Catalog of Missing Devices: Gadgets that could exist if not for copyright laws - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/press/releases/catalog-missing-devices-illustrates-gadgets-could-and-should-exist <comment><USER2> I usually like EFF content but this is pure bullshit.

None of these seem to be limited by any copyright laws or patent laws.

A Physicist doll: what exactly stops anyone from making one? The fact that you can't call it Barbie? I can name at least 3 Barbie like dolls which directly compete with the Barbie brand and I'm pretty sure that Mattel made a scientist Barbie before they made a few doctor ones for sure.

Meme-making DVR: Why can't this exist?

Rain and Train: what???

Ad free YouTube: why not?

Machine translation: no problem other than technical challenges

Text To Speech for Ebooks: again not a problem there are even a few products that target that directly:

Fonts on Ereaders: kindle can't a few others have no problem with custom fonts.

The soundtrack thing: there are a few products that match music to the video content and theme preset for quick editing so again what is the problem.

<comment><USER3> > Meme-making DVR: Why can't this exist?

Mandatory copy protection on HDMI output controlled by TV station, analog signal distorters on the crappy analog outs, and to top it off if you're using material under "fair use" that does not stop rightholders from lawsuiting you jnto bankruptcy. In addition the DVR may not be legal to sell as it may be used to strip DRM.

> Ad free YouTube: why not?

EULA violations at the very least, and if you're saying "x supports YouTube" without licensing the trademark, you're at risk of being sued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was somewhat underwhelming as an information effort both when you take into account the attention span of the average reader and the kind of stuff shown. It is easy to come away thinking "meh".

If they really wanted to get the message across they could have focused on two things people tend to care about: youtube and music. There's tons of nonsense in that area that may be more relatable.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to add this to the list: a Catalog of Missing Devices that can be easily read from a cellphone.

<comment><USER6> Here are some rough summaries:

* Physics Barbie, a toy that talks physics

* Meme-Making DVR, which would let you edit and remix video

* Rein N Train, letting you selectively block private data, like loyalty cards or GPS for auto insurance

* Ad-Free YouTube Kids

* Machine Translation, for translating video based on subtitles or automated speech-to-text then translation

* Text-to-speech, for ebooks

* Third party consumables for 3D printers

* Fonts on e-readers, just being able to choose and change them

* Arielle, which chooses the appropriate soundtrack for whatever you're reading or watching

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Third party consumables for 3D printers

FYI, this is already the norm in 3d printing. The companies that make filament are (almost?) all entirely separate from companies that make printers.

<comment><USER8> 12 years ago, one of my biggest customers for RFID tags was 3D Systems. They put them on their consumables exactly for this purpose. I don't follow that industry, so I have no idea what goes on at this point. And, for anyone interested they were ISO 15693 tags operating at 13.56MHz made by Texas Instruments.

<comment><USER7> > I don't follow that industry, so I have no idea what goes on at this point

I do. If what you describe was ever more than an aberration, it is at least no longer the norm.

I don't even know of any printers that have the capability of checking an RFID tag, let alone any company that sells filament with RFID tags in it.

<comment><USER9> I'm a hobby 3D printer user with four printers, and none use chipped filament. But then at work they don't consider machines below $5000, and many of them use proprietary feedstocks.

We recently got the new HP Jet Fusion printer [1] which produces wonderful functional parts from nylon and while I don't operate that machine, I can only assume HP has made it rely heavily on proprietary software and consumables.

[1] [https://youtu.be/XeTdo-w6Qx8](https://youtu.be/XeTdo-w6Qx8)

<comment><USER2> You don't buy cartridges from HP (these are user refillable) you do need to buy their agents or authorized agents you can't just dump any PA12 powder in it and hope for the best.

High end printers especially powder deposition ones use pretty complex chemistry and the consumables have to be up to spec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it disconcerting to see Cory Doctorow talk about restrictive copyright issues while he hasn't, to my knowledge, released anything substantial into the commons. The work that he does put a "creative commons" license under is always with a restrictive "non-commercial" license.

I'm glad that he advocates for freedom and liberty and it's not like hypocrisy makes these arguments any less valid but it does leave me feeling a bit weird.

<comment><USER11> Is it actually hypocritical? There's a lot of room to make copyright less restrictive without entirely abolishing it.

For example, by only granting copyright protections to DRM-free works. Or requiring renewal every so often, so that abandoned works can still be used.

We don't need to make the world CC BY-SA to fix copyright. It helps where we do, but it's not the only way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> what? China does not give a shit about US copyright. If any of these ideas worth anything they would do it. But physics talking doll? What?

</comment><comment><USER13> This is the sort of evangelizing that is more counterproductive than is helpful, because it's arguing a fairly extreme version that distorts the truth. To wit:

* Physics Barbie: The complaint here is that a doll that gets its spoken facts from the cloud can't be overwritten by parents to have STEM-friendly phrases. Of all of the things, this is truly a stretch because... just buy a different doll if you really care?

* Meme-making DVR: It would be more accurate to say "you can't get HDCP content in a form you can composite for clip-making."

* Rein-and-Train: This is basically a complaint of "the manufacturer won't let me edit the code on my hardware devices." This has nothing to do with DRM or DMCA or even copyright law.

* Ad-free YouTube: Ad-blockers do exist. And they're not illegal, not even under stretchy definitions of DMCA. If you had the ads more or less burned into a HDCP stream, then building an ad-blocker for that might have legal repercussions, but the ad servers aren't going to want to do that for other reasons.

* Machine translation: the complaint here is effectively that the audio-extraction tools could run afoul of the DMCA's anti-copyright-circumvention provision. This is a bit of a legal stretch, but any tool but that one step would definitely be in the clear. It's worth noting that the fansubbing tools actually turned out to push the edges of video editing and distribution technology, and fansubbing is the sort of thing that is almost certainly illegal.

* Text-to-speech: Assistive technologies are, I believe, fully exempt from the copyright laws (particularly if solely for personal use). I don't know if the exemptions are only limited to Braille book production or other technologies, but you could probably get in a ADA lawsuit if you were so inclined.

* 3D printer ink: no idea what's preventing the thing here, especially because the recent Lexmark v Impression case more or less holds that you can legally do some creative things to get around the RFID DRM stuff here.

* E-Reader fonts: Again no legal issue here other than "the manufacturer won't let me do something."

* Adaptive music for mood of books: Similar issue with machine translation. Of course, given the granularity of data, the e-book metadata (which isn't encrypted in the DRM formats) is probably sufficient to drive what you'd want anyways.

Nothing in that list is persuasive that anything in copyright law is wrong, especially because half of the list doesn't actually correspond to copyright issues.

</comment><comment><USER14> All of that nonsense for what is essentially a dig against DRM, while in reality most DRM gets cracked in no time as soon as there's a compelling reason to crack it, so those devices would've been created anyway if there was actual demand for it.

Don't take it wrong, I hate DRM as well, but was a stupid and laughable way to make their point.

</comment><comment><USER15> What I miss is the P2P revolution that never was. Internet was not supposed to be about centralized "cloud-based" solutions. YouTube is a bad solution to a problem we should not have.

And I also miss the paywall-free science and the Wikipedia of music we would have without copyrights.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a list of devices that the EFF suggests would/could exist if not for bad copyright laws. It is not a comprehensive catalog of ideas for devices that should exist.

<comment><USER17> Ok we'll change the title above to use your phrasing. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Airbnb lets you vacation in illegal West Bank settlements - <AUTHOR> http://972mag.com/airbnb-lets-you-vacation-in-illegal-west-bank-settlements/115666/ <comment><USER2> It is not illegal, they pay property tax to the local government.</comment>


In Georgia, a legal battle over electronic vs. paper voting - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-georgia-a-legal-battle-over-electronic-vs-paper-voting/2018/09/16/d655c070-b76f-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html <comment><USER2> Here in NY (and I'm sure in many other places), you manually mark up a paper ballot with your vote. You then insert it into a scanner which confirms the ballot's validity and then drops it into a lockbox.

The votes can be tallied instantaneously through the electronic system, but if there's any irregularities the lockboxes can be opened and manually counted as verification. And you can open a small number of randomly selected lockboxes every election anyway, even absent any suspected wrongdoing, just as a check to verify that the electronic counts are working as expected.

How is this not the standard everywhere? Yes, there's more paper (and thus expense) involved, but surely having a non-hackable paper trail is worth it to protect our democracy?

I was at DEF CON the first time they did the voting machine hacking. Those did not fill me with confidence.

<comment><USER3> How do you tell if something goes wrong? I think what's often missing in these discussions is a need for automatic audits, too, even if not full audits initially but only for a small sample.

If there is anything wrong found in that first series of audits, then a full audit should be requiered by law and there should be severe prison punishments for those state officials failing to start and finish those audits in the specified time after the election.

Corrupt state officials should not be able to create any sort of delays or use them as an excuse.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure how it's handled now, but what I'd like to see is after the election closes, a random method to select poll locations is used -- such as a lottery ball machine -- and those locations are then required to do a manual recount. No one has advance notice of which poll locations will do this, so there's no opportunity for cheating (eg, turning off a defeat device at the locations that will be audited).

If there are any differences in the count then additional locations are required to also do a manual count, and if more than two locations have differences, all electronic numbers are trashed and the whole election is counted manually.

<comment><USER5> This is basically what San Francisco, CA does. They use 3 10-sided dice to randomly choose 1% of ~600 precincts to manually audit. You can watch the random selection for the June 2018 election here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLSLlBkFY-Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLSLlBkFY-Y)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "I don't know any conceivable way you could change Georgia's election system > . . . in a matter of weeks," said Cathy Cox, a former Georgia secretary of > state who oversaw the 2001 study that led to the state's adoption of DREs. > "It would be chaotic beyond belief."

