Can you break a camera without being identified in a completely surveilled area?
This goes to a core why many believe a totalitarian surveillance system might not have a way back out. Once the first guy or girl breaks the first camera the cops will know immediately and they will end up in jail before they can say "revolt".
Former revolts and revolutions always needed the incremental creation of critical mass. Without the possibility of prior planing and coordination all that leaves you with is being a hopeless martyr who will be locked away in a heartbeat with the faint hope of at least motivating a few others to resist.
I don't see how they could "know they're the best" when Windows is the best. If you want the CLI tools from 1979 that come with your Mac, you can easily add them to Windows, the best and most widely used desktop operating system on the planet.
Seriously, there's nothing that comes close to Windows - it just works great and the manufacturer doesn't pull the rug out from under your feet every 5 years like Apple does. If there were something better I'd switch to that too, but there's not.
And even worse than outdated CLI -- the keyboard is a tool from like two hundred years ago (barely changed from movable type tech). Can't believe all these computers still use such old technology. Just because it works is a terrible reason for not updating it.
Hmmm, well I'd say that beyond a very superficial comparison with "keyboards" from 200 years ago (if there even were such a thing), modern keyboards have changed a lot and for good reason.
I'm sure glad that my ancestors decided to move out of their caves.
If some app removed a function that you depended on in a newer version, you'd want to go back to the old version. At that point, you wouldn't be able to just use the app.
Then you'd have to spend your time waiting for the author of your walled-garden app to fix the problem or spend your time finding a different app to use and then spend more time transitioning to it.
In any case, I think that the trade-off needs to be acknowledged for what it is. You're trading your freedom for convenience. Of course this is the American way, what with all the overflowing amounts of freedom that we have.
Please stop thinking like a developer. Firstly that very rarely happens in the apps that I use from the Play/App Store. Secondly, if an app has a dealbreaker, I'll just use another one.
Most people don't think "Oh man I love Instagram v50.1.2",they just use Instagram.
Incorrect. It happens regularly and it certainly affects non-developers. I've seen it too many times. Look through any apps review history and you'll find people complaining about changes that they have no control over.
It's the same thing with the OS. There are always tons of complaints after a new release of iOS.
> ...I'll just use another one.
Yep. And you'll spend your time looking for another one and then you'll spend more time transitioning over to it.
> Most people don't think "Oh man I love Instagram v50.1.2",they just use Instagram.
Nope. Instead they think - "Oh man, Instagram sucks after that last update, but what can I do about it??" and then they give up.
App reviews aren't really empirical. People write reviews for things they don't like much much more than for things which they're fine with.
If I really really hate an update, I don't spend more than a minute transitioning. I just look at the "Apps like this tab". Another feature that is not there natively in Windows/Linux and requires third parties to make subpar lists.
If new software was really so terrible, people would be abandoning apps, not complaining about them which is what happened with Linux and to a lesser extent, Windows.
Yes they are. The definition of empirical is that you can observe the evidence. This is easily observable.
What have you presented besides your own anecdotes?
> "Apps like this" on Windows/Linux
It's called Google. The same thing I use to find iOS apps because Apples app store search and recommendations are horrible. None of the app store searches are really any good and I'm pretty sure Google is the number one place that people usually search for things. I don't know anybody who opens up their app store to search for an app.
Anyway, argue all you want - you're wrong. People care about updates that mess up their stuff whether you can bring yourself to acknowledge that or not.
Incorrect again. The fact that you can go onto any apps review history and see evidence that people are unhappy with updates that break their stuff is exactly the definition of empirical evidence.
Sorry, but none of your badly formed, hand-wavy reasoning has proven that wrong. Also, nobody is arguing that "the majority" think something - I'm arguing against your completely anecdotal and un-evidenced claim that it "rarely" happens.
What evidence do you have that it rarely happens? None that I can see so far...
It's a biased sample because people who are fine with their app don't write reviews. The sample is polluted.
My evidence can drawn from the fact that ten percent of people write reviews. A fraction of that are negative. If an occurrence happens say five out of a hundred times,that's a rare occurrence.
I'll use the previous statements one at a time to build a case. I'll use only the statements that you have said or accepted. Everything I'm typing, has been said before.
People who are fine with their apps don't write reviews.
Ten percent of the user base (at most) write reviews.
This includes the people who want to complain more than the people who don't.
In this ten percent a fraction of reviews are negative.
A fraction of ten percent of the total users feel negatively about the app.
This is a rare occurrence.
If you feel I've misquoted any part then I apologize.
> People who are fine with their apps don't write reviews.
This is obviously incorrect since you can see positive reviews, many of them in fact, on many apps. I myself have posted positive reviews... not sure when you thought I agreed to this.
That alone pretty much kills your whole theory. Sorry but I still don’t agree with you and I think you’re really reaching here. Most importantly though, you have presented zero evidence in favor of your claims.
Positively reviewed is someone who likes the app. I was very careful with my language to avoid this confusion. I said people who are fine with their app.
