I opted to try the "beg the manufacturer to turn off the panopticon" approach[1]. The first time I got 2 hours of elevator music before hanging up, the second I went through 3 levels of customer support before they claimed it was done (3 days later). Might have to steal your approach to verify that though...
That song is directly inspired by the Pepsi nonsense; the lyrics and backing video [1] have some direct quotes. Definitely the first thing that comes to mind each time a multi-billion company decides to change their logo and nobody likes it.
Lots of whitespace, lots of unnecessary animations, and lots of floating bars I'd never click occupying screen space. Hopefully this isn't too hard to fix with browser extensions.
I got my first experience in running a small-medium sized (~1000 user) game community over the past couple years. This is mostly commentary on running such a community in general.
Top-level moderation of any sufficiently cliquey group (i.e. all large groups) devolves into something resembling feudalism. As the king of the land, you're in charge of being just and meting out appropriate punishment/censorship/other enforcement of rules, as well as updating those rules themselves. Your goal at the end of the day is continuing to provide support for your product, administration/upkeep for your gaming community, or whatever else it was that you wanted to do when you created the platform in question. However, the cliques (whether they be friend groups, opinionated but honest users, actual political camps, or any other tribal construct) will always view your actions through a cliquey lens. This will happen no matter how clear or consistent your reasoning is, unless you fully automate moderation (which never works and would probably be accused of bias by design anyways).
The reason why this looks feudal is because you still must curry favor with those cliques, lest the greater userbase eventually buys into their reasoning about favoritism, ideological bias, or whatever else we choose to call it. At the end of the day, the dedicated users have much more time and energy to argue, or propagandize, or skirt rules than any moderation team has to counteract it. If you're moderating users of a commercial product, it hurts your public image (with some nebulous impact on sales/marketing). If you're moderating a community for a game or software project, it hurts the reputation of the community and makes your moderators/developers/donators uneasy.
The only approach I've decided unambiguously works is one that doesn't scale well at all, and that's the veil of secrecy or "council of elders" approach which Yishan discusses. The king stays behind the veil, and makes as few public statements as possible. Reasoning is only given insofar as is needed to explain decisions, only responding directly to criticism as needed to justify actions taken anyways. Trusted elites from the userbase are taken into confidence, and the assumption is that they give a marginally more transparent look into how decisions are made, and that they pacify their cliques.
Above all, the most important fact I've had to keep in mind is that the outspoken users, both those legitimately passionate as well as those simply trying to start shit, are a tiny minority of users. Most people are rational and recognize that platforms/communities exist for a reason, and they're fine with respecting that since it's what they're there for. When moderating, the outspoken group is nearly all you'll ever see. Catering to passionate, involved users is justifiable, but must still be balanced with what the majority wants, or is at least able to tolerate (the "silent majority" which every demagogue claims to represent). That catering must also be done carefully, because "bad actors" who seek action/change/debate for the sake of stoking conflict or their own benefit will do their best to appear legitimate.
For some of this (e.g. spam), you can filter it comfortably as Yishan discusses without interacting with the content. However, more developed bad actor behavior is really quite good at blending in with legitimate discussion. If you as king recognize that there's an inorganic flamewar, or abuse directed at a user, or spam, or complaint about a previous decision, you have no choice but to choose a cudgel (bans, filters, changes to rules, etc) and use it decisively. It is only when the king appears weak or indecisive (or worse, absent) that a platform goes off the rails, and at that point it takes immense effort to recover it (e.g. your C-level being cleared as part of a takeover, or a seemingly universally unpopular crackdown by moderation). As a lazy comparison, Hacker News is about as old as Twitter, and any daily user can see the intensive moderation which keeps it going despite the obvious interest groups at play. This is in spite of the fact that HN has less overhead to make an account and begin posting, and seemingly more ROI on influencing discussion (lots of rich/smart/fancy people post here regularly, let alone read).
Due to the need for privacy, moderation fundamentally cannot be democratic or open. Pretty much anyone contending otherwise is just upset at a recent decision or is trying to cause trouble for administration. Aspirationally, we would like the general direction of the platform to be determined democratically, but the line between these two is frequently blurry at best. To avoid extra drama, I usually aim to do as much discussion with users as possible, but ultimately perform all decisionmaking behind closed doors -- this is more or less the "giant faceless corporation" approach. Nobody knows how much I (or Elon, or Zuck, or the guys running the infinitely many medium-large discord servers) actually take into account user feedback.
