, so I hope that they don't stop. But I would rather see them make hardware based around iOS than their own OS.</comment>


What Happened to NewsBlur: A Hacker News Effect Post-Mortem - <AUTHOR> http://www.ofbrooklyn.com/2010/11/3/hacker-news-effect-post-mortem/ <comment><AUTHOR> I tried to show how the onslaught of visitors from my Hacker News link last week had an effect on both the server (as shown in all of the 7 day munin graphs), and the project (how I'm responding to feedback and planning the course of NewsBlur for the next few months).

I'm just so close to NewsBlur being profitable. I am 35 premium user accounts away (for a total of 80 accounts). Once NewsBlur goes profitable, that's when the real hard work starts. I would then have support issues, broken features in edge case browser/OS configs, and the headaches of keeping a server running for high availabaility, while on a shoe string budget and working super-part- time. (I write most of NewsBlur on the A train, 35 minutes each way from Brooklyn to midtown).

<comment><USER2> I am unclear on how 80*12 dollars is profitable, altho, I guess if you only worked on this 70 mins a day for a year, I guess that comes out to 4 dollars an hour, but you must have worked on this on the weekends as well...

I guess you are only factoring the cost of servers, not your own time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, I am not counting my time as a cost. I am merely factoring in the cost of servers and bandwidth.

3 servers:

        - App server: 1GB, $40 / month
        - DB server: 512MB, Postgres/MongoDB, $20 / month
        - Task server: 512MB, Celery/RabbitMQ, $20 / month

<comment><USER3> If you're using Rackspace (the costs above are similar to it), you can use reserved instances on EC2 and save yourself quite a bit of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a product space/market that many have attempted in the past and failed. I have probably used a dozen different feed readers in the past 10+ years, and this is the first time that I have signed up for a new product in this space and been genuinely excited.

Great work. Content publishers will also like this because you aren't scraping, and you are preserving the original format of their content.

(Bug report - are you auto-detecting feed urls? I put in the domain for my own site and it didn't find the feed, although it is referenced as a rel. You also don't have Sydney as a timezone)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sydney has been added.

        'Australia/Adelaide': '(GMT+09:30) Adelaide',
        'Australia/Darwin': '(GMT+09:30) Darwin',
        'Australia/Brisbane': '(GMT+10:00) Brisbane',
        'Australia/Sydney': '(GMT+10:00) Sydney, Hobart'

As for the feed url, i'm not sure why it missed your rel'ed RSS. Email the site to me and I'll get cracking on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is brilliant, I'm switching over to this right now. Funny enough, Google reader has just died a quick death since I discovered HN a month ago, but maybe I'll start using RSS again with News Blur.

Obviously this is beginning stages, but i think the typography and sizing of UI can still be refined and reduced substantially.

The intro page is the weakest for me. The calligraphic doodle below google reader feels alien. RSS reading is all about streamlining your reading. I'd dull down the colours of the UI to the max (think the new itunes monotone scheme) in order to maximise the individuality of the fed content (which is the USP of your product).

You only need The Google Reader Sign Up and the How it works shown for the beginning. The New Improvements feed is not what a first time viewer needs to see when they put thier virgin eyes on your product.

Seriously impressed!

</comment><comment><USER6> I"m so glad you're finally getting some pick up on this. It's really a fantastic effort! Your openness is also truly appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER7> Not to turn this into NewsBlur tech support, but is there some way to see recent unread posts from all my feeds, in chronological order, without having to click around on the left sidebar?

That is basically my single mode of operation in Google Reader. I'm sort of surprised that I can't do it trivially because I thought that everyone used RSS readers that way.

Other than that, the UI is pleasant, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's river of news and it's slated for next month. I wasn't going to implement this until recently, when a user very persuasively convinced me to make this a priority. I thought it was a workflow that didn't fit in with the rest of NewsBlur. He thought it was a necessary feature for any hard-core user.

Everybody reads RSS differently, and I am only trying to pleasure a few groups for now. But river of news is one of the highest ticket priorities. Up there with the iPhone app (which is 60% done), fixing misbehaving feeds, and fixing the many Chrome bugs.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I was figuring out how to do this as it's the way I read everything (Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook).. rather than visit sources one by one (which is what I'm trying to move away from for sites I like the design of - if NewsBlur can combine that "site's own pages" effect with the river benefit, a big win for me).

One thing I can't figure out, though, is why many feeds do not show the "real" page for the item. Instead, it reverts back to just using the feed or showing the _front page_ of the blog in question, even though the URL is clearly in there. When I'm on "Original" I'd just like to see the URL for the item on the right without having to open it in a new tab/window. Or is this a bug?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a different use case. If you want, you can click on links in the original site, but then you are no longer on newsblur.com. The way i am able to take over the original site is through a proxy.

