Global living conditions are getting better - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/23/14062168/history-global-conditions-charts-life-span-poverty <comment><USER2> It's sad how many comments dismiss the remarkable data, e.g. by commenting that the article "only" shows that average living conditions have improved, as if that is an argument against the conclusion that global living conditions have been continuously improving (and likely to continue if the trend continues).

The data shows that for all the selected metrics global living standards have improved, regardless of wealth distribution etc. For example, fewer children are dying today than in 1800 or 1960:

\- a child born in 1800 had a 43.3% probability of dying before their fifth birthday

\- in 1960 the probability was 18.5%

\- in 2015 the probability was 4.25%

The 1800 estimate is astonishing. Almost half the children born in 1800 would probably have died by 1805. To me even the 1960 mortality rate is astonishing. Almost a fifth of all children born in 1960 would probably have died by 1965.

An even bigger improvement can be seen in extreme poverty (defined as living on $1.9 a day adjusted for inflation and price differences between countries):

\- in 1820 94% of the global population lived in extreme poverty

\- in 1960 64% lived in extreme poverty

\- in 2015 only 9.6% lived in extreme poverty

I cannot see how such statistics can be interpreted as anything other than extraordinarily positive, and I just hope the trend continues.

<comment><USER3> I don't think the people that are pessimistic about the future (The premise of the article) dispute or are ignorant of the fact that we are better than a century ago or even a decade ago. I think the article is attacking a straw man: they were not asked if things got better in the past, but about the future. People don't see an optimistic narrative that they subscribe to anymore. The mantra "we 'll keep doing what we are doing and things will improve because it worked in the past" doesn't seem to catch on anymore. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

<comment><USER2> Without knowing the future, I think the best we can do is look at historic trends to give us an idea of what is going to happen in the future. I agree 1800 is an interesting datapoint but probably not that relevant for the present day. Nonetheless, there appear to have been consistent improvements even in the past few decades, and there is still plenty of scope for improvement given almost 10% of the world population are in extreme poverty (about 700 million people).

I think a lot of people answering the survey question:

 _"All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?"_

focus on whether _their_ world is getting better or worse, and not the whole world. Most of the improvements in the past few decades have been in developing countries, which have experienced dramatic improvements in standards of living (and developing countries are also home to the majority of the global population). Meanwhile standards may well have been relatively stagnant or declining for many people in developed countries.

If we are talking about whether the world is getting better or worse, expectations based on experiences in India and China are far more pertinent than the recent history of the USA.

<comment><USER3> Predictably, Chinese are the most optimistic in that survey ([https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/01/05/chinese-people-are- most...](https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/01/05/chinese-people-are-most- optimistic-world/)). Obviously everyone's subjective opinion is different and that's what the survey was seeking in the first place.

Why would the experience of the Chinese be pertinent to people of the US or France, however? I don't think their economic regimes are transferable.

<comment><USER2> The point of the article is that objectively the world, as a whole, is getting better, and in some cases improving quite dramatically. Personally, I don't think the survey quoted in the opening paragraph is really that interesting - it's not the least bit surprising that people replied subjectively rather than objectively.

My point about the Chinese experience being more pertinent was regarding these objective measures not how people replied subjectively to a survey question. It's not that the Chinese experience is pertinent to someone in US or France, but that recent Chinese economic development has been more pertinent to whether or not the world has objectively gotten better.

In the future we are also going to see far more reductions in poverty and child mortality in countries like India and China than in the USA, because the USA is so much wealthier. Additionally, if we want to understand how to improve the world in the future, I believe it's more important to look at countries that have recently improved standards of living, like China, rather than countries like the USA that experienced their most significant improvements in standards of living before the 1960s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would love to see a complement to this piece examining our "loss potential", which I basically define as the potential for us to undo all of the good we've done.

Sure, things are better, but I would argue that there's a greater loss potential. As technological potential grows that means more and more people have a target on their back, dooming them to inevitable irrelevance. Say our technological/societal progress results in us destroying ourselves with some weapon/technology in the year 3000. One would amortize the negative infinity loss through the preceding years. This would result in negative progress each year, right? Of course it's impossible to predict when such a thing would happen.

\----

Also, it would be nice to compare things to what we could have achieved. For example, if western civilization really did stunt potential of certain places or people, and NOW they're finally catching up, is that impressive? The alternative could mean we would be where we're at now a few decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting and give me hope but is it accurate?

This article suggests that vox does not get it right all the time:

[https://www.quora.com/Media-Business-in-2015-How-credible- ar...](https://www.quora.com/Media-Business-in-2015-How-credible-are-articles- on-vox-com)

<comment><USER2> The author is Max Roser, the economist behind the Our World in Data website ([https://ourworldindata.org/](https://ourworldindata.org/)). The data is all sourced from that site and seems to be well researched when I have casually browsed the datasets.

I have a lot of respect for his work, but I can't really judge it's accuracy without diving more into the data.

<comment><USER6> Adam Johnson at FAIR ([http://fair.org](http://fair.org)) criticized the Our World in Data website's standard for Democracy in this article: [http://fair.org/home/voxs-cia-backed-democracy-standard- is-o...](http://fair.org/home/voxs-cia-backed-democracy-standard-is-ok-with- slavery-and-women-not-voting/)

I need to read more about the website and where its data is sourced to make a judgement myself, but the above link was informative to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recall a dead-tree uncle writing his daughters (longhand perfect cursive) a summary of life. His life is "good" ( I forget his exact words) conclusion was very surprising.

The "humanity" question is really one thing to me. More or less live births.

The mindset of "better" had been passed down our generations and I am greatful for it

Edit. He lived in the US in the mid 1800s

</comment><comment><USER8> Regardless of my opinions on this, it's the comments from articles like this that make me wish there really was a longer reprieve from political discussions on Hacker News. I'd take no political discussion over really heated political discussion, because often in comments (from both sides) people get so heated that I can't even get through one or two paragraphs without losing understanding of whatever point they are getting across or refuting. I enjoy reading HN for the comments primarily, but it seems that when it comes to political discussions it seems worse off than Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER9> there are also things that are worse now. half of animal species alive in 1970 are now extinct. we have created new diseases as we've removed the threat of old ones. things like sitting outside and looking at the stars are harder, or listening to birdsong. the family no longer spends much time together. our lives are more virtual and less based in reality, which leads to a lower quality life and less happiness.

<comment><USER10> Have you even talked to the elderly? They are much happier today than they were kids. The ability to communicate with old friends and family across the globe and purchase medicine easily.

Over half of your claims relate to the environment. Perhaps you are too attached to that? Or are you so firmly fixed to your narrative that quality of life is decreasing? I can easily cite many MORE animal species that are not extinct today, but would have been, if it were not for our technological advances and conservation efforts. But of course, this doesn't match your narrative, so you will deny it at all costs.

<comment><USER9> amazingly, i have spoken to some elderly people, and not all were happier today than as kids. although who's to say how much their current circumstances and memory affect their recollection. and how can there be many MORE species that would have been extinct if not for us humans and our "progress" and technology, which is what drives their extinction in the first place?

what good is it to live in a great techno-wonderland if we've traded much greater gifts to get there? i could say perhaps you are too attached to the idea of progress, the idea that because time passes things must get better?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like the hope in this article. I can't trust it any more than I can trust other media sources but I'd rather believe this than some doomsday prophecy that was mostly designed to scare views into watching more.

<comment><USER12> > I can't trust it any more than I can trust other media sources

Do you consider absolutely every single media source the same as every other one?

There are most definitely organizations that have proven to report more accurately than others, and have ethical standards.

<comment><USER13> "More accurately" is relative and not "perfect accuracy". The "ethical standards" depend on the institutionalized ethics, which you & others may or may not agree with. Alas, we have a generation of reporters who seem more interested in changing the world than objectively reporting on the state thereof; if they want to change it the way you want it changed, you tend to consider it "accurate" and "ethical".

<comment><USER8> Ethicality is subjective but accuracy is not. It's pretty much impossible to have perfect accuracy but there are some organizations that do provide more accurate news and data than others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is for example less land per person now than ever before. So, it's more a question of what you value than objectively better.

<comment><USER15> If you think owning property is more important than the metrics in the article, I think something is objectively wrong with your belief.

<comment><USER13> If you were raised in a self-sufficient rural mindset, owing property is a _very_ important value - to the point that someone saying it's "objectively wrong" is offensive.

<comment><USER16> Is it a more important value than not having your children die by the age of five?

kmicklas said "more important". He/she is right. If you think available land is more important than your kids not dying, something's very wrong with you.

<comment><USER13> Consider that other people hold different axioms. For many of us, it's not that one is valued above the other, it's that one facilitates the other.

