The Terrifying Power of Internet Censors - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/cloudflare-daily-stormer-charlottesville.html <comment><USER2> Two questions for everyone:

1.What do you think are the chances of Nazi's taking over the United States?

2\. What do you think are the chances of the US government using its power and influence to label and suppress opposition?

I think the answers to these questions pretty much determine where you stand. If you think there is a real chance that Nazi's will take over the United States, then any means of opposition is justified, and censorship is a fair price to pay to keep this evil from happening. If you think that there is pretty much zero chance that Nazi's will take over the United States, but that government has a tendency to suppress dissent, then censoring Nazi's(who you think pretty much have no chance of coming to power and making their evil ideology anything more than words) is just opening the door and setting a precedent of suppressing ideas and will likely be used to suppress other less evil (or even good) ideas.

<comment><USER3> Republicans of course know that George W. Bush was hitler, McCain was Hitler, Romney was Hitler, and Trump- you know the joke by now.

"Call them Nazis" is a pretty standard tactic in the left wing arsenal.

Bush: [http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/jan/5/20040105-1145...](http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/jan/5/20040105-114507-1007r/)

McCain: [http://www.mtv.com/news/1593432/madonna-compares-john- mccain...](http://www.mtv.com/news/1593432/madonna-compares-john-mccain-to- hitler-at-tour-opener-campaign-calls-slam-outrageous/)

Romney: [http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- room/news/247789-romn...](http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- room/news/247789-romney-campaign-tells-obama-to-rein-in-his-supporters-on- nazi-comments)

It's kind of a shame that Democrats have trivialized the Holocaust into a political punchline. But you can see the 'concerns' on the left if these 'nazis' get into power. It drives their rationalization for these kind of censorship actions and the tech companies are just taking advantage of an opportunity.

<comment><USER4> Not sure if you actually think this is only one side doing this, but just substitute "hitler" for "communist" from the right, with the same fears and motivations.

There's no excusing either, but let's discuss this with some intellectual honesty.

<comment><USER3> Communists don't get banned from the internet so far- nazis do.

<comment><USER5> You can absolutely get banned from right-wing forums for being even slightly liberal (aka "communist").

You only have to look at The_Donald to see this in action everyday.

<comment><USER6> GP mentioned being banned _from the internet_ , not from a forum.

Name a single Communist who got their domain name permanently clientHolded by every Registrar attempted, or their Hosting, DNS, DDoS mitigation services denied by every provider attempted.

Reality is that Communists don't face anywhere near as much platform denial or employment insecurity as Fascists do. Not even close, despite the significantly more horrific body count of Communists in the 20th century.

<comment><USER5> In the West, communists don't have to worry about being banned from the internet because, at least to my knowledge, they don't believe in racial supremacy and support systemic extermination of other races. Unlike, you know, Nazis.

It is interesting you bring up the higher body count of Communists in the 20th century. The only reason Nazis didn't get to exterminate more people is because America entered the war and the Allies won as a result. Make no mistake though: if Germany had won, Hitler would have moved on to people of other races. After all, he believed the Aryan race to be far superior to others, including non-German whites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd say it's more sad than terrifying. Terror implies immediate danger, most people will not feel the danger that shutting down of a Nazi website should entail. Most people are not Nazis.

The value of an online community exists within participation from those that visit the website. Anyone that visits can explore the ideology from the perspective of those that believe in it, which is an invaluable tool for education.

What happened in Charlottesville was a moment in american history, no matter which side you fall on. What google, godaddy, and cloudflare are doing is (understandably) limiting community engagement on extremist websites. However by doing that it is also restricting those that want to understand who-what- where-when-why-how from accessing the conversations that occurred, and obviously, they did indeed occur. Now, anybody that wants to explore both sides of the event has to do so by navigating a barrage of news articles which loosely throws around the term "nazi", and a smaller subset of opinion articles which view it as a censorship issue.

It makes the stance of anti-censorship & anti-nazi an impossibly difficult stance to take because these two issues are being viewed as two sides of the same issue. This is not conducive to a proactive internet culture. For the first time in history we have the opportunity to explore opposing political/race ideologies from inception to protest, and instead of using it to learn about human nature and group think, companies are hitting a mute button to win a popularity contest with investors.

<comment><USER8> That's great until the mob with torches are outside your door calling for your blood. Intolerance will _always_ win if you insist on every issue being a "both sides" debate. It's the same as trying to argue with a creationist, antivaxer or flat earther; there cannot be a reasonable discussion if one or more sides have no facts to stand on (master race bollux was bad science back in the 1920s and hasn't gotten better).

No one is loosely throwing around the term Nazi, these groups self identify as American nazis, carry fucking nazi flags, are on video chanting "jews will not replace us". Also these groups aren't new; they've been around for years technology has just amplified their voice. You don't need The Daily Stormer and its ilk to come to an informed decision on "are Nazis bad" just open a history book.

There's a valuable discussion to be had about whether it makes sense for the internet to not be a public run utility (and thus subject to full 1st amendment protections). But so long as we're leaning on the free market to sort things out, you're on the wrong side of history if Nazis are the cause you want to defend.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like you're okay with society censoring the websites of Nazis, yes? Care to clarify who gets to decide who is and isn't a Nazi?

This is not rhetorical. In my experience, a lot of people agree with "It's okay to censor Nazis" but virtually no one agrees with "It's okay to censor people that ____ disapproves of", _regardless_ of what fills the blank.

I guess I'd say I'm against censorship not because there's no speech bad enough to censor, but because there's no one trustworthy enough to do the censoring.

<comment><USER10> > _Care to clarify who gets to decide who is and isn 't a Nazi?_

Given the strict definition of "waving swastikas and advocating for violence against Jews" works in the scenario at hand, I'm not yet terrifically concerned about over-reach.

<comment><USER9> > waving swastikas

The only reason people wear swastikas in America is _because_ of the strong free-speech protection that this thread is discussing the erosion of. If we banned swastikas (like Germany) then people would stop wearing them (like Germany), but we'd still have the same hate speech you're discussing censoring.

> advocating for violence against Jews

That's a pretty broad standard. If a politician supports evicting Israelis from disputed settlements in the West Bank, is that "advocating violence against Jews?" The answer "Yes according to some people, No according to others." So again, I ask: who are you trusting to decide? President Trump? Congress? You personally? To be clear, the offer currently on the table is "some middle-managers at Cloudfare, as directed by the fickle hand of social media."

<comment><USER10> > _If a politician supports evicting Israelis from disputed settlements in the > West Bank, is that "advocating violence against Jews?"_

Someone chanting "death to Jews" and waving Nazi flags leaves little unambiguous. I'm usually a slippery slope fanatic when it comes to free speech, and I still am as it relates to First Amendment concerns, but private companies choosing not to do business with people who self identify as Nazis, wave Nazi flags and chant "death to Jews" while saying that employees of said companies are _also_ Nazis is pretty clearly their right. Courts aren't computers and the law isn't code; judges can understand "they are Nazis."

<comment><USER9> You're answering the question "Is it okay to censor stuff that's super-duper bad", which no one is asking. The question at hand is who gets to distinguish bad-enough-to-ban from the not-bad-enough-to-ban. That you've replied twice without answering suggests, I think, that there's not an easy answer. Not that there's any shame in that! The founders couldn't come up with a good answer either. The first amendment essentially says, "Restricting speech is so difficult to get right that we don't trust Congress to do it."

Meanwhile, the point this article is making is that (in practice, if not in law) the _current_ answer to the question of who decides what to censor is "middle managers at network infrastructure companies, based on what their social media departments suspect might hurt their brand." If you think that's an acceptable answer, great, but I don't think you can go on thinking of yourself as a "slippery slope fanatic when it comes to free speech" in that case.

<comment><USER11> But you're saying that we should just ignore the examples of super-duper-bad speech because of the difficulty of deciding where the line is. And that is a really hard problem, but it doesn't take away from the fact that people are engaging in super-duper bad stuff like calling for genocide and plotting and committing political murders.

<comment><USER12> Yes, and maybe allowing that would be less bad than allowing censorship to creep its way into acceptability.

<comment><USER11> I'd like you to expand on this. I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of a chilling effect, and can understand how accepting the open advocacy of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or terrorism would negatively impact the freedom of those who are intended to be on the receiving end of such policies.

How many or how detailed must threats against others' wellbeing become before you consider them unacceptable?

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

<comment><USER13> Threats of violence are already illegal. If speech crosses into threat/violence, we should punish that vigorously so as to deter further violence and to assure would-be victims. In fact, this is already policy and it's working out pretty well; Nazism lags even Islamic terrorism (at least in the US) in deaths. Surely if we tell people not to worry about Islamic terrorism, no one should be chilled by Nazism. The fear isn't rational; it's only propped up by leftist FUD (as fear of terrorists was largely propped up by the right in the aughts).

<comment><USER11> Strange, I haven't heard of anyone being arrested for promoting genocide yet, why not? Your comparison with Islamic terrorism is a red herring since we don't have Islamists holding public rallies demanding we impose Sharia law.

<comment><USER13> > Strange, I haven't heard of anyone being arrested for promoting genocide > yet, why not?

We weren't talking about promoting genocide, but about threatening and committing violence. If you can't debate with integrity, I'm not interested.

