Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content • Hacker News Board

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#171

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #50

illustriousbear wrote: post #25

Hackernews comments were generally onboard with Twitter banning Trump for controversial tweets that can be considered as incitement. As much as I like Sci-Hub, it is clearly a service that disregards and breaches copyright. If you advocate for Twitter exercising a heavy hand on greyer areas (Trump), you shouldn’t be surprised when they do the same for clear breaches of their TOS/Laws (SciHub). It scares me that these…

I agree that HN comments were completely and totally wrong to be onboard with banning Trump AND I also do not agree with banning Sci-Hub... but the solution isn't screaming at Twitter. The solution is using our freedom of speech and expression to start creating and supporting other services. I know that's hard, but at least in your personal life, try to use ActivityPub services and encourage everyone else to do so. S…

Twitter and Facebook and Youtube were argued as the alternatives to the previous generation of gatekeepers.

Ungated media such as Usenet of various moderation-free zones online also fail.

There's an inherent cconflict between complete freedom of access -- a sort of full-body local contact or intimacy, and and of distance, time, and/or scale.

Distribution and scale presume a gating function somewhere. The only remaining question is what the channel biases for.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#172

Post by vorpalhex » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 7:56 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #86

wincy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When our daughter was born with a rare life threatening condition my wife used SciHub to read articles about her condition. While the doctors had merely skimmed the pages, my wife pored over them and found a suggestion of using a particular drug. After asking five different doctors about it, one finally agreed to prescribe it. It was strange how reticent doctors were to prescribe something and instead just told us sh…

Thank you for sharing an inspiring story. When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer my dad poured over literally hundreds of medical papers to determine the best course of action. I believe he saved her life. Scihub was instrumental in that. I helped a little in checking and challenging his conclusions. I think it's unlikely she would have had as good an outcome if we'd just listened to the doctors. My conclusion…

I had a doctor mis-diagnose a very serious eye infection that could have led to blindness on one side as... a stye. And recommend I treat it with hot compresses.

Luckily I'm obstinate and finally saw a specialist who correctly identified it and treated it, but it's critically important to be very active in your own medical treatment. Get second (and third, and fourth..) opinions, raise lots of questions, push back (politely) against things that don't seem to make sense.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#173

Post by owenversteeg » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 7:59 PM UTC

GoOnThenDoTell wrote: post #125

marcinzm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Elsevier has a 37% profit margin which is insane.

That’s a lot smaller than I expected, means they’re spending a lot of money on something

This isn't intended as personal criticism of your comment, but I've noticed that people with minimal experience in business often overestimate margins and don't entirely understand what they mean. A 37% margin is crazy high and truly exceptional; there are only a handful of businesses that profitable at scale. When you hear a 30%+ margin, think of businesses like Mastercard, that collect a percentage of most transactions that its 1B+ members conduct. Apple also has notoriously high margins for what they do, and theirs are at 18%. Most of the businesses people interact with in their daily life have low or even negative profit margins: Walmart 3%, restaurants ~2%, Uber -35%. All the storefronts are owned by commercial real estate groups (margins usually ~4%), gas stations are ~2%, travel, car dealerships, airlines etc are all very low margin.

My personal gut feeling, when I see those very high margins, is that's it's a clear cut case of capitalism not working right. Occasionally margins are high because of innovation and the position is deserved, but not in most cases. Visa and Mastercard have long been in the top handful of most profitable businesses in the world, making basically all their money on interchange. As a result, if you want to accept payments in America, you're eating around 2.5% of the transaction cost right off the bat. You might think okay, but they provide something in return, right? Fraud protection and security and support and all these important things - what would we do without them, without paying that 2.5% tax? Turns out we'd do fine. The EU capped interchange for debit cards at 0.2% in 2015 and things have worked perfectly fine ever since. Other high margin businesses are clearly not benefitting the world (e.x. Philip Morris.) Patent trolls and Verisign are both fabulously profitable, and they add zero value. And even if you like those businesses, there's an even more compelling case for regulating away Elsevier in its entirety.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#174