OK and I’ve seen plenty of 2.5 - 3 star reviews where people were just fine with the app too. Same thing with products on Amazon. I’ve also left review such as this myself.
People like sharing their experiences with others. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Go figure.
I am looking forward to the death of reddit because I think it can be done way better. One big thing I'd like to see changed is the very blunt upvote/downvote hammer that results in tyranny of the majority every time. Instead, I'd like comments to be sorted based on my "network of influencers", or users who I've rated positively...
Another thing I think should be changed is that mods shouldn't be all powerful and they shouldn't be able to just shut down.
Echo chamber usually means it merely reflects back what you emit -- that's a possibility, but personally I like inciteful or thought-provoking comments more than I like comments that agree with me, and seeing more of them is also possible: this is one of the reasons I hate that pg (and thus HN) promotes downvoting for disagreement, and basically censors (with near invisibility) dissenting voices.
My favourite system has been Slashdot because you could promote your view of (moderated, and meta-moderated) content voted to be insightful, say, whilst reducing viewing pure joke posts, and such. You could also boost/nerf particular voices.
Reddit is too much "cutesy animal" content, I wish I could filter all of that, it just doesn't amuse me.
Exactly, and this highlights what I've never understood about echo chamber arguments. You might genuinely like things that you learn from, things that change you. You might like a subject matter that encompasses a huge variety of types of content- for instance if you follow astronomy, and see an article about a new discovery, it seems like more is going on than a pre-existing belief being echoed back at you.
I'm not saying there's no such thing as echo chambers, but there's so much else going in when you engage with sources you select that doesn't have anything to do with whether a pre-existing belief is being echoed back to you.
A lot of people do want echo chambers, and a lot of social media is designed to exploit this.
People tend to consider content that appeals to and reinforces their biases and desires to be more interesting, of higher quality and more trustworthy than content that doesn't.
Even self-described "free thinkers" tend not to want their beliefs challenged or to be moved from their comfort zone too much.
I’m not sure your latter statement is true. I’m a “free thinker” (whatever that is supposed to mean these days) and run in those circles. Most of us have jobs, so we only have the time to digest articles that take less than an hour to read except in rare instances.
I’m very open to other ideas and I actively manipulate the mechanisms on sites like Facebook to prevent being put in an echo chamber. But I am difficult to convince using emotional arguments and I also don’t have time to read a 900 page dissertation on my lunch break. Long form journalism is amazing though, but unfortunately rare and often now corrupted by bias.
Most people in my circle are in the same boat. We are all welcoming of total mental shifts if warranted by the data. We’re happy to entertain an idea long enough to get through a lengthy article even if we’re not sure of it. But if you start with trying to gut wrench you’ve lost us.
Unfortunately the majority of people respond more strongly to pithy memes and emotional appeals, so that’s most of what I see both from those who putatively agree with me and those who don’t. It takes extraordinary effort to find good arguments about anything being written/presented by anyone.
I only have personal experience (and, admittedly, my own biases) to go by, but I suspect you're an outlier, and I'm referring to the norm, both within and outside the mainstream. I think the ways most people approach social media are the same either way, people want to be entertained and they want to feel emotionally validated.
I don't know if a personal echo chamber is such a bad thing in a pseudo-anonymous internet community. Look at what happened to 4chan and voat, where a bunch a racists decided to take over those sites and it was relatively easy for them to do so. They destroyed whatever community was there before their takeover and now both of those sites are known as racist sites. Compare that to hubski, which has a built-in echo chamber mechanism (I think you when block someone, they can't respond to you), and it's much harder for the site to be taken over by an outside group. The community just blocks the outside group and the outside group just ends up talking to each other in their echo chamber.
Communities become echo chambers when a tiny minority of people who have too much time on their hands monopolize discussions. I'd even argue that this is the primary mechanism of echo chamber creation. Other mechanisms like the one OP mentioned aren't that significant a contributor in creating echo chambers.
I think the percentage of the population that desire genuine and thought-provoking discussions may be smaller than those who simply want validation and being part of a like-minded group.
We are going to live in echo chambers no matter what. I'd rather live in my own echo chamber than the one that Facebook or the DNC or RNC or Fox News or some Washington think tank has built for me.
By doing on your own research on issues you care about. If you have a strong opinion on something and you're only source of information is your own echo chanmber then you're just intellectually lazy.
If you don't want to put in the time then fine, but maybe you shouldn't hold a strong opinion one way or the other. Your own echo chamber is likely no better than any other.
I don't think that term means what you think it means.
I mean real research, e.g., quanifiable fact, scientific research. This is not your opinion, it's data, and data tells us things we didn't know before.
Now that's a perspective I haven't thought of before.
They could make it so that the more time you spend on Reddit, the less control you get over your feed. I know it's a complete non-starter for business reasons, but it's an interesting thing to think about.
