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Dear MG Siegler, Are you seriously upset about your photo?

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Re: Dear MG Siegler, Are you seriously upset about your photo?

#31
post #7

The TechCrunch crew has a long history of "calling out" major companies on their product decisions, in the absence of any of the data or context in which such complex decisions are made. P.S. I love how Tom has turned into the elder statesman of social networks.

Not to mention MG Siegler's long history of calling out Google. Always skeptical. But totally loving the elder statesman analogy. Best part about Tom"s reply is his own humility--Myspace having "decent" technology.

Not to mention MG Siegler's long history of self-promotion.

Re: Dear MG Siegler, Are you seriously upset about your photo?

#32
post #20
post #3

He's not "seriously upset" about the photo. He thinks what's happening is ridiculous, and therefore took the time to ridicule it. He's clearly right. But it's not a moral crusade.

Tom Anderson gets it the wrong way round, and completely misses Siegler's point. The question is not is why does Siegler care. He can reasonably expect to care: it's his photo attached to his personal profile and his photo is part of how he chooses to portray himself online. Siegler now knows that he cannot be himself on Google+, and now thousands of others know that they cannot be themselves on Google+ either. The q…

This is how he humanizes himself? I'm not buying it.

Re: Dear MG Siegler, Are you seriously upset about your photo?

#33

Pretty sure this would fall under Apple's "objectionable content" policies for their app store. Wonder if MG would complain about that policy, too? :-)

According to the linked complaint by MG, he is not whining about the policy so much as about the deletion without warning: > My problem isn’t so much with the fact that I couldn’t have a profile picture of myself giving everyone the finger — which I can and do on Twitter and elsewhere — it’s that no one bothered to tell me or warn me before they just went into my account and deleted the picture. he does also take iss…

It betrays his technical competence to say they went "into my account," doesn't it? I don't think it's helpful or appropriate for him to use property terms for a topic like this.

Re: Dear MG Siegler, Are you seriously upset about your photo?

#34
post #12

removing offensive photos It's not offensive to me. I'm all grown up now.

You say that like it's a good thing. It's not. It should offend you.

Just because something offends you doesn't mean you have to go nuts, but being jaded to offensive things is not a good thing.

Re: Dear MG Siegler, Are you seriously upset about your photo?

#35
post #20
post #3

He's not "seriously upset" about the photo. He thinks what's happening is ridiculous, and therefore took the time to ridicule it. He's clearly right. But it's not a moral crusade.

Tom Anderson gets it the wrong way round, and completely misses Siegler's point. The question is not is why does Siegler care. He can reasonably expect to care: it's his photo attached to his personal profile and his photo is part of how he chooses to portray himself online. Siegler now knows that he cannot be himself on Google+, and now thousands of others know that they cannot be themselves on Google+ either. The q…

There are public sections of G+ and private sections. If you have a private album limited to 4chan buddies or whatever with tubgirl, goatse, the lemon party, etc. and they took that down, I would find issue with it. But if you've got goatse as your public profile picture, that is an issue that Google has to deal with. I use those examples not because they are directly comparable to what Siegler put up, but because I imagine most of the people here on hn would find those images offensive.

When you're dealing with a really massive user base, you're inevitably going to have a lot of people that would find an image of a guy flipping the bird to be horribly offensive (their heads would simply explode if they ever saw goatse). Should you cater to those people? Where do you draw the line? Do you go with the U.S. Supreme Court's definition of obscenity? Siegler's picture is certainly not obscene, but it would certainly make a prude think twice about signing up for G+. I would rather not cater to the prudes of the world, but if Google wants every person with access to the internet on G+, then they'll have to offer some concessions to them.

Re: Dear MG Siegler, Are you seriously upset about your photo?

#36
post #3

He's not "seriously upset" about the photo. He thinks what's happening is ridiculous, and therefore took the time to ridicule it. He's clearly right. But it's not a moral crusade.

I definitely disagree that he's "clearly" right, and disagree that he's right at all. Tom made the good point that this is Google's social network, and if you want to use it, then you should play by the rules, which are IMO mor than reasonable (why do I want to see people flipping me off).

I don't know why everyone is making it sound like this sets a precedent for more "censoring" when this is already the standard for any currently popular social network.

Re: Dear MG Siegler, Are you seriously upset about your photo?

#37
post #2

[deleted]

I think it's offensive, and I would like to not see things like that pop up in my stream.

Isn't this one of those things that are on the line where if just 1 person says it's offensive, then it should be treated as such. It's kind of like if there were only 10 men and 2 women in a room, then by democracy, you'd probably end up with rape being OK.

Re: Dear MG Siegler, Are you seriously upset about your photo?

#38
post #9

Really? An "'I hate white people' t-shirt" parallel? Don't even get me started on that atrocious "we don't need to see this" line of argumentation. If the Google+ is going to censor (let's call things by their proper names) pictures that "people don't need to see", where's the goddamned line? Imbecile. That such a poorly constructed argument makes its way to the Hacker News homepage is worrisome. I had the hope that…

It's not censorship. Your rights have not been abridged. It's a free service with terms of use, provided by a corporation.

This is not a police action by an authoritarian government, stopping people from expressing Constitutionally-protected speech in the public square.

Try to buy a full-page ad in any newspaper in the country showing goatse.cx in all its glory. Businesses generally limit profanity on their services.

Act surprised if you want to, but methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Re: Dear MG Siegler, Are you seriously upset about your photo?

#39
post #34
post #12

removing offensive photos It's not offensive to me. I'm all grown up now.

You say that like it's a good thing. It's not. It should offend you. Just because something offends you doesn't mean you have to go nuts, but being jaded to offensive things is not a good thing.

Why should that offend him? Are you offended by a thumbs up picture? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumbs_signal

G+ is an international social network. It's interesting how you assume that what's offensive to a large number of people in the US (maybe 100M people) should be offensive to the world (7B).

Re: Dear MG Siegler, Are you seriously upset about your photo?

#40
post #36
post #3

He's not "seriously upset" about the photo. He thinks what's happening is ridiculous, and therefore took the time to ridicule it. He's clearly right. But it's not a moral crusade.

I definitely disagree that he's "clearly" right, and disagree that he's right at all. Tom made the good point that this is Google's social network, and if you want to use it, then you should play by the rules, which are IMO mor than reasonable (why do I want to see people flipping me off). I don't know why everyone is making it sound like this sets a precedent for more "censoring" when this is already the standard fo…

As far as I'm concerned, if a service you like, does something you dislike, you should complain, and you should tell people about it. Especially if the service is used by tens of millions of people and is growing at the rate that Google+ is.

It sounds like you disagree with this though. Why? Why do you think he should have kept his mouth shut?

"this is already the standard for any currently popular social network"

And it will remain so, if people don't complain loudly enough that an alternative is created which behaves differently.

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