There is always something we can do about it. Fight. The question is whether enough people have the will to do so, or whether they have accepted their fate as cattle.
Indentured servitude is voluntary and is exploitative. Whether it is voluntary is not indicative of whether it is exploitative. You have to look at the bigger picture.
Here's the top of a conversation I had with him, starting with me:
Thanks for the thought out response. I agreed with just about everything you said, which makes this whole situation that much more frustrating. On one side, you're right and you're trying to create substantive discussion, which their sensationalist reporting often rubs against. On the other hand, [dead] in its current state is neither informative nor allows for substantive conversation about why it's [dead]. Ironically, the action of [dead]'ing looks like a malicious response from you and your colleagues -- something that's still hard for me to shake, especially considering who owns HN and who's within its network. Or at the very least, it looks malicious in the face of potentially simple UX changes.
His response:
Yes, I hear those frustrations and they all make sense. I'm afraid I'm pessimistic, though (having been at this job for many years) about the possibility of a fuller explanation ever clearing up these perceptions—for example the perception about "who owns HN and who's within its network" being the main factor in what gets marked as [dead] on the site. In my experience, (some) people are going to believe that, regardless of anything we say or do. A lot of people on the internet are primed to perceive maliciousness and, sadly, I don't think we have the power to change that.
I also don't think it's possible to "promote substantive discussion about why [a post' is dead" because that sort of meta-talk invariably becomes bogged down and self-referential. In my experience, such discussions don't lead anywhere productive, they just generate more and more of the same.
The moderation burden such meta-discussions impose is high, because if we don't answer and explain, our absence gets taken to mean that we're hiding something and/or that whatever people are accusing us of must be true. That's potentially disastrous for HN because it means that those moderation resources get sucked away from things that matter more for the quality of the site.
But I don't want to come across as too dismissive! I appreciate your openness and your suggestions and will think further about them.
”If people try to hold us accountable by talking among themselves about our actions, it takes away valuable time that could be used to do vaguely defined other actions” is not a terribly strong defense of moderation opacity.
Especially during a time when there is strong authoritarian pressure to suppress certain kinds of speech, and the result of your unaccountable actions is the suppression of that speech. The benefit of the doubt is rapidly being lost here.
edit: thank you for taking the time to email and post the response.
that doesn’t make any sense. NYT is paywalled and their links don’t get autokilled. (not your fault obviously, but whoever is calling the shots on this)
did you know that flock has a data sharing contract with ring cameras? amazon’s panopticon is much larger. i believe it is on by default and users have to manually opt out, but i don’t have a ring camera to verify.
Only sharing specific clips is opt-in¹, but the program and its notifications are on by default. Maybe not surprisingly, consumers aren't asked if they want to participate, and the option is buried enough that most people will never see it.
¹ I'm being generous here. Police can still obtain Ring footage via warrants or "emergency" requests that don’t involve the user choosing to share anything.
hey, while I have you here Mr CEO, why are you comfortable allowing abusive cops the tech to stalk and harass former partners, I've met women that had ex husbands in the FBI that kept chasing them across country to continue the abuse and your camera systems help enable those acts.
since the flock CEO’s comment is dead, i hope you don’t mind if i reply to him here.
Your wealth and power will not save you. Your rich friends will not save you. Turning off the monstrosity you are helping to create and reckoning with what you have already done in the world is the only thing that will. If there is still any shard of humanity left in you, I hope this finds it. It is not too late to turn away from the path you chose. But it soon will be. And there will be a reckoning either way.