What your describing is that every link shows it's original site endpoint, which means reading every story would require a separate page load. Instead, I just consolidated the front page, and if you want the story content as it appears in the feed, then there's the Feed view (and you can go back and forth between them with the left and right arrow keys).

Otherwise, it's a slow process to load all of those stories one-by-one.

<comment><USER8> Aha, I thought it was just an IFRAME (and then thought the "arrow" at the side was rather clever and I'd need to go see how you pulled that off ;-)).

Oh well, that's a shame. One of the initial big wins (in my head) was that I like to see the original design of the item rather than the plain feed version (handy for these individually designed blog posts nowadays) but without opening 101 tabs over my session. This still works fine in NB for blogs where all the posts are held on the front page a while, it seems, but just not those that nest things on individual post pages I guess. (Hurrah for you open sourcing it though!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's refreshing to read an article all about the service you're providing to your customers and not your percent conversions or CPM. So many of the entrepreneurs here are all about the money rather than the product.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hey just one small but really noticeable improvement:

When you change feed, and the "iframe"(or whatever it is) is loading the next page, you should fadeout the old one, and maybe (if possible) put a loading gif or similar until load completion.

That would make the interface far more responsive, since when i was clicking feeds to test, sometimes i didnt notice if the click was doing something or not, and that produces frustration along with multiple clicks (unnecesary work overload)

Cool app anyway! Wish you the best :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Great job. Like other posters have said, this to me seems so new and innovative in an otherwise commoditized space.

Is it intentional that there's such a big whitespace gap on the 'home' page? (Chrome 7, OS X 10.6)

[http://img.skitch.com/20101104-n3yd14f7s73ddkdxaqxyuda5hr.jp...](http://img.skitch.com/20101104-n3yd14f7s73ddkdxaqxyuda5hr.jpg)

I really hope, and believe, this will replace my use of google reader, which I have found to be absolutely painful to use. I wish google products had more inspiring interfaces.

I'd love to talk to you about your decision to open-source it sometime.

Keep up the good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that whitespace is intentional. I know, it's a bit disconcerting because nobodyd oes it that way. I _may_ fill it with dashboard style analytics and graphs. But that's a ways away for now.

The focus is on the sites. The logo only shows up when you first go to newsblur.com. That's also intentional. Why do you need to see the logo as you're reading your sites?

As for why I went open-source, I figure that the good will that comes from being open-source will help me obtain my #1 top priority: meeting future co- founders. NewsBlur is my public resume. Making it profitable is priority #2. Well, it can easily be profitable if folks are buying premium accounts and not bothering to host everything on their own servers. Seems to be working out pretty well, so far.

<comment><USER12> This is a cool project and really great that it's open source, since I want to learn more about Django, but that whitespace really stopped me with I first loaded the site. I spent several minutes thinking it must be a CSS error. It made me wonder if there was a layout problem, and how did the developer miss this. So maybe it's at least visually distracting, which takes focus away from all the good work done on the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the best premium account upsell ever. I raise my hat, and giggle. Screenshot: <http://cl.ly/303349b79ded3049b733>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah, thanks. She's actually blind, hence why her eyes are bigger than normal. But she's a beagle, so if you know beagles, you know that they couldn't care less about their eyes. It's all nose for them. On walks I have to remind her that she's about to bump right into a tree.

And that truck for an icon? It's for all the food I have to truck in to feed her. Har har.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow. Impressive story and an impressive site. Also, thanks for all the details on how your site handled the load. It's a great write-up. Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been spending too much time on HN and not enough on RSS. Which captures the most interesting high-leve tech stuff, but doesn't keep my in all the loops I want to be in, and I have Google Reader fatigue, so I think I'll give this a serious look.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hey Samuel, I met you at the Hackers and Founders meet up in NY a week ago. I remember you telling me about Newsblur and so I took a look at it and I am very impressed and will continue to use it.

All the best to you and Newsblur

</comment><comment><USER17> This is nice, too bad I hadn't heard of it before. A feature I'm really missing is a page with all new items (eventually sorted by "goodness").

</comment><comment><USER18> Did you do the UI and graphic design as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I did make the UI. Uhh, as for graphics, I use Silk icons. Besides that, I don't think I use any graphics. I'm very big on thinking about design, but I do not for the life of me know how to draw.