When much of your survival comes from the land, _having_ sufficient (or more) land is a major factor in preventing your kids from dying, and in doing much better than "not dying". Food comes from land. Shelter (wood, brick, rocks) comes from land. Heat (wood, straw, dung) comes from land. Growing up, half my family's food came from our backyard, and most of our heat _could_ have (easier to get firewood delivered, but the fallback was there).

You may look at a city and praise the wonders of modern upscale living. I look at a city and see a million people dead in a week if the water/gas/electricity gets shut off. You may look at a rural community and see sub-optimal living conditions. I look at a rural community and see a culture that will continue on thru major EMP/Y2K/etc technological disasters.

It's not that I think available land is more important than my kids not dying, it's that I think available land is a major component to ensuring my kids don't die.

<comment><USER16> But under _actual existing conditions_ , why do children die? It's not starvation (at least in the US and Europe), or EMP. It's lack of medical care.

So, back to the question at hand. Isn't the availability of medical care more valuable than the insurance value of the land? Yes, the land lets your kids live if there's an EMP. But the medical care lets your kids live through all the years until there's an EMP, if there ever is. Isn't the actually-happening reality more important than the might-be?

Or, to put it in more brutal terms: How many of your kids would you be willing to have die due to lack of health care, in order to have the land to keep all your kids from dying if there ever is an EMP? For most people, I think the answer is "zero".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What's heavier, the linked web page as provided (html, css, js and image files) or as ONE large image?

I tested it: the whole page rendered as one high quality 1918 x 17591 JPEG file weighs 3.58 MB.

As loaded by the browser, without ad blocking, it does +280 http requests to dozens of servers and downloads 6.9 MB.

If pages were provided as images, we might burn less CPU cycles and produce less CO2. Not so good for clicking ads though ;)

<comment><USER18> what if you make it monochrome?

<comment><USER17> As a 16 color grayscale png it's 870KB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article should be retitled 'proof that life became net better between 1800 and today'.

No evidence is given that life at any point in the future will be better than it is currently.

Disappointing and misleading.

<comment><USER20> >No evidence is given that life at any point in the future will be better than it is currently.

Because you cannot say that with certainty. He in fact addresses this very point towards the end:

"Big problems remain. None of the above should give us reason to become complacent. On the contrary, it shows us that a lot of work still needs to be done — accomplishing the fastest reduction of poverty is a tremendous achievement, but the fact that one out of 10 people lives in extreme poverty today is unacceptable. We also must not accept the restrictions of our liberty that remain and that are put in place. It is also clear that humanity's impact on the environment is at a level that is not sustainable and is endangering the biosphere and climate on which we depend. We urgently need to reduce our impact.

It is far from certain that we will make progress against these problems. There is no iron law that would ensure that the world continues this trend of improving living conditions."

<comment><USER19> I think you misunderstand my criticism.

On a very simplistic level, the article can be reduced to three statements:

1) A minority of people today believe that life is getting better for humanity

2) Between 18XX and today, life improved (at least as measured by the examples given)

3) There are challenges facing humanity for the future and there is no guarantee that life will continue getting better

I'm not disputing any of the points or data sets in the article, nor am I disagreeing with the author. I am simply disappointed that at an article which barely touches on the issue of whether life is currently improving or not is misleadingly titled 'Life is getting better for humanity'.

<comment><USER21> What you're saying would seem to imply that there's a reason to believe that all the trends in the article have stopped or reversed.

Looking at the data provided, the trends are smooth and showing improvement at this moment in time, so I think that contention is reallt clearly false.

If you're saying something else, I would like to hear it! But I so far have not been able to divine a different meaning.

<comment><USER22> the point i think is that you cant use average living condition as a source for validating whether living conditions are getting better on average especially since we know that wealth and benefits of modern technology isnt actually getting evenly distributed.

compared to 1800 sure, compared to 1960's not so sure.

<comment><USER23> At the very least, evidence demonstrating a persistent, long-term trend would seem to be evidence in favor of the trend applying to the current day. Especially when the main thing driving people's perception that life is _not_ getting better seems to be media reporting that fails to focus on the big picture. In other words, the world could be improving while (of course) human lives are partly bad. Focusing on the bad --which can always be found -- and not on the overall general trend skews our perception about whether and how things are changing.

Of course, there could be countervailing reasons (and evidence) that the general trend does not hold currently, like the suggestion that (a) distribution of benefits has become more uneven and (b) this uneven distribution may make things worse overall than they were before the benefits existed in the first place.

There are lots of ways people could try to provide evidence that the general trend somehow no longer applies. But I think the linked article points out: this sort of evidence is not what media is giving. News media points out that something is bad, sure, but it fails to place it in broader context. The broader context is one of general slow improvement over long periods of time, which is something that we don't get from the news; news media likes to focus on today's bad things, long general trends are not "newsworthy".

Also, as the article suggests, even today's positive evidence for the general trend is not newsworthy, in part because it is so pervasive and boring (e.g., every day 130,000 fewer people are living in extreme poverty). Something that happens regularly every day is not "news". (Or maybe the 130k fewer people thing is not news mostly because it's a good thing. The rate of murders and/or car accidents can be fairly stable, but people seem to have an appetite for hearing about each of these bad things as it happens, so that's what news reports.)

<comment><USER22> I am not listening to media and I am not saying it can't get better (post- scarcity is not something I believe is impossible for instance) but you have to be very precise when you make these kind of statements as they are ignoring the reality for many people. Just a simple fact that children today are less likely to live a better life than their parents in the west is worth thinking about.

It might be an indication that yes life is improving globally but that does not mean it improving in a way that is proving this trend to continue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wrong. The average of all lives is getting better. I think people feel disgruntled because life in the upper end is not improving. Its all good and nice that humanity is dragging its tail forward, but that kinda happens by default, all the time, even without effort. Somehow people feel that the head is not moving forward fast enough , though. We want our flying cars!

<comment><USER24> > Its all good and nice that humanity is dragging its tail forward, but that > kinda happens by default, all the time, even without effort.

No, it doesn't. This isn't some intrinsic element of humanity, positive societal change requires dedicated effort, will, and resources.

Your point about flying cars is a joke right?Flying cars would kill thousands more and be a huge liability. Maybe the problem in the developed world isn't that things aren't growing or improving, but that people don't appreciate the standard of living they have.

<comment><USER25> I think there are two big things contributing to the lack of appreciation of the living standard:

\- anything you experience daily becomes a baseline, so people keep complaining about relative differences within their wealth bracket instead of comparing to less wealthy societies

\- a typical person in the West doesn't have that much time to enjoy their standard of living, having to slave away 10-12 hours a day (commute included), being burdened with mortgage and possibly other credits, and being one workplace fuckup from serious economic trouble...

<comment><USER26> > having to slave away 10-12 hours a day

Well, part of that is a choice to consume at a rate that requires such work. It's somewhat easy to have a nice financial position by delaying kids and not pouring money into cars and shopping ... but not many people choose that lifestyle.

The FIRE community is all about the alternatives.

<comment><USER27> You can't live in a van in an area as wintry as mine. A somewhat low standard of living is acceptable, but people need _security_.

<comment><USER26> I feel this argument is taking things to extremes. There are many intermediate states between living in a vehicle without heat and insisting on eating out, buying nice things, having vacations, expensive phones and plans, etc.

<comment><USER27> I dunno. I can easily give up on ever eating out, buying new things (I rarely do anyway, other than books), going on vacations (I only get a couple of weeks' vacation every year anyway), or purchasing new phones for un-cheap prices (I already keep mine until it breaks each time). Those are actually pretty negligible expenses. If I really want to speed up the trip towards financial independence, I have to reduce my housing and health-insurance premiums.

That's the only place the money can really come from to invest more than I already do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Contraception is not improvement in health. Around 1800's women used to have atleast 10 children. Women now cannot even imagine having 10 children. Most of them will die before giving birth to 10th one.

<comment><USER21> Contraception is a huge improvement in quality of life as well as human freedom.

Women in the past would very frequently die in childbirth. Do you have data to show that childbirth is as dangerous as it was in the path? Or that it was safer in the past? (That would be truly shocking and counterintuitive.)

<comment><USER21> To answer some of my own questions, child birth is becoming tremendously safer:

      Year           Deaths per 1000 live births
      </comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>   </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
      1700 to 1750	 10.5  (British [1])
      1750 to 1800	  7.5  (British [1])
      1800 to 1850	  5.0  (British [1])
              1990    3.8  (Global [2])
              2013    2.0  (Global [2])
              2013   <0.09 (UK [3])
              2013   <0.28 (US [4])

Though I can't find a source, some articles claim a 1% maternal mortality rate in the 1600s! [5]

From that same Slate article, child birth is still one of the most dangerous things for young women, despite it being far safer than ever in the past. This means that contraception is actually a health benefit. It makes it much safer to be a young woman.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/)

[2] [http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT)

[3] [http://patient.info/doctor/maternal- mortality](http://patient.info/doctor/maternal-mortality)

[4] [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/health/maternal- mortality....](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/health/maternal- mortality.html)

[5] [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/death_in_childbirth_doctors_increased_maternal_mortality_in_the_20th_century.html)

<comment><USER29> Why is it surprising that women are _really good_ at giving birth?

