311–320 of 1001 posts
Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you buy hardware? I’m genuinely asking because where I live it’s impossible to buy stuff that wasn’t made in China. It’s almost impossible to lead en ethical life in this day and age if you do anything related to tech.
It’s almost impossible to lead en ethical life in this day and age if you do anything related to tech. So the lesson is: Being ethical in one way is hard, so don't bother being ethical in any aspect of your life?
Whether buying hardware or working for google is worse is another debate, but you should be able to see why people can work at google and not necessarily feel guilty about it.
Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.
Google is a pretty huge company. What if they're working on something unrelated - maybe even something that benefits the world?
If there were no other thermostat companies, you might have an argument. But there are plenty of other thermostat companies, and plenty of other tech companies than Google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google left the mainland Chinese market long ago and all of its services are blocked there. The most likely explanation is that some mainlander inside Google has been pushing for this with the "this is racist and hurting the feelings of the Chinese people" argument.
What a strange thing to say on a public forum, when we can just use Google to find information that directly contradicts your claim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#2016%E2%80%93pres... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)
Not really. Google hasn't returned to the mainland market. Youtube is blocked.
That little bit of developer interaction or Project Dragonfly - whatever its state may be - does not contradict that.
If you believe this sort of censorship is ordered from the top in order to get back into the mainland market, that's fine. I still prefer my explanation.
What an infantile understanding of the issue. The reason that hate speech creates outrage is because it exists to communicate inhuman hatred of others for their immutable characteristics. The reason that sites like YouTube don't tolerate it isn't that they share in the outrage - it's that they rely entirely on advertisers to keep their bottom line positive, and advertisers aren't going to pay to be associated with ha…
"If you don't think it's hate speech, it's because you're a ___ist too" is a shameful way to argue.
There was a previous unrelated discussion about this just a few hours ago which was climbing to the top of the front page when I saw it. And then just vanished: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264 It's not flagged, it just went from #13 on the front page to invisible. In a single refresh. How does that work? Looking at the votes and age, it should be in the top 5 of both Ask and the front page. What's the m…
I don’t know this for sure and this is just a guess. It would be great to know the details, waiting to learn more seems best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 共匪 is seen as an insult by a group, but others do not This is where the legal concept of protected classes may be helpful. They're sets of attributes society has deemed one cannot discriminate against. That tends to line up well with said society's line between insulting and hateful. As a legal definition, these class definitions tend to be precise. That makes them convenient for exporting. Notably, political affil…
I like this idea, but it is hard to apply such a criteria across borders. In California, for instance, political affiliation is considered a protected class. The omission of political affiliation from the nationally protected classes in the US is a direct consequence of the persecution of communists during the Cold War. This is actually not a great idea when you consider that it essentially legalizes political persec…
This is hard. But it's a different category of hard from the problem Google has chosen for itself.
Let's assume California has a protected class that New York doesn't. China has protected classes the U.K. doesn't. That could mean a comment visible in New York isn't in California. Or it could mean something else.
This isn't an easy problem. One needs to map comments to various protected classes and then measure "hatefulness" according to local constructs. One needs to decide what to do with content so flagged. But that's objectively easier than doing all of that plus coming up with the definitions for protected classes.
Viewed through this framework, deleting a comment, as Google is doing here, is almost always wrong.
> it essentially legalizes political persecution
The First Amendment is supposed to protect against this. Protected classes govern private actors.
Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.
Other companies have been doing the same for many years?
Imagine you posting “nazi bandits” on a WW2 video and seeing it vanish after 15s. We in the IT community need to disassociate with google as much as we possibly can. Free speech is more important than ever.
They would target anything that gets spammed and reduces the quality of discourse (such as it is on YouTube).
I see no evidence that China is getting any special treatment here. It was the subject of hateful spam, so now it gets a filter. Same would apply to any other country or topic.
From my perspective, the absolutist "freedom of speech"/anti-censorship belief is naive. There would be no havens for intelligent communication online without censorship.
When an intelligent, well-reasoned critique is deliberately suppressed, protest is warranted.
Until then, it's shrill and spammy and divisive and ascribes nefarious intent to people simply trying to keep the room clean and is, ironically, best moderated away to preserve the quality of discourse elsewhere.