I consider my work as the epitome of the "Design is not just the look" ethos. I spend what little free time I do have thinking about the flow for all the little parts of NewsBlur.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is good news. And, to think, your title was pepping me for another failed startup write-up.</comment>


Show HN: Integrating a CMS and Parse into Wordpress for a MMORPG Community Site - <AUTHOR> http://aftermath.io/mmo-community-site/ <comment><USER2> Nice that you managed to do all that, but I couldn't stop thinking that there is an enourmous overuse of (and overinvestment in human capital related to) Wordpress.

The fact that everyone uses Wordpress makes it seem like the best option for all kinds of things, and thus creates these problems.</comment>


Show HN: Social Shopping Search with Sentiment Analysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.heyhi.com

<comment><AUTHOR> After buying a pair boots online last week, I found myself searching social sites to get a better idea of a) what they looked like b) how people like them. This resulted in me realizing there isn't a great site which provides this service. As such, I threw this together.

It's pretty basic, but searches Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter for the product you would like to see more about. My hope is to monetize it with some Amazon referrals. It's pretty scrappy right now, but I also added a very basic sentiment analysis so people can see both popularity ranking and overall sentiment for the current product.

I would love some feedback. I'm hoping my rate limits for all these APIs hold up until I can allow people to log in using their own accounts.

</comment><comment><USER2> Tried "wool t-shirt" [http://www.heyhi.com/results/show?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=w...](http://www.heyhi.com/results/show?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=wool+t-shirt) and got one photo of a kid and a link to an Amazon search I already did.

I think there's probably potential here -- but it wasn't useful to me today.</comment>


Finding Duplicate RSA Moduli in the Wild - <AUTHOR> http://sbudella.altervista.org/blog/20181211-duplicate-moduli.html <comment><USER2> This is a nice exercise, but sort of reads like an argument against the unix way ("Diogenic programming") in that the author has to jump through lots of hoops to do w job that would be easy with the right specialised tools (e.g. a database).</comment>


What to do when your annual salary increment sucks - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/what-to-do-when-your-annual-salary-increment-sucks-88d26c5dd7fa <comment><USER2> Sure, blame the employee for the 3% raise cap or the bonus pool that is too small. It's not the managers fault either. Companies have systems explicitly designed to control salaries and bonuses. "I appreciate all that extra work you did but I'm sorry, we have a 5% raise cap.."

Businesses give poor raises because they can. I never found it worth the effort to haggle for a raise when I could just give myself a raise by going somewhere that valued me more.

I've been super lucky to work at companies that made me look forward to going to work but business is business.</comment>


Philip K. Dick on Blade Runner - <AUTHOR> http://www.philipkdick.com/new_letters-laddcompany.html <comment><USER2> I went into reading this letter thinking that it would be another 'they destroyed my vision!' example. I'm pleasantly surprised as I have a fondness for the movie. I'm not an expert though, I just do eyes! Just eyes!

<comment><USER3> I was expecting a rant as well. And I am actually a little skeptical about this letter, and not just because it lacks a signature. He never saw the final cut, yet is willing to make a grand, sweeping pronouncement about how important the movie will be.

The letter also says "My life and creative work are justified and completed by BLADE RUNNER". I doubt many respected authors would make such a pronouncement about a Hollywood adaptation and their own artistic legacy without seeing the final product, but this is even more unusual considering the adaptation barely followed the narrative in the original book.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, nobody can claim to have seen the final cut and the continuing proliferation of versions supports the notion of it being a very important (if perennially unfinished) film.

You're right that the book is very different from the film, but even here it's much different than most adaptations, as key dialog is lifted almost verbatim from the book. I think if this letter is legitimate, Dick was probably more excited about the portrayal of the universe his stories took place in, rather than the faithfulness of the script to a single one of his works.

<comment><USER5> If you look at Phil Dick's published work, he isn't faithful to his own scripts at all - the short stories and novellas weave and re-weave each others' ideas, characters and settings, and the ending and message of a story can be very different from version to version.

I could comfortably imagine him reworking the DADOES plot into something just as far away from the original as Blade Runner - in fact, if anything, I find Blade Runner less radically different from the source material than some of his own reworkings.

Memory is saying the two versions of Second Variety are a good example, as are the various forms of Ubik, but my books aren't currently on the same continent as me so alas I have no citations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow. This is a great post.

Being a young teenager and reading electric sheep and then seeing blade runner, Then to live and see things slowly unfolding toward this future he describes -- such as the rapid decline of critical life such as honeybees and frogs, BCI, AI, etc -- it really does blow my mind to see it all being a possibility - albiet a very dark one.

Also Google just released the Nexus one. Coincidence? I think not!

