FWIW, when potentially live saving content gets flagged on HN, effectively censoring it, I can't help but think there's a concerted effort by some actors (terrorist organizations, 3-letter agencies, foreign countries) to suppress information.
It's a big reason I avoid HN. I can imagine censoring free-speech being HN's downfall.
I don't think it's hard to answer your question, though: medical advice in internet comments is something people are supersensitive to, and you're mostly going to get responses from the one-standard-deviation-from-the-mean portion of the bell curve which, being the fattest portion, has the dominant effect.
You can argue that the forum should have more space for deviant views, and I agree, but given that there's no way for an internet forum to differentiate deviant-views-that-are-on-to-something from deviant-views-that-are-insane, it's not clear what to do.
For example: there was a guy posting for years on HN that the secret to health is to imbibe mercury, because mercury cures most ailments. He is quite sincere. I'm sure he felt the same way about his comments getting flagged.
Personally I'm in favor of a wide spectrum of discussion on most things, but we have to be realistic about the capacities of an internet message board.
My mate Gary from down the pub said ivermectin cured his grandmas cancer and that the medical elite doctors are just hiding it because ivermectin is cheap and doesn't make much money.
All the proof I need. Although she died 3 weeks ago, but he swears it wasn't from the cancer but old age.
> Mainstream Oncology collapsed after the rollout of contaminated COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines.
> Most Oncologists abandoned their Hippocratic Oath, gave contaminated mRNA Vaccines to all their cancer patients and took the mRNA jabs themselves.
> Some Oncologists have now developed mRNA Induced Cardiac arrests, blood clots and Turbo Cancer. Others have already died suddenly.
> These Oncologists buried their heads in the sand and abandoned everything that it takes to be a good competent doctor.
No, it's pretty damn deranged. If you have a good medical treatment, you can confidently let the data do the talking for you instead of hooking into political controversies to score some points for yourself.
You're being a bit gratuitously negative, which is against HN rules, considering the magnitude of the potential impact of this work. Ivermectin won the Nobel Prize.
"First-in-the-World Ivermectin, Mebendazole and Fenbendazole Protocol in Cancer has been peer-reviewed and published on Sep.19, 2024!"
I am more in favor of flat code organization, but I probably won't use C to implement a compiler again, as it involved a lot of unnecessary work. Zig or Rust would be better choices.
You don't permit ticket transfers. Instead you sell tickets back to the venue for the price they were bought. Your tennis buddies would better be ready to buy the ticket from the venue 1 second after you sold it back to the venue, else someone else might get it.
I was thinking this, however you "transfer" to the other person, the original buyer gets a refund, and you pay the original ticket price+tx fee, or original buyer pays the fee. Either way.
An option I'd like to see implemented is to make the customer put down a bond. Besides charging the customer for the ticket, also charge them another higher amount that gets refunded x days after the concert. If the customer is found to be a scalper don't return the bond.
Scalpers can't pay high bond amounts at scale combined with the risk of not having the bond returned.
For popular acts, when scalpers are selling at 10x or more the base price, the bond would have to be pretty high to put the scalpers off, and that would be a problem for many genuine customers. Unless the bond is silly high, that being defined as high enough that it significantly messes with fans, it would still be worth it even if the scalper is noticed and the bond not returned.
> If the customer is found to be a scalper don't return the bond.
This is how most suggestions for solving the problem fall down: how do you, with any reliability, or at least reliably avoiding false positives, detect a scalper?
This is easy to notice. You can't go around saying "I've got two front row" when the mere act of saying it gets you noticed. You can't post online you're selling tickets because it gets you noticed.
Only the venue/band sells. Only the venue/band buys back tickets, and they're required to buy them back at the price they were sold. Full refund of ticket price and bond.
If noticing scalpers is easy, the bond doesn't need to be silly high. Catch a scalper and you get 50% of their bond.
That assumes the vendor runs a buy-back scheme. That would cost and the cost paid by all ticket buyers, if one isn't in place already.
Openly selling is only part of the problem.
How do you distinguish between someone buying tickets as a gift and someone who sold them on in a manner you did not detect? What about group bookings, do you want the ticket seller to collect full ID of all the intended audience members? After that, what if the group of friends changes - who pays the admin fees?
Your idea isn't terrible, but it is far from perfect.
> If noticing scalpers is easy, the bond doesn't need to be silly high.
That is a huge if. Many scalpers are rather experienced and organised, while some will be very easy to spot I suspect a lot of them won't be, at least not without a bunch of false positives that will inconvenience genuine buyers.
> That assumes the vendor runs a buy-back scheme. That would cost
What would it cost? The vendor runs software that sells tickets. The same software can buy tickets back, invalidate the ticket IDs, and issue new tickets with new IDs. This feature can be part of the software at no additional cost.
Not running a buy-back scheme possible costs more to customers because of today's scalpers.
> How do you distinguish between someone buying tickets as a gift and someone who sold them on in a manner you did not detect?
As the venue/band, you don't need to. Sell to anyone.
As the customer, when you're buying from a scalper you know you're buying at a higher price than the advertised price.
> what if the group of friends changes - who pays the admin fees?
I don't see what admin fees must exist for this. Software manages anything. Printing a new ticket is cheap.
> Many scalpers are rather experienced and organised.
So is law enforcement. Scalpers can't hide the fact that they're selling.
How do you determine scalpers? I buy 6 tickets for me and my friends and we all get sick. Are we scalpers? I buy 1 ticket and a work trip gets foisted on me the next day so I try to resell. Am I a scalper?
Won’t everyone just charge the ticket buyer the price of the bond? So this still only harms the fans that want to see the show. The scalpers just need to have more up front capital in your system.
If you return the ticket to the venue/band, you get your money back, get the bond back, and you're not a scalper.
Charging the ticket buyer the price of the bond doesn't only harm the fans that want to see the show. It also harms the band that won't have fans come see the show. It's an incentive for the band to buy back unused tickets. Bands currently don't do that.
Fans demanding ticket buy backs puts pressure on bands to put an end to scalping. It's fans who pay the entire cost of scalping now, not bands.
The reason people suggested that for emails, is because you have to send a large number of times to spam. With social media, that's not true. A single post can be viewed a large number of times.
Use quadratic post fees. The larger the number of people who try to view a post, the larger the fee becomes or the post stops being viewable.
So the fee isn't a one-time fee, but an "open" fee that keeps increasing.
Another mechanism is to require a fee to view. If after viewing the content the user deems the content isn't valuable, they flag it in some way or they don't bookmark it, and this indicates the poster should pay the display fee.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44246859
FWIW, when potentially live saving content gets flagged on HN, effectively censoring it, I can't help but think there's a concerted effort by some actors (terrorist organizations, 3-letter agencies, foreign countries) to suppress information.
It's a big reason I avoid HN. I can imagine censoring free-speech being HN's downfall.