<comment><USER11> Yes we were, as anyone can confirm by reading back up the thread. Impugning my integrity because the topic of conversation makes you uncomfortable seems like a you problem.

You chose to answer a question that had been addressed to someone else, which you're welcome to do, but it doesn't give you ownership of the conversation as you seem to imagine.

<comment><USER13> > as anyone can confirm by reading back up the thread

I said "Threats of violence are already illegal.", to which you responded, "Strange, I haven't heard of anyone being arrested for promoting genocide yet".

> Impugning my integrity because the topic of conversation makes you > uncomfortable seems like a you problem.

Ha! If I had any doubt about your integrity, I certainly don't now. Feel free to keep trolling, but you'll just be shouting into the void; I'm blocking this thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article has some good points. But I think it's interesting to notice that there are certain kinds of information that even we here in the US, and other liberal countries, censor (and have more or less always censored) without a moment's consideration. Take child porn, for example. So that blows a hole in the idea that there's no clear line somewhere. I wonder, then, why are ideas like Nazism, with its close historical proximity to genocide and the death of millions (arguably much more repugnant than pictures of naked children), somehow given more consideration than something like child porn?

<comment><USER15> Easy answer to your question -- do a quick google search for NAMBLA

We don't censor the _opinion_ that people should be able to have sex with children.

There is a very clear line and it's called the First Amendment.

We censor child porn because it is a crime that involves a victim.

The Daily Stormer was all talk.

Once you start talking about censoring people who _might_ cause people to commit crimes, you've crossed a philosophical boundary into policing thought crimes.

<comment><USER16> For what has to be the billionth time: when a company stops you from posting hate speech on their platform, your first amendment rights have not been violated.

<comment><USER17> No, but your fundamental human rights, as recognized by the UN, have been.

[http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human- rights/](http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/)

Article 19

<comment><USER18> " _Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers._ "

I assume you'll be filing suit against _Der Spiegel,_ _Le Monde,_ and _The Economist_ for failing to publish your articles?

Seriously, I would bet that "impart information and ideas through any media" doesn't mean that you have the right to use others' equipment, venue, and name.

<comment><USER19> Except for maybe when you paid for such access beforehand?

<comment><USER20> Just because you pay for something, doesn't mean I have to continue to sell it to you.

Now - if the Daily Stormer paid for services, and wasn't refunded their money after their access was pulled, that's one thing.

But if the money was returned to them, and they were told "We won't sell you this service any longer, because you have violated our terms of service" \- then the company offering the services are free and clear to do that.

If the DS wants to continue broadcasting their speech, they are welcome to set up their peering services, dns providers, and DDOS prevention and CDN services themselves. And, if someone violates their terms of service, they are just as free to stop providing services to them.

But companies aren't required to give someone a bullhorn to amplify their voice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So the real problem here is the monopoly/oligopoly.

Usually, a monopolist has more restrictions in what it can do than a healthy market business. Should a monopolist be allowed to not serve a customer because of an ethics difference? (assuming the customer did nothing illegal)

<comment><USER22> Situations like this will help drive a mindset that these and most all ISPs should be regulated as Utilities.

<comment><USER23> You are serious? A IP washing service is by no means a utility. Maybe we can talk about companies that receive a government granted monopoly; certainly we should talk about regulated Title II, but this article claiming that Cloudflair should not choose who they protect is asinine.

Anyone is free to try to go raise the money to create a technology company; just as any technology company should have the freedom of self-expression to not take customers outside of protected classes.

<comment><USER24> The author of the article makes a point about how it's everyone's right to go onto the street and voice your opinion. But if you'll be attacked and silenced any time you do that, so long as you don't hire the local protection, do you still have that right to free speech if the local protection doesn't like you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There are two services that are gateways for small, independent (but prominent / notorious) internet sites:

CloudFlare and Google Project Shield.

These are the two only services that provide affordable DDoS protection, even for 100++Gbps, for $200/month or free.

Tell me another provider like CloudFlare that will protect a blog against a 100Gbps DDoS for $200 a month.

\---

By the way, regulating CloudFlare by limiting its ability to choose customers would be unconstitutional under the 1st amendment, would it not? There are a very specific number of protected classes that private individuals or companies can't discriminate against.

"Do not discriminate against hate speech" is not a class.

<comment><USER26> > hate speech" is not a class.

As a hacker, do you not see that there's a security vulnerability here that's big enough to drive a truck through? You simply _label_ whatever you don't like as hate speech, then you're magically allowed to censor it.

<comment><USER27> Cloudflare can and will censor everything they want without the need for labels

When you subscribe to their service you agree to their terms

The right to be published or served through a gateway is not an universal human right

<comment><USER6> > The right to be published or served through a gateway is not an universal > human right

This is demonstrably not true; it just requires the victim to be a member of a protected class. Private businesses can not legally deny service to ethnic minorities, women, people with disabilities, or gay people.

The law determined many decades ago that some people are more equal than others.

<comment><USER24> > Private businesses can not legally deny service to...

They can deny service to those people. They just can't do it _because_ of their membership in those protected classes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> We can't realistically expect service providers to completely allow free speech until we learn to separate the speech from the service on which it occurs.

Suppose a bunch of Nazis started frequenting Hacker News and dominated every thread with a discussion of Nazism. The site would pretty quickly become known as "that Nazi place" and everyone who's not a Nazi wouldn't want to go there, even if the people running the site don't share the opinions of the people using it.

It's not entirely rational, but if GoDaddy got a reputation as "web hosting for Nazis" that would severely limit their market and hurt their business, so of course they're going to jettison that customer in order to keep all the others.

<comment><USER29> We do have DMCA safe harbor. Is that different from what you're talking about?

<comment><USER28> I'm thinking more of an economic consequence, rather than a legal one. Customers boycott businesses all the time for speech they find distasteful. A newscaster uses a racial slur and advertisers threaten to pull sponsorship until he's fired. A company owner endorses a candidate or cause that customers don't like so they vow never to do business with them again, etc. etc. I personally stopped using GoDaddy years ago because of their stance on SOPA.

So, why couldn't businesses boycott customers for the same? If someone's speech is so odious that nobody wants to be associated with them, even in a remote, business sense, I think that should be allowed as a reasonable consequence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> _it wasn't until Cloudflare, a website security and performance service, dropped the site as a client that The Daily Stormer truly lost its ability to stay online_

Daily Stormer lost its ability to stay online on the clearnet because its registrars kept dropping it. First GoDaddy and Google for .com (or .net) and then national registries when they tried ccTLDs (.al and others).

They did manage to find a replacement for Cloudflare -- BitMitigate.

[https://bitmitigate.com/a-commitment-to- liberty.html](https://bitmitigate.com/a-commitment-to-liberty.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Should we encourage or require companies like google and cloudflare to cater to fringe groups? Ordinarily, a business, especially in the United States, has the freedom to not conduct business with all but a few protected classes. Is being a neo-nazi, or a member of antifa, or of the old Animal Liberation Front now supposed to be a protected class?

If yes, does that mean we also require the bakery down the road to post advertisements for local hate group gatherings? Do we want to commit to taking away a business's freedom of association?

If a Nazi walks into the coffee shop I'm at and starts trying to rally people around the their ideology, I'm going to do one of two things, either leave or attempt to talk the nazis down, and when that (typically) doesn't work, also leave. If the Nazi comes back every day and does the same, it can reasonably affect that coffee shop's business. Does the coffee shop not have the freedom to kick the Nazis out?

<comment><USER32> If you think of internet communication as a utility, then perhaps we should? Would you think it's OK for an electricity or a water company to decide who it wants to serve based off that company's fallible determination of an individual or group's beliefs?

I think if only because communication is such a basic human right, then we shouldn't risk the 'false guilty verdicts'.

If you think about it - giving a business the right to cut off customers decreases the chance of guilty people being empowered and skating by without punishment (which is awesome!), but increases the chance of innocent people being victimized through a 'false conviction'.

I'd argue that for very fundamental services, it's not the job of the business to try to play judge and jury and determine who is right and who is wrong, if only because the risk of an innocent party (like a false conviction putting an innocent person behind bars in the legal system) is so high stakes.

<comment><USER31> So since food and water are also basic human rights, should we disallow Walmart from turning away Nazis? If I was a jewish business owner, why shouldn't I have a right to turn away someone advocating for my death? At that point isn't it just self defense?

<comment><USER33> You do not need to announce your political ideology to do business with Walmart, etc. Walmart does not collect that info by nature of a normal transaction.

You do need to announce your political ideology to whoever you're buying services from when you're buying services for a website for a politically charged website.

<comment><USER20> > You do need to announce your political ideology to whoever you're buying > services from when you're buying services for a website for a politically > charged website.

Actually, you don't - at least not here in the United States. That said, if the company finds out about your political ideology before they sell the service to you, or after the service has been sold to you, they don't need to sell it to you or continue to sell it to you.

They do need to give you back your money, though, if you have paid for service already (minus whatever you have used).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Maybe this is a pretty good test of the free-market to self-regulate. Most people wouldn't shed a tear for one hate site going down. But if someone else takes the reigns of this company and starts following Twitter or YouTube's example, what would stop another competitor from filling that void and taking the money from jilted sites? As long as it's possible for new services to compete...