After all, the genes of the ones that weren't have not been selected for, tens of thousands of years ago.

Either way, contraception is pretty orthogonal to the actual mortality rate of women due to child birth.

<comment><USER21> It's actually the opposite: Humans are not very good at giving birth. And that _is_ surprising.

Child birth is hugely dangerous for humans, and the speculation in the scientific field is that it's an evolutionary interplay between the size of an infant's skull at birth, constraints on hip sizes, and the amount of brain development that can happen as a fetus or as an infant.

Tens of thousands of years is pretty short in terms of morphological development of humans. Evolution on time scales shorter than that is limited to extremely simple mutations, usually, such as lactose tolerance by adults (which has arisen multiple times independently in the past 10k years).

I do agree that contraception has little impact on maternal mortality during child birth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Unless you can prove that humans are becoming more content or happier, then I don't think this proves anything. If we have massive advancements in technology but we're all still angry, xenophobic, selfish, etc, nothing is getting better

<comment><USER2> So you don't think the humans are better off if there is declining child mortality? And you don't think people now earning $2 a day are happier than when they were earning $1?

<comment><USER30> I really don't think people are happier. Money isn't a basic need. People want their fears affirmed and addressed. People want to feel meaningful. etc etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I meet a lot of people whose idea of "getting better" is wealth being more evenly diffused across humanity. If that really is our aim the easiest way to achieve it would be to halt, or even reverse, quality of life improvements for the top x percent of people.

If "getting better" means raising the maximum possible quality of life inequality seems unavoidable, since people need an incentive to pursue and propagate technological advances.

<comment><USER32> > I meet a lot of people whose idea of "getting better" is wealth being more > evenly diffused across humanity. If that really is our aim the easiest way > to achieve it would be to halt, or even reverse, quality of life > improvements for the top x percent of people.

What if doing that really would make more people happier on average?

<comment><USER13> It won't. It has been tried many times, and failed with spectacularly deadly results (upwards of 100,000,000 dead in the 20th century from such governance).

Punishing productivity doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As a species we need more stress to get evolution to shape us harder. We are cheating! And there is a price to pay to evolution, as a species. From a single specimen perspective, yes, life is fantastic these days.

<comment><USER34> Evolution is too slow to care about anyways. If we artificially added heavy evolutionary pressure, we might see results in ten thousand years or so. Do you really think it will take that long to figure out how to do it better and more precisely manually?

<comment><USER33> You would not believe how fast speciation become under stress. And right now humanity has power to create new species quite literally. Question is, will it use these tools to speed up its own evolution or not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is neoliberal propaganda. It argues from average lives that no one actually lives. For example: The share of people living in extreme poverty has decreased immensely. However, your life can be absolutely miserable in a place like the United States while technically not living in extreme poverty. Reducing the dynamics of the entire world and the experiences of each human being to a single number is preposterous.

An example particularly in the United States: Poverty levels have decreased in the US. However, cost of living has exploded in certain areas, meaning that people who technically don't meet the official definition of poverty in, say, San Francisco can have their lives completely upended by the fact that they can no longer afford housing.

A related example not in exactly the same vein is neoliberal identity politics: It is ok for people to be oppressed my structurally racist institutions so long as the oppressor class is sufficiently racially diverse. s/race/{gender, orientation}/g Hide the fact that identities are tied to material relationships of economics and power behind a statistic about """diversity""".

Reducing people to statistics is a technocrat's wet dream and a fundamental ideological goal of neoliberalism: Reduce everyone to rational market actors, measure everything with statistics which abstract away actual reality and allow governments and corporations to justify any action they want because they set the definitions, dissimulate coercive power relationships by refusing to measure them.

Vox is faux-progressive propaganda for the worst kind of capitalism.

<comment><USER36> You forget what extreme poverty is. It is lacking three square meals a day and being stunted (like being a couple inches shorter).

The poor of the US live better than the median person in India.

Isn't neoliberalism all about being free to be racist (or not racist)? Feel free to correct me about this.

> fundamental ideological goal of neoliberalism: Reduce everyone to rational > market actors, measure everything with statistics which abstract away actual > reality and allow governments and corporations to justify any action they > want because they set the definitions, dissimulate coercive power > relationships by refusing to measure them.

I'm biased as a supporter of neoliberalism; but isn't the fundamental ideological goal of neoliberalism maximization of human freedom?

Statistics don't abstract away actual reality; it's the best way to analyze a large number of people. I can't interview all 1.2 billion people in India; instead I can look at the statistics to understand that population.

Neoliberalism is all about minimizing the coercive power relationship between the people and the government.

> justify any action they want because they set the definitions

I wouldn't call it definitions (they're normative); but yes, neoliberalism uses moral justifications.

<comment><USER35> > You forget what extreme poverty is. It is lacking three square meals a day > and being stunted (like being a couple inches shorter).

The definition of extreme poverty is living under $1.25/day (2005 dollars). You'll note that the chart cited in the article is backfilled to 1820. What does it mean to be living in extreme poverty in 1820? Was 95% of the world starving every day? It's an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinarily good analysis to make, but hey, it's a statistic so it must be true! One way in which this statistic is almost completely likely to be bullshit is that most of the world was no where near industrialized in 1820 and comparing means of living under an industrial mode of production versus a subsistence mode of production is suspect.

Furthermore, much of the misery associated with unindustrialized parts of the world in the time period the chart measures _was directly introduced by industrialized nations_. One looks at unindustrialized areas of the world today and sees constant conflict, famine, and systemic societal dysfunction and extrapolates it backwards under the assumption that it is the absence of capitalist industrialization that sustains these conditions when in fact these conditions were created in the process of capitalist expansion that largely benefited a few hegemonic nations. Neoliberal ideology rewrites human history so that it can blame preindustrial societies for the misery capitalism and imperialism visited upon them.

> Isn't neoliberalism all about being free to be racist (or not racist)? Feel > free to correct me about this.

Neoliberalism is specifically a reprogramming of the elements of liberalism to reduce all human activity to the actions of rational, atomized economic actors in a private market. The erasure of the commons, the marketization of social structures such as education, family structures, personal beliefs, cultural expression, the erasure of power relationships (because everyone is voluntarily participating as a rational economically minded being in everything they do), and the depoliticization of human interactions (there is no political, only the economic) are all hallmarks of neoliberalism. Another aspect of neoliberalism is a technocratic view of government which is antithetical to enlightenment ideals: The point of government is to manage and regulate markets and nothing more. Neoliberalism also paints its mechanisms, which are often driven by heavy regulation, police actions, and military invention as inevitable natural outcomes of human nature: in particular globalization is seen as an organic growth of human economics when in fact it has been fostered and directed by deliberate government actions, not laissez- faire economic development.

I don't know what you think neoliberalism is.

> I'm biased as a supporter of neoliberalism; but isn't the fundamental > ideological goal of neoliberalism maximization of human freedom?

Sure, and the Party in 1984's ideological goal was to maximize freedom too. The material goals of neoliberalism are ultimately the class interests of the capitalist and owning class. The ideological goal of neoliberalism is to frame the world so that those who control most of its resources are naturally and inevitably the ruling class and that any objection to the sacred, natural law of the market is invalid. So, freedom is framed not as a political concept, but a purely economic one, and ultimately "I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve" (Isaac Asimov). Because the market is natural and inevitable, any structure it may have that disadvantages anyone to the benefit of another is natural and thus not an impingement of freedom.

> Neoliberalism is all about minimizing the coercive power relationship > between the people and the government.

Somehow it does this by increasing the power of the police state, increasing military intervention in weaker countries, staging coups for violent neoliberal dictators in nations that reject it (e.g. Pinochet), increasing regulations to the benefit of the largest corporations, consolidating industries into fewer and fewer independent entities and creating a close relationship between politician, bureaucrat, security officer, and businessman.

<comment><USER21> >Sure, and the Party in 1984's ideological goal was to maximize freedom too.

Pretty much every paragraph has terrible stinkers like this, but I'll focus on it because it's probably the least political and most open to direct academic interpretation rather than viewed through highly ideological lenses.

The second slogan of the Party in 1984 was "Freedom is slavery." Their explicit goal is to prevent individuals from having freedom. And asserting that everbody must make themselves subservient to the Party (otherwise, bad stuff).

I can't find a single example anywhere in the book of the Party stating that they want to maximize freedom.

<comment><USER35> Oh goodness gracious, I misremembered it as "Slavery is freedom" from when I read the book 10 years ago. My, oh my, how _careless of me_.