</comment><comment><USER7> Funny follow-up ... Ridley Scott, the director of BR, is also a producer of the TV show "Numbers".

There is a scene where two of the FBI agents are walking through the mall area where parts of BR were filmed (where Deckard looks for, chases, and ultimately kills the dancer replicant as she crashes through the glass) and they make references to how "Ridley Scott saw this all coming" and "this area looks like something out of Blade Runner" ...

</comment><comment><USER8> Over the last few months I've really gotten into Philip K. Dick. He wrote some of the best sci-fi I've ever read. Whereas a lot of sci fi is about cool stuff just to write about cool stuff, PKD used imaginative/futuristic settings, characters, and objects to explore the human condition.

"Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep" is a great book. One of its central questions is what makes humans, human. The book gives you plenty of ideas to mull over, and at the same time it's an exciting, plot-driven read.

I watched blade runner a month ago, a couple weeks after finishing Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep. The movie was nearly incomprehensible and the acting was terrible. It was too terrible and bizarre to even really be a disappointment.

All this is to say, I wonder how PKD would have felt after seeing the entire movie.

<comment><USER9> "eXistenZ" is the only good PKD movie I know about, although it is not directly based on one specific book.

Also you've got to read all the short stories. They are better than the novels in my opinion.

<comment><USER10> From imdb: The truman show 8.0 Minority report 7.7 Blade runner 8.3 Total recall 7.4

<comment><USER9> And scanner darkly (7.7) - still eXistenZ is the one that really stands out for me. But I admit that there are other "good" movies out there that use PKD as a basis.

<comment><USER11> Scanner Darkly comes closest to capturing the spirit of PKD's written work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What i found most insightful is the "monotous death" he says SF is at risk of settling into. All the brilliant SF's reputation is overshadowed by the pulp works with tasteless covers, and people tend to think of SF as children's books, not serious (if you compare it to "classic" litterature). We need more works like Bradbury's, that are in themselves brilliant litterature (look at the prose in Fahrenheit 451!) as well as SF.

<comment><USER12> I've found the success of a work Science Fiction _as a work of literature_ is closely correlated to how far removed it is from present day society. Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World are both fairly close to society today, as far as Science Fiction goes. Richard Powers has had great success writing about things like virtual reality (Plowing the Dark) and artificial intelligence (Galatea 2.2), but his works are even closer to present day than Bradbury or Huxley. The Foundation Series, while not quite on Powers's level, are still incredible books that _might_ just belong in the class of real literature. I don't think it will ever get there though because its world isn't coupled closely enough with the one we know.

<comment><USER13> Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse-Five_ is a sci-fi story that's also considered real literature. It's mostly set in the 20th century.

I don't like terms like "real literature". I would say the Foundation series despite its weaknesses is worth reading for anyone who wants to be well rounded in his/her book choices.

<comment><USER14> I just finished David Forrest Wallace's Infinite Jest and was surprised that is was sci-fi. DFW was such a literary golden boy, i think people don't mention that IJ was a sci-fi book to avoid belittling him. total crap, if you ask me.

<comment><USER13> There are sci-fi elements in IJ for sure. I just think IJ is too broad in scope to label it sci-fi though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I recall observing in the early 90's, with some amazement, that the actual Times Square had started to look like its depiction in Blade Runner, with over-the-top lighted billboards in every direction and sterile, glass-fronted places of non-sex commerce. It's easy to forget that Times Square verged on being a crappy porn district when Blade Runner came out.

<comment><USER16> Times Square is not depicted in Blade Runner. The city in the film is Los Angeles.

<comment><USER17> It's an easy mistake, since in the movies, New York City is usually depicted at night and Los Angeles is usually depicted at daytime. Blade Runner (and I guess The Fifth Element) reverse that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PK_Dick#Mental_health>

He also never saw the released movie (which was not the commercial success he predicted), let alone the multiple later cuts.

<comment><USER18> Commercial success?

How about CULTURAL success?

Blade Runner changed the direction of science fiction movies. Heck, it changed the direction of WRITTEN science fiction (and, yes, I'm saying that the movie, not the original book, changed the direction of written SF).

I could go on and on, but I don't want to sound like a fanboy...but Blade Runner was - by its effects - one of the most important cultural artifacts of the second half of the 20th century.

<comment><USER16> _Commercial success?_

The gushing letter he wrote predicted it's going to be a commercial success. I like the movie too (well, not the terrible theatrical release) but that doesn't mean that letter isn't somewhat nuts.