<comment><AUTHOR> That already happened with Daily Stormer: [https://www.propublica.org/article/spurned-by-major- companie...](https://www.propublica.org/article/spurned-by-major-companies- the-daily-stormer-returns-to-the-web)

I imagine it might be easier to make some niche profit in Cloudflare's business. Not so sure with Twitter, partly because Twitter itself isn't profitable, but also because the main feature of social media services is their ubiquity and userbase. Even if Voat were decidedly a better site than Reddit, it just wasn't that interesting to revisit a sparsely populated discussion site. Especially one weighted toward folks who wanted to discuss the things that Reddit wanted to ban.

<comment><USER35> > ubiquity and userbase

I'm not so sure about that - I recall having much better experiences when these sites were much smaller. Something about eternal september.

<comment><USER36> It depends on the filtering to get to smaller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Interesting to think about the dichotomy that exists between our country and China when it comes to issues like this. In China, they would just block the content and move on to other things. In the US, because we value every individual's rights, we have to grapple with these tough questions.

I think it's worth these headaches to protect our inalienable rights, but others may disagree. It makes me proud, though, that our country is still willing to take on these issues despite the amount of vitriol from both sides.

<comment><USER38> As frustrating as these topics can be, I think it's much better to have the discussions then to just shut things down a-la-China.

My fear is that this particular case could set a precedence of the "pipe lines" controlling the contents that are passed through. If we allow this to happen in this case, how long until the other bigger pipe lines are allowed to make similar decisions? Is it a slippery slope that leads to Time Warner, Verizon, or AT&T to control what content is allowed to passed through their cell/data networks?

I don't know what the correct course of action is, I just hope that we will continue to debate and weigh options and not turn a blind eye to this kind of thing.

<comment><USER39> >Is it a slippery slope that leads to Time Warner, Verizon, or AT&T to control what content is allowed to passed through their cell/data networks?

It's not a slippery slope. It's rock bottom. Those companies already proposed exactly that sort of thing, a long time ago. They proposed it with copyright enforcement, and they proposed it when they fought against Net Neutrality and common-carrier rules.

They want to control what goes through their pipes. They do not want to be a dumb pipe, they want to rent-seek, they want to play highway robber of the information superhighway. They've told us that. They are proud of that. They believe that is good business.

The question is whether we let ourselves hear it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Google is the most terrifying company today. De-google yourselves as much as you can, folks. This company cannot be trusted.

I know this post will get flagged and deleted because so many google employees post here and flag everything. But it must be said. Do not trust Google.

<comment><USER41> I'll back you on this opinion. I was a huge fan of early Google (98-04). They seemed like a noble, cute, altruistic steward of the Internet, and they did a lot of good. IMO we have to acknowledge that things have changed. The factors that made them succeed wildly, allowed them to grow into a profoundly self- interested, monopolistic behemoth with entirely too much power. They no longer even _appear_ well-intentioned, and we ought to update our expectations accordingly.

<comment><USER42> I'll add another point. Even if you believe, today, that Google is good/noble, it's still best for the market to promote competition. If you allow too much power to concentrate into an oligopoly, the cost to capture the market drops to a level where coercive actors have the capability to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The problem is as follows: a small number of private companies have huge power over the internet.

<comment><USER44> Yes, I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Somewhat relevant: Twitter also just suspended the account of the White House Communications Director, Hope Hicks.

I'd love to see an org like 18F start providing federated FOSS platforms for govt communication like GNU Social.

<comment><USER14> That seems to be the result of a targeted mass-reporting instigated by a group of radical leftists. I wonder if Twitter wouldn't reinstate her account once they realize what happened.

<comment><USER46> Would like to see everyone who flagged Hope have their own account terminated for violating ToS. But will never happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Interesting to see Matthew Prince (Cloudflare CEO) basically _begging_ for regulation of his own business. I think that he wants to be legally forced to serve everyone so that he doesn't have to be accountable to Twitter hordes for doing so, he can just say that it's the law.

</comment><comment><USER43> The problem is that the US government is able to get private companies to do its bidding without being liable to scrutiny from politicans our the courts.

</comment><comment><USER48> Slippery slope arguments like the one in the article are so tiresome. It's perfectly possible to deny service to Nazis without it snowballing into a problem for the rest of society. After all, plenty of nations have had anti- Nazi laws on the books for generations, and they continue to function just fine for the 99.9999% of society that doesn't want to murder me for my religion.

<comment><USER49> But this is the age where everyone you don't like is a Nazi

<comment><USER48> Differentiating hyperbole from actual Nazis is pretty trivial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The success of censorship is measured in how much you don't know about its topics.

</comment><comment><USER51> Seems pretty un-terrifying to me. If you want to read the Stormer, google it, click on the wikipedia page and go to the .onion link with Tor Browser. Nothing's really censored these days.

</comment><comment><USER52> Hate speech is a special category of speech, and is treated as such in the legal systems of many countries ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech)). It has and does lead to violence toward the groups to which the hate speech is directed. The legal system in the USA fails to acknowledge this fact, and one of the consequences is racial violence.

Cloudflare, ISPs, and other companies or non-governmental entities should not be obligated to enable or allow hate speech via the services that they provide. Haters should have to bear the full cost and social consequences of propagating their message.

<comment><USER53> As is evidential within that wikipedia links's first paragraph, there are different definitions of "hate speech," and its difficult to properly regulate. Above that, the US has a long tradition of upholding the liberal values of philosophers John Locke, and John Stuart Mill. And the latter even argues that it is unethical to limit things considered as hate speech. Its not necessarily a failing, it is by design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I was under the impression that CloudFlare removed them not due to their content, but due to the site beginning to act as if CloudFlare was a collaborator or in support of them. If that was the case, it only seems logical they would want to distance themselves from that site and the ongoing drama. We also arent equating the response of their customers. Didn't Godaddy's response generate from a Tweet to them about it? Trust and believe, support tickets were sent to registrars asking for a clear stance on this.

</comment><comment><USER55> My main concern with the web is its mutability. If we had a protocol that considered changes versions, we'd be creating a much saner store of information for future generations.

<comment><USER27> Git+static web sites

It's been my idea for years now

Please don't steal it

<comment><USER56> I think github already has…

<comment><USER27> And Gitlab too

The interest around the idea of immutable web is growing

But it's still an hard tool to manage for regular people

Now we only need a good backend for it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> If a company has the fiduciary duty to make money for its shareholders, can it simultaneously be forced to allow content on its servers that risks its ability to earn profit? These companies are happy to take anyone's money until the glare of bad PR starts to take money from their pockets.

It seems like this kind of "censorship" is exactly the kind the freedom-loving West is looking for. Market-based.

</comment><comment><USER58> There's a lot of arguments under the claim that because you are being censored my a private company rather than the government that you don't have the right to complain about it.

After all, they're private businesses they can do whatever they want, at least I'm not being oppressed by the government!

First of all, there's actually a notable connection between many of these large companies and the US government (or other governments) so they idea that they hold no responsibility in regards to free speech ends up a bit weaker. They're operating under the grace of the government they're under, if the government wants to shut them down it's bad news for them, so they generally want to cooperate and comply with government orders. While they're not being directly operated by the government, they do have to keep them happy.

Secondly, there's pretty much no offline public meeting place left to share ideas, if you get blacklisted from the Internet you have significantly less ability to express your ideas or opinions to be debated, debunked, or proven. What do you have left? Shouting in the middle of Starbucks on a busy afternoon? You're banned on social media, you can't operate your own website without being blasted off of the Internet and even if you did have valid claims nobody would be able to hear them. As a result your ability to exercise your speech has been dramatically diminished, while people you disagree with retain all of their rights because they have "the right ideas".

It's not hard to agree that neo-nazi ideas are unacceptable, inflammatory, and against my ideals and the majority of others, but it's not only their rights that are at risk. If the tables were turned and our idea's of what's right and wrong, moral, and otherwise acceptable were in the minority of opinion people would be extremely concerned about the right of arbitrary companies being able to restrict our ideas.

Ultimately we hope the best ideas can win out, but that's not possible if no alternative ideas are allowed to form. While the current problems may be from a quite arguably minuscule amount of people that are pretty disagreeable today, there's no telling what the future will bring in regards to new ideas which may shake up current social norms. What you use to hurt people you disagree with today, may be used against you tomorrow.

Finally, you can just ignore people and things you don't like. It's not a hard thing to do without censoring someone/something so hard that they get a platform under the reasoning that they're being censored by evil companies or governments. There was nothing forcing me to go to a website that I didn't want to go to, the majority of the sites that got censored would just be ignored or forgotten by the majority of people. Nobody would be talking about these neo-nazi sites outside of a small fringe group of people if it wasn't for efforts to erase them from the Internet for having "the wrong ideas", there's always going to be people looking to get attention and the only way to battle that is to not give them the attention they seek.

People have the right to say things that are incorrect, disgusting, immoral, or otherwise wrong. I have the right to ignore those people. Censorship is not ignoring them, it's acknowledging them to the point of an extreme which you then have to justify with some moral grandstanding about how you saved the world from a problem they weren't having.