I'm skeptical you can actually engage with any of my more substantials """stinkers""" and that's why you resorted to nitpicking. In any case, that line can be replaced with the general idea of the party's newspeak and doublethink in the book. In particular, the line "war is peace" from the slogan fits the bill. Instead of saying the party wants to maximize freedom, let's say it wanted to maximize peace. The party loves peace, in fact! There. I clarified the minor point you snagged on.

And for the more substantial points I described in the post, the most accessible scholarly source I've read is Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown [1]. Unfortunately, it's impossible reduce any lengthy political analysis to the point where it can be fit inside of an Internet comment.

[1] [http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/BROW_UND.html](http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/BROW_UND.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Disqus bait and switch, now with ads - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/disqus-bait-and-switch-now-with-ads <comment><USER3> I have to disagree even as someone relying on Disqus in a few different ways.

First off, they did provide notice. I received an email about this at all the addresses I have an account under. Maybe the the author didn't and that sucks but this seems like an edge case and he is one of the exceptions, not the rule.

Second, you can turn this feature off which brings me to my next point. Even if they do decide to change this can you really blame them? The thing is we're all using the service for free and on top of it they're willing to share revenue with users. I mean we can't just expect every free service to never monetize. Could they have done it differently? Sure but lets not give in to the temptation to be armchair CEOs here and proclaim that we know that a different model would have worked better for everyone. I give Disqus the benefit of the doubt that they did their homework and decided that this is the best way for them to monetize and still do right by their users.

I use Disqus on my personal blog and I use it as part of an app I'm quite passionate about. In my app (link is in my profile) I use Disqus in much the same way Tumblr does where you enter your short name and your public pages can have comments. As someone using them in these two different ways I empathize with the author especially when it comes to my app as I don't want the ads associated with anything I'm personally doing but at the same time I'm not blaming Disqus either. I use them, in both cases, as an alternative to rolling my own. Their platform is far richer than anything I could do so even if they didn't allow opting out its still a win for me.

In the end this outrage is unnecessary. Disqus made no secret of this, reached out to us, provided a way to opt out, and even offered to share revenue! On top of that they're still a totally free service that's offering us value. The author himself says his blog will no longer have comments because of this. Why? I'm sure he can create a commenting system himself but obviously Disqus is delivering value in a way that's pretty tough to replace.

Come on guys, its one thing to not like these ads but to not use Disqus in protest really isn't hurting Disqus as much as it is the person who stops using them in most cases. They definitely acted in good faith on this one and we need to stop acting like every free service on the web owes us the service we want, how we want it, when we want it. This isn't a charity we're talking about here, its a web startup. I follow jaquesm's blog and I agree with most of his thoughts but I can't get behind this one.

<comment><USER4> How would you feel if twitter decided to include (for your benefit, of course) a bunch of advertising next to their button after sending you an email about it and defaulting to 'on'. Would that be ok for you or would you feel that that was not what you signed up for when you decided to embed their button tag?

I signed up for a 'comment tag', not for an 'advertising tag'. There is a world of a difference between those two, it changes my blog from a non- commercial one into a commercial one and that is - to me at least - a major shift. On top of that they make it look as if _I_ endorse these links.

To see that happen without my explicit consent is something that is enough to turn me off from that particular service provider because I can apparently not trust them with the responsibility of not altering our relationship in a material way relative to the terms of service of the moment when I signed up for their service.

<comment><USER5> you can stop using their service if you dont like it.

I dont understand this sense of entitlement regarding free services.

And it is not like disqus did not warn its users , they did. Dont like it ? use something else.

> To see that happen without my explicit consent is something that is enough > to turn me off from that particular service provider because I can > apparently not trust them with the responsibility of not altering our > relationship in a material way relative to the terms of service of the > moment when I signed up for their service.

then stop using that service , what's the big deal ? did you pay for it ? no. So there is no binding contract between them and you.

<comment><USER4> > you can stop using their service if you dont like it.

I just did.

> I dont understand this sense of entitlement regarding free services.

This free service just made it look as if I endorse a bunch of companies and decided to change my site from non-commercial to commercial. That's _my_ prerogative.

> And it is not like disqus did not warn its users , they did. Dont like it ? > use something else.

They may have warned, I definitely did not receive it, they changed the terms of service post the part where I signed up and defaulted me to behaviour under the _new_ terms of service. That is 'bait-and-switch'.

> then stop using that service , what's the big deal ? did you pay for it ? > no. So there is no binding contract between them and you.

Actually, their terms of service bind me _and_ them, sure they can change the terms but those are not the terms that I agreed to when I signed up and I don't go around checking the terms of service every 3 days to see if someone is up to something sneaky.

Whether I paid for it or not is not material.

<comment><USER6> Currently in their TOS under 'Advertisements':

 _You agree that Disqus may include advertisements and/or content provided by Disqus and/or a third party (collectively "Ads") as part of the implementation of the Service._

Now I don't know if this language was there before the change you are speaking of, but if it wasn't I'm sure included in their TOS was that you agree to them being able to amend their TOS at any time to include something like this.

<comment><USER4> Let's just say that I find an opt-out change of a comment engine to an advertising tag that states that I recommend certain products and services using stealthy advertising a non negotiable move, no matter what your terms of service say.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps you should have thought of this _before_ using a completely free "SaaS" offering?

Perhaps you'll think of this next time.

<comment><USER8> You seem to be focused on what Disqus has the right to do, while jacquesm is talking about user expectations and the consequences of violating them.

I'm inclined to agree with him that displaying ads on the user's site without explicit opt-in is a major faux pas with the potential to destroy a company's reputation permanently.

<comment><USER7> I don't think what Disqus did was in good taste, but I do think that it's foolish to expect otherwise from a free SaaS provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They've been doing this for months, and it's done revenue-sharing style, so if you're getting a lot of comments, you stand a chance of making a couple of bucks through the ads. (If you go to your admin page and click Analytics, you'll see the discovery tab which tells you how much you've made.)

I've gotten multiple emails on it, so it certainly wasn't a bait and switch. A piece from November on the matter:

\--

The new Promoted Discovery for Disqus was a major release for publishers like you who are seeking ways to drive business around content, community and conversation. We're very excited about the results so far. There's strong engagement in discovered content and excellent flow of new high quality traffic for websites using Disqus. This tells us it's winning for both publishers and their readers.

We're only getting started. As we grow, we'll continue to evaluate new opportunities for you to grow and make money with us. We think you'll like them because, like Promoted Discovery, they will be complementary to the user experience. If you'd rather not try out these features, you can always turn them off in your settings.

The next feature we're piloting lets you get credit for the traffic you drive to ecommerce sites like Amazon or eBay. If you already do some form of affiliate linking, we do nothing to those existing links. Soon, you may begin to see the impact of these in your reporting dashboard (we'll be rolling this out slowly over time). Of course, all of this happens seamlessly behind the scenes — the experience for your readers doesn't change at all. You can learn more by reading this page.

At Disqus, our core philosophy is to remain native to the core user experience and provide the best community experience possible. As always, I welcome your questions and feedback.

<comment><USER4> I have not received an email, there is no opt-out switch, and honestly I have not seen this on the comment section of my blog until it showed up just now. Elsewhere in this thread there are people that say they don't have it right now so it appears to switch on/off according to some hidden criterion.

Highly annoying.

"At Disqus, our core philosophy is to remain native to the core user experience and provide the best community experience possible."

I hate language like that.

And I'm 100% sure that I have never seen these ads before.

<comment><USER9> Whatever the case, you can turn it off:

[http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/666278#disco...](http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/666278#discovery- settings)

<comment><USER4> It should have defaulted to 'off'. You can break trust exactly once.

<comment><USER10> Just out of curiosity, but what exactly did you think the arrangement between you and Disqus was? Their service obviously saves bloggers a lot of hassle, and it can't be free to maintain?

I don't mean to say that this justifies this perceived wrong, but it certainly justifies, from their standpoint, to think: "If you're going to use our service, for free, you should at least read our emails (and not filter them to the Spam folder)". Also on their side: they've allowed the ability to opt out.

So you can still drop the service on the grounds of principle, and technically, this is a "bait and switch"...but it's a pretty mild one.

<comment><USER4> Whatever it was that I thought I signed up for, I explicitly did not sign up for an advertising tag, especially not a stealthy one, and on top of that not one that looks like an active endorsement on my part.

<comment><USER11> You agreed to their terms and conditions upon sign up. It says:

"We may, without prior notice, change the Service;"

<comment><USER4> And my terms of service read 'and if you change your terms of service in a way that I don't like I will disable your plug-in and I'll bitch about it'.

<comment><USER12> That doesn't make any sense. You agreed to their terms of service and now you're complaining because it doesn't match your ideals. Disqus is a great service provided for free, what did you expect?