 _Heck, it changed the direction of WRITTEN science fiction_

Except it didn't. Science fiction was already going there anyway. William Gibson on Blade Runner -

" BLADERUNNER came out while I was still writing Neuromancer. I was about a third of the way into the manuscript. When I saw (the first twenty minutes of) BLADERUNNER, I figured my unfinished first novel was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I'd copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film. "

 _I don't want to sound like a fanboy_

Well, you're not doing a very good job of avoiding it. While you're sputtering at me and using all caps you somehow didn't notice I wasn't even talking about the movie. Simply pointing out it's a crazy letter written by a mentally ill person who hadn't even seen it. This fact is quite independent of the quality or cultural impact of the movie.

<comment><USER12> _Simply pointing out it's a crazy letter written by a mentally ill person who hadn't even seen it._

I'm curious why you feel a person's mental health has anything to do with the correctness of his/her writing. It's an obviously incorrect idea, but I'm wondering why you hold it.

<comment><USER16> I'm curious why you consider the nutty idea that mental health is completely orthogonal to one's ability to write 'correctly' obvious. If your ability to perceive reality is impaired (say, you're delusional or clinically paranoid or otherwise irrational) you're likely to have a very difficult time accurately representing and interpreting reality in writing.

<comment><USER12> _I'm curious why you consider the nutty idea that mental health is completely orthogonal to one's ability to write 'correctly' obvious. If your ability to perceive reality is impaired (say, you're delusional or clinically paranoid or otherwise irrational) you're likely to have a very difficult time accurately representing and interpreting reality in writing._

If a mentally ill person writes down 1+1=2, the fact that they are mentally ill does not make them any less correct. Being mentally ill may or may not affect the probability that a person will write something correct, but that has nothing to do with the actual correctness of what is ultimately produced. Attempting to disprove what was in the letter by pointing to the author's mental illness is just you being intellectually lazy. You might as well have used his physical height or eye color. These attributes are equally valuable in disproving the correctness of ideas.

<comment><USER16> _You might as well have used his physical height or eye color. These attributes are equally valuable in disproving the correctness of ideas._

No they are not. I'm sorry but your argument is simply stupid and wrong. This is written language, not maths, ideas and thoughts have more dimensions than 'correctness'. If someone mentally ill, there is a higher chance what they write is not reflective of reality. And I wasn't attempting to 'disprove' anything in the letter using his mental illness. The letter is obviously overblown and inaccurate on its face. The guy hadn't even seen the movie! Why was he writing such weird letters? Well, I don't know it for a fact but it seems reasonable to conclude it's because he was mentally ill, not because his eyes were brown. The mental health of the author is a useful piece of information when evaluating a piece of writing. Saying that it isn't is bonkers.

<comment><USER12> _I'm sorry but your argument is simply stupid and wrong._

Well spoken. You're eloquence is overwhelming.

 _If someone mentally ill, there is a higher chance what they write is not reflective of reality._

I acknowledged that possibility in my previous reply. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I wont discuss that here.

 _I wasn't attempting to 'disprove' anything in the letter using his mental illness._

Whether you intended to or not, you used his mental illness as a piece of evidence. Your intent doesn't really factor in to the meaning your words convey.

 _The letter is obviously overblown and inaccurate on its face. The guy hadn't even seen the movie!_

This is a valid piece of evidence and the correct way to argue that a piece of writing is incorrect.

 _The mental health of the author is a useful piece of information when evaluating [the correctness] a piece of writing. Saying that it isn't is bonkers._

Saying that is very, very wrong. Once upon a time we claimed the author's gender and skin color were "useful" pieces of information when evaluating the correctness of the writing of women and black people. This was used as an excuse to not publish the work of these disadvantaged groups. Why do you think we have double blind submissions to scientific journals? The correct and _only_ way to evaluate the correctness of a piece of writing in on the words alone.

My stance is not a controversial one, it is an accepted fact. When correctness is the primary concern, only the writing is examined. Information about the author can be used as a filter (example: submitting an OpEd to the NYTimes), but never as a factor in determining correctness. I've done my best to convince you, but if I have failed at this point we're both just wasting time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Elsewhere on the site:

<http://www.philipkdick.com/films_bladerunner.html>

Bladerunner is a favorite movie of mine, I must have watched it 10 times or more over the years. From the soundtrack (Vangelis) to the pre-CG visuals it's really impressive, it also realistically captures the mood of a possible near- future.

After all these years I _still_ haven't gotten around to reading the book, but that's just got bumped up quite a bit on the todo list.

It's funny how the photography enhancement scene from Bladerunner is replicated in many movies later in time but never quite with the same feeling of it being possible.

Is this part of the test ?

</comment><comment><USER20> Funny. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is one of the cases for me when book is way better than movie. I literally feel asleep on Blade Runner. Twice. Then again maybe I was too young then to even watch this.