</comment><comment><USER59> ITT Nazi hysteria. The only thing between us and the Fourth Reich is Twitter and an intrepid band of internet commenters.</comment>


The other Restaurant Finder - <AUTHOR>

We are two high schoolers who have made something the big G released right at the same time as us (literally a day after). While they have the Android side of things, we are on our third version of our app.<p>What the issue is, we can't figure out how to find or get users. Our app is called Gruburg, www.gruburg.com <comment><USER2> You've got a built-in distribution network in restaurateurs.

Consider some signage that restaurants can post in some high-vis locations telling the customer to review on your app.

Oh and your search box is broken on the main page. And I hope that you have some deals in the works to give your users gift cards.... I hope it's true.</comment>


How Does Java Both Optimize Hot Loops and Allow Debugging - <AUTHOR> http://cliffc.org/blog/2015/02/22/how-does-java-both-optimize-hot-loops-and-allow-debugging/ <comment><USER2> Maybe this is just openjdk8 but my API is ~5 times slower when run with `-Xdebug -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,address=9999,server=y,suspend=y`</comment>


Ask HN: What Happened to GitHub Education Pack? - <AUTHOR>

I am still waiting for my pack (more than a month passed), and i am wondering why? Github sent few template e-mails, thats all.<p>Is this about DigitalOcean? why don't they give the rest of the pack and send the do coupon in future? <comment><USER2> its worth noting that they didn't send me an email with them all. I had to re- navigate to github's page to get the codes and then sign up on the other companie's pages.

</comment><comment><USER2> What are you talking about? I got all of mine as soon as I signed up?</comment>


We're losing the information war - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/uw-professor-the-information-war-is-real-and-were-losing-it/ <comment><USER2> I think it shouldn't be forgotten that all this craze have a much easier time spreading since the western states _did_ spread a lot of lies through the media in the second half of the 20th century.

One example i've actually lived, is when tchernobyl exploded, french media showed maps of the radioactive cloud stopping at the borders (due to winds) and never going in. This was of course a huge lie that e everybody now admits.

Then, we had the false testimonies at the UN of various sorts ( koweitien poor lady in the first gulf war that was in fact a member of the royal family), and colin powell for the second one.

And if i go back in time, JFK is the mother of all conspiracy theory, since no true investigation clearly explained what happened, and so the only explanation we have is the one of a lone crazy guy ( which remains unconvincing to many people).

So, all in all, i would say this trend of systematically questionning the official explanation is a very healthy one. It just needs to become more mature, and maybe be one day a new form of investigative journalism.

<comment><USER3> This is not a "trend of systematically questioning the official explanation". This is blatantly and aggressively pushing out propaganda using conspiracy theories as medium.

This shit won't teach people to critical thinking, it only generates more noise to defend against. People will learn to ignore news even more than they do now. Maybe they build a twitter and facebook spam-filter to help with noise. So we isolate ourselves into bubbles that no new idea can penetrate. Basically, the reverse from systematically questioning the information.

<comment><USER4> Alex Jones is often the person to trot out when you want to discredit the alternative news media. What you then get is exactly the reaction you just got, which is aggressive push-back and a desire to never research the topic yourself.

Because what just happened in your head? You generalized and lumped all alternative news media into a group that is exactly like Alex Jones; far out and kooky.

This is the desired effect.

The fact is there are many good alternative news sources, that go out of their way to try and find out the truth behind the corporate bought out main stream media.

Just because there is one bad apple, does not mean all other news sources are exactly the same.

<comment><USER5> The difference was that investigative journalism used to cough up documents, videos and proofs before running to the presses.

Now it's a string of 'anonymous official' and the new form that tries harder to be legit 'anonymous official heard X person say', with X a famous and readily recognizable character out of government.

At that point is hearsay vs hearsay. Reputable outlets are trashing their reputation and dragging it in the ground in the name of 'faster news' \- but then it's even harder to normal people to tell what's grounded, what's likely, what's a half truth and what's propaganda.

It's far to easy to get position from a crackpot conspiracy theorist and wash them up into a better thought post on a unbranded website, so google searches now dig up as much trash as good posts for many important topics, and because the writing style and source weight is the same (hearsay) it'll be increasingly difficult for people to process.

This is especially true for controversial topics that sit at the edge of personal knowledge. I.e. some day ago I was curios about methane plant total lifecycle impact compared to solar panel disposal or solar concentrator plants, and happened across this article that brings up some interesting points, backs them up with some easily verifiable math and shows a greater complexity to a topic I thought was more straightforward:

[http://energypost.eu/wind-solars-achilles-heel-methane- meltd...](http://energypost.eu/wind-solars-achilles-heel-methane-meltdown- porter-ranch-means-energy-transition/)

and the problem is... I have no idea if anything written in there is actually true. it looks true, it sounds a reasonable and balanced analysis, but for that article there are three stating the contrary, and I have not the instruments for differentiating which is good and which is pushing an agenda, since it's not a clear case of partisanship (like you'd expect from articles pushed from 'the union of conservative scientists')

<comment><USER6> _The difference was that investigative journalism used to cough up documents, videos and proofs before running to the presses._

That's not really the case. The Washington Post didn't have any of that when they published their original Watergate scoop. The story came from an anonymous source (the famous "Deep Throat").

The difference is that traditional investigative journalism has a process for establishing the likely credibility of anonymous sources. For a controversial piece, it ultimately comes down to the author's reputation and the editor-in- chief's judgment: will we bet the credibility of our paper on this story?

So-called alternative media generally don't seem to care. Their writers will absorb from anonymous and second-hand sources without much editorial oversight. If a story is revealed false, they can just ignore or delete it.

The problem is that people now assume that Washington Post and Breitbart operate on similar editorial standards. Superficially they're both news websites with a miserable comment section, so the confusion is understandable in a way...

<comment><USER7> > _The problem is that people now assume that Washington Post and Breitbart > operate on similar editorial standards._

I'm afraid the WaPo have themselves to blame for this. In the early 2000s they (and the NYT, and CNN) bet the credibility of their paper on yellowcake, Curveball, and Bush's 16 Words. And they believed lies because they were being told by people in respectable positions, and they dutifully forwarded them on. When they were proven wrong, they responded with a mix of doubling down; claiming that while they were wrong, no one could have known better; and publishing retractions buried in the back pages.

That doesn't make places like Breitbart credible, but it does make the WaPo (etc) incredible. So alternative/mainstream can absolutely not be the dividing line for judging credibility. You have to judge outlets (and articles) individually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good article. I thought the statement ""The true common denominator, she found, is anti-globalism"" makes a lot of sense.

For those of us who like to maintain national sovernty (thus dislike 'trade' deals) and mistrust globalists, the news media does seem biased.

I am in my 60s, and most of my life I could be considered a slightly conservative democrat, but in the last decade I have embraced a philosophy of 'small is better' and 'distributed is better than centralized.' It was an eye opener for me how much the news media favored Clinton and in general treated Sanders unfairly. Anyway, living through last year really made me believe that the news media is just a tool for the financial elite.

<comment><USER9> A question only intended as such: could you explain what you mean by the word "globalists"? Thanks!

e: I should clarify that I'm not being sarcastic or snarky and am genuinely interested in what "globalists" means -- I've never read it or used it, I am hesitant to look it up because I feel it might not get a fair shake in whatever I read, and was wondering how _this user_ uses it.

<comment><USER10> I'll try to do both sides justice although I'm sure there are people representing either side that could correct me on many aspects...

I think of 'globalist' as being something of a perjorative/having at least a slight negative connotation. It describes a perspective where all humans are part of a global community/family. You could contrast it with 'nationalism' (which has it's own negative connotations--the two sides provide derision against each other) in which nations should be independent and sovereign.

Critics of globalism argue that it centralizes too much control, planning, finances and government, leaving locals with less autonomy. Nationalists are not fans of e.g., the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, etc.

Critics of nationalism argue that international cooperation brings many benefits and that nationalists are merely racist or xenophobic. It's harder to list organizations that globalists are not a fan of because most nations have at least one nationalist movement. Brexit would be a good example in the Anglosphere.

<comment><USER11> Another criticism of globalism is the global labor pool, which is a major problem in the US. People can't unionize when the jobs can be shipped to a country with a lower quality of life. It takes away workers' leverage and guts the middle class.

<comment><USER12> The shame is in the blaming of the 'foreign' workers for this problem. This is a problem fundamental to the idea of exchange value itself. The solution is not to isolate from international reality.

<comment><USER11> > The solution is not to isolate from international reality.

What do you mean by this? If you mean protectionism isn't the answer, then I have to disagree.

Global trade between countries with vastly different economies is simply not fair and continues the policies that keeps the poorer country poor. For example, Mexico has a minimum wage of $0.48/hr, and its citizens have a pretty poor quality of life. When a rich country ships its jobs to the poor country, it facilitates the policies that lead to a poor quality of life for the citizens of the poor country and leads to a race to the bottom to see which country can offer the cheapest labor, all while gutting the middle class of the richer country. Sure, more wealth is created in the process due to capital movement optimization, but what does it matter if that wealth is only given to the capital owners?

I agree that we shouldn't blame foreign workers. It's the fault of the politicians and economists who made global trade between vastly different countries the norm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Its because of things like "russians hacked election" I see people say it and repeat it everywhere and on many news sites.