Oh yes, it would be awfully hard to make this switch in a matter of weeks. But this time crisis was created by negligence, since it's now been 2 years since officials were made aware of the problem.

> The unsecured server that Lamb exposed in August 2016 is part of an election > system — the only one in the country that is centrally run and relies upon > computerized touch-screen machines for its voters — that is now at the heart > of a legal and political battle with national security implications. > > "I > was absolutely stunned," Lamb said of his discovery of the exposed data. And > he was angered when six months later, despite warning officials at Kennesaw > State University's Center for Election Systems (CES), which housed the > server, the data was still publicly accessible online.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately it seems at least one of the people (Cathy Cox) responsible for this system is no longer in a place to be held accountable. She should be tried for negligence, along with the other administrators/politicians that drove deployment of this system.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > _Barnes testified that the server that holds the data that Georgia's 159 > counties use to build their ballots is "air-gapped," or isolated from the > Internet. But he acknowledged that he uses a thumb drive to transfer ballot > proofs from the server to his desktop computer, which he uses for email. > From there, he moves the data to a Dropbox-like site, where counties can > retrieve the ballot data._

Anyone know what "ballot proofs" refers to? I hope that's not just a fancy terminology for a tab-delimited text file that contains the voting totals. I wonder what "Dropbox-like" site actually refers to -- a cloud site created in- house by the state government? Or by a contractor that ostensibly specializes and is authorized (i.e. fills out the paperwork and background checks) to sell a file-transfer app that's basically a wrapper around a commercial cloud service?

<comment><USER8> I understand that they need a way to transfer data to and from the machine that builds the ballots but the method outlined above doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence. Barnes freely admitted that their desktop computer handles their email and that they use a thumb drive to transfer data from that desktop computer to the "air gapped" ballot build server.

If his desktop becomes infected with a virus of some kind, isn't it straightforward for that virus to infect the thumb drive and then to infect this server that builds the ballots? My understanding is that most "air gapped" machines lack USB ports or have those ports plugged so as to discourage their use.

In terms of what they should be using to transfer data, that is outside of my wheelhouse. But the current system seems ripe for exploitation by a third party dedicated to gaining access to this machine that builds the ballots.

<comment><USER9> > isn't it straightforward for that virus to infect the thumb drive

Maybe not "straightforward", but, yes, absolutely, that would be a very likely vector. As I understand it, this is how the Stuxnet worm was designed (the one that sabotaged the Iranian centrifuges).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > He said that, a decade ago, the threats came primarily from "dishonest > insiders or dishonest candidates" or criminals but that "everything changed > in 2016." Russia's efforts to penetrate states' and counties' voter > registration systems and to hack manufacturers' software "presented a > substantially new and much more serious form of threat."

In short, as long as the ballot could be reliably corrupted only by the locals who'd been bribed the device manufacturer in the first place, the corruption was stable. But now there's an outside player.

Electronic voting is bad, and Ireland gave up on it, but it's not the only issue in election integrity. See also: gerrymandering/redistricting, voter roll purges, etc.

<comment><USER11> It seems to me that the problem in the US is that a lot of people think it's more important for their party to win than for the election to have integrity.

<comment><USER10> Well, yes; look at the decades of voter rights litigation. There's a long history of trying to suppress Black voting. So long as that's still going on there will be voting integrity problems coming from within state legislatures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel like a broken record on this topic. It drives me crazy.

ON-SITE OBSERVERS.

If any person wants to check the vote they should be able to stand there and watch the whole thing and then demand a manual count on-site immediately afterwards. No bringing ballots somewhere else to be counted.

Democracy is how we stop violence from deciding resource allocation. It will be undermined if it is at all possible.

Also, I really hate how electronic voting machines instant tally elections. We had that here in Ontario[0] and completely aside from my security concerns over e-voting, having the night end in a single minute ruined the normally fun nail biting as the results came in on CBC.

[0] Which, by the way, did not allow me to be an on-site observer. Do I distrust Elections Ontario staff? No, but I shouldn't have to trust people. This is a fucking election. I ran the last federal one as a DRO. All paper ballots are 100% secure. The fucking e-voting lobby is evil.

<comment><USER13> > I really hate how electronic voting machines instant tally elections.

I understand the sentiment, but I dont think entertainment should be any kind of factor in this decision.

> I shouldn't have to trust people.

Verification systems are great (I fully endorse the electronic-for- convenience-backed-by-paper system), but ALL systems require that you trust people. The key is to have sufficient verification, both instant and later, to make fraud difficult, detectable, and provable.

<comment><USER14> >I understand the sentiment, but I dont think entertainment should be any kind of factor in this decision.

Note that the above poster was talking about Ontario. Canada has a different relationship with election results. It is illegal for Canadian results, including entrance/exit polls, to be announced prior to closing. In the US this would be seen as a radical freedom of speech issue. In Canada it is normal. In the US it is normal for people to see initial results and perhaps rush in to vote, or stay home if their candidate is leading. US politicians also regularly concede defeat based on preliminary results. So someone fiddling with the display of preliminary electronic results can, in the US, directly impact the final tally.

That isn't a thing in Canada. We don't expect to know anything until after polls close. So we have no need of "instant" tallies. Counting happens during the day but results are not published. Electronic voting might speed it up a little bit, but never would we get close to the instant feedback possible in the US.

<comment><USER13> > In the US it is normal for people to see initial results and perhaps rush in > to vote, or stay home if their candidate is leading.

Is it? I was under the impression that most everyone had adopted a voluntary policy of not reporting exit polls prior to closing, at least since 1980, so that's just shy of 40 years of not doing as you describe. I've certainly been ignorant of results until polls close. I recall estimations of "turnout by party" and "what issues motivated you" prior to closing, but not how people ended up voting.

> It certainly doesn't have anything to do with entertainment.

How do you think the OP meant about the "normally fun nail biting" experience that is electronic voting "ruined" by ending "in a single minute"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In case you missed this finer point, the Secretary of State who has certified these machines is also the candidate expected to win the election by a small margin. He has refused to recuse himself from the responsibility of ensuring a fair election.

<comment><USER16> Kris Kobach had the same arrangement in Kansas recently, he ran the election and was a candidate. He won very narrowly and many people suspect he stole the election.

<comment><USER9> And this is another angle to the problem. Even if everything _was_ on the level, just the perception of corruption increases cynicism and decreases political engagement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hand counting of paper ballots is a highly parallel process that can be done quickly at any scale. The only reason to introduce counting machines is so that someone can extract money from it.

<comment><USER18> FWIW, most proponets of hand counting advocate "sort & stack". For elections in the USA, that means a count per race / issue. Some jurisdictions can have over 30 per ballot.

Further, each precinct has to be tabulated separately. The poll site I ran for years had 5 precincts, roughly average. We'd have 400-800 ballots per election, depending.

One change that would make manual counting more feasible would be to split our ballots into federal, state, local.

Every election administrator I've ever met opposed manual counting. Mostly because it's a lot of work.

A group of intended to run experiments to determine the effort, cost, accuracy of manual counts. Simulate a real election, eg print up marked ballots where the totals are predetermined but not known to the counters. Alas, we never got our act together before every one burned out.

PS- Any tabulation method has to accommodate marking errors, aka adjudicating voter intent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a Georgia resident, this is highly disconcerting. I would be quite happy, willing, and patient with polling precincts had to switch to all-paper ballots if it meant guaranteeing that my vote was accurate and actually counted.

While I almost never vote for a winner, since I'm an outside middle-ground voice in this extremely conservative state (on the whole), I at least want the confidence that my vote wasn't tampered with. Right now, I have no such confidence. Yet I will still vote because it is my right and not voting is not the answer to this problem.

</comment><comment><USER20> I do not understand why paper ballot would be difficult to achieve, that is the easiest to do!

I never voted in the US, but the system seems overly complex for such a simple exercice. Here in Canada, we have a paper ballot ([http://www.elections.ca/vot/yth/stu/gui/images/dxsmp1-e.jpg](http://www.elections.ca/vot/yth/stu/gui/images/dxsmp1-e.jpg)), which is pretty simple. The vote is done, the stub is tallied and 2 people need to verify the vote before dropping it in a sealed box. When the polls close, the votes are counted, by multiple persons, by hand. Nothing electronic.

... and there is a single vote at a time, no votes on laws when electing representative, etc. That is just non sense.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've said this before, but I'll say it again because it's always useful in these threads...

I believe that a _well designed_ paper ballot system is superior to _any_ paper-free system. Furthermore, I think the concerns of the general public about what is actually problematic in elections (and what solutions can work) are generally wrong. I'm basing this on my experience as an election judge in Minnesota. I'll describe the system, and you can decide for yourself.

Minnesota uses paper ballots read by Scantron machines - the sort of bubble- marked sheets you used for tests as a kid. We have same-day registration and provisional ballots available for unregistered or incorrectly registered voters. We do not require ID for ordinary registered voters. There have been two statewide recounts in recent years - the 2010 governor's race, and the national-profile 2008 Franken/Coleman Senate race recount.

Now, the process. First and foremost, _all_ activities that require handling ballots, whether marked or unmarked, sealed or open, must be done in the presence of representatives of at least two political parties. It is flatly illegal for one party to handle ballots alone. This prevents all sorts of fraud - either adding fraudulent ballots, or removing marked ballots.