I think I should try and watch Blade Runner again.

<comment><USER21> Please do try! I have original VHS versions of both the theatrical release (hard to find!) and subsequent director's cut which became the mainstream. Now you can find them all on DVD. I recommend watching the director's cut, then the original theatrical release. Changes aside from the voice over are really subtle, but important! If you want to go for completeness, watch the final cut as well.

Maybe I'm just a hardcore fan, but I did that with my girlfriend while explaining all the differences and she really liked it.

<comment><USER22> _"... I have original VHS versions of both the theatrical release (hard to find!) and subsequent director's cut which became the mainstream. Now you can find them all on DVD. I recommend watching the director's cut, then the original theatrical release. ..."_

The directors cut is underwhelming. I only just noticed the latest release with not 2 but 5 versions on DVD. I had the chance to see the original version when it came out. It really did change the way SF was portrayed on film. Gone was the shiny white, clean environments of say BG or ST. Guess I'll have to ask Syd Mead which is his favourite release when he's in town ~ [https://www.alumni.rmit.edu.au/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid...](https://www.alumni.rmit.edu.au/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid=1093)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How rare for an author whose works inspired a movie to approve of the final product! Here's to futurism!

</comment><comment><USER24> How prescient!

Coincidently "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" was the last fiction I read (a couple of years ago).

</comment><comment><USER25> I wish Phil would have come out and said whether he liked it or not, sheesh! ;)

</comment><comment><USER26> You really have some nice toys here.

</comment><comment><USER27> All I can say is.... is: Yes.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow. I know that Hollywood folk have this stereotype of overrating their own importance in the world, but wow. This is really over the top.

I have no idea who this person is, but I assume he had something to do with the film. If that's the case, I just can't imagine how he could say those things with a straight face. Does he really take himself that seriously?

It was a movie.

<comment><USER29> Either you are too young to know about him or you are not into sci-fi.

Both are not your fault. But perhaps you should do some research about who he was before you choose to have an opinion about him.

<comment><USER28> I'm 38 and am indeed quite into sci-fi. I saw Blade Runner in the theater in 1982. None of that has any bearing on whether that guy is up himself.

I prefer to read things I see here without any context or preconceptions. I'll often get to the bottom of an article or all the way back to the comments here before I discover it was written by somebody I'm familiar with. I thinks that's helpful because it keeps your mind free of bias while you're soaking up what's written on the page.

I'd suggest reading the letter again without any preconceptions and see if it seems a bit self-important.

<comment><USER30> > I'm 38 and am indeed quite into sci-fi.

Apparently not as much as you think if you don't know who PKD is.

<comment><USER28> Ah, but Powells' sci-fi section is 4 ailes, 30 feet long by ten feet high, both sides. One author can only take up so much space.

Speaking of which, Powells itself is a full city block, 3 stories high, with a Technical Books annex filling another half block. I'm reading as fast as I can, but you'll have to cut me a bit of slack for not getting around to this particular author yet.

Any suggestions for a title I should start with?

<comment><USER31> _Ah, but Powells' sci-fi section is 4 ailes, 30 feet long by ten feet high, both sides. One author can only take up so much space._

Go for quality, not quantity. Remember, 90% of everything is crap ... and I hope that you get that reference.

<comment><USER32> So perhaps he should start with "Venus Plus X" by Sturgeon...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Netflix Achievements (A Design Suggestion) - <AUTHOR> http://philosophistry.com/archives/2010/07/netflix-achievements.html

<comment><USER2> I wonder if it's a beneficial thing to add extrinsic motivation to view a work of art. Shouldn't most of the value come from the work itself?

I imagine some people thinking: "This show sucks, but if I watch 3 more seasons I can get the badge like all my friends." Then the notion of Netflix could shift from highly individualized recommendations to novel social game to lowest common denominator social chore.

<comment><USER3> On a personal perspective, the achievements feel more like a fun "to-do" list. I often don't know what movie to watch, and having a list to go through and check stuff off of (aka, "Oscar Winners in 2010") would give more direction on what to watch next.

<comment><USER4> No affiliation, but <http://www.icheckmovies.com/> is based around a similar concept.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great. I created the achievements mock-up article primarily because I was excited about tracking my National Film Registry movies. And this site has that! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have there been any successful applications of the "achievements" model outside actual video games? People talk about it a lot, I don't think I've ever seen it done.

I also don't think my life needs any more pointless random goals set by somebody else. I have enough pointless and random goals of my own.

<comment><USER6> Works pretty well on StackOverflow. And credit card rewards/miles/etc are _kind of_ like achievements.