Now when I look at the evidence with a critical eye based only on facts, what I see is "DNC hacked". Now you may go on to say it may have effected election etc but there is no proof whatsoever that the actual "election" was hacked. Huge distinction to me.

Lot of it boils down to incentive to get clicks. "Russians hack election" will get more clicks than "DNC hacked".

Waits for downvotes from people who believe russians actually hacked the election!

<comment><USER14> Nobody, in any significant numbers, has ever claimed or believed that there were direct manipulations of vote counts. This is a pure strawman. Saying the Russians "hacked the election" is just a sloppy shorthand for the, at this point well-established, attacks on the process that did occur. Nobody is intending it to mean vote-count changes.

<comment><USER15> It's sloppy biased shorthand. How you summarize things has huge consequences to how people think about things. "Hacked the election" makes it seem like the results are illegitimate. Informed people know the difference, but the average person is watching like 5 minutes of a news a day and reads the headlines and maybe the lead.

For a profession that is so cautious it'll throw the world "alleged" before someone who is caught on camera murdering someone, I think it's a pretty big sign of some bias.

I'm sure the right wing bias'd papers have found a term that minimizes the hacking too.

<comment><USER16> I have to ask - if the information presented to the public about the election candidates was false, how can we expect that the public made a reasonably informed choice about those candidates?

Strikes me as a perfectly valid definition of a hack; a social engineering hack, but a hack all the same. We see those all the time in our own life; we call it fraud or failure when it succeeds, and attempt to roll back to a known good state. Why is an election different?

<comment><USER15> Our system has to deal with mistruths because there is no way of filtering out lies. We do this by allowing all opinions and positions to make their case and letting the people decide.

Also, the "hacking" actually exposed true information about the candidate. Which makes this an even harder situation. Is the election illegitimate because the people got to learn MORE, true information?

There is a clear and concise way of stating this. Russia attempted to influence our election.

I don't think redefining releasing information as hacking really helps anyone understand this. Did Entertainment Tonight hack the election by releasing the pussy tape?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There seems to be a lot of people who cannot handle the possibility of the NY Times being wrong enough to be skeptical about. They get very upset and worried about what happens when people loose faith in such institutions. They then delegitimize the distrust others have for traditionally trusted news orgs and reduce people who read alt sources (left or right) to fools.

You can call them idiots all you want but in my adult memory there have been several scandals at the Times that have challenged my trust.

Until you can empathize with someone who reads infowars you're never going to solve the problem of fake news.

<comment><USER18> So let's keep score.

NYT. Wins: too many to count. Losses: 3

I don't quite see your point.

<comment><USER19> I think this is what a lot of people in this thread don't understand. They want a narrative, you're either the good guy or the bad guy.

We all know about the NYTimes' failure in the buildup to the 2003 Iraq War but what about a story like Hoosick Falls where a chemical company had been dumping perfluorooctanoic acid into the drinking water?

I have been reading the paper for decades and I can say that for every Iraq War failure there are hundreds of Hoosick Falls stories that involve important investigative journalism.

The NYTimes makes mistakes but it is a net good to society. There is a current trend in popular culture where if a solution is not perfect then it shouldn't be implemented at all. There will never be an objective media and you should be highly skeptical of any media that claims that as their advantage.

<comment><USER20> The problem is, that many people think the "failure"s were not failures, but plain lying. And so then the newspapers don't make it up for it, if they actually do good journalism on topics where they don't have a hidden agenda. Also, if you believe that, than you also don't know what other failures haven't been uncovered, so you loose trust.

<comment><USER19> Were those failures plain lying? As a person who tried to be critical in both 2003 and in retrospect I'm not so sure about that.

I would encourage you to read the actual papers and the later analysis to come to your own conclusion. The OPEDs leading up to the war are particuarly interesting. If you have a NYTimes membership (I'm sure they have some form of free trial) you can access the "timesmachine" which is great UI they built to navigate archived papers back to the 1800s

There is a lot of rhetoric flying around on both sides today. As in most conflicts I find the reality to be much more nuanced and less clear cut. The temptation to omit details to fit the narrative is in my opinion the only thing you can count on from all media sources.

<comment><USER21> I think [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international- students...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students-us- colleges-trump.html) is plain lying of the most common kind the NYTimes does: selective citing of statistics so you can claim that everything you said is true but you create an impression at odds with reality.

See [http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/one...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/one- real-blooper-cannot-let-pass.html) for more details.

You are of course correct that omitting details to fit the narrative is what's going on here. This particular case is more egregious that most in that "details" is "two out of the three equally important numbers in the study's results".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This lady talks as if false flag state-sponsored terrorism for political purposes does not exist.

As evidence that it most certainly does, I would suggest the work of Dr. Daniele Ganser (University of Basel, Switzerland) on Operation Gladio - NATO- sponsored terrorism in post-WW2 Europe, a notable example of which is the Bologna rail staion massacre, which killed 85.

[https://www.danieleganser.ch/assets/files/Inhalte/Interviews...](https://www.danieleganser.ch/assets/files/Inhalte/Interviews/Zeitungsinterviews/GlobalResearch%20\(2016\)%20-%20NATOs%20Secret%20Armies.pdf)

He also did an interesting lecture on 9/11, examining the evidence on the tenth anniversary: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fUT7XgLiTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fUT7XgLiTY)

</comment><comment> Paul-ish One part of the article caught my attention

> Starbird says she's concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward > "the menace of unreality — which is that nobody believes anything anymore."

I think a cynical and distrustful populace is a threat to effective and functioning national institutions.

As an example, I was talking to someone I worked with who is from Iran about roads and driving. He was telling me that in Iran the roads can be very dangerous, because drivers don't follow the rules of the road, or the rules themselves are inadequate. In fact, Iran is in the top 10 countries for most dangerous roads[1].

I was shocked by what he was saying, surely if so many people were harmed, there should be some public outcry that something so simple as poor traffic policy and enforcement is leading to deaths. Where are the bereaved family members? Everyone benefits from safer roads. This isn't something that would fall across idealogical lines either. This seems cut and dried.

When I asked him why people aren't protesting or demanding change, he laughed and said if there was some sort of mass movement to reduce traffic fatalities, the first thing that would spring to peoples minds would be something along the lines of "What is _really_ behind this movement, who stands to gain politically from this?". It is a degree of distrust and cynicism that leads people to organize into the smallest family units, because they don't trust any larger institution.

I think the United States could end up down this path as well, where we are all so cynical that we withdraw our participation and input from the larger institutions. Rather than try to improve a flawed system we would rather say "It only looks out for itself, so I will look out for myself."

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/06/07...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/06/07/a-map- of-the-countries-with-the-most-dangerous-roads/)

</comment><comment><USER23> One thing I kind of wonder is why is there an expectation that the political game at large is supposed to be interpretable or legible? In other words, why shouldn't politics be strange? In most adversarial games we're bound to encounter sabotage and misinformation, with circumstantial evidence being the only kind you can encounter.

So full out dismissal of conspiracies just because they "seem like tin-foil hat stuff" seems naive. It's hard work to dismiss bullshit but equivocally easy to dismiss what might otherwise be viable paths of inquiry. It is possible to take a rational approach.

[http://www.collativelearning.com/conspiracy%20theories%20-%2...](http://www.collativelearning.com/conspiracy%20theories%20-%20chapter%208.html)

<comment><USER24> I think most people just don't know that the political game is a strategical, competitive game. Most people believe the common narrative that politics is the service(!) that should make your life comfortable on a city-wide, country- wide and global level which you pay for with taxes. E.g., $10/month to netflix for that I can watch tv shows. $400/month to government for that I don't get robbed by barbarian hordes from other countries.

It's not the smartest point of view, but it's very common.

<comment><USER25> > It's not the smartest point of view, but it's very common.

And the opposite view, that the government is an evil entity lurking in the shadows, out to get you and your family is smarter? Amusing.

<comment><USER24> That's not the opposite view. The contesting view I support is that the government is a group of struggling humans playing game of thrones with each other (but mostly without the killing, firing is enough).

E.g. the change of mind of Erdogan (a very common topic in European media these days). Coming from the taxes-for-political-service point of view, one would argue that Erdogan has become a really bad leader, killing and firing many of his people and fighting against the EU who is publicly acting like the big supporter of human rights. From the game of thrones point of view though it looks like he's struggling for years to get support from the EU, but they don't really support him. Now he seems to get support from Russia and maybe even China, so he decides to make EU the big enemy because that gains him favor with his people and strengthens his ties to Russia. From that point of view it's suddenly a very logical, maybe even smart move. One might even argue that he doesn't have another chance and if he wouldn't do it, he would end up losing his job, dead, or in jail and being replaced by another who is more willing to play good boy for the Russians.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "News at 11: Humanities professor shocked to discover many people disagree with mainstream academic & globalist groupthink"

(and no, I don't think social science is a real science)

You don't need to study this stuff professionally to see what's going on here.

1) Trust in institutions has been falling steadily for a long time. That's because modern institutions are not trustworthy. Vast conspiracies were posited, laughed off as tin-foil-hattery, and later exposed as true (Snowden being the canonical example). Large federal governments like the US Federal Govt and the EU became more and more opaque, with ever larger and more byzantine bureaucracies and regulatory frameworks that seemed to create a game of tails we win, heads you lose. Judges interpret the law to suit their political preferences, not what a plain reading or common sense would seem to imply. And so on.

