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Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

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Re: Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

#11

Post by jsmthrowaway »

rurban wrote: post #9

Similar to the HN penalty, reddit also seems to have some Snowden countermeasures in effect. It was a very popular IAmA, but the Android AMA app, displayed only 2 answers for it, and the 3 people who wanted to answer, Laura Poitras, Ed Snowden and Glen Greenwald, were limited to about one answer per 10 minutes, so for the whole hour they could answer about 10 questions. This limits usability and civil interactions a…

I love that you completely guessed the incorrect answer, and then moved right to calling it censorship and critiquing Reddit based on your assumption. Snowden's account was rate-limited because accounts with no activity are more scrutinized for spam purposes. If the other accounts were (and I see no evidence of that, since Glenn Greenwald has done his own AMA before), it's the same reason. That limit exists because new account creation is so trivial. It also exists on HN in different ways, you forget.

It took me several thousand comment karma on Reddit until I stopped noticing the rate limit entirely. I can't speak to the Android issues.

Either way, the moderators worked it out; there was some confusion about the accounts downthread. I don't begrudge someone speculation, but when you then immediately move to acting on your speculation and decrying a community incorrectly, you should probably check if you're correct first.

Re: Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

#12

Post by whyever »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #7
spcoll wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".

More specifically, HN tries to avoid inflammatory topics that cause a lot of ultimately fruitless discussion ("flamewars"), typically identified by news items with more comments than votes. Political topics are frowned upon for causing this. I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics, but mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from th…

> I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics

Well, the effect is still the same, isn't it?

> it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on

That seems contradictory. If I recall correctly, I've heard the mods explicitly say that they also like non-tech/web/startup topics.

Re: Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

#13

Post by john_b »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #7
spcoll wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".

More specifically, HN tries to avoid inflammatory topics that cause a lot of ultimately fruitless discussion ("flamewars"), typically identified by news items with more comments than votes. Political topics are frowned upon for causing this. I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics, but mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from th…

The obvious counterargument to HN's policy is that the developers building the next generation of web services should be able to openly discuss mass surveillance and how our present technology enables it. And that, furthermore, this discussion is in the best interest of HN because developers on the whole are obviously passionate about the issue and will be a part of how it evolves in the future, one way or another.

I get HN's policy and the reasoning behind it; I just think it's wrong. Not all important discussions are constructive, and not all constructive discussions are important.

Re: Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

#14

Post by DAddYE »

A good thing about America is that while the "politics" lag behind citizens and US companies try at least to solve partially the problem. I liked these bits:

Google encrypted the backhaul communications between their data centers to prevent passive monitoring. Apple was the first forward with an FDE-by-default smartphone (kudos!)