Second, a simple paper tally is kept of the number of ballots cast in each precinct. At count time, the number of votes counted by the machines must exactly match the number of ballots given to voters. A mismatch triggers a hand recount of the precinct and a bunch of other validation bureaucracy. This checksum also prevents the addition/subtraction of ballots at the precinct level.

Voter machine tallies are spot-checked by hand counts of individual machines - not enough to slow down the process, but enough to insure that there was no large-scale alteration of machine behavior.

Registered voters are on paper rolls. When a registered voter arrives, their name is marked off the list and they are given their ballot. If someone tries to vote twice as the same person, it's caught (and triggers bureaucracy). Their ID is not checked. Same-day registration requires ID and proof of precinct residency; the valid documents are well specified (utility bills, etc).

Political parties are invited to have poll monitors at any and all precincts, to keep an eye on the process. The poll watchers do not touch ballots or participate in the count, but are welcome to observe. They can also challenge individual voters, which makes ballots provisional and may lead to ID requirements. (I remember in 2004, the Democratic poll monitor was convinced the Republican monitor would challenge every single brown-skinned person in the precinct, and the Republican was convinced the Democrats would bring busloads of fake voters in from Wisconsin or something. Needless to say, both were wrong.)

The result of all of this is that highly accurate informal counts are available on election night, thanks to machine voting, but manual recounts are always available, thanks to the paper. And the integrity of paper ballots is strongly protected by process.

The only even arguable gap is the idea of fraudulent voting by using other people's registrations, or fake registrations. But actually doing this at a scale large enough to matter is difficult and risky. Minnesota presidential elections draw about 1.5M voters. To alter the results by 1% would require 15,000 fraudulent votes. If someone could vote once an hour, they could maybe vote 15 times. You'd need a thousand people, with training, transportation, and written data. It's hard to keep conspiracy at that scale secret.

So yeah. This is _trustworthy_. And it's simple. It doesn't require exotic technology. It's mostly just good bureaucracy.

<comment><USER22> As a fellow Minnesotan I have high confidence in our election system due to everything you described above. Given that, it's probably not surprising that our state regularly has among the highest voter turnout in the nation.

<comment><USER21> Every time I see in the news about how Georgia or Ohio or some other barbarian backwater is having trouble doing something as straightforward as having a reliable and trustworthy voting system, I want them to just adopt our model wholesale.

I'm sure the Great State of Minnesota would be happy to host representatives from other states, offer them our laws and process documentation as a model, and advise them in joining the world of effective and trustworthy democracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This Medium post has another analysis of the Georgia voting issue:

[https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting- mach...](https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting-machine- vendors-87278fdb0cdf)

</comment><comment><USER24> I found this medium article investigating fishiness in Georgia elections a couple weeks ago. [https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting- mach...](https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting-machine- vendors-87278fdb0cdf)

Kathy Rogers was GA election director, now has a golden parachute at the company who manufactures electronic voting machines for GA. She came to my attention for writing a menacing-but-technically-incompetent letter to DEFCON vote hacking village attendees.

Skeptical because only published on medium, but seems like Cohn might be onto something.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is very much an outsider with no skin in the game making suggestions...

Considering that the US is a federation, would it not make sense for the federal government to run local elections as a service?

This is on the back of another idea that has been floated around for elections in regions where "free and fair" is an aspirational goal. I stead of an international body certifying elections, it might be better to have a 3rd party run the elections, and make all the implementation decisions.

..just to keep a separation of powers between election system and candidates running within that system. Similarly, as referendums are increasingly important in many European locales... we need a more nonpolitical body empowered to finalize the wording. A president perhaps, for "westminster-like" systems.

<comment><USER9> The federal system here is fairly weak, by design -- and the ideology of that weakness is still prevalent. Making this shift would probably require more arm-twisting and political capital than the federal government can apply even when federalists are in power. There's a latent suspicion of the federal government in the electorate here that is usually pretty easily activated.

I'm also not sure I see the advantage to centralizing this. It's a case of "many hands make light work". There's a _lot_ to do to conduct an election. Breaking the task among lots of basically autonomous units, made up of local individuals instead of some faceless Washington bureaucrats (see, there's that latent suspicion ;) gives some resilience -- and helps voters feel connected to the process.

Also worth noting that although the structures of the various intra-state governments are _broadly_ similar, there's plenty of differences that would be a pain in the neck for a federal administration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> In India, there has been a debate going on for years that EVMs should be replaced with the old paper voting method. People against EVMs say that they can be tampered and results can be altered whereas the other side says it's very safe to use EVMs.

<comment><USER21> At this point, I'm automatically suspicious of any party that says it's perfectly safe to use paperless voting machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The only electronic voting machine I would ever trust wouldn't have any more hardware capabilities than a TI-81 calculator. It doesn't need it, and every bit of extra bullshit and hardware and layers of software is a security vulnerability. The only other problem I see after doing that would be whether or not to publicly release the hardware diagrams. Maybe have the gaming commission verify the machines like they have very successfully done slot machines and electronic gambling machines.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think the onset of election season has caused these types of articles to become in-vogue. I have been surprised by the reactions of what is mostly a tech savvy community. Full disclaimer, I work at a voting tech company as an engineer, and just wanted to give my 2 cents.

\- Paper ballots and Risk limiting audits do not actually constitute a perfect solution to this problem. They do not constitute what is considered an End to End verifiable voting system. You cannot actually definitively know that your vote was counted in the final tally, and cast as intended. The Risk limiting audits as currently structured can only verify that a computer counted a small sample size of votes as a human would. It cannot confirm all the votes were counted, or that your vote was not tampered with.

\- Paper ballots also do not address the needs of folks voting over seas, or those affected with disabilities.

\- When current election systems are often described as easy to hack, the systems referenced are often hardware that is 10-20 years old. If you look at the landscape of the Election's industry, there are only 3 vendors that account for over 90% of the public election market share in America. These system's were put through certification many years ago, and continue to operate through those certifications. The result of an inability to innovate in this space, is that we will continue to use those systems (that many perceive as vulnerable) for the foreseeable future.

\- Smaller election vendors are encouraging the idea of recurring certification, as well as more stringent certification requirements.

Most people who use these forums are very capable of understanding concepts like Asymmetric encryption, checksums, and other tamper proof methodologies for high value data. If you can trust the idea of an Encrypted e-mail server ( e.g. Lavabit ), or encrypted chat servers (Signal), it should not be hard to imagine that there is a secure way to conduct elections electronically and through the internet.

Finally, given how the past few decades have progressed, it seems that you would be on the wrong side of history to say that electronic voting cannot be done safely in a digital form. The process needs to be secure, but it also needs to be convenient, safe, fast, and trustworthy. Observing a few votes being cast in your polling station is nothing compared to observing every vote being cast for a given election.

<comment><USER29> > it should not be hard to imagine that there is a secure way to conduct > elections electronically and through the internet

It's hard to imagine because it's completely impossible. In most of the world not being able to prove you voted for someone in particular is considered a key characteristic of the vote. No internet based voting guarantees this.

> Finally, given how the past few decades have progressed, it seems that you > would be on the wrong side of history to say that electronic voting cannot > be done safely in a digital form. The process needs to be secure, but it > also needs to be convenient, safe, fast, and trustworthy. Observing a few > votes being cast in your polling station is nothing compared to observing > every vote being cast for a given election.

Throwing around claims of wrong side of history would be just an insult it wasn't so dangerous. Paper voting is not secure because you "observe some votes being cast in your polling station". It's secure because each polling station is staffed by political adversaries that do the count together of every single ballot. This is _much_ better than the level of systematic verification than you can ever even attempt to do to your huge stack of software and hardware. It's also a kind of verification that everyone understands and so it effectively convinces the losing candidates they actually lost. Which is as much of an important characteristic of a voting system as getting good counts.

So get off your high horse. Apparently you design these systems and don't understand the actual safety characteristics of the paper count. The kinds of attack surface electronic systems add is huge and yet they provide no actual advantages to properly run elections. The thread is already full of examples so I won't add more but it's telling that in most of the world this isn't an issue at all because we just run our simple, cheap, reliable and fast process like we've always done and forget about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> old, but gold: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EV_c1-YTk8M#](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EV_c1-YTk8M#)

<comment><USER31> As an aside, the original source of this joke, which a lot of people associated with election tampering, was cheap resistive touch screens that were incorrectly calibrated.

You'd push a location on the screen, but due to normal wear the location that the press was recorded was wrong, this would get worse the more wear the screen had and the longer between re-calibration.

Eventually people got videos of you'd push one candidate and another candidate to the left or right/up or down would receive the vote, often in different races.

This was a scandal in the sense that the machines were not fit for purpose, overly cheap, and poorly maintained/serviced. But it wasn't a good example of election tampering (just one that fit what a lot of people expected to see when tampering was occuring).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It really worries me for US democracy that they don't seem capable of running an election in a way that voters feel confident that their votes are counted correctly. Bush v Gore in 2000 should have been a warning but nothing seems to have improved and now we even have a president who does everything he can to undermine trust in election results. Once people start losing trust in elections and other public institutions the door is wide open for a strongman who claims to clean up the mess by getting rid of the system. Trump is a start ("clean up the swamp") but things may get much worse.

<comment><USER21> Bush vs Gore led directly to the idiotic touchscreen machines. Florida's paper ballot mechanism sucked, sure. But touchscreens are far, far worse. People fell for it.

<comment><USER32> That particular system sucked (the 'hanging chads' come to mind), could have been easily remedied without going electronic though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I can not access that article, can someone please submit it to archive or has some other mirror of it?