<comment><USER4> I did not expect to see myself recommending products and services that I would not ever think of recommending to others and I would not expect to see my site change from non-commercial to commercial and I did not expect to see ads masquerading as regular content.

Terms of service are a fig leaf, how you act is what matters and these actions are not acceptable, especially not for an opt-out that wasn't there when I signed up.

<comment><USER12> In what way are they not acceptable? They are totally acceptable to me. They provide a great service for free and now they want to monetize it with ads, shocking! I think it's extremely generous and quite remarkable of them to offer both a cut and an option to opt-out. They should be rewarded for that, not blamed. I think the sense of entitlement you have knowing that disqus offered you a great and free service for years and now a way to opt-out or even make money is really disgraceful.

<comment><USER13> If I offer to paint your house for free, and I do a good job of it but also steal your TV, you actually are entitled to be upset and even call the cops. You can't say, "Hey, I was working for free, and now I want to monetize it with his TV. He's acting so entitled, like I need to ask if it's OK first."

(Obviously I'm not saying they stole anyone's TV, but more extreme examples demonstrate the flaws in an idea better than more subtle ones. The principle of "It's free, so I can do whatever I want and you're being an entitled brat if you object" is simply fallacious.)

Long story short: Working for free does not give you free reign to violate people's trust. Something that isn't OK doesn't suddenly become OK just because you were working for free. If you acted under-handedly, don't be surprised when they call you under-handed on their blog. Being free doesn't immunize you from accusations of under-handedness. It does limit their recourse, but they still have every right to be unhappy.

<comment><USER14> That's a poor analogy and even you have pointed it out. So using it only creates an unnecessary and invalid connection between stealing and what disqus did.

To be fair, "I can do whatever I want" was actually the condition GP pointed out. As other users have pointed out, this was not a surprise to most of them as they were notified about it.

> they still have every right to be unhappy

Yes They do. But they don't have the right to call the other party malicious.

<comment><USER13> > _That's a poor analogy and even you have pointed it out._

No, I pointed out why it's a perfectly fine analogy ("more extreme examples demonstrate the flaws in an idea better than more subtle ones").

When drawing an analogy, the things need only be similar in the areas being compared. In fact, the more dissimilar they are in other respects, the better, because the whole point of an analogy is to show how similar features behave in different contexts.

For example, if you put forward the proposition, "OJ Simpson is violent because he is black," I might respond by pointing to other well-known black men such as Martin Luther King, who was clearly not violent and is pretty well known as a good person. This does not mean I'm equating OJ Simpson and Martin Luther King in any respect other than their race — in fact, the differences between the men are at the heart of the comparison. They are similar in the aspect being compared (race), but otherwise unlike each other in nearly every way possible.

If any dissimilarity invalidated an analogy in the way you seem to believe, analogy would be altogether impossible because things could only ever be compared to themselves.

> _So using it only creates an unnecessary and invalid connection between > stealing and what disqus did._

No, it doesn't! I posted a fairly long parenthetical specifically explaining this. _Please_ take the time to read and think about what you've read before replying in the future. It is very annoying to have to explain this over and over.

Again, the difference between the two actions is at the heart of the analogy. _Obviously_ you'll agree that the painter who steals the TV is in the wrong. Nobody thinks it's OK to steal your customer's stuff. The point is that the same justification — he offered a free service, so he is entitled to monetize it in ways that affect you without telling you and you have no right to complain — would appear to apply to the painter's actions. Thus, it is a weak justification. That was my point.

> _Yes They do. But they don't have the right to call the other party > malicious._

ctrl-F malic -> 0 results

Uh, cool?

I don't think anybody is calling Disqus _malicious_. Malice is intent to injure someone, and there's no evidence that Disqus was actively seeking to hurt people. I think the accusation here is that the way Disqus has behaved is inconsiderate and sneaky.

<comment><USER14> > more extreme examples demonstrate the flaws

You are calling out for slippery slope, if X is acceptable than 1000X must also be. And since 1000X is not, therefore X shouldn't be.

> analogy would be altogether impossible because things could only ever be > compared to themselves.

To be honest, I rarely trust analogies as logical statements. They are good for introduction to a concept but they have an inherent bias towards the view of the constructor which may not be visible to the other side in an debate.

The argument you put forward was that 'I do it for free so I can do anything' is fallacious. Yes, it is. Firstly the argument here is 'You agree that I do this for free, the definition of 'this' may change with time and it is entirely my right to do so' is the actual condition.

> It is very annoying to have to explain this over and over

I am sorry I annoyed you, that was not my intent. I did read it but may be I can't read as well as I hoped I did.

> ctrl-F malic -> 0 results. Uh, cool?

While I am at least a little offended by the snark I would assume that it was my mistake that I annoyed you a lot. English is not really my first language so probably my choice of word 'malicious' was out of place, but you are taking things too literally. _Disqus has behaved is inconsiderate and sneaky_ \- I am trying to point out that they notified their users and were not trying to hide anything about this.

Honestly, I see no point continuing to annoy you. So I will shut up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hi Jacques, I'm Daniel from Disqus. Hopefully I can clear some stuff up.

As others in this thread have pointed out, we haven't really been shy about what we're doing here. You can see a progress update of how things are going on blog.disqus.com (it's the second post down as I write this).

We've put a lot of effort into being communicative around what we're doing with discovery and advertising (we call it Promoted Discovery). I don't think "bait and switch" is accurate in describing how we approached this. It was about a year ago that we started talking publicly about the idea of a revenue- share ad product within Disqus.

As our ideas matured, we started sharing those details with our userbase. This was about 6 months ago. As with many of the things we do, Promoted Discovery was rolled out gradually so that we could learn and get better. Along the way, we blogged, sent out emails, and surveyed users. We've done half a year of messaging and we're still not done with the full roll-out. It sucks that our messaging didn't reach you, but you should know that you can configure how everything works, or opt out completely, on disqus.com/admin/settings. When new users sign up, they also are introduced to what Promoted Discovery is and have the choice to configure it.

As always, we're learning through feedback. Especially with the product. Are we finished with the advertising product? Not yet — the product has plenty of room to grow and get a lot better. But it's performing well for many publishers and they're happy with the revenue that's coming in. We care about that because our core discussion product is going to get even better because of it.

<comment><USER16> Hi Daniel, why was it not opt-in? You describe it as a "revenue sharing" program, but did not ask your customers if they wanted to be part of it. You assumed their silence meant that they did.

<comment><USER17> Because that's how most options that are likely to make money are rolled out these days. Disqus are not the only one using these tactics.

I can't find the link the anti-patterns video/site, I'm sure someone will know the one I am talking about. But it's things like pre-selecting paid for delivery options, adding travel insurance to flight cost etc etc to drive up costs but then make it not obvious how to remove those items... kind of reminds me of those tactics.

Most of the things rolled out in Facebook I found out through HN or other friends posting. It's not always obvious (though in this case it looks like everyone else got he email except the OP)

<comment><USER18> > I can't find the link the anti-patterns video/site, I'm sure someone will > know the one I am talking about.

This one? <http://darkpatterns.org/library/bait_and_switch/>

<comment><USER17> Yeah, pretty much. One I saw was a webcast but discussing the same thing. It's pretty well publicized now.. at least in the HN community :) Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "If you aren't paying for the product/service then you are the product/service being sold."

EDIT: Wow. Why the downvotes?

Do people still not understand this saying? I understand it hurts if/when you get burned but it shouldn't come as a surprise when free services change to something less desirable to monetize their business models. I wouldn't be surprised if they soon offer paid "premium" accounts that don't show ads.

<comment><USER20> That quote is often wrong.

For example, there are "freemium" business models where the users are segmented by usage level, or by need of additional features. In those models, the "free" users aren't being sold, they're just potential customers and advocates.

Further, this sort of breach of trust isn't limited to free services. There are paid services that start selling advertisements as well.

<comment><USER21> You can still be the product if you're on the free end of a freemium model. LinkedIn is an example.

<comment><USER22> You can also _not_ be the product as a free user (like on Weebly). The above quote implies that as a free user, you are always the product, and that's just not true.

<comment><USER19> Honest question, how is a free user not sold by Weebly?

It appears they have a for pay designer platform. It also appears they are funded... are they done raising rounds and/or not considering going public? The reason I ask, is because every free user is being sold then. Their usage/stat of adoption is being sold to investors and others in order to increase their value/price. I imagine someday, Weebly will find a way to place ads/marketing material in front of those free users (even if its just in periodic emails to those users).

EDIT: I could be wrong about them eventually placing ads in front of the users... but I imagine it and expect it to happen someday. If not, cheers!

<comment><USER22> I started Weebly. I plan to never place ads in front of free users.