Depending on how it's done. Hubski is pretty similar to Reddit, with a 'follow' mechanic to see content liked by certain people. It can easily be an echo chamber if you want that, but if you follow a good scattering of different people then it comes out much more varied than Reddit's hivemind outcomes.
There's nothing wrong with that, considering everybody else is strenuously trying to pull you into theirs. Upvote/downvote brigades abound as well as the institutionalization of power-users.
We already build our own echo chambers with personalized multi-reddits (which I use to great effect, since the defaults are trash-tier) as well as the main sub-reddit subscription list. I quite like this idea.
Groups that try to pull you into their echo chamber almost always have dubious or selfish intentions, ranging from blatant advertising to astroturfing. This puts power back into the hands of users.
You might be a fan of Hubski then - it's a pretty similar interface to Reddit, but in addition to a global top (i.e. frontpage) and tags (i.e. subreddits), you can follow other users and get a feed of the content they like. It's a pretty elegant approach, and helps you see a good range of content if you follow accordingly.
It's also a much better userbase to my mind, but that's probably a function of small size.
Modding is hard work; reddit barely provides the tools we really need. Note that _bionoid_ mentioned bots - you effectively need to use third-party tools to effectively moderate even a moderate sized sub.
I'm not sure what you mean by "just shut down", but the best subs tend to be the ones where rules are enforced strongly and consistently.
'Just shut down' might mean "the sub", not "conversation". I don't think mods need weaker tools, but there's definitely a fiefdom problem where mods can't be dislodged by any means. A pair of examples:
For years, the /xkcd subreddit was run by a group of Holocaust deniers, simply because they got there first when an old mod left. They censored content, linked to bizarre white supremacist garbage, and generally did the reddit equivalent of domain squatting. Experienced users went over to /realxkcd or something, while new users just wandered into the garbage fire. I don't think that's a free speech or mod tools issue, I think that's an 'unhelpful labelling' issue.
Another sub, I believe /frission, had a head moderator who had a drug trip or religious experience or psychotic break or something. He kicked out all the other mods, announced that the sub had "served its purpose" by guiding him to this moment, and declared that he would delete all posts and then take the sub private in 24 hours time. There was a massive archiving effort and pleading with the site administration, but ultimately the only thing that helped is somebody talked the guy into restoring one other mod who could avert the meltdown.
Broadly, I'd like to see reddit massively expand the bot api and in-house moderator tools, because it's a thankless job to do right. But I'd also like to see some form of administrative or community review for the cases where moderators go utterly off the rails and destroy subs - even something extreme like >95% agreement would have handled these cases.
> there's definitely a fiefdom problem where mods can't be dislodged by any means
That's true. I do wish there was a way to wrest control away from absentee mods - or something like your example - but I'm not sure how such a system would work in a fair, hard-to-abuse way.
And I completely agree with your last paragraph, with that caveat of needing to think very hard about how to make it abuse-proof.
IMO /. got right, more or less. Limited amounts of votes, can't vote and comment on the same topic, and both ups and down are hardcapped (-1 to +5, starting at 0 for anonymous, 1 for registered).
I just wish they never had tried to "modernize" their site, as the 2.0 commenting system is a downright mess.
I'm not sure if that's (just) aging per se, perhaps Conservatives are, er, more conservative and so less likely to leave to find something else. That would leave older sites that were once the mainstream to become automatically more [C|c]onservative.
My goal is to replicate reddit, but the distributed nature of notabug would allow you to experiment with these ideas on your own peer, or possibly just a custom UI build.
For some subreddits, the up/down point system can be pretty useful, there will some substantial comments that genuinely have better (or at least more) content than other comments.
But for the majority of subreddits, I have it sorted by newest comment first. I don't understand why social media sites today are moving away from that, 99% of high-scoring user-curated content just means it's a particularly popular or inciteful comment.
It doesn't promote good discourse if out of 10 comments, the one that naturally floats to the top is the most inciteful one.
> I don't understand why social media sites today are moving away from that
They don't want you to know when to stop looking. If they present feeds "newest first", you can move on as soon as you get to an item you've already seen. With a "curated" ordering, you never know when you'll see new content, so you keep scrolling (and thus providing them your interest data and looking at ads).
This is a very interesting word. I think you mean insightful, which is what people usually use to describe a clever or novel thought.
I've never seen the word inciteful before, but that would probably mean something that really riles people up and makes them angry. After rereading your last sentence, it seems like you actually meant inciteful, but it's not a word that's used very often.
So then they don't have to take part in it. Take your business somewhere else.
I can't believe you're all going to sit here and complain about fucking booze and sex while at the same time, by doing business there at all, you're supporting a tyrannical fucking monster of a government!
There's a ton of liberal west coast idealists on HN who pretty much hate anyone who isn't exactly like them or who they don't understand. They think they're better than everyone else with their Macs and their pure functional programming.
These people can only exist in a bubble though. Most people outside that bubble are laughing at them.
Can you manufacture devices faster than people can break them? I think some sort of mass uprising could still work.