2) Whilst trust in institutions has been falling steadily for a long time, trust in the mainstream media has collapsed dramatically in relatively recent times. This too is fully deserved: people don't trust the traditional news outlets (in the USA) because they lie a lot and are nakedly biased. The difficulty of finding any national newspapers that supported Trump and the practice of outlets that had never declared before in their history declaring for the 100% globalist/liberal-elite-style Clinton, summed this phenomenon up. The subsequent artificial mass hysteria over Russia and the (dubious at best) Russian "hacking" of the election reinforced this idea: the media is as locked in a form of groupthink as Washington itself is.

You can't repeatedly teach people that there are no reliable sources of information, and that conspiracy theories are sometimes real, and then act surprised when large numbers of people start seeking out alternative sources of information that more frequently support conspiracy theories.

<comment><USER27> Trust in the mainstream media has only collapsed among a single group: the right-wing[1]. This is where your "it's just desserts" narrative falls apart. Study after study [2] shows that while the mainstream media is still popular and widespread among the majority, the right-wing have literally gone off and formed their own media-sphere.

And while there's no doubt that the media has engaged in deliberate propaganda -- though Snowden has nothing to do with this, the canonical example is actually Iraq -- it's highly doubtful that people are turning to InfoWars because they no longer trust the New York Times to give them verified, well- sourced, non-partisan reasonable facts and interpreting. That doesn't actually make any sense at all under even cursory analysis.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/as-hyper-conservative- medi...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/as-hyper-conservative-media-surged- republicans-trust-in-news-cratered/)

[2] [http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard- st...](http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php)

<comment><USER28> Trust in the media is also extremely low among those voting for independents, and only half decent among Democrats:

[http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass- media...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks- new-low.aspx)

If 51% trust in the media is seen as 'good' for the left wing, then standards have really fallen.

<comment><USER29> Apologies if I'm out of order but is there a particular reason why therpe1's posts are being marked [dead]? [dead] posts are difficult to read )in my browser at least).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > The mainstream press periodically waded into this swamp, but it only > backfired. Its occasional fact checks got circulated as further evidence: If > the media is trying to debunk it, then the conspiracy must be true.

To what extent, then, is fake news culpable? If people are hell-bent on rebuffing the facts, how significant of an effect could targeting fake news websites have? I have seen similar thing happen in India, particularly forums with right-wing majority. Anything that sounds remotely critical is quickly shot down as a product of biased media. Every decision centric to right-wing view, no matter how damaging, is regarded as unassailable and they would fight to death to defend it. Arguing with facts is almost a lost cause .

It's been a long time since I was regular part of those forums, but, I do occasionally get to see their views on social media. No change whatsoever in their adverse opinions. I have a feeling that changing views of people for the most part is an uphill battle. Most people quickly associate their identity to a view and absolutely refuse to budge.

<comment><USER31> >To what extent, then, is fake news culpable?

Definitions first, fake news is not bad headlines, or bad reporting.

Fake news is specifically the creation of websites that look like legitimate news sites, with what look like legitimate articles, in order to generate click and ad revenue.

SO a concrete example is the creation of a site called "Mercury Sun reviewer", with articles talking about how Hillary is about to be indicted.

Its not really news, its fiction presented with a Headline and a byline.

\---

For India, we've not really been dealing with Fake news in this manner, aside from maybe whatsapp forwards and propaganda.

The creation of masses of website just in order to convert people to click bots, doesnt happen. Internet penetration isnt high enough to afford it.

\---

So fake news IS an issue, BECAUSE people will believe it without checking. Its a monetization scheme which callously targets politics and power.

The definition has been bent out of shape since it got mainstream.

I think for the HN crowd, this definition should work and stick

\---

And I think I know those forums.

<comment><USER32> So, according to this definition, standard news sites are incapable of ever producing fake news since their website also serve as legitimate news site?

That does little more then raising the costs of implementing manipulative falsehoods by making the traditional news a gatekeeper.

<comment><USER33> Legitimate news organizations make mistakes or might be taken in by reporters with bad intentions, but as an organization, their intent and purpose isn't to produce fake news.

<comment><USER34> But if their intent is to profit, reguardless of ethics and facts? Sure 'real' news will be included, but mixed with questionable content. This is the real problem and situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Some arenas devolve into full-blown contests of self-interest and strategic game-playing. Politics, stock markets are pretty important so it's not too surprising that it happens.

But as humans we don't spend all our lives trying to mislead others and scraping for small edges.

People contribute to this forum, and contribute to open source, and vote, and contribute to their communities.

We are tribal, and hierarchical, and violent, but we are above all social.

Somehow we figure out social structures that work, that help people arrive at more or less objective truths and common ground.

Obviously, if a lot of people want to tear everything down, democracy and most social activities don't work. In the words of Madison "To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea."

Cooperative social activities only work to the extent people believe the social institutions that coordinate them are legitimate. People only devote their lives to build, and risk their lives to defend, organizations and systems they see as legitimate.

HN has a pervasive community ethic and 'pay it forward' karma and reputation ecosystem that rewards people for sharing quality and burying fake news and garbage. It's also a lot of work from dang and the HN team.

The question HNers can be asking, is there a market design and technical affordances that can restore legitimacy to news? Tools to let people signal quality and build credibility and fight the noise machines? Or is the current market design the best we can do, and are we going to constantly see successful hijacks from all sides?

</comment><comment><USER36>
      It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University of Washington
      professor Kate Starbird was sifting through thousands of tweets sent in the aftermath
      and noticed something strange.

      "There was a significant volume of social-media traffic that blamed the Navy SEALs for
      the bombing," ...

      Same thing after the mass shooting that killed nine at Umpqua Community College in Oregon:
      a burst of social-media activity calling the massacre a fake, a stage play by "crisis
      actors" for political purposes.

I have noticed that infowars.com, when I have checked, has aligned with the Russian narrative. I have observed it casually but it has been too noticeable to just ignore it.

<comment><USER37> Infowars is anti-globalist. The Russian state is anti-globalist. Not really surprising that they'd have similar talking points.

Peter Hitchens does a good job of explaining why conservative anti-globalists like Russia – "Why I Like Vladimir Putin" [https://youtu.be/UeO44STvnJw](https://youtu.be/UeO44STvnJw)

<comment><USER29> And What is "anti-globalist"? Paul Samuelson's paper shows that the simple models free trade and globalism are based on are both incorrect and especially not all sunshine and flowers for the USA:

"Where Ricardo and Mill Rebut and Confirm Arguments of Mainstream Economists Supporting Globalization" by Paul A. Samuelson

[http://www2.hawaii.edu/~noy/362texts/samuelson.pdf](http://www2.hawaii.edu/~noy/362texts/samuelson.pdf)

from the paper:

"Act II, however, deals some weighty blows against economists' oversimple complacencies about globalization. It shifts focus to a new and different kind of Chinese technical innovation. In Act II, China's progress takes place (by imitation or home ingenuity or . . . ) in good 1, in which the United States has previously had a comparative advantage. (High I.Q. secondary school graduates in South Dakota, who had been receiving from my New York Bank wages one-and-a-half times the U.S. minimum wage for handling phone calls about my credit card, have been laid off since 1990; a Bombay outsourcing unit has come to handle my inquiries. Their Bombay wage rate falls far short of South Dakota's, but in India their wage far exceeds what their uncles and aunts used to earn.) What does Ricardo-Mill arithmetic tell us about realistic U.S. long- run effects from such outsourcings? In Act II, the new Ricardian productivities imply that, _this invention abroad that gives to China some of the comparative advantage that had belonged to the United States can induce for the United States permanent lost per capita real income—an Act II loss even equal to all of Act I(a)'s 100 percent gain over autarky._ And, mind well, this would not be a short run impact effect. Ceteris paribus it can be a permanent hurt."

That phrase, "...an Act II loss even equal to all of Act I(a)'s 100 percent gain... " is haunting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> There's nothing new about lulz. I mean, look at 4chan/b/, LiveJournal, Encyclopedia Dramatica, the 8chan boards, etc. What's new is Twitter blasting it to the masses. And various players figuring out how to automate and monetize.

<comment><USER39> The difference between "lulz" and this is that the lulz is trollish; this seeks to be taken seriously, and, horrifically, often takes _itself_ seriously.

<comment><USER38> It might seem that way. But lulz _always_ seeks to be taken seriously. And the fact that some people take it seriously, or at least seriously enough to get upset about it, is what makes it so lulzy. To those who get that, it's just lulz.

What's new is that Twitter brought lulz to defenseless masses.

<comment><USER40> Don't group everyone together like that. I used to frequent 4chan, and eventually joined in the trolly lulz threads. It was all just for fun. What made the site fun for me was the recognition of a foreign culture, the assimilation period where I began recognizing what made the site's culture unique, then a sense of being because I recognized the mentality the site formed. Like many things, it all had to do with our tribal evolution. Some may take lulz seriously, but don't assume everyone does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The "mainstream" media (reddit, twitter included) is no longer trusted. The loss was voluntary.

For someone who wants real news, it's left to the reader to consume their news from comment threads, several sources with different flavors of bias (some of them truly opaque), and try and piece together reality from that.