As a company we are profitable and have been for over 4 years. We do plan on going public some day. But I find it a bit of a stretch to say that as a free user we are "selling you" as adoption statistics. As a free user, you are getting a lot of value, you pay nothing in return and you have no negative side-effects either (advertising, data gathering, etc)

The reality for us is that free users tend to be really happy with the service we are providing them for free. And they tend tell their friends about us. And some of their friends eventually pay us money for our Pro service (~$3-7/month).

Does that mean you are being sold? Absolutely not. You don't have to tell a friend. As a matter of fact, you don't have to do anything nice for us at all, and we'll still provide something of value to you for free.

But if you are pleasantly surprised at how easy it was, and you end up telling a friend on your own, that's great! And it justifies the cost of the free users of our service from a business point of view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I completely agree with Jacques that they should have been up front with him about the change, shortformblog suggests that they were with them, so perhaps the blog provider wasn't passing along the email? What ever, its annoying I'm sure to wake up and find you've gone commercial!

As a web site that gets quite a bit of traffic (blekko.com) It is interesting to see both sides of this conversation. As the 'ops' guy I'm always getting cold called/emailed from salespeople for services that will "drive traffic to your web site" and the business model is all very similar. Apparently it works well for these 'service providers.'

To illustrate, lets make up a company, we'll call it "megatraffic" or MT for short. They call me up and they say, "Chuck we can drive millions of page views your way, which you can monetize with this ad-provider network. We'll share revenue 50/50, how cool is that?"

Their other guy calls me up and says "Hey Chuck, we make your site visible to millions, for just a small price per click, we'll put a link to your site on the {hundreds/thousands/millions} of sites in our network."

So MT here sells both ends of the pie, they "become" a sort of ad network by charging folks who contribute links to the customer site. And then they also get 50% of the revenue when someone follows that link and then clicks on an ad at the landing page. That's a pretty sweet deal for them, kind of a lame deal for the patsy who is paying and paying. It is like affiliate marketing where you don't realize right away that you are an affiliate.

Then we read about (and I block from our search engine) on a daily basis organized groups of miscreants who then write code to click through these networks to shake loose the pennies and nickels and quarters that the revenue generates. Given Google's publicly reported ad revenue its easy to see how clever people can create multi-million dollar revenue streams with just a bit of programming, maybe a botnet or two, and a complicit traffic aggregator.

All that money just laying there. First you pick up a few pennies, then a couple of bucks, next thing you know you're working to squeeze every click you can off the page like HuffPo.

<comment><USER4> The preferred way in which I think plug-in services should work is that they leave older accounts in the state they were when they signed up under some set of terms-of-service and from the moment of changing the TOS can default new sign-ups to have the newer settings enabled.

<comment><USER23> I agree that would be a great way to structure the updates from the perspective of the blog service provider.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On first looks I'd say this is probably in violation of advertising regulations.

In both Europe and the US there is a requirement for any advertisements to be clearly marked as advertisements and separated from other content.

For the US see FTC 16 CFR Part 255 (Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising):

<http://ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf>

For the UK the ASA CAP rules:

[http://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/Display- Code.asp...](http://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/Display- Code.aspx?CodeId={94A142F4-6CFD-44BC-80A6-2B01624492F5}&ItemId={747AEFC3-F2CE-4A69-B97C-110310A2E924})

</comment><comment><USER25> I have an aversion to hosting 3rd-party functionality on my sites for this very reason.

They do not work for you, they do not answer to you, and their motives are usually quite different than yours.

Thus, don't be surprised when they act to satisfy those motives in ways that you may not entirely agree with.

<comment><USER26> To me it depends. Something like Disquis where they were giving it away for free I agree. However if it is a for-pay service where you are exchanging money for service, they have some incentive to do right by you, so that your money does not go elsewhere.

<comment><USER25> Good point, but keep in mind that if they're a business, then the ultimate goal is to make money. It's kind of like the formula prescribed in Fight Club which refers to whether or not a car manufacturer will issue a recall: the decision will most often be based on which result will net greatest economic yield. If the profits from doing X are more than the expected losses (say, due to customer attrition), then that's a good "business decision".

<comment><USER26> That's the risk with any SaaS/PaaS/etc, not just ones going onto your site. Anytime you pay someone a monthly fee to offer you a service, there is a risk they will change things and force you to reconsider using that service, which will then lead to having to change whatever you doing to warrant said service.

Guess it boils down to trust and if you don't, buy something you keep locally and control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Whether it's comments, posts, email, OS, government etc... _what you don't control, you don't own_. Period.

I enjoy reading comments (despite their negative vibe lately) since there are still some nuggets of gold amid the asinine BS. The deluge of rubbish is really from unmoderated places (news blogs are particularly notorious), but if an admin keeps on top of these, comments are a beautiful thing. Another blog losing comments is a damn shame. It's just one more nail in the coffin for interraction away from the shadow of walled gardens.

I think this was already mentioned elsewhere on HN, but Stallman was right.

</comment><comment><USER10> So this has been going on earlier than December, at least as early as October, according to this Disqus blog post (which says they started it in August):

[http://blog.disqus.com/post/32684337804/expanding- promoted-d...](http://blog.disqus.com/post/32684337804/expanding-promoted- discovery)

So how sure is the OP that he didn't just miss the emails/announcements about it? That said, yes, those links are kind of annoying (especially when unstyled) and can clash with the content.

As much as I want to switch my blog to Octopress, at least I can have a commenting system through Wordpress.

<comment><USER28> Based on your link above it appears that you can turn off the "discovery box" in the Disqus settings and have "just comments" if you wish.

<comment><USER4> Right, until they change things again and you get a new 'feature' for your benefit which you auto opt-in to.

That's the kind of behavior that turned me off from having a facebook account. That you need to review their terms of service all the time to see what they are up to now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Thank you for reminding me to check if I could finally delete my account - <USER2> can and I did. It was impossible to delete accounts due to an "issue" in their system for the last 3 or 4 months and was only fixed within the couple few weeks. I only realized it because I found posts that I'd made anonymously years prior were showing up when I Googled my name. I was horrified. These posts were just one-off comments that served no benefit to being associated with my primary account, but the idea that this was happening to people hoping to stay anonymous in more serious situations was still eye-opening.

I assume that comments left without being logged into a Disqus account (but while passively logged into a Gmail account) were automatically associated with your email and indexed by Google under your real name without any verification on your end. Disqus thinks that this is some sort of beneficial feature rather than a potential breach of privacy, and has you go through and remove these posts after-the-fact. There was no way to disassociate the comments from my account than to delete them, so while I didn't actually want to remove the comments from the contexts they were in, I had no choice.

Today it tells you that there are "guest comments" that are associated with your email address, and asks if you'd like to merge them, but doesn't show you what they are nor is there an option to delete them before merging. I don't want to merge comments into my account that I can't even see first, and I'd much rather delete my account entirely than risk having them continue to be associated with my namesake.

These things, in addition to these suggested ads which are disguised as posts also written or endorsed by the author and in my experience totally unrelated if not straight-up offensive (saw a recommended link on a serious blog promoting an article on some famous floozy's nip slip) have completely put me off to using Disqus and commenting on sites that utilize it. Whether or not they are deliberately trying to be shady or if their UX just sucks, it isn't worth it to me.

</comment><comment><USER30> The real problem is the tech world's lack of an ability/strategy to come up with a sustainable revenue generating business model before hooking (crack- like) millions of users to their service.

Users get used to these free world-class services and when the companies inevitably have to come up with a way to stop flushing investor money down the toilet, users bristle at this.

The bigger problem is this, in a world of free services, how is a service with a sustainable business model supposed to compete? As a user I'd rather use them, but they simply can't exist in this kind of artificially created economic ecosystem (steel dumping comes to mind).

I'd say "buyer beware" but we're not exactly the buyer here are we?

</comment><comment><USER31> I never got an email as well. Also looking at settings they have also started modifying your links to add affiliate ids. [http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/851667-affil...](http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/851667-affiliate- guide)

Both these were turned on by default. Terrible move. I understand that they have to monetize but turning these on by default is not cool.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't know why you keep calling this stealthy or a bait and switch, I've received emails on this. Also at one point, Disqus was showing me that I was not using the latest "theme/style" and that I should upgrade. And in doing so, it would enable features such as recommended and related content.

Everything I did last year fulfills the requirements of 'opt-in'. I could have left the old style and never received the new features.

Based on my experience with this exact feature, I think the OP mis-read/didn't read the information provided by Disqus.

<comment><USER4> They are stealthy because of how they are not labelled as ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I didn't notice this happening on my blog either until a friend notified me. When I looked at my blog post, the ad space was just filled with my own blog posts, so I thought it was cool, since users will be referred to other articles I wrote. However, for everyone else, those slots were ads and links to blog posts outside my blog. I disabled the feature right away. I have my own ways of making money without Disqus helping out incognito, thank you very much.