<comment><USER7> Not really - credit card rewards/miles offer a _real_ reward for doing something, achievements in the way Xbox does it (and everyone copies thoughtlessly) does not. I can exchange my points for something of tangible value to me - I doubt people would care about credit card points if they were purely for shits and giggles.

Achievements are fascinating, and MS certainly has pulled it off admirably. But whenever I hear of a web startup doing achievements and other game mechanics, I can't help but feel that it often is simply trying to mask the fact that their service offers insufficient value to their user, and they have to inject "socialness" to make it more attractive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Netflix's discontinuation of the friends feature, following the discontinuation of multiple queues, has pretty much proven them more feature- averse than Apple. Could this be done by a third party through the API, though?

<comment><USER9> As far as I know, after the backlash following the announcement of the planned discontinuation of multiple queues, they backed out and left them in place.

At least, my wife and I still have our separate queues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a cool idea for Rails Rumble this fall. Hmm...

</comment><comment><USER11> I recently wrote about the psychological elements behind fun game/webapp design, elaborating on a very cool UX presentation:

[http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/why-games-are-fun-the- psy...](http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/why-games-are-fun-the-psychology- explanation/)</comment>


Trump Hints at Plan to Create 'Space Force' as Sixth Military Branch - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2018/05/21/613017475/trump-hints-at-plan-to-create-space-force-as-sixth-military-branch <comment><USER2> It's really just a matter of time, right? Makes me wonder what will happen when a private company starts inhabiting another planet, such as spacex and Mars. Will it be labeled a colony of the United States? How soon until it will need defense of its own?

And how long until that colony doesn't feel so attached to the United States anymore? What does an interplanetary revolutionary war look like? Two space forces having it out, what a sight that will be.</comment>


What is randomness? Nobody knows.. - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/04/19/random-is-as-random-does/ <comment><USER2> I think there is very good, and at the same time _trivial_ , definition of how much random something is.

Given any source of data, you define randomness the inverse of the ability of somebody observing the output sequence to guess what the next item will be.

For instance in a stream of random bytes the observer will not be able to guess with more probability than 1/256 what the next byte will be, but if the sequence is "ffaaffaaffaa..." it will be trivial.

Note that this covers a lot of interesting things, for instance PI has a random-looking distribution of digits, but is not random, because from the sequence it will be easy to predict, the observer will see it is PI and will predict the next digits with 100% accuracy.

Actually in this reasoning there is an "observer" that is the one that will try to come up with a model to improve the probability to guess the next item, but still I think it's an interesting way to define randomness, a lot more intuitive than talking about models.

<comment><USER3> Hi, Salvatore, Read [http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Nassim-Nicholas- Taleb/dp/14...](http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Nassim-Nicholas- Taleb/dp/1400063515) this book, Nassim discover and explore for most of people the true meaning of randomness, and actually he show useless of "Mathematical true randomness" in real life. Highly recommend this book. And Yep, u are absolutely right, the random effect, is totally depends on how to look at it.

<comment><USER2> Thank you! I'll buy the book, it's a truly interesting subject :)

<comment><USER3> Yep, exactly! Especially u can look on more common topic like success, and part of probability in it.

And sorry, they already have a second edition: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081297381X/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081297381X/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=1278548962&pf_rd_s=lpo- top- stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=1587990717&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=125E5S0W9G3MNNTVP7DP) ,

after this book, i highly recommend read his another book: fooled by randomness

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The right question isn't "is this system random?" but rather "is it useful to model this system as random?"_

I couldn't agree more on this. As George E.P. Box put it, "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful".

</comment><comment><USER5> I love when financial types talk about a "20% chance" of X happening (like earnings miss, default, etc) If you are familiar with the postulates of probability, you realize that they are talking out of their butts, and are trying to sound oh-so-precise-and-mathematical.

Much of the financial world is about the appearance of quantitative thinking and not actual quantitative thinking.

<comment><USER6> It is better to be wrong than to be vague. --Freeman Dyson

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think one of the most widely accepted definitions of randomness in mathematics was given by Martin-Löf.

Basically it says that a process is random iff it doesn't exhibit any _atypical_ property that you can test with an algorithm.

In other words: if there is no computable way of proving that it's not random, then it is random.

<comment><USER8> How does this not trivially exclude everything (the first definition, not the circular restatement)? Considering that, say, a sequence of coin flips either has the property of "beginning with heads" or "beginning with tails," it certainly appears to.

<comment><USER7> My bad, I was being too vague - sorry for that.

I meant "any atypical property" instead of "any property".