I started writing this as a reply to paradite, but decided against that after going far out of scope.
It's disingenuous to pretend that the chemical weapons of the WW's and the massive cold war stockpiles of VX or sarin are in the same class as deliberately nonlethal lachrymator agents used in riot control. The fact that chemical weapons treaties technically ban pepper spray in the same manner as nerve gas doesn't mean it's a massive evil of police overreach -- there's plenty of low-hanging fruit on that topic without needing to make ridiculous arguments.
GP isn't wrong though. Tear gas of the type used by civilian police forces against the general population is illegal to use in war. It is a war crime to use it.
Tear gas was developed by France and used on the battle field in WWI before being used for "crowd control".
"Riot control agents, including tear gas and other gases which have debilitating but non-permanent effects as a means of warfare, is prohibited in armed conflict under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention."
And, if a government's leaders feel they need to gas, assault with sound cannons / water cannons / pepper spray, use flash bang grenades, beat with clubs, and/or fire rubber coated steel bullets at their population, it might be taken as a hint that the government involved has lost the consent of the governed.
This is one of those sayings that's technically true but misses the point by a mile.
A wounded soldier is a greater burden than a dead soldier, so a possible tactic would be to deliberately wound. Some people thought that was especially amoral, so they added a rule against it to what they called international law.
So most police weaponry is illegal under international law, but it's illegal because it's less deadly than the permitted alternative.
I have a feeling that many people seeing this will assume that the aversion to specific content is akin to an ordinary distaste for blood and gore, jumpscares, or other "hit or miss" aspects of film. For most of my life I would've agreed, and to be honest I still agree now if I speak only for myself.
For some people, it's not a matter of taste and it's not a matter of getting over it. Call it weakness if you want, call it mental scarring; either way movies should be entertaining, not traumatic. I can't speak to dogs dying, but flippantly watching "Last Night in Soho" with somebody who really didn't need to see that convinced me to start checking the IMDB parental guide before settling on anything.
The structure of the referenced website (long list of yes/no categories with explanation) seems a bit of a bad fit compared to just enumerating potentially problematic features. I guess it enables categorical searching, but it seems pretty bleak to browse through a filter like this.
I have been watching horror movies since I was 7, which was the early 80s. Dario Argento being a family friend and my grandmother loving horror did push that along. I thought I was ready for any blood and gore until 2 years ago my little dog (named after Bruce Campbell) was mauled to death in front of my eyes (fuck pitbulls) and recently this guy in Australia who was stabbed in the neck ([0] do not watch this thing, I included it for reference; it was so different than movies; he didn’t realise he was dead) on video and bled out in seconds. I was not ready for any of that.
It depends on what sort of content you're looking for. Reasoned discussion on contentious issues demands considerable moderation, but anonymous platforms are great for legitimate niche/curiosity-driven topics.
For example of the second, there was a thread on /ck/ a few weeks back where some guy (probably a grad student; I'll never know) stumbled on a few $K of food lab equipment. Thread went on with a variety of experiments/projects which ranged from "reasonable" to "why would you even consider this" (some kind of flavored oil distillate from a happy meal, used to make ice cream).
If that was on HN, it would be someone's social-climbing portfolio blog, or I would have to wonder if it's astroturfing by some lab equipment company, or Mcdonalds. I'd question if this really was a curiosity-based endeavor, or if it was just someone trying to signal to potential employers "look at my Relevant Project!" or "look how quirky I am!" to friends.
But none of that was a concern; there is really no way for that individual to profit or benefit from this in any context. It's an anonymous forum, and there's strong social pressure to not subvert that (unless it is simply by virtue of posting similar content). It takes the game theory out of the equation; nobody is trying to sell me something.
It's not for everything or everyone, and there's definitely some effort in filtering out garbage posts. The same goes for HN, except the content to manually filter out is the sea of sometimes-veiled advertisements and self-promotion rather than plain-faced flamebait.
That thread on /ck/ was legendary! I've also seen some pretty funny "ITT: Pretend we're HN" threads on /g/. The Overlap between 4chan and HN seems to be larger than it originally appears...
I'd be suprised if most people on 4chan's /g/ and other anonymous technology boards wouldn't frequent hacker news on a regular basis. The individuals behaviour just depends on the sites social norms, so they're not a nuisance here.
If a search engine encounters the query "Williams Sonoma 12 inch skillet", retail outlets selling it should organically appear in results without the need for ads.