My problem is not that they have this feature, and I don't really care whether they sent out an email or not. My problem is that it was opt-out, not opt-in, from the start, and they tried to deceive bloggers further by making sure we don't see the ads when we look at our own pages. I chose disqus over facebook comments b/c I can see facebook pulling something like this, but it's definitely disappointing to see from disqus.

<comment><USER4> > My problem is that it was opt-out, not opt-in, from the start, and they > tried to deceive bloggers further by making sure we don't see the ads when > we look at our own pages.

If true that is a lot nastier than it seemed so far.

<comment><USER34> And that is of course not true, probably just a coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think Disqus is a great service, and I suspect that this business model will work fine for them, but it's obviously not ideal for everyone.

The economics of hosting comments are interesting -- there is real engineering effort in doing it well; there is product value to some degree of aggregation (spam & bot detection, etc.); the operating expenses are real especially at a Disqus-style scale, but it's not clear that many people would pay even a small subscription fee.

Makes me wonder about the viability of either a federated (not fully p2p, but "local" aggregators), either with or without actual coordination between members of the federation on spammers, e.g.. I'd probably swallow the cost of hosting comments for a few thousand "neighborly" sites, if it meant i had a good commenting system with no commercial interruptions, and be happy to subsidize "good people".

</comment><comment><USER36> They are obviously not a charity company and its totally understandable the need to make revenue. However, when i sign up for a service and i am asked to link to an external JavaScript file, i expect that file to do as advertised, i can understand the functionality changing a bit without me being notified but not when they do such drastic changes, in that case they should either go with an 'opt-in' option or disable there commenting system until i approve that i am okay with this new functionality. For all those that say 'you can stop using them if you don't like what they do', of course you can but there 'malicious' code still rendered on my webpages right? As an example, what if tomorrow they added 'functionality' to there widget and they started forcing pop ups, would that be okay? There is a certain level of trust needed towards a company that wants me to link some external code on my website that they can change at any given time, actions like that destroy said trust.

Here is the thing, if they done it the proper way i am sure most people wouldn't opt-in, if you are running a website that makes a revenue from ads, you probably already have all the ads your webpage can 'support', if you are running a website as a hobby you probably aren't interested to make any sort of revenue so you would rather not have the ads. Its way more profitable for them to just force there way in, specially if they see that there users don't care.

</comment><comment><USER37> Disqus is in the unenviable position of having a freemium product that everyone wants but nobody is willing to pay for. Their freemium model provides commenting services with the expectation that value-added features or the need for an SLA would compel site owners to upgrade to paid plans in order to use those features. Problem is, customers that are large and important enough to require an SLA are _also_ large and important enough to be able to afford a custom solution.

This leaves them with the options of transitioning the business model to something that people are willing to pay for, or finding ways to _extract_ value from their free customers.

I know of one other commenting widget provider who got into this exact same morass, but they have opted to leverage the communities that their customers have created to engage in "influencer marketing", where the site owner cooperates with the commenting widget provider to have an above-board "sponsored conversation" with a third party company.

Since it's unlikely that Disqus will be able to successfully integrate advertisements into commenting feeds in a way that doesn't damage their relationships with site owners, an approach like this shifts the value- extraction machinery away from a site's commenters, who Disqus technically has no claim on, and provides an avenue for mutual profit with the site owners, who have an existing relationship with Disqus.

</comment><comment><USER38> @jacquesm I felt the same way and got mad at disqus when I saw they did that without my consent. I turned off the "feature" and started looking for alternatives.

Vanilla Forums looked like it provides a neat option to serve the same purpose (embedded comments hosted elsewhere)

[http://vanillaforums.com/tour/turn-drive-by-blog- commenters-...](http://vanillaforums.com/tour/turn-drive-by-blog-commenters- into-engaged-community-members)

I didn't end up setting it up and have just had the disqus nonsense turned off.

<comment><USER39> I came here to say the same thing. It seems to have the same functionality except your users have to signup either on your site or through some oauth I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. I was wondering what is going on with the flagging of this article, it is much lower in the ranking than you'd expect looking at the age and the accrued points. It took me a while to find that disqus is a YC company, so that's why there are so many flags.

</comment><comment><USER40> 116 comments and not one mention of the substrings "ethic" or "moral".

Yes, Disqus is free. Yes, their ToS permit this. But their actions are ethically dubious. I wish we, as a community focused on building startups, held ourselves and our peers to a higher moral standard.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is why I never even thought about using disqus. No comments anymore in the blog, and old comments lost? Not good...

<comment><USER42> The old comments aren't completely lost. If jacquesm wanted to, he could export the comments to XML ([http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472149-comme...](http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472149-comments- export)) and then write a custom script to re-import them into a new commenting system of his choice. But unless he does that, then yes, the old comments are basically lost.

<comment><USER43> I think this should be highlighted: disqus is, at least, until now, quite upfront about telling you that the data is yours and you can take it away, if you don't want to use them anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's not a bait and switch - that's hyperbole at its finest. It's just something you don't like that you weren't notified about but still _optional_.

</comment><comment><USER45> Somehow Ghostery saw this coming a long time ago... it seems like anything running across multiple sites turns to advertising for revenue eventually!

</comment><comment><USER46> Does anyone have a link to a site that's currently showing these adverts? I can't find any with ad's showing

<comment><USER47> Not sure if this is the same thing the OP is talking about, but there is a 'Recommended Content' section with a bunch of ad-type links at the bottom of each post's comments on <http://avc.com>

<comment><USER48> That's it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This happened last year to one of the sites I manage which uses Disqus. I did not receive notice either, it just happened. And after I turned it off, it got turned on again in December.

Like Jacques I found this incredibly annoying. But unlike Jacques, I decided that the annoyance was outweighed by the convenience that Disqus gives me. We went with Disqus because it was a good UI and easy to implement--that has not changed. I just have placeholder now to check that setting every month or so.

</comment><comment><USER50> This might have negative consequences for people running personal websites:

"Bloggers -- You Might Have Already Had Libel Insurance, but you might have lost it by having ads or a tipjar.":

<http://www.volokh.com/posts/1185312054.shtml>

Lots of homeowner's and renter's insurance policies cover libel lawsuits, but many of them would exclude a website that makes or attempts to make even a trivial amount of money, such as by Disqus' ads or affiliate links.

</comment><comment><USER51> If those are ads, per FTC rules they need to be marked as ads. "Recommended Content" does not = ads, if anything it equals a false endorsement, which is mislabeling, something worse than an omission by some respects.

Some one decided "Whats this?" is all they needed. That might be more passable if it was hosted on a site which they own, but its not, its being syndicated to countless other publishers, and in effect hijacking those publisher's own credibility.

</comment><comment><USER52> Just checked my site and no ads so I'm not sure. Perhaps they are a/b testing this?

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure I did not have ads until today either, it stands out quite clearly. Maybe it only happens on 'high traffic' days or some other criterion but this definitely blind sided me.

<comment><USER19> Perhaps it's based on the content of the page and whether they have ads that tie into the content?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I wouldn't know, I've redirected all the disqus hostnames to 127.0.0.1

This has saved me the bandwidth otherwise wasted on ppl's idiotic quips and now, ads.

<comment><USER54> A great idea. Can you paste your list here? I'd like to add it to my hosts file.

<comment><USER53> sure,

127.0.0.1 disqus.com

127.0.0.1 www.disqus.com

127.0.0.1 mediadcn.disqus.com

127.0.0.1 parsley.com

I also use a slightly modified hosts file from here:

<http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/>

it does a pretty good job of cutting out the crap but I had to add things to get rid of any facebook links, disqus links, etc...

<comment><USER54> Thank-you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I can't say I'm impressed here.

In the process of being all self righteous and morally outraged, you have killed the comments contributed by your audience.

It strikes me as odd that I kept coming back to your blog, mainly to see whether my comment #775739854 of ~January 23rd was still pending moderation. That post represented considerable effort and it included remarkable data points highly relevant to your post subject.

I noticed I wasn't really the first person to actively _bump_ his comments in order to get noticed. Also, this was the second time I posted said comment at that very article. Somehow, the first one got mysteriously missing, after having been pending for moderation. So all of this leaves me wondering whether you were just not ready to maintain your blog, including comments.

Here is the gist of the comment (I can't reproduce the version anymore, since you ... destroyed it):

> [http://jacquesmattheij.com/when-haskell-is-not-faster- > than-c...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/when-haskell-is-not-faster- > than-c#comment-775739854)

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=

Hmm. I might be missing something.

But I too read that article you linked, and decided to whip up something in C++. Here's what I wrote, largely unoptimized: <https://gist.github.com/4590998#file-cpp-version-cpp>

To my surprise, it was ~40x faster than your C version... (tested with the original test input replicated 2500 times). Here's the timings (makefile included in the gist I linked)

sehe@desktop:/tmp/4590998$ time ./cpp-version < input | md5sum 33ad35318cfcdc0b675f33633b26445b - real 0m2.187s

sehe@desktop:/tmp/4590998$ time ./c-version < input | md5sum 33ad35318cfcdc0b675f33633b26445b - real 1m30.358s

(the md5sum is just there to verify that the results are identical)

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=

<comment><USER55> O hey, just found the heap profiling runs.