Time will tell whether this current trust drought is an ebb or a permanent change.

</comment><comment><USER42> Contributing factor: Point of view by editors and producers of mainstream media. The Podesta emails reveals much dissonance provoking coziness between the media and the political establishment. Audiences want muckrakers and are not getting it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Random thought: What if we (educated, academically minded people) are modeling this, and the conspiracy theorists are just copying us?

Think about it: We write and say things using obscure language, about topics that are totally foreign to most people, and when they don't understand, we laugh at them and call them stupid for not having the language background knowledge to parse what we are talking about.

That's exactly what these conspiracy groups are doing. Of course the "facts" they are cataloging are just made up, as opposed to being peer reviewed in journals, but the mode of discourse is exactly the same as scientists and academics use: Ignore people who don't understand you, distribute ideas amongst your immediate peers, and judge your validity based on your ability to be understood by only them.

I've tried to stop making fun of political adversaries for saying stupid things because of this.

<comment><USER44> This reminds me of Richard Feynman's classic Cargo Cult Science speech. ([http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm](http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm))

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> <<"If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn't know how to vaccinate for it."

Stop reading that stuff.

Take responsibility of your own media health

Just like you did when you quit smoking.

I am not responsible for my neighbor smoking and I am not responsible for my neighbor reading NAtional Enquirer or Twitter or domestic Com

</comment><comment><USER46> Danger aside, I think the psychological revelations that have come out of this phenomenon are fascinating. We are surely all on some spectrum of mental soundness, and likewise are all vulnerable to some channels of psychological manipulation. What's shocking is just how many can be manipulated and the extremes to which they are. You'd probably never guess that someone you know or work closely with scrolls through InfoWars, or whatever the radical left equivalent is, during couch-time after work. Hell, maybe it's you...

</comment><comment><USER47> I believe the real problem boils down to competition for clicks.

The business of news has become a business of clicks. And competition is brutal. It's a fight for survival because there are only so many people who will click through, visit your site and cause revenue to be generated.

In looking for ways to generate more clicks all of these outfits engage in pinging the audience to find a set of resonant frequencies they can use with some reliability to get a large enough portion of the audience to provide them with these much-needed clicks.

How? You segment the audience and appeal to the kinds of human emotional reactions that result in action. This generally means negativity, criticism, wild fabrication, etc. Anger and indignation are far more powerful motivators than an invitation for intellectual engagement.

If resonance is easier and stronger on the left, why waste time pinging the center, center-right or right? Objectively speaking, that would be a terrible business decision. You go where ROI is greatest.

There's plenty of historical evidence to show that masses are far easier to manipulate at all levels with leftist messaging. The entire history of Latin America, every country south of the US border, demonstrates this in absolute terms.

As a business who needs clicks to earn a buck and survive it is probably far easier and more profitable to make the audience go into resonance with articles that provide stimulus left of center to varying degrees.

And so, in the search for clicks we have lost depth, intellectual honesty, objectivity, truth, fairness and even reality in both the producers of news and the consumers of their product. The goal is no longer truthful reporting of news, it's gossip and fabrication for clicks.

Due to this we end-up with lazy hack-job "journalists" producing outrageous click bait for lazy ignorant who would rather read 140 characters and react with a click than take the time to research, learn, study and apply one ounce of thought to what they are being fed.

Pavlovian raw stimulus-response at scale.

In other words, despite all of this technology the masses are being driven, herded and exploited as mindless digital cave-men. And they reward their digital shepherds with clicks, lots of them.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is a particularly american problem. It's not Alex Jones or Breitbart or Hannity or Limbaugh it's the fact that profits come before truth and making money by appealing to human nature through click bait, fear mongering, exaggeration, conspiracy theories is the only thing that matters.

The internet killed the profitability of real journalism and free press and might take down democracy with it.

<comment><USER49> If you dont get your news from PBS/NPR first, _then_ major ad driven media as supplemental in the US, I honestly think you are doing yourself a disservice. People like their own echo chambers over being challenged to think analytically.

*not to imply PBS/NPR isnt slightly bias

<comment><USER50> I'm a big fan of a lot of the work NPR does, but I disagree. I think applying this to the general population is a recipe for bias and disaster. Those agencies have their own slew of motivations which differ from others. Consider them as a source, certainly, but no less fallible than others.

If you hold a certain set of opinions then NPR/PBS doesn't "challenge" you much at all. I'm generally a lefty but I started reading libertarian slanted articles and I have to admit they've got some interesting points of view on things that I hadn't considered before - that's the sort of challenge you want. If you want to be challenged, look to the other side of the spectrum.

<comment><USER48> I should add that the profit motive isn't unique to the right, the left just gain viewers through either comedy and satire or mainstream consumerism, which is more acceptable but still doesn't necessarily incentivize the truth, especially if that truth clashes with a sponsor/advertiser.

The BBC definitely has a political bias and I certainly wouldn't rely on it and swallow their coverage, or more often lack of coverage, like my parents would anymore than I would RT but not being puppets of advertisers gives a different view that the US lacks given that NPR is almost a token service that is kept subdued and out of the view of those who don't specifically go to it and is seen as boring instead of hard hitting journalism.

I like free speech advocates on both sides. YouTube has Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, Sam Seeder and others and the types of guests they have provide a larger view of things. I wish there were more with a less US centric view but the libertarian scene seems much stronger in the US, maybe as a reaction to all the crap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Either it feels like something and therefore is believable, or it is rote repetition of cultural mores that once upon a time felt like something, and is in the end not believable. The fate of all systems of knowledge that prize conformist structural adherence over emotional breadth is failure.

</comment><comment><USER52> Yes, the prominent center, center-left, and leftish new outlets (NYT, WSJ, Economist, WP, etc.) have some bias in their writing. However, most of the authors and staff at those organizations are extremely professional and take their mandate to report and analyze very seriously. To me, this is self- evident 95% of the time. To the extent that there is bias, it is slight and subtle. Opinion is labeled as such. Pointing to specific counter-examples is like identifying NASA with the failures of the Challenger -- it completely misses the forest for the trees.

What there is not is a serious right-leaning counter-weight to this, and that is the vacuum into which the manifestly untrue and unserious outlets stream. Why this is true is an interesting and controversial discussion in its own right.

<comment><USER53> I wonder if it's just impossible to find serious right-leaning journalists that aren't full right wing, since journalism is already heavily liberal, full of institutional bias, and few people are willing to work for peanuts.

<comment><USER54> Perhaps the Economist? They seem generally professional and intellectually honest, but posit everything from a right/Capitalist perspective.

<comment><USER55> The Economist is a bit unique in that their "classic liberalism" editorial viewpoint doesn't neatly fit into America's current tribal division; in America I've heard it called both "right-wing" and "left-wing" as a result.

Such shows a danger of trying to pigeonhole every editorial stance into "left" and "right" categories. It would be nice if we expanded beyond these somewhat artificial opinion collectives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Does anyone have the list of the 81 source sites that Starbird cataloged?

</comment><comment><USER57> If you're suspicious of Sandy Hook then I suggest watching this lecture by Sofia Smallstorm here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJYQihoNNuQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJYQihoNNuQ)

The inescapable conclusion for any reasonable person when presented with all the facts is that the whole thing was staged. Is that outrageous? Does sharing this make me a lunatic conspiracy theorist? Not really. It just means the US mainstream media isn't doing its job.

<comment><USER58> I'm the last person to say that the US mainstream media is doing a good job.

That said, I see you've been on HN long enough to not be surprised that all kinds of people can be found on here. It turns out that at least one person here was a personal friend of one of the Sandy Hook parents back in high school. Who played D&D with him, talked about Commodore computers with him, and who remembers when his roommate got mad and put peanut butter in his floppy drive.

It's bad enough that my old DM lost his child in a senseless tragedy. But when people try to insist that his greatest pain was all a hoax, that the child he lost maybe didn't even exist, that's just beyond the pale. Maybe it's easier for me to have all the facts because I know people affected. But thousands of people know these families - have you considered talking to someone who knows them? No matter how bad the media is, some stories are about real people, who can hurt. Please consider that when you spread bullshit online.

<comment><USER57> > That said, I see you've been on HN long enough to not be surprised that all > kinds of people can be found on here.

Well, quite. For example, I am a coder, an investigative journalist and a digital forensics consultant with a scarily good track record over the last 25 years even if I do say so myself.

> It's bad enough that my old DM lost his child in a senseless tragedy. But > when people try to insist that his greatest pain was all a hoax, that the > child he lost maybe didn't even exist, that's just beyond the pale. Maybe > it's easier for me to have all the facts because I know people affected.

You have some facts? Great. What are they? Because so far you haven't given me any, just a second-hand sob story which may or may not be true. What's this guy's name? Where can I check out his details? Does he even exist? Because there isn't a single scrap of evidence to prove that Adam Lanza even existed, just for starters, let alone how this 120 pound kid with development problems managed to carry such a heavy arsenal into the school and kill so many people in under a minute. Where are the crime scene photos? Just one will do. Why isn't there any video or camera evidence of the shooter? Who cleaned up the blood? There are strict federal laws governing that. Not a single photo of a body. Not the shooter. Not his mother. Not one child. Not one teacher. Nothing. All kids were ruled dead at the scene. Which if you've ever talked to an EMT you never rule a person dead at the scene unless they've been decapitated. You can get shot in the head and a doctor can revive you. But no, everyone was ruled dead at the scene and there are no pictures of any blood, bodies, shell casings, anything.