An "atypical property" being a property that _almost no sequence_ has, i.e the set of sequences which exhibit this propery is a measure-zero set.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Randomness should be a function of both a numeric series and an agent. It should measure the ability of a given agent to predict the next element in the series.

</comment><comment><USER10> Good article. I liked the points made, especially the comparison to continuous variables.

The argument about "true" randomness versus psuedo-randomness is very interesting. As the dilbert comment posted elsewhere points out, it's impossible to really know how "random" something is, because if it matches your expectations, then it isn't.

So it's hard even to compare "true" random number generators and psuedo-ones. You might even argue that PRNGs are better in some cases because you can make provable statements about the distribution of their output. (Of course, those statements might depend on the seed being "random"....)

Anyway, I guess the takeaway is that, as the author says, randomness is poorly understood; instead, we can only make statements about random numbers and probabilities and do our best to reconcile those with what we have to work with in real life. This seems like poor comfort to academics who rely on some formal notion of randomness that is unachievable, but on the other hand randomness seems to always work "well enough" in practice.....

</comment><comment><USER11> I tend to think of randomness as a quantitative measurement of our ignorance of the world.

</comment><comment><USER12> Randomness has at least one property... It can't be compressed.

That is, it has no pattern.

<comment><USER13> Sometimes randomness spits out what we call patterns. 123456 seems like a pattern to us, and our beloved compression algos we wrote. But 123456 is just as random as any combo. I think. Right?

Related thinking, Sean Carroll on TED- Arrow of Time <http://y2u.be/WMaTyg8wR4Y> He says there's 'more' or 'less' entropy, but is there _really_ such a thing? Rolling 6666666 on a dice, and we scream luck! But rolling 3164536 should be just as likely/unlikely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Randomness is an equal chance that one of a number of events occur. Is he arguing that we do not know what randomness is? Or that we have not found anything truly random?

<comment><USER15> No. There are plenty of random variables without non-uniform distributions. Plus an event in probability theory is not what you think it is. An event can be any subset of the sample space.

<comment><USER16> The behaviour that dice and spinners and coins are trying to emulate is precisely what dsthysd said. In each case you hope that the faces of the die, sections of the spinner, and sides of the coin are equally likely each time.

I don't think I'm being unrealistic, how can learning more about probability theory change the conventional definition of random?

Isn't the real difficulty in trying to make a non-deterministic system out of a computer, since all we ever do with computers is feed instructions into them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's how science works. If you keep asking why & digging deeper, you eventually reach something that hasn't been "explained" in terms of something else.

</comment><comment><USER18> nothing is really random in an absolute way, when we have stuff that is very complex or hard to compute and we can't figure out what it is we call it random

<comment><USER19> Well, maybe quantum indeterminacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me of the question of consciousness.

<comment><USER21> they are related, what is free will?

<comment><USER22> You could be conscious and live under the illusion of free will...

That's unlikely, though. See <http://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf>

<comment><USER20> I keep reading that sentence. I guess I had no choice in the matter. What is free will?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Relevant xkcd: <http://xkcd.com/221/>

</comment><comment><USER24> Reminds me of the delbert comic: <http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/></comment>


How Bitcoin made right-wing conspiracy theories mainstream - <AUTHOR> https://www.salon.com/2018/06/08/how-bitcoin-made-right-wing-conspiracy-theories-mainstream/ <comment><USER2> If you actually read this article in full, it seems quite inane to me.

>Now you have actual Nazi groups being in favor of Bitcoin. Weev, one of the biggest Nazi leaders worldwide is into it. There's a great Twitter account that tracks Weev's Bitcoin wallet, every transaction coming out of it, along with those of some other neo-Nazis.

It doesn't seem important that someone you dislike, nazi or not, uses a currency. Many of the world's worst criminals and killers use the US dollar. It doesn't matter.

>that "the world will ultimately have a single currency," which to me is a conspiratorial belief.

It doesn't have to be Bitcoin. I don't think anyone important seriously thinks Bitcoin in its current state can be a world currency. But you might be surprised what happens in the next few decades or 100 years from now as far as a world currency goes.

>There is at least a hint there of "illegitimate/parasitic profit takers interfering with an otherwise-honest transaction," which is a classic form of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

At this point I don't think this article is worth taking seriously. I'm not sure how you can read lines like this that imply rent-seeking is an "anti- semitic conspiracy theory" and continue on thinking this article is worth your time. Even if other points of the article are better than this, I still expect better content on HN

</comment><comment><USER3> If this wasn't PR for a book, I'd think it was a satire of how someone on the left, who hates Bitcoin, would describe it.</comment>