As you can see, the C++ version uses __much __less memory (also the C version by the OP uses 73MB - whoa; The OCaml#3 might report 12MB, but the C++ version clocks in at just 12KB. I'm guessing he C++ version would use the same order of magnitude as the OCaml#3 on comparable input sets, though)

        Command:            ./c-version
        Massif arguments:   (none)
        ms_print arguments: massif.out.18434

            MB
        73.22^#
             |#
             |#
             |#
             |#
             |#                                                           :
             |#                                                           :
             |#:::::::::::::                                              :
             |#: :::::::::::::@::::@::::::@::                             :
             |#: :::::::::::::@::::@::::::@:::@::::@:::@::::              :
             |#: :::::::::::::@::::@::::::@:::@::: @:::@::::::::::@::::   :
             |#: :::::::::::::@::::@::::::@:::@::: @:::@::::::::::@::::::@::::::
             |#: :::::::::::::@::::@::::::@:::@::: @:::@::::::::::@::::::@::::::@::::
           0 +</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----->Gi
             0                                                                   16.24

        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
        Command:            ./cpp-version
        Massif arguments:   (none)
        ms_print arguments: massif.out.18391
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

            KB
        12.15^@
             |#:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
             |#                                                                      :
             |#                                                                      :
             |#                                                                      :
             |#                                                                      :
             |#                                                                      :
             |#                                                                      :
             |#                                                                      :
             |#                                                                      :
             |#                                                                      :
             |#                                                                      :
             |#                                                                      :
           0 +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----->Gi
             0                                                                   11.17

<comment><USER55> Ah well. It looks like I'm just invisible to you then. Sorry for bothering.

Good luck with the blog

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I don't understand why people scream bloody murder when businesses attempt to make money off of something they give away for free.

Of course they have to run ads.

And while it's bit of a grey area to display ads as "recommended content"...Disqus hardly invented this practice. And based on the design and colour scheme, it's fairly obvious that the "recommended content" links are part of the Disqus widget (and generated, provided by Disqus).

On second thought, I can imagine the average user is not savvy enough to make see this distinction. But I honestly don't care. If you hate ads so much, open up your wallet and pay the "true" cost of your free lunch.

</comment><comment><USER57> Shortcut. Shortcut. Shortcut. Shortcut. Shortcut. If you use cloud services to shortcut your infrastructure, you are not in control. Use another provider for your billing system, you are not in control. Same here. You are not in control so you have no reason to complain when they try to make money. If you want to do it right, just use some software that keeps the comments and all infrastructure on your site. Simple. Or better yet, write your own. It is not that hard at all.

</comment><comment><USER58> If you're not the customer you're the product. There's no longer any excuse to think otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER59> I don't know why the author is annoyed at this, it's not as if he's paying for the service.

<comment><USER4> Because a change was made since I first signed up for this and that change was defaulted to 'on'.

<comment><USER60> If new features in any product/service aren't defaulted to 'on', no one will ever use any of them. Normal people don't change settings. As long as you're notified of the change (which Disqus did through email and blog posts) and it's not a privacy concern, I think 99% of companies will and should do exactly what they did in this situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I learned about this before and this made me explicitly modify settings for blogs I have. I turned it on for two small projects and I would be happy to share results in a month if anyone wants to see (unless thats against TOS)

</comment><comment><USER62> Honestly, this is not an issue for me at least. I've got several disqus' and disqus does a tremendous job in handling comments. It's a lot better than paying $999 for VIP disqus for sites that don't even make a dime.

</comment><comment><USER63> Out of curiosity, anyone have a good alternative? I'd like to investigate alternative comment boxes for static content (even if I have to host them elsewhere myself, eg. open source solutions).

</comment><comment><USER64> I agree--->Bye Bye Disqus

Anyone suggest replacement SaaS comment solutions?

<comment><USER65> don't you know you can just opt-out..

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I use disqus on my blog for comments. I just checked and I'm not getting what he's getting, and I do have one post that gets ~40 views per day. Weird.

</comment><comment><USER67> You can turn it off here:

<http://*.disqus.com/admin/settings/?p=discovery>

</comment><comment><USER68> Nothing is free.

If it's free you, or the attention you provide / facilitate is the product.

</comment><comment><USER69> Formerly free service now tries to monetize. More news at 11

</comment><comment><USER70> You can turn the "feature" off... It's in settings.

</comment><comment><USER71> You can turn it off...

<comment><USER72> Regardless, it should be opt-in rather than a backstab to the user's trust. Actions speak louder than words, and this behaviour says plentiful of this company's management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Just turn off the feature and stop whining.

</comment><comment><USER74> I am curious if all the "free-then-ads" defenders in this thread are (a) purveyors of "free-then-ads" businesses defending their business. (b) young or jaded people who really have grown accustomed to this tactic

Option (a) is Annoying, unpleasant, and bordering on astroturfing, but understandable

Option (b) is sad.

</comment><comment><USER75> Happened at a time when I was considering Disqus as my main comment system on my new (being built) blog. The main visual appeal of my weblog is going to be(at least that is what I want it to be) minimal and also engaging - as in discussion.

Looks like I need to search for alternatives now. Maybe sth similar but installed on my servers that I can control, or some other paid option where the main business is handling their customers' reader comments and not advertisement. There might be some with clean and easy interface where a commenter does not have to go through much hassle.

Having said that, Disqus being a free and non-charitable organization one should have seen this coming.

</comment><comment><USER12> I flagged this article because I think Disqus is providing a great service free of charge. They give you the possibility to turn the ads off and if you turn them on, you actually get a cut! Sounds like a good deal to me.

The negativity and sense of entitlement in this post is very strong and frankly unbearable to me, I hope it won't ruin the Disqus guys day. Making it opt-in would have been a ridiculously bad financial decision as they would have lost revenue from millions of sites already. I hope this change will help the company be profitable and improve their product.

<comment><USER76> Way to be unbiased.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Tool for getting meaningful data out of database quickly - <AUTHOR> I work in a medium entreprise that does not have a dedicated data analysis team.
I have a workflow that comes in every week or so, which would be someone high-ranking asking for such and such data, by this and that range of months, with this and that kind of attributes.
We have 3 SQL database (2 PostgreSQL, 1 old Oracle), and usually this involves me opening up my SQL program, writing out the query by hand, and then exporting it.
Sometimes the demand would involve a lot of tables that are scattered.
I have DataGrip which helps me, but I want something better.
I know in my head how it all works, but I would like to know if there is something on the market that lets me:
- Assign meaning to all the relationships of tables;
- Query visually by telling it (e.g.) "all drugs dispensed" after that it knows what "all drugs" means and "dispensed" means; and
- Quickly export to Google Drive or similar share-able avenues.
I can of course write SQLs, but after a while it gets very tedious. I have so many views/functions that I built up to be ready for all the demands but sometimes it gets counter-intuitive.
Do you know of a tool that helps me with this? I've tried these following tools but they seem to pitch for different business use-cases (most seem to pitch for business people who want charts, I don't want charts, I just want my Excel files).
- Google Data Studio.
- Microsoft PowerBI.
- Mode.
- Klipfolio. <comment><USER2> Sounds to me like you want data warehousing/Online Analytics Processing tools, but you don't have a DW/OLAP environment.

I'm not sure what kind of tools you could bolt onto SQL databases to make them more useful in this kind of context.

You might be better off exporting all your data on a regular basis to real DW databases and then using their tooling.

I'm sorry that I don't have any better answers for you.

</comment><comment><USER3> hey - i evaluated a bunch of tools like mode and google data studio as well trying to solve this exact problem, but i could never find what i was looking for...

so we built structure to solve this - it's a sql editor like datagrip but it allows you to build datasets that you can reuse for new analysis. so, in your case you define your relationships once with SQL, in this case 'all drugs', and then you can build a model 'all drugs dispensed' that reuses the 'all drugs' dataset... and the views / tables are linked and organized so you dont have to recreate them every time.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1tmeFgWMLs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1tmeFgWMLs)

it doesn't solve the problem of your data being scattered across multiple databases (you can send your data to a data warehouse with tools like fivetran), or an export to google drive - but it does solve the hard problem of keeping your analytics organized in a sane way so you dont have to rebuild the same sql queries over and over again, or have a bunch of various SQL definitions of the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can use qlik to basically build your own reporting warehouse as extracted data files in their QVD format.

[https://www.qlik.com/us/products/qlik- sense](https://www.qlik.com/us/products/qlik-sense)</comment>