If it’s $39.99 on W-S.com, I definitely want to see the place that’s willing to sell the same pan for $34.99, the EBay listing for $32.50, and the one selling a competing similar one for $29.99 even if those sites don’t have the organic search SEO juice to land in the top 10.
As a Google search user, why wouldn’t I value these? If Google doesn’t serve them and another search engine does, I’d be inclined to switch to the other one.
> If it’s $39.99 on W-S.com, I definitely want to see the place that’s willing to sell the same pan for $34.99, the EBay listing for $32.50, and the one selling a competing similar one for $29.99 even if those sites don’t have the organic search SEO juice to land in the top 10.
But why would those sites not have the "organic search SEO juice"? If those sites are actually good places to buy that kind of thing, a good search engine should direct a user searching for that thing there.
I think it's fairly clear that Amazon and Ebay would show up as the top organic results.
What wouldn't show up is lmm-cookware.com, launched early October 2021, who is trying to establish themselves as a new destination for cooking enthusiasts. That domain is new, the business is new, no Google reviews, but they've got the pan in stock, are willing to sell it for $30 shipped, and have an advertising budget to reach customers.
As a consumer, I want to be able to learn about that offer, make my own decision where to buy the pan, and I'm happy to use a search engine who will show me that offer. lmm-cookware, I, and the search engine all win from this outcome. I don't care whether lmm-cookware has been a good place to buy pans such as these for the last 180 days; I care whether they're a good place to buy it right now.
> I think it's fairly clear that Amazon and Ebay would show up as the top organic results.
Why? How websites are ranked "organically" is somethine that is up to the search engine. A user-focused search engine would have no problem including factors like price (for shopping sites) that the user cares about. An even better one might provide the user with options to refine the ranking criteria for each search.
Meanwhile you keep assuming that somehow the site willing to give you the best deal will also be the one winning the advertising bid. That makes no sense as they are also the site spending the most on advertisement which they have to recoup somehow.
> As a consumer, I want to be able to learn about that offer, make my own decision where to buy the pan.
You seem to be under the impression that you would be missing out on an offer without ads. But if you only look at a finite set of links you are always missing some offers - ads only change which offers you see. And they do that not based on any judgment of wheter it would be a good offer for you but only by how much those sites paid.
In such a world, I’m assuming their listings would be near the top as lots of people click on Amazon’s and EBay’s organic results (due to the wide selection on their marketplaces and generally very competitive pricing and good delivery track record). What people click on seems a good proxy for a search engine of “what are people looking for? (also phrased as “what will bring people back to my search engine next time?”)
In terms of winning the SERP paid ad bid, I don’t care if the search engine shows me the ad that’s best for them, because that will still give the newer business the chance to win the bid. If they choose not to, well, in that case I don’t see their ad. If the search engine doesn’t have ads, then in all cases I don’t see their ad.
If they go completely insanely rogue (like showing me a paid mesothelioma ad regardless of my search term), they either lose my future search traffic (“foosearch never has what I’m looking for”) or they lose the advertiser (“mesothelioma ads convert well for us on barsearch but not on foosearch; I need to lower or pull my bids on foosearch”)
> I think it's fairly clear that Amazon and Ebay would show up as the top organic results.
> What wouldn't show up is lmm-cookware.com, launched early October 2021, who is trying to establish themselves as a new destination for cooking enthusiasts.
If a new site is what users are probably looking for, then it should be top of the organic results. Google and other search engines already use signals like when the site was updated, whether it has a social media "buzz", or what price it's selling something at. It's highly unlikely that spending advertising money is a good signal; yes, promising new companies do spend advertising money, but so do established companies and out-and-out scammers.
Helping the user discover new sites is maybe part of what a search engine should be doing. But mixing ads into the search results is too intrusive and anti-user a way to achieve that (if it even does). Maybe there's a time and a place for advertising, but it should be clearly separated from organic results; Google used to be good at that (indeed they were famous for having advertising that was less intrusive than their competitors), but they've been getting steadily worse.
Steam does have rules about it, but they are not strictly enforced. If your game have it's own backend / website then you can freely bill people there after you onboarded them via Steam.
IAPs are different: here Valve actually require you to process payments through steam when game is running via Steam. But even in this case a lot of games can be launched independently after installation through Steam.
Also on top of this Valve already decreased it's comission from 30% for large publishers.
[1] https://www.mazdausa.com/site/privacy-connectedservices