> No matter how bad the media is, some stories are about real people, who can > hurt. Please consider that when you spread bullshit online.

Yeah I'm deeply moved. Not.

<comment><USER58> I don't know what they teach investigative journalists, but showing that you are deeply unsympathetic to how harassment affects victims' families does not tend to get people to reveal information to you. And who asks for private information on a public forum? The web hasn't killed email yet.

I don't know the answer to most of your questions. I have purposely avoided most information about the shooting. All I know is that one of the victims was a real person.

May you fare well in finding the truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> "Until you can empathize with someone who reads infowars..."

Absurdity defined.

<comment><USER60> Empathize != agree with. That is a modern perversion of the term.

<comment><USER59> I do not empathize with, nor do I agree with, people who wilfully wallow in paranoia and stupidity.

Does that clarify my position sufficiently?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> "we kind of laughed at it"

The lazy traditional mass media thinks it can just ignore any nefarious angle or pretend that it doesn't exist and that it cannot exist. The best example is the Sandy Hook conspiracy. I have no stake in this game, but I'm as interested as anybody to hear both sides and it turns out that CNN will not ever provide the other side of the story while infowars will. It's that easy: Infowars does its actual journalistic job and questions _everything_. That's what CNN is supposed to be doing. That's what the are all supposed to be doing as journalists, you should be JUMPING at the option of Sandy Hook being a false flag. If it isnt, that's even better. But I want to hear all angles about it. There is no value in being blindly trusting of the government. I'm not an american but I'm pretty sure that one core value is to distrust the government, to be ready for it to turn evil. I listen to Alex Jones for many hours every week and he is definitely hyperbolic (which can be funny and this is often the goal -partly) and he sometimes gets things wrong too. But he provides much more value than reading the equivalent of a machine generated press release on CNN.com.

<comment><USER62> _The best example is the Sandy Hook conspiracy. I have no stake in this game, but I 'm as interested as anybody to hear both sides and it turns out that CNN will not ever provide the other side of the story while infowars will. It's that easy: Infowars does its actual journalistic job and questions everything._

Some stories just don't have two sides.

Infowars doesn't do a "journalistic job". What they do is take a story, work out what their world view says ("Guns make people safer and the government is bad" in this case I think?) and then finds some theory - any theory - to back their view and calls it the other side of the story.

<comment><USER63> As a minimum, you can look into why people believe things you consider false. Then you can investigate those.

Or you could just ignore them, then they will ignore you and probably our society will be worse off.

<comment><USER62> Sure. I understand completely why people believe in theories like this. The paper linked from the article has a good explanation.

I don't know a useful way to talk about though. Evidence doesn't seem the best approach because there is always some theory why their evidence is better.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Companies that contribute to open source can gain a competitive advantage - <AUTHOR> https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-hidden-benefit-of-giving-back-to-open-source-software <comment><USER2> There's a very real business reason to make certain goods cheaper, even at your own expense. "Commoditize your complements" is the short catchphrase for some of this.

The short explanation is that when something is cheap, demand for complimentary goods goes up. For example, when the software for managing cloud deployments gets lower (in a total cost of ownership sense, not just sticker price), then demand for cloud computing goes up. Google has both Kubernetes as an open-source project and Google Cloud Compute as a revenue-producing product.

Really good blog post that explains this in further detail: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy- letter-v/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/)

There's another reason to do open-source, and that's to get your future hires pre-trained on some of your internal tools and frameworks. If Go or Angular were internal-only things, Google wouldn't be as able to hire engineers with experience in Go or Angular.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it possible that the folks who contribute are just inherently more passionate / have more experience (already participating outside of work) than those who don't contribute?

Not to say I think the article's premise is necessarily "wrong" just wondering if folks who contribute just are more likely to have some aspects that benefit their employer.

<comment><USER4> Significant contributors know the software they work on more intimately. Most obviously having an expert on staff like that makes for faster debugging when something goes wrong. Less obviously (but more importantly), having someone who truly understands the software well helps ensure optimal architectural decisions about how the software gets integrated.

<comment><USER5> It's a good indicator for an agency to contribute to their chosen platforms. It means they have been able to identify and fix an issue in a way that was sympathetic to the architecture. If you can see a plugin or module made for the target platform even better.

You don't want an agency that writes a bunch of code in their own way and bolts it into your framework, because when you change agency later the new agency will have to learn how to read their code plus the platform code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Enlightened businesses know to hire key contributors to the open source libraries they depend on. :) I was glad to work for such a business for several years, and proud to offer them great value.

<comment><USER6> I would love to hear more about your experience, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Were you employed to maintain your project full-time? Did you consider working for more than one of those conpanies, as an independent contractor? What about starting a services or product company around your project?

Thank you!

<comment><USER4> I was an employee, not a contractor. Over the 8 years I worked there, probably about half my time was spent on open source contributions: not just coding but also community management and such.

Before I got hired by this company, I did consulting for a handful of clients, but I personally prefer the stability of reporting to one boss. It was my personal "business plan" you could say to get hired. And it worked! :)

The project was moderately successful over its twelve-year lifespan but has now completed its arc. While a certain amount of marketing is necessary to get people's attention, for a long-term relationship like this, value is ultimately imperative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love open source and work with it every day. I used to contribute but I grew tired of interacting with difficult people. Some project owners are grumpy, or perhaps someone wants to bike shed every detail. I shouldn't let it get to me, but I did.

<comment><USER8> This is hard to get right. Personally I try not to be a grumpy maintainer but I'm frequently a picky one. Lately I've been an absent one.

I think maintainers can frequently come across as grumpy simply because their goals are different from contributors. They have to live in and fix the codebase for the long term, so have a proportionally higher stake in consistency while also having a much broader knowledge of the rest of the code. It's hard not to nitpick in this situation.

For the contributor, they're frequently trying to get some other work done and would rather not have endless back and forth over the precise detail. Furthermore their feature or bugfix is clearly a good idea because it solves their own problem. A problem that, unfortunately, the maintainer doesn't have.

Perhaps a partial solution is in treating project maintainership itself as an engineering problem. That is, having automated testing infrastructure, developer tooling for code consistency, etc. This kind of stuff has become dramatically easier to set up for small open source projects, but depending on the language it can still be a lot of effort.

</comment></comment><comment> c-smile The question that intrigues me quite a while.

I suspect that there are types of projects / product areas that especially benefit from being OpenSource. What are these areas?

Yet my mental model considers the following development _business_ models:

* OpenSource/Bazaar - everyone can do whatever they want, without much of supervision. Like famous NPM registry.

* OpenSource/Glassdoor - only selected "maintainers" can actually do the development, the rest, on the other side of the glass, can only look and suggest something (if they have loud enough voice). Like Linux development.

* ClosedSource - internally that is also using either Bazaar or Glassdoor model - it is just auditorium is smaller and more focused - limited by the organization itself and its clients. Like Windows and its all major customers, states and agencies.

How do these models correlate with product areas?

<comment><USER4> "Open Source" is a _development methodology_.

It is compatible with various _business models_. One of the most popular is "open core", where a product is available under an open source license but a company makes add-ons available under proprietary licenses for a fee.

There are also various _governance models_ for open source projects. A company can maintain ultimate control over the direction over a product (e.g. Docker, the Go programming language, ...). Or the project may be governed by its contributors and may have various rules for contributors being offered a governance stake. ("BDFL" or Benevolent Dictator For Life where 1 person has final say, a "PMC" or Project Management Committee where members join by invitation, etc.)

<comment> c-smile Thanks for the clarification but that's pretty much what I just said.

Not sure about this though:

> "Open Source" is a _development methodology_.

Development methodology is one of these as far I understand: [https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/software- security/top-4-softw...](https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/software- security/top-4-software-development-methodologies/)

In any case my question/suspicion still stands: far not all types of software projects are fit or benefit from being OpenSource.

<comment><USER9> In my experience, when most people talk about "software development methodologies" they mean something like "the kinds of things captured by labels like Scrum, XP, Crystal, RUP, AUP, waterfall, etc." In that sense, I wouldn't say that "open source" has _traditionally_ been thought of as a "development methodology", but by the same token, I can see how it would be fair to refer to it that way.

Maybe it would be better to say "open source is a development philosophy" or "open source is a development approach" or something, but I actually think it fits as a "development methodology" with the caveat that it's not _just_ a development methodology. For a lot of people, (myself included) it's more of an ideology or even a way of life.

Anyway, there are companies that actively talk about running projects as "internal open source" and in that sense, I would argue that referring to "open source" as a "development methodology" is reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I agree. Digging deep into an open source library is a major pain in the ass, but helps to get better and being it to clean up the code and add a couple comments.

Increases the quality of your own products too.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can't agree more.

Open Source is beneficial for so many reasons. Just a few:

\- Use of the software, of course \- Your programmers become better at their craft \- Access to cutting edge innovations \- You have the power to fix something, you aren't reliant on someone else \- You get some pride in your contributions. You helped build that.

Get on board! Open Source is truly a great thing.</comment>