Post by f430 » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 8:00 PM UTC

wincy wrote: post #33

xnyan wrote: post #4

Rights holders have been trying to get rid of sites like the pirate bay for more than a decade, and if anything PB is easier to find and more reliable to use than ever before. If they really want change, it's time for them to dispassionately consider their situation. The way to "beat" piracy is to consider it as a competitor, which it is. When I was a kid, everyone downloaded raw mp3s and now that number is a fractio…

When our daughter was born with a rare life threatening condition my wife used SciHub to read articles about her condition. While the doctors had merely skimmed the pages, my wife pored over them and found a suggestion of using a particular drug. After asking five different doctors about it, one finally agreed to prescribe it. It was strange how reticent doctors were to prescribe something and instead just told us sh…

How is that doctors miss this? Is it because they don't want to risk their license?

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#175

Post by pmiller2 » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 8:01 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #162

biggc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 55 TB ... > smallish What a time to be alive

55 TB fits comfortably on 4 16TB HDDs. You can fit around 8 drives in a single tabletop NAS before you have to go either to multiple enclosures or rack mounting. Using that as a metric I would call anything below 100TB smallish. Storage is indeed progressing a lot.

You can get more than 8 without going to external enclosures. I have a tower case with 15 drive bays in it.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#176

Post by LockAndLol » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 8:07 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #113

LockAndLol wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once of the reasons SciHub exists is for the same reason torrent websites and DDLs exist: ease of access. Not everybody wants to go through 5 different options to get access to an article when a single step (aka SciHub) would do.

I understand that. But isn’t it useful to know about other avenues, in case SciHub is unavailable to you, or you just don’t want to use it?

I see. Indeed, it is useful.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#177

Post by blt » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 8:10 PM UTC

hirako2000 wrote: post #117

LockAndLol wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once of the reasons SciHub exists is for the same reason torrent websites and DDLs exist: ease of access. Not everybody wants to go through 5 different options to get access to an article when a single step (aka SciHub) would do.

And having to pay double digit for a paper just to make one citation.

I think they meant that people with institutional access to journals still use sci-hub because it is more straightforward than dealing with all the institutional logins, which are especially annyoing when not on the institution's network.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#178

Post by nemo1618 » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 8:12 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #86

wincy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When our daughter was born with a rare life threatening condition my wife used SciHub to read articles about her condition. While the doctors had merely skimmed the pages, my wife pored over them and found a suggestion of using a particular drug. After asking five different doctors about it, one finally agreed to prescribe it. It was strange how reticent doctors were to prescribe something and instead just told us sh…

Thank you for sharing an inspiring story. When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer my dad poured over literally hundreds of medical papers to determine the best course of action. I believe he saved her life. Scihub was instrumental in that. I helped a little in checking and challenging his conclusions. I think it's unlikely she would have had as good an outcome if we'd just listened to the doctors. My conclusion…

Is it possible to find, say, a private doctor that is able to give more personal care than a GP at a typical hospital? Whenever I talk to a doctor about my symptoms it feels like they're just doing triage. I can't really blame them for that, but I would happily pay $$$ for an experienced professional who truly cared about my health. I have no idea if such a thing exists though (outside the sphere of the very wealthy, of course).

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#179

Post by pradn » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

daotoad wrote: post #142

jowsie wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with this is the authors of some papers either don't respond or simply aren't alive anymore.

It also scales really badly. If a paper becomes prominent and many people want to read it, is it reasonable for the authors to be inundated with hundreds of requests for a copy? What is the point of journals if we rely on word of mouth interactions to share information?

In the humanities, authors often upload to Academia.EDU. It doesn't seem to have as much use among scientists.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#180

Post by StavrosK » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

notriddle wrote: post #127

TheRealSteel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could/has SciHub been replicated with a database of magnet links to torrents of papers, or similar? Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point? Can this be remedied so that SciHub can be operational in a truly decentralized, Bitcoin-like manner, where governments can't interfere short of blocking entire networking protocols? This is not really my area of expertise, but I'd like to understand t…

> Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point? Sci-Hub can pull PDF's on demand from academic databases, using credentials that have been secretly donated to them. Once the file is acquired, it could be distributed with a magnet link, but getting it out from behind the paywall in the first place is the tricky part.

IPFS would be perfect for distributing this, if it worked well.