<comment><USER34> [https://outline.com/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat...](https://outline.com/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/in-georgia-a-legal-battle-over-electronic-vs-paper- voting/2018/09/16/d655c070-b76f-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html)

<comment><USER33> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Thought this was gonna be about the country :/

</comment><comment><USER36> Obligatory Xkcd link:

[https://xkcd.com/2030/](https://xkcd.com/2030/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Let's rehash that old argument in the comments shall we?

<comment><USER38> Pretty much everyone (i.e. by a margin that would be considered a landslide in a normal election) who works near tech agrees that electronic voting is fine as long as it produces a paper record (or a uses a paper ballot) per vote which provides a mechanism to verify the integrity of the system after the fact and makes tampering hard to scale.

There. Done.

Edit: changed wording, receipt vs record.

<comment><USER39> An electronic machine that only exists to print a paper ballot makes the most sense IMO. You get the convenience and consistency of a touch screen (no hanging chads), but you get to see the paper that gets printed out and see that it matches what you put in, and the paper is the actual system of record that matters.

<comment><USER40> Do you see a role for the electronic machine to provide a count as well? My sense is that the switch to electronic machines (and the switch to mechanical booths prior) had to have been driven at least in part to make the preliminary count easier to obtain.

<comment><USER41> For those of us who want to switch to alternate electoral methods like RCV, approval voting, multimember districting, etc, using machine counting is a big deal. If you are paper only, the increased labor to do repeated tabulations (as is done to an extent in RCV) is significant. It is the reason a bill to implement RCV in a state I used to live failed, after passing the state house and being discussed for some time in the state senate.

Whatever counting method you are using and whatever reporting method you are using, it needs to be verifiable. I still can't believe we had ballots from 2016 that were destroyed after brin subpoenaed, without any consequence for those who had charge of their possession and safety.

<comment><USER21> I beg to differ. I live in Minneapolis, where we do RCV on paper. It has not caused any of the problems you're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Paper voting is a waste of resources. And can be frauded the same way as electronic voting.

<comment><USER10> Ah yes, it's famously easy to remotely change thousands of pieces of paper that are locked in boxes.</comment></comment>


Bounds Check Elimination (BCE) in Golang 1.7 - <AUTHOR> http://www.tapirgames.com/blog/golang-1.7-bce <comment><USER2> This is an area of optimization that was figured out in the Pascal era, then forgotten during the C era. It's good to see it coming back. Work on Pascal was able to optimize out about 95% of bounds checks. Here's an overview that has a literature survey.[1]

A big win is hoisting bounds checks out of loops. I think the Go compiler already optimized out the check for loops where the loop iteration variable is bounded by the range of the array. But that's a special case. The general case has a problem. Consider

        func copy(src []int, dst []int) {
    	for i := range(src) {
                dst[i] = src[i]
            }
        }

This has a subscript out of range error if dst is shorter than src. It's the classic C buffer overflow. For optimization purposes, we can look at this as

        func copy(src []int, dst []int) {
    	for i := range(src) {
                assert(i < len(src)) // subscript check
                assert(i < len(dst)) // subscript check
                dst[i] = src[i]
            }
        }

The FOR statement insures that i < len(src), so a prover would see this as (i < len(src) implies (i < len(src)), which reduces to True, and we can discard that assert. We still have the assert for "dst". For that, it's possible to hoist it out of the loop. We generate the check

        func copy(src []int, dst []int) {
            assert(len(src) <= len(dst)) // generated
    	for i := range(src) {
                assert(i < len(src)) // optimized out
                assert(i < len(dst)) // subscript check
                dst[i] = src[i]
            }
        }

which gives us

        len(src) <= len(dst) and i < len(src) implies (i < len(dst))

which simplifies to True. So assert(i < len(dst) can be optimized out. We have one run-time check remaining, and it's outside the loop, done once. This is hoisting a bounds check out of a loop, and it's a huge win for inner loops. Good test for a compiler: write a matrix multiply and make sure it can do this.

[1] [http://www.cri.ensmp.fr/classement/doc/E-235.ps](http://www.cri.ensmp.fr/classement/doc/E-235.ps)

<comment><USER3> If out of bounds errors were undefined behavior, lifting the bounds check out of the loop would be legal. But in go, it isn't an error. It is equivalent to panic(), which can be caught. If the caller recovers, they should see the partially-completed loop, but lifting it out of the loop would change that behavior.

Here is an example, using your copy function:

[https://play.golang.org/p/Cc3Oc3le-9](https://play.golang.org/p/Cc3Oc3le-9)

<comment><USER4> I think the point is that in the cases where you can prove it's not possible, you can optimize it out. This is functionally the same, because if it's incapable of panicing because of out of bounds, you don't need to check for it. I think what you likely get in practice is something like:

        func copy(src []int, dst []int) {
            if (len(src) <= len(dst) {
                for i := range(src) {
                    dst[i] = src[i]
            } else {
                for i := range(src) {
                    assert(i < len(dst)) // subscript check
                    dst[i] = src[i]
                }
            }
        }

That way you still get panics in the case where they are applicable, but not in the cases where you can safely abstract the bounds check away (because a panic for that reason should not be possible). Although this is likely at the code generation level, so you can consider the if statement to be a sort of macro branching on what code is actually generated.

<comment><USER2> Go backed into exceptions. Originally, "panic" was always fatal.[1] Then came "recover".[2] But it was considered bad form to use "recover" for anything other than doing a final cleanup and exit. Now, the library JSON parser can panic and recover due to invalid input, then return an error code. That's exception handling.

Now we have to give up optimizations so that Go's exception handling will work. Every function call, every subscripted access, and every map reference is a potential loop exit. Bleah.

[1] [http://dave.cheney.net/2012/01/18/why-go-gets-exceptions- rig...](http://dave.cheney.net/2012/01/18/why-go-gets-exceptions-right) [2] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang- nuts/HOXNBQu5...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang- nuts/HOXNBQu5c-Q%5B1-25%5D)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This doc, written by one of the Go team at Google, enumerates the state of BCE as of a few months ago:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vdAEAjYdzjnPA9WDOQ1e4e05...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vdAEAjYdzjnPA9WDOQ1e4e05cYVMpqSxJYZT33Cqw2g/edit#)

</comment><comment><USER6> Is Go not optimizing out the dead code in those examples because of those debug flags? Or does it not do that in general?

Or is it just doing the bounds check elimination (and debug messages about it) before the dead code elimination?

<comment><USER7> Go handles dead code by not allowing you to compile something with dead code. In the examples the "_ =" is needed to force it to compile and do the work without actually assigning the value to anything.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps i misunderstand you, but isn't simply calling a function the same as what you quoted? Eg, `_ := Foo()` is the same as `Foo()`. No assignment needed.

`_` mainly exists to allow ignoring single values, within multiple. Eg, dropping an error: `val, _ := MightError()`

<comment><USER7> Foo() can have side-effects, taking a value from an array cannot, so Foo() is not necessarily dead code, whilst a[0] certainly is.

_ serves multiple purposes, not just for ignoring a return value. It's often used when you care about the side effect but not the return value, such as importation a driver for a database . You'll never use the library, so you import it as _ "db.driver.name/path/".

<comment><USER9> Can't taking a value from an array result in a panic? Quite the side effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> tapirl, just fyi this references line numbers like line 22, but doesn't display any numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> ? you mean there is not line numbers at the beginning of code lines? yes, my blog server code is too simple to show line numbers.

<comment><USER11> you could use something like [http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/](http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/) to do it in JavaScript.</comment></comment></comment>


Chrome extensions can now call iframe page content scripts - <AUTHOR> http://matthew.mceachen.us/blog/sandbox-telegrams-or-how-your-chrome-extension-can-interact-with-page-content-scripts-1123.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting...but haven't Chrome extensions always been able to communicate with content scripts (and back) through chrome.extension.sendRequest?

If I understand correctly, what you've managed to do is communicate with _embedding_ page's scripts, in a cleaner way than the one suggested by Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're correct, unless you're playing with ifrmes. tabs.sendRequest doesn't allow you to talk to scripts in iframes -- only the tabs.executeScript has the allFrames param, and but that script will be sandboxed from the content scripts (hence the postMessage workaround).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I always find these browser extensions completely terrifying. You can have all the encryption in the world, but all it takes to extract your bank account or credit card information is one lousy browser extension.

<comment><USER4> It isn't just extensions on there own: extensions like greasemonkey allow external scripts to be added, and even without that there are bookmarklets that get complete access to the content in the browser's DOM too. Admittedly a bookmarklet requires user intervention to run once installed, but a script in GM or similar will run just as automatically as an extension on its own.</comment></comment>


Chatbot Game Update: "trending topics" give you suggestions for chatbot rule submissions. - <AUTHOR> http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_mr

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is to have a chatbot capable of discussing current affairs.</comment>


Intel acquires Movidius - <AUTHOR> http://www.movidius.com/news/ceo-post-september-2016 <comment><USER3> Wow, nervana, and now movidius. Intel are eating a lot of non nvidia machine learning hardware. Theyre also really into opencl, half the talks at this years international workshop on opencl were from intel [http://www.iwocl.org/attend/sessions/](http://www.iwocl.org/attend/sessions/) Interesting times :)

<comment><USER4> That's definitely one way of saying Intel is all over the place lately because it has no idea what's "the future."

Many-core CPUs (Phi), FPGA's (Altera), ASICs (Nervana), and now the GPU-like Movidius for machine learning.

