161–170 of 325 posts
Just think of it, there is a real developer who decided to do this. Spam is immoral, but doing that to an open source repository is your personal all time low.
Ethics and feelings don't make money or keep food on the table.
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I think "immoral" is a reach as a description of spam, and to be crystal clear I'm not defending spam. How is spam any more immoral than ads in a web page? Both are inserting advertising into a channel that a user is accessing information through, as a way to raise revenue or change behavior. (Spam is not by definition phishing, any more than banner ads are innately phishing, though phishing can be served through bot…
Because, like so many things, context matters. Ads have a place in the world, where we expect to see them (whether we like them or not), and typically most ads are not trying to pass as non-ads (yes of course there are exceptions to this). The difference here is that these exist in a place where ads should not be, as per the description and use of the service. And it also subverts the experience the service owner is…
Just think of it, there is a real developer who decided to do this. Spam is immoral, but doing that to an open source repository is your personal all time low.
> but doing that to an open source repository meh. It's owned by Microsoft - aside from the regular morals of spam and whatever, I don't think it's especially bad to target a Microsoft property. How much of the NPM registry actually is open source?
Just think of it, there is a real developer who decided to do this. Spam is immoral, but doing that to an open source repository is your personal all time low.
Probably an unpopular opinion, and I realize I'm kind of ranting on a relatively unrelated subject, but I have become really dissuaded with the Node ecosystems dependence on seemingly boundless dependency trees. The fact that Window's file system can't handle moving project directories (without deleting the node_modules), and relatively simple projects using megabytes of raw text to work... anyways. While I understan…
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I sometimes run topical searches like to discover packages if I don't know the package name ahead of time. It would be annoying if NPM were not indexed at all.
It would be annoying if NPM were not indexed at all More or less annoying than NPM being used for hosting spam?
Just think of it, there is a real developer who decided to do this. Spam is immoral, but doing that to an open source repository is your personal all time low.
I think "immoral" is a reach as a description of spam, and to be crystal clear I'm not defending spam. How is spam any more immoral than ads in a web page? Both are inserting advertising into a channel that a user is accessing information through, as a way to raise revenue or change behavior. (Spam is not by definition phishing, any more than banner ads are innately phishing, though phishing can be served through bot…
What?
Many websites need ads to survive. Node.js doesn't need spam to survice. It's a quite huge difference, don't you think?
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> What case is there when you want to find a package in NPM, and information about that package, using Google? Coz you might want results not only from docs but stackoverflow and other places ? > Essentially, there is no overlap in the Venn diagram of "searching for a package" and "searching for information about a package". You want one or the other, not a results page with links to both. Of course there is. I want…
Coz you might want results not only from docs but stackoverflow and other places ? Of course there is. I want docs, examples, and maybe opinions vs alternatives if I look to solve problem X with external dependency. You don't need the link to the package in NPM to be in the results for either of these examples.
Just think of it, there is a real developer who decided to do this. Spam is immoral, but doing that to an open source repository is your personal all time low.
Life makes much sense when you consider it to have the ethics of professional motorsports racing. There, there is no sense of ethical behaviour, as long as you act within the rules you can do anything. That is how modern F1 driving came to be. The F1 team engineers say that designing the cars consists of looking at the new rules and working out how to bend and subvert them. All of life is like this. People exploit an…
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I don't think this kind of spam is new. Its just your perspective that determines this is immoral . An argument can be made that any tool built to gain SEO advantage is also borderline immoral and those tool exists for almost a decade now. There are and have been bots to generate SEO content and/or spam websites and custom plugins for Wordpress which achieve that. All to game the search engine. This too is immoral as…
Many years ago I quit my job at a search engine company for my personal ethics, because they had me start manipulating search results based on who paid for their entries.
But I’m aware that I did that out of decent financial security, not out of some deep moral courage.
If writing spam was my only way out of poverty or to feed my family, I’m sure I would act differently.