381–390 of 603 posts
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With /r/politics you get HEAVILY downvoted if you voice anything conservative or even just defending someone conservative from unjust accusations. So much so, that you can only post new comments every 10 minutes, while they keep on dogpiling you.
It's hard when people want liberal things like sources or data to back up "facts"
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Yeah, chiming in from the Mid-West, the Trump base is out in full force. Lots of Trump signs in yards (with varying degrees of offensive slogans), seeing Trump flags flying from the back of pickup truck beds and yards everywhere... one gets the opposite impression. Whether the 'silent-majority' is truly the majority or actually the 'extremely vocal minority' will decide the election. However, there is no denying Trum…
The midwest likes the Republican candidate, but the entire Midwest gets a the same number of electoral college votes as, what, eight or nine coastal states?
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> I don't understand how facebook came to be responsible for policing political opinions anyway. There's tons of software engineers, product designers, etc. on an ideological bent. If companies like Facebook and Netflix hire these types of people, even if they think they're on the same side, they shouldn't be surprised when their employees begin making collective demands. > I see it amongst commenters here too. What…
>so control over dangerous ideas makes sense to them This is another concept that confuses me 'dangerous ideas'. How is that different than what the church did with things like witchcraft and paganism, those were 'dangerous ideas'. What makes an idea dangerous? If there's dangerous ideas are there safe ideas? What makes an idea safe? Can you give me and example of a safe idea vs a dangerous idea? Who decides which id…
Certain ideas that its morally right to eliminate some people who happened to be born a certain way seems to me to fall into that category of dangerous ideas, primary because it offers no appeal, no rectification, you cant convert/repent your way out of death.
I think this actually made Zuck's leadership look solid. Of course it's a little naive to say "we aren't political", but he's probably just doing that because it's the calculated thing to say. Almost every other company says things like that, except for a few ideological ones in Silicon Valley. I don't know how anyone takes these employees at FB seriously. They are complaining about the lack of free snacks? Anyone co…
If I had priced a $10k perk into my salary and no longer got it, I'd be disappointed in Zuckerberg's dismissiveness here.
I think this actually made Zuck's leadership look solid. Of course it's a little naive to say "we aren't political", but he's probably just doing that because it's the calculated thing to say. Almost every other company says things like that, except for a few ideological ones in Silicon Valley. I don't know how anyone takes these employees at FB seriously. They are complaining about the lack of free snacks? Anyone co…
Free snacks, and their quality, is a complex signal. They're some of the first things to go as cash tightens up, and they're a decent rubric as to how much leadership actively gives a fuck about employees. Or they're a garnish on a pile of shit. It does definitely depend on the goals regarding company/employee relations: is this a job for which I'm paid money, or is it supposed to be more than that? If the former, ho…
So, facebook employees are mad they're not allowed to censor things they disagree with that people post on facebook? I don't understand how facebook came to be responsible for policing political opinions anyway. In fact, I don't understand why employees at tech companies believe they have the right to police people's opinions period. I see it amongst commenters here too. What gives any of these people the right to po…
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Not really. Even the people who train the models and code the algorithms don't have a lot of control over how they respond to ever-changing inputs - and that's kind of the real problem IMO. There was a recent thing on Twitter, where someone discovered that it would consistently generate thumbnails focused on white faces when both white and black faces were present. At a gross level this is clearly because of inadequa…
If we don't understand how something works and it seems to be causing negative effects perhaps we shouldn't be using said algorithms in the largest social network.
Neutrality doesn't just happen. No matter how neutral a system it is at one point in time, people will continue gaming it and it will cease to be neutral. There must be continuous active response to maintain that neutrality. This is a lesson Google learned with SEO long ago. Passivity is not the same as neutrality, and insisting on one often makes the other impossible.
That's not meant as a refutation of your point, but perhaps it's worth some time to think about how a "no algorithm" version of Facebook would actually play out. Here's your starting point: Twitter but 10x as large.
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Would you consider advocating for genocide to be a variable line that could go either way?
Genocide "is a political opinion I disagree with"
It's one thing to join in occasional political discussion as part of a variety of intellectually interesting topics, but quite another to only (or mostly) be using the site for that. Once that line is crossed, HN is clearly not being used as intended, and there's a huge difference in how those two different kinds of account impact the site. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and adjust accordingly?
If you or anyone want more explanation about how and why we draw the line this way, there's plenty here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...