You could argue that "they're just experimenting" to see what will take off. But I don't know if paying $17 billion for something (Altera) still fits in the "experiment" category. Was acquiring McAfee antivirus for $8 billion an experiment, too? What if FPGAs _aren 't_ the future of machine learning, and they fade out? Does Intel write-off the $17 billion, like it did the $10+ billion it spent on the mobile market.

And it's now trying to make x86 chips, while at the same time making ARM chips better _for the competition_. I don't think Intel (its current CEO) has any clue about what the company should focus on. Sooner or later, its PC market profits will be squeezed/wasted on these acquisitions, and Intel will need to show something for it.

<comment><USER5> No, it would not need to write off the $17 billion, it would simply spin Altera back out again. It was a successful stand-alone company and FPGAs have plenty of applications that have nothing to do with machine learning to make it a viable segment of the market for a long long time to come.

McAfee is a different matter and the mobile market _could_ have been won but not in the way that Intel hoped.

<comment><USER6> How cold have the mobile market been won ?

When answering take into account that Intel's fab services division couldn't really compete with TSMC (at least on price) .

<comment><USER5> By letting go of the x86 instruction set. But that's something I figure Intel will do in 2300 or so.

<comment><USER7> The instruction set is irrelevant. In modern CPU, decoding the X86_64 instruction set takes about 80K transistors. Compare this with 1,175 millions transistor packed into a Skylake - it does not even factor.

What is relevant is the ability to compute within a power envelope. Intel didn't try to scale down its new designs for mobile. It tried to scale up old cores with new technology - something that they got good at during the tick- tock development flow. And guess what, new core designs beat process improvement. Intel eventually reached same power envelopes as ARM with more computing power, and better overall performance due to better memory bus access. But it reaches them after 8-12 months after Qualcomm does, so it's a full generation behind in terms of mobile development.

Specific to this acquisition, Movidius packs 150 Gflops under 4W of power. Skylake packs 100Gflops under 120W of power. The difference here is more than 2 degrees of magnitude. Moving the designs to the new Intel processes should cover another significant improvement. So that's what's going on.

<comment><USER8> > Specific to this acquisition, Movidius packs 150 Gflops under 4W of power. > Skylake packs 100Gflops under 120W of power. The difference here is more > than 2 degrees of magnitude. Moving the designs to the new Intel processes > should cover another significant improvement. So that's what's going on.

Where did you get the measurements? Link please.

M2 to Skylake is like apples to oranges. The RISC cores are based on Leon, and then you have 12 SHAVEs/VLIW cores, which are very good at number crunching and GPU/DSP-like tasks, but they are not really general purpose CPUs as such. I think you should exclude them from your comparison.

Anyway, good for Movidius, I wish 'em all the best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those like me, who don't have the slightest idea what is Movidius: based on [http://www.movidius.com/technology](http://www.movidius.com/technology) and my lay-programmer reading of it, it seems they've designed some kind of CPU/chip specialized for "vision" processing (and/or neural networks).

<comment><USER10> They do embedded machine learning chips (mostly for vision) - their Myriad chip is in Google Tango and the Phantom 4 drone

<comment><USER11> Supposedly in the HTC Vive as well, but right now it seems to only do edge detection...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bit disappointing to see another Irish tech company sell out early instead of pushing for a flotation. Can anyone more familiar with the industry comment as to whether there was a realistic chance for them to succeed on their own?

<comment><USER13> It's an Irish thing - I'm constantly looking at the Irish tech scene and what we're missing that we can't really compensate for is size. Theres a trend among such Irish tech companies to sell very early.

In Silicon Valley a company will never experience any problems scaling. The entire ecosystem is developed there is a full stack available to cater to whatever the growing firms need - be it talent, investment or other resources.

Ireland is more limited - we cater to startups and large tech companies quite well so the strategy is grow, move to US while medium sized grow again and then return to Ireland when you're Apple or Google and you want an EMEA HQ. We don't cater that well to the medium sized firms in Ireland so it encourages early selling.

[http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/were-missing-out- on...](http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/were-missing-out-on-the- bigger-picture-when-early-stage-tech-firms-sell-out-34158700.html)

<comment><USER12> You're probably right. I wonder if there are lessons to be learned though from similar sized countries (e.g. Israel, Denmark, Netherlands)? My feeling is that a lot of the issues you raise are valid, but they could be addressed or at least mitigated somewhat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very strange to see it signed off with Sláinte. I never thought it used much outside of Scotland

<comment><USER15> The dead giveaway that you're looking at Irish and not Scottish Gaelic is the accent direction: Irish uses acute accents exclusively, whereas Scottish Gaelic uses grave accents exclusively in its standard orthography (though older variants, and some holdouts still use both acute and grave accents).

<comment><USER14> Thanks, good to learn the difference. Graves are a pain on UK keyboards though, I propose they switch!

<comment><USER15> There are complicated reasons why that's unlikely to happen, which go back to why some people still use both grave and acute accents Scottish Gaelic (vowel quality, essentially) and why standardising on the grave accent was a more natural choice for SG.

It's not a huge deal so long as you use an appropriate keyboard map.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This might lead to duopoly in the market for hardware machine learning chips with Intel and Nvidia competing-with/acquiring new players. This could ultimately stifle innovation like it happened with EDA companies - <USER2> and Cadence.

<comment><USER17> Are you suggesting that such a scenario would be worse than the current situation - nVIdia having a monopoly on DL hardware?

<comment><USER16> Not at all. These startups have to hold out a bit longer. The AI revolution is just beginning. They are selling short.

<comment><USER18> Hard to do. The funding landscape doesn't really support very long term AI applications without an associated consumer application as proof. Commercializing AI is quite hard actually and most of the AI projects you see are cost centers for the bigs (Alphabet, Apple etc...)

Novel ML implementations have a lot of R&D overhead and need a (comparatively) lot of incubation before they are effective. Tying that to a commercial success adds magnitudes of complexity that 99% of Venture doesn't like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They use it in the phantom 4. That is a DJI drone.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know if they actually support learning on the chip or does it just execute a pre-trained model efficiently?

<comment><USER10> inference only. This is an IoT/robotics play for Intel, combined with RealSense.

The only feasible product at the moment for training large models is NVidia GPUs. Maybe AMD in 1-2 years time, if they decide to wake up and invest in software optimisation for deep learning

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone know how much Intel paid?

<comment><USER21> You can work it out from dfj espirits blog post. They're a publicly traded VC.

<comment><USER20> The Telegraph says "Intel...has made a conditional offer for Movidius, which will result in an estimated total cash return of approximately £27 million for Draper Esprit." Unclear what their % ownership is though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congratz guys!

<comment><USER23> I'm jelly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> that's a surprising move. Movidius had a rather unimpressive multiprocessor chip, but managed to get it incredibly hyped.

IMHO, Intel is desperate to buy machine learning hype.

Movidius hit gold with the sell, the company products weren't worth much.</comment>


Convert your iOS App into a PSD file - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vpdn/MMLayershots

<comment><USER2> This would work really well with Framer: [http://framerjs.com](http://framerjs.com)

<comment><USER3> And one of the reasons why I built the library in the first place. Thanks Koen for Framer.js, it's awesome!

<comment><USER2> Ha only saw it in the readme now :-) Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks great. Excited to try it out.

<comment><USER3> It's still early work in progress and I've only tested with a few apps so far. Also test coverage could certainly be better. If you find any issues, feel free to ping me up (@vpdn).

<comment><USER5> Hi vpdn.

The Podspec seems a little screwy, it's not installing the actually library files, just the PSDWriter classes.

Edit: I notice the pod spec has changed since the tag - maybe you need to tag a new 0.1.1 ?

Edit 2: Using "pod 'MMLayershots' :head" in the pod spec still doesn't work.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I think I screwed up the source_files regex in the Podfile. Have pushed a new pull request to the Cocoapods repo, hopefully will be fixed soon.

Update: There's a transitioning period currently ongoing at Cocoapods (migration to Cocoapods Trunk). For now please use the updated podspec in the github repo directly:

pod 'MMLayershots', :podspec => '[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vpdn/MMLayershots/master/M...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vpdn/MMLayershots/master/MMLayershots.podspec')

<comment><USER6> alternatively, use:

pod 'MMLayershots', :git => '[https://github.com/vpdn/MMLayershots.git'](https://github.com/vpdn/MMLayershots.git')</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/21/14683942/pewdiepie-controversy-youtube-drama <comment><USER2> I've been watching Youtube vids for a long time (well relatively, like 10+ years) and it's one of my primary forms of entertainment.

It has been very interesting to see youtubers come and go, a lot of them seem to burn out on the schedule of trying to produce content regularly, which I can understand, anyone who's edited videos would realise the time it can take to produce something of good quality.

Pewdiepie is an interesting case as he's far and away the biggest "real" channel on youtube (i.e. not VEVO or one of the generic youtube channels).

[https://vidstatsx.com/PewDiePie/youtube- channel](https://vidstatsx.com/PewDiePie/youtube-channel) gives you an idea of the size, he regularly gets 5-10 million views a day!

The controversy seems very click-baity to me, I read the articles and watched his response videos. It seemed to me that he made some pretty bad taste comments (if you've seen much of his content that shouldn't be a surprise) and the WSJ deliberately sliced it up to take it out of context and produce the most sensationalised headline possible.

All reminded me of the quote generally attribued to cardinal Richelieu.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

<comment><USER3> The pewdiepie controversy seems manufactured to me.

I get pewdiepies humor. I watch his videos anticipating his originality and I guess 54 million subs do for varying reasons.

His ability to express himself and generate content that makes me laugh repeatedly. He's not insensitive despite what some news articles say. The anti-semitism thing is so overused today its a little meaningless. The only way to push its worth is to generate headlines and articles to emphasis its importance.

He jokes broadly about every culture and only seems to have issues with one culture in particular, unsurprisingly.

It's reached a point it feels he's holding back something funny to please WSJ - a huge, huge tragedy and loss to his freedom and originality.

<comment><USER4> Ultimately, his freedom and originality haven't been impinged; if he wants to say whatever he wants, he can make and host his own videos.

His freedom of speech doesn't override Disney's freedom of association or YouTube's freedom of the press; they're under no obligation to publish or promote anyone's content, and the counterweight to that is that people who don't like their policies can boycott them.

But you're unlikely to find a successful boycott organized around the notion that there should be no ramifications for paying strangers to hold up signs that say "Death To All Jews."

<comment><USER5> This is all correct -- but it underlines the awkward moral spot that Google (my employer) is in.

Our incentive is to pay lip service to freedom of speech while taking the path of least resistance and censor to keep angry 3rd parties happy. You might think this shuts down only speech beyond the pale. But we are still rewarding those who act most offended, and our wisest course is to kowtow more and more.

That stuff is no danger to a society when the soap boxes are distributed about land. But YouTube is a single platform in the position where it can one of the most effective censors of film on earth.

It is more more powerful in this field than any government, -- except those which can force our hand. Yet Google has the rights, and indeed duties of a private company. And that is a long-term danger to society and to the company.

<comment><USER6> If we stopped saying things that might "offend" someone somewhere there would be silence. What's interesting is, the more we try to silence certain voices, the louder their message gets. Does demonization (?) work? Does it back fire ? Take IS for instance. The stronger and more extreme the resistance (?) the stronger it gets.

I'm certainly not defending hate, etc. Just wondering - out loud - if the old countermeasure rules still apply.

<comment><USER4> There are things that are pretty unlikely to offend, things that are very likely to offend a lot of people, and things that are very likely to offend a few people (this kind of humor is often called "punching down" when the few are a low-power group and "punching up" when it's a high-power group).

Nobody is calling for zero offense; that's a slippery-slope argument that doesn't really apply to the situation. And nobody has silenced PewDiePie; he's completely free to continue to publish his content on YouTube (with proper community flagging, within the guidelines of the YouTube community, and even if he were no longer free to do so, he wouldn't be "silenced;" he'd just have to move his content to .mp4s hosted out of his own pocket).

What has happened is YouTube and Disney have both exercised their option to no longer pay the guy for being offensive, which they are perfectly within their rights to do.

In terms of the more general "Just wondering aloud" question: The old Streisand Effect is still in play, but the Internet is now a mature enough platform that it has "these sites" and "those sites." You can find all manner of things completely unacceptable to YouTube's community standards linked off of 4chan. Keeping them off of YouTube does probably make them a little harder for most web users to find (since YouTube's search, indexing, and relational systems are so convenient). That's likely working as intended.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. They are free to hire and fire whoever they want. But that's not my point. The question is this: Does marginalizing and demonizing - in the internet era - make fringe ideas weaker or stronger? Or is "there's no such thing as bad press" finally not true?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Does anyone here spend much of their usual 'entertainment' time watching YouTube (specifically content creators not TED talks and such)? I started doing it recently just to see what all the fuss is about as it seems pretty common for younger people (and I'm 26 so it's not like I'm old but I didn't do it).

After subscribing to a few channels I started watching stuff regularly. Basically if I want to kill 10 mins I'll open up YouTube and there'll be something to watch. I'm committing so little time I don't need to really think about it before clicking (unlike say Netflix). On the other hand when I step back a minute I notice that the videos provide incredibly little value as opposed to usual entertainment sources. I could watch a crappy 20min sitcom and it may be deemed trash but it still has a story and characters it feels like it provides some value to me. I don't get that on YouTube. I've tried a variety of the most popular channels and some other stuff and it's largely memes and clickbait and something I forget about the moment I'm done watching.

It seems like a lot of the popular creators don't actually produce good content but instead have managed to built a personality cult around themselves that hooks very young people. I've noticed comments where people praise 'hustle' and 'content' and 'awesome product placement'.

Just interested on other people's thoughts on the platform and content.

Edit: Thanks for the replies everyone, very interesting.

<comment><USER7> I definitely spend a lot of my entertainment time watching youtube. I really agree what you're saying as far as big content creators not offering much substance to their videos, but it's wrong to think that the "big youtubers" are the only ones making things on Youtube. I have my subscriptions filled with some pretty amazing smaller youtubers who are making great, cerebral content all the time. I'm more interested in non-fiction, while it sounds like you're looking for fiction and story-telling, but I'll share some of my favorite channels anyway

PBS idea channel - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3LqW4ijMoENQ2Wv17ZrFJA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3LqW4ijMoENQ2Wv17ZrFJA)

Historia Civilis - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv_vLHiWVBh_FR9vbeuiY-A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv_vLHiWVBh_FR9vbeuiY-A)

Langfocus - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNhX3WQEkraW3VHPyup8jkQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNhX3WQEkraW3VHPyup8jkQ)

Crash Course - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX6b17PVsYBQ0ip5gyeme-Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX6b17PVsYBQ0ip5gyeme-Q)

Baz Battles - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx- dJoP9hFCBloY9qodykvw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx- dJoP9hFCBloY9qodykvw)

Wendover Productions - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9RM- iSvTu1uPJb8X5yp3EQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9RM-iSvTu1uPJb8X5yp3EQ)

Practical Engineering - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMOqf8ab-42UUQIdVoKwjlQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMOqf8ab-42UUQIdVoKwjlQ)

<comment><USER8> Primitive Technology - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA)

has been my favorite recently. Hits the engineering and problem solving part of my brain but is also weirdly very meditative without any talking.

<comment><USER9> Be sure to turn on the subtitles - he narrates through CC what he is doing which is often very interesting.

<comment><USER10> Subtitles are different than Closed Captioning.

<comment><USER11> Not on YouTube - the menu entry is literally "Subtitles/CC"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Went into the article expecting it to be silly, but there were actually a ton of interesting insights, especially about how no one knows how to manage these celebrities.

Also, slowbeef is being humble; he literally invented the LP and curated the scene forever ago. His Metal Gear 2 annotated playthrough (from the mid-00s at the latest, I'm remembering HTML tables) was absolutely hysterical (at least to my teenage self), and was the only way I could read the earlier plot to that series at the time. He's also been able to figure out how to hack ROMs for translation that nobody else could and ran translation projects, like with Policenauts. He's a hero in the gaming community and totally underrated, so I'm always upset to not hear his name come up more often when people discuss Let's Plays.

<comment><USER13> To anyone who was initially confused here, "LP" means "Let's play" (watch somebody play videogames), not "Long Play" (record).

I didn't think I was _that_ old...

<comment><USER14> There is ALSO a Long Play category for games, which is videos that do a full play through of a game with zero commentary, and in as few segments as possible. (Many longplays are just one video.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's worth nothing that this article was posted a month ago: since then, there was another incident along the same lines where popular YouTuber JonTron imploded for the same reasons as described in the article.

Jim Sterling has the most objective take on the sequence of events: [http://www.thejimquisition.com/youtubers-say-the-darndest- th...](http://www.thejimquisition.com/youtubers-say-the-darndest-things/)

<comment><USER15> JonTron isn't going to lose his subscriberbase from this though... I doubt most of them care.

Personally I don't really, mostly because his personal views never come into play on his actual show. This kind of thing always happens when you get someone involved in comedy to participate in a serious discussion, you start realizing they have opinions and views that you may not like.

<comment><USER16> > JonTron isn't going to lose his subscriberbase from this though... I doubt > most of them care.

I'm sure many of his casual viewers won't care (or even know), but spaces like his subreddit have a lot of people condemning him and saying they're done with his channel. That's the sort of thing that can eventually eat away at content quality by breaking your relationship with bigger fans - think of how Many A True Nerd depends on subreddit feedback to fix mistakes and guide playthroughs.

<comment><USER17> >subreddit have a lot of people condemning him and saying they're done with his channel

Yet he broke 50k subscribers on March 16 and he's at 51,798 as I write this comment. It's almost like you can say anything you want on Reddit.

<comment><USER16> Again, "many of his casual viewers won't care". Several people elsewhere in this thread have observed that his subscriber count _did_ dip, but normal growth has brought him back above that level already.

My point was a very specific one, which is that a lot of longtime viewers who heavily engaged with his content (e.g. posted at length on the subreddit) seem to have walked away from engaging or perhaps subscribing at all. I think that's damaging even if his viewer count doesn't tank, which is why I gave a specific example of how it could hurt a channel.

<comment><USER18> _> My point was a very specific one, which is that a lot of longtime viewers who heavily engaged with his content (e.g. posted at length on the subreddit) seem to have walked away from engaging or perhaps subscribing at all._

On the contrary - a large number of them had little or no history on the subreddit and it reeked of a bizarre form of astroturfing with plenty of new accounts repeating very similar messages. To what end? No idea. He's popular enough that it is totally possible he had a number of subscribers that felt the need to join Reddit and speak out. But any long term fan would know Jon's opinions on such things. So if anything, they weren't the most engaging of fans and "no harm done".

Mostly smelled of rotten fish to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Okay, so... occasionally it comes up that I experimented with being a gaming youtuber as a way to escape some of the difficulties I was having with the SV ecosystem. I worked hard, I connected with other famous Youtubers, and bam, I was profitable (sorta) and producing content.

Everything in this article about a capricious Youtube is true. Everything in this article about the underappreciated difficulty of producing this content is true. I produced a lot of media, but I easily put 5x hours into it (it doesn't help I play simulation and builder games). Everything about how expensive and difficult that job is is _true_.

And it's also true that the communities of Youtube and their related satellites (a lot of fandom on Tumblr, SA's leftovers, 4chan, Twitter, even obscure stuff like GaiaOnline) are... They're hateful. People will find a reason to hate you. Your fans will pick fights in your name. You'll frequently get criticism from both sides of an issue, and they're not always as cut-and- dry as the PewDiePie Nazi joke cards were. I was threatened doxing by a 15 year old, I called in to the SF police to warn them that I was expecting my workplace to be SWATed because people were mad I was "an ally of the feminazi gay community".

 _But..._ Folks, at the end of the day none of this really excuses humor about rape, violence, racism, etc. And if you do cross that line because you're desperate or exhausted you _do_ get an out. You can say Mea Culpa, apologize profusely, donate some revenue to charity and _people move on_. The PDP's particular crisis keeps hovering (besides his degree of exposure) is that he's decided to ally with the unrepentant, openly racist parts of Youtube like Sargon.

There is an implication from this article, as I read it, that it's inevitable that people will break down or make mistakes. I agree with this part, but it also implies that we should forgive unrepentant bad actors who effectively say, "It's about the money. I thought I'd make more if I had people put up cards making light of antisemitism."

That's not a new thought, and these consequences are not new consequences.

<comment><USER20> You're so right that the modern price of fame / celebrity attention is such a minefield. There used to be misguided or mentally unstable folks who would stalk or take things too far, but I think the amount of power modern tech / networks can be deployed for purposes of, well, being mean online has more real world affects than at first.

What I'm saying is that far too frequently by the time a young person who craves fame gets it, they're naive on how the system might chew them up and spit them out, and just as they're getting some valuable experience, their time has passed and they're forgotten to the sands of other failed acts.

<comment><USER19> It'd be an outright lie for me to say that some folks don't try and prove themselves by coming into conflict with a specific person more famous than them.

But I also think it's a somewhat inevitable outcome that as you become a focal point for attention you'd better be ready for said scrutiny and for you to be interpreted within the dialogues other people are having. Asking people to do otherwise is absurd, they cannot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The internet has changed the nature of "fame". In the past, you needed to generally _buy into_ fame. To be famous, you needed managers, publicists, etc. Media access was a limited resource that was handed out only to those that met approval.

This created in the audience certain expectations about what it means to be famous. Don't treat the audience wrong or do anything too far outside those expectations or face the audience's wrath.

The internet changed what it means to be "famous" because the internet _is media access_. Unfortunately, the sociology of the audience hasn't caught up and often still apply the old expectations.

In the past, it was possible to walk away from fame because it _wasn 't your normal life_. Being famous was a job you could (usually) leave. However, a lot of people that have become famous through the internet cannot leave. It was their _normal life_ that became famous. Tight coupling between fame and personal life causes or amplifies a lot of these problems.

For a much better explanation, I _highly_ recommend watching Innuendo Studios' video essay "This is Phil Fish"[1]. In spite of the name, it isn't really about Phil Fish. It's about everybody who _isn 't_ Phil Fish and how they (miss-)handle internet celebrity.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW- owa2w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w)

</comment><comment> nommm-nommm Eh....this may be an unpopular opinion but this article is supposed to make me feel really bad for the self imposed "workload" of Pewdiepie. Boo hoo, he's so disadvantaged... he made, from my quick research, something like $15 million _last year alone_. If $15 MILLION salary isn't enough for you that you have to keep "pushing the envelope" being "edgier" for more and more attention then I think you're probably being greedy and shouldn't really be surprised when you finally push it too far.

Maybe I'm the asshole, but I just can't muster up sympathy to empathize with the plight of someone who makes millions of dollars playing video games and making off color remarks.

<comment><USER22> He makes enough money to hire writers.

<comment><USER23> And a PR person to let him know what is too far and how to handle issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So errrrm...am I completely out of touch with the world for not knowing who PewDiePie is (or what the incident referenced was)? Why not explain that in the beginning? There's a link later but I kind of went through most of the article blindly.

<comment><USER15> He is the largest youtuber, he has like 50M subscribers. Did a bit pretending to be a nazi that people took out of context alongside some other things, became a huge stupid controversy.

<comment><USER25> It wasn't taken out of context. It was an awful thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Probably a lot of PewDiePie's appeal is his uncensoredness. It's just unfiltered non-sense for the most part.

Some people can't deal with it. But a lot of people want it.

Personally, I think that's why I love Dave Chappelle so much. He seems to be able to get away with a lot as well.

Few things relaxes me like someone making jokes with no filters.

<comment><USER27> Don't mistake uncensored for unfiltered - Dave Chappelle probably writes and tells a joke a hundred times before you ever hear it, and it gets filtered through a LOT during that time.

<comment><USER28> Nice example since his recent stand up routine is getting a lot of flack for supposed anti-LGBT statements (I haven't seen it yet so I can't say if they have any value). With regards to the Pewdiepie case I am on his side here the quality of jokes doesn't matter it was pretty clear that they weren't meant to be taken seriously and that should be it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What's wrong with just "owning it"?

Why do entertainers whose viewers come for edgy jokes apologize for occasionally delivering a joke in excess of poor taste? It seems like most of the outrage comes from non-core audience members. It's a long-tail kind of thing. I'm willing to bet a big portion of any given entertainers' audience is willing to excuse the occasional bad joke for all the funny ones.

Some groups have louder voices than others when you make bad jokes at their expense. Why not say, "that's what this channel is about"? There are plenty of twitter personalities I follow that occasionally go on shit posting tirades but I ignore it because everything else they post is gold.

Seriously, why not say "fuck you this is what my channel is like if you don't like it don't watch"?

You think the people who walked out of Amy Schumer's show in Florida were her core audience? Why'd she apologize? She jokes about how bad her pussy smells. I mean, there's a certain group of folks who love her stuff and they probably aren't easily offended by her brand of vulgarity, but would light their clothes on fire at someone else's. To each his own. Find a niche and unabashedly own it. I mean... it got Trump elected.

<comment><USER30> Doubling down on or simply ignoring controversy seems to be the best course of action in today's outrage culture.

Look at Trump: He never apologizes for anything, and controversies and scandals slide off of him like they were nothing.

It seems so obvious to me that I've been tempted to try my hand at the crisis management business, but I fear a strategy of "do nothing" isn't very protectable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Take fairly normal people doing fairly normal things and then expose them to millions of people who think they're great and who can directly comment to let them know they're great. Or that they suck. Or both.

Even the traditional distance-Holywood celebrity model makes people go crazy, but when you're letting people right into your life and they're encouraging you to do crazier and crazier stuff, you're either going to burn out or blow up.

</comment><comment><USER32> Are we going to pretend none of this is done, including the article, just for the sake of creating drama and gossip?

Maybe I am trying to look too much into it, but it's pretty clear there's a network of content producers behind the scenes of all the famous Youtubers, doing all the editing, selecting 'crappy' thumbnails, and playing the videogames on which the stars will later put their own voice over.

Doesn't this make a lot more sense than assuming some youtubers are supernatural and can churn out content by the hour?

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't really watch any of the youtube or twitch personalities but I am aware of them. So from my perspective it seems like these are people in their 20s so it shouldn't be surprising that they make bad choices. That being said, they are bad choices and they should be criticized for them.

I think the article makes a good point that it is kind of amazing that Disney bought Maker Studios but doesn't seem to be putting in the work to make sure their employees don't do something stupid.

</comment><comment><USER34> >Now, imagine your business hinges on all these random changes.

I have a hard time finding much sympathy for this argument. When you build your business on top of somebody else's business, you get to be subjected to their whims. that's how it works. If you wanted complete control over your platform, you're welcome to host your videos on your own website. And then you can see how many people view them, and the value that youtube is providing.

I see Youtube acting as a buffer between the wishes of the content creators and the wishes of the viewers as a big part of their value. I subscribe to a few channels, but i absolutely don't want a push notification every time any channel i subscribe to uploads a new video. that would be annoying as hell, and i'd stop subscribing to channels if that was the default behaviour. But that seems to be what the author of this article wants. For me, the fact that youtube is exerting some control to make sure their channels don't abuse notifications is a great thing.

</comment><comment> FLUX-YOU Does Google's YouTube group host a line of communication between its product managers and content producers? Is there a service agreement between Google and its content producers around features and site behavior that will impact viewers and paychecks?

If not, then content producers are simply in a bad long-term position and they need to start looking for leverage against it, whether it's taking their subscribers elsewhere or getting a seat at Google's table so website and mobile app updates don't start mucking with subscribers getting their content to users.

OTOH, as a user, I don't want to be inundated with notifications and _especially_ begging notifications if I unsubscribe to someone.

<comment><USER35> YouTube has a lot of flack for not communicating well with creators. Things only get done if lots of pans are run when the creator makes a video on how limited the channels of communication are with YouTube.

I remember Eli the Computer guy talking about how he got two community strikes on some really old videos and couldn't really appeal (I don't think they supported it at the time) it. It wasn't until he made enough noise that he was finally able to get a rep from YouTube.

YouTube is a good platform and I can't think of any competitors as good as YT, but they really need to improve communication with the creators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Talking head on Youtube complains that being a talking head on Youtube is a lousy business. Whatever.

I've watched a few videos of people talking while playing video games. I usually wish they'd just STFU and play the game.

<comment><USER37> There are plenty of those as well and much more enjoyable, especially if you don't want to put $60 + 20h into a game and just experience the story in the background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> >On a platform that changes its rules on the fly, all the time.

Is there, or has there ever been, a platform that doesn't change the rules on the fly, all the time? I'm not talking about video alone. Tastes in comedy, music, film, and books change yearly. The requirements to become successful on any platform are always in flux and never totally clear. Survivorship bias abounds.

Also, I have very little sympathy for anybody making videos about gaming. Mindless drivel. If you can't keep up, it's because the market is saturated and your product or execution is not as good as your competitors.

</comment><comment><USER39> " _You need ad revenue if you want to make a living talking over video games, which means views and that means uploads._ "

For some reason, that reminds me of the Four Noble Truths...

1\. Life's a bitch...

2\. ...Because you are an idiot.

3\. So stop being an idiot.

4\. No, really, just stop.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm just gonna quote something from the article:

> If there is someone who's making the stuff you enjoy ..., find ways to > contribute. If they have alternate payment systems like merchandise or > Patreon, consider it so they don't have to play the "ad revenue works in > volume" game.

Do this.

I support a number of creators via Patreon, including Daily Tech News Show and Drunk Kids Gaming.

If you get value out of the content you consume, please consider giving some value back, using a mechanism (like Patreon or PayPal) where you know that most of the returned value is reaching the creator who's content you consume.

</comment><comment><USER41> The youtube algorithm and setup is really messed up, but it reminds me of the google algorithm for search.

This video shows that crap uploads and clickbait rule youtube. I was actually fooled by these content creators and they used it as an example in their follow up video. It was really eye opening.

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

I wonder if youtube has or will have a "panda" event.

</comment><comment><USER4> It feels like Slowbeef's take on this is pretty solid, but the takeaway from him seems, interestingly, to be "Hey, this is harder than people think," and not "It's no surprise people burn out or get hit with a huge scandal doing this; this entertainment channel is now oversaturated with amateur content and it's a sucker's game to play without a lot of investment."

</comment><comment><USER42> This is so far outside my realm of experience I do not know how to read it. I have not been hearing a lot lately about the Pew Die Guy, nor do I know who the Fine Brothers are. There are lots and lots of algorithms and data structures to learn about.

<comment><USER43> Let's Plays are videos where people play video games and commentate over them.

Fivrr is a site where people can offer small services for about five bucks.

Pewdiepie is a famous youtuber who produces lets plays. He got in trouble for playing some indian men on Fivrr to wave around signs with racist messages on them on camera as part of a joke. It understandably didn't go over well and lots of people wrote angry articles about it.

The Fine Brothers produce videos where people "react" to things. So you might show a bunch of kids the twist from some movie, and show their reaction to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> YouTubers aren't imploding, rather they're growing so large that mainstream journalists think they can get clicks writing smear pieces about them.

</comment><comment><USER45> Unrelated, but am I the only one who can't believe how bad both the app and the website are from an experience perspective:

Website:

1\. If my google home is playing music in my kitchen, I can't watch videos. It just cuts them off and gives me a licensing error. Instead it should just downgrade me to ad-driven youtube.

2\. Most videos have huge 'annotations' that I can click off, but automatically get clicked back on for the next videos. Its usually people begging for you to subscribe to their channel. Its almost never to annotate anything and even if it was, the UX is terrible. It should be something I call up, not something that blocks the video content.

3\. In-video ads. On top of the ad to watch the video I now need to be pestered with this little pop-up adds their ruin immersion. Oh I have youtube red, but I get these anyway sometimes. I imagine this is just a bug but even then they're a terrible experience for non-youtube red subscribers.

4\. Audio quality is often terrible. Not sure if its the video itself but even the official music video channels usually have audio that sounds, at best, like 56k MP3 streams circa 2002.

App on Android

1\. Holy hell is is slow to startup. Worse, if you accidentally hit a youtube link and try to press back, you need to press the back arrow about 3 times before it responds. Its probably my slowest app. Meanwhile an mp4 served from imgur is near instant. Heck, even a big ugly gif starts up much faster. There should be no scenario where a 100mb gif starts up faster than a 3mb youtube video.

2\. Autoplay of next video means that if I'm reading the comments and if the video ends then it wipes the comments I'm reading and replaces it with the description of the new video.

3\. Quality seems variable even though I'm pegged to the same 50mbps wifi connection at home with full bars.

Not to mention, the comments ranking system encourages 'hilarious' jokey comments over the more serious content. Youtube comments are usually terrible but for less popular videos they can be insightful, the problem is that the top 5 or so comments are either jokes or fairly obvious trolling attempts.

I wish someone wold disrupt this space but I imagine the deep pockets you would need to host all these videos on top of the legalities of it all means that only the top 5 tech companies would be able to compete and they're just not interested. I imagine the margins are fairly low here.

<comment><USER46> omg this. The YouTube android app is a disaster. Incoherent, poor propagation of what I've watched between devices, no obvious UI for how to stop watching a video (back button just thumbnails it so you can navigate - you have to swipe- sideways the video to actually _close_ it), and it locks up for a _long_ time starting up a video.

Also, the fact that vertically-filmed cellphone videos don't fill the screen when you try to watch them in portrait mode is so bone-headed it's actually funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> That was a long article that could be summed up by: "Sometimes people say stupid things. Most don't record and publish it for the world".

<comment><USER48> I was disappointed to find out the laser-focus was on scandals related to youtube celebrities, and not on the infrastructure youtube has that _creates_ youtube celebrities.

The author mentions Game Theory (another youtube channel) which has some videos that delves into these mechanics instead.

My fear with Youtube as a casual viewer is that content creators (such as the author) are too focused on scandal with other channels they themselves are friends with and not focused enough on keeping engaging content and/or keeping engaged with the fans who made them money in the first place.

<comment><USER49> One factor that is rarely mentioned in this conversation is that Drama helps Youtubers - a lot. Videos about 'Youtube in crisis' gets a whole lot of views, much more than the usual standard-fare videos. This doesn't only apply to the YouTuber being targeted.

For example, assume there is some controversy over some gamer on YouTube. YouTube Channels dedicated to talking about Internet culture, like h3h3productions or PhillipDeFranco, take the opportunity to make a video titled "YouTube is Dying" with a lot of question marks in the thumbnail. They do this because videos about meta-controversies get more views than specific things. So the video gets more views, and other YouTube channels talk about the 'controversy' in order to get views themselves. Then the gamer may make a video titled "Response to YouTube controversy" which gets way more views than his average video, because it's a meta topic that everyone's talking about. And the cycle continues.

TL;DR: Controversies help content creators get more views.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Reasons Youtubers don't realize their Youtubing actually became a business and don't hire a crew (that includes a PR team).

Zoella does a good job, she had a breakdown thas was very not problematic, but is mostly very professional.

Pewdiepew pewdiepie whatever. he's stupid. fuck that shit. fuck hacker news. fuck you all.

</comment><comment><USER51> It's not implosion, it's just the outrage crowd setting their sights on a new target and gaming sites trying to settle score with the new media.

<comment><USER52> 'outrage crowd'. Huh. right now, the big blowup is over some guy ('jontron') spouting racist BS. This is bad enough in front of an adult audience, but in fact he is performing this for children. Shouldn't we be mad? For PewDiePie recently, the same story: He is an adult (who should know better) performing antisemitic jokes for children, who might not follow the joke were it funny. When they don't follow it, when it's not funny -- it wasn't -- it boils down to a respected figure repeating anti-semitic talking points to an adoring audience of 14 year olds. Did he mean poorly? Maybe, maybe not. If he didn't mean poorly and it was all environmental factors, "He's just trying to make a living and YouTube culture doesn't give him time to test jokes", are we supposed to apologize for him and move on? I say he took on a responsibility and failed it, so we should be angry.

If he wants to perform for children he needs to respect the fact that his words have exaggerated consequences because he's dumping them into impressionable, insecure minds. Don't reduce me to some 'outrage crowd' and write me off when I'm concerned that a children's performer is feeding them rape & jew 'jokes'.

<comment><USER53> With all respect, it is the parents responsibility, not youtube or jontron, to make sure their little angel is not drinking in racist rants.

<comment><USER54> That's a laudable attitude, but its feasibility is rapidly eroding in this always-connected world. Can't watch over the little angel's shoulder to see what's on their phone 24x7.

<comment><USER55> I think it is less about filtering what a kid sees and more about preparing children for the crazy shit the world can throw at kids without meaning too.

For any adult looking at PewDiePie's shenanigans it is clear that he isn't actually supporting organized racism, or if he is he is astoundingly bad at it (perhaps as bad at being funny. But to a an unprepared kid (or dumb adult) this stuff can seem shocking and the jokes might be missed on them. PewDiePie simply didn't care some kids might see and wasn't concerned about it.

Parents can prepare their kids and create open environments where the kids can ask questions. If done right the parent can create situations where they can simply explain that PewDiePie lacks good taste when the kid asks what its going on.

This is a bunch of idealist rubbish, but at least a few parents have done it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> The reason this guy went on multiple racist and antisemitic tirades - including a debate where he goes off on the terrible consequences of a world where whites aren't the minority - is ~it's hard to get in the YouTube sidebar~?

<comment><USER12> This article was about PewDiePie's nazi joke, the JonTron thing happened more recently (article is over a month old).

<comment><USER19> Sure, but Jontron thinks it'll raise his revenue to ally with Sargon and have that tirade. He even said so. He's under the impression that the viewers who give him revenue are all white nationalists.</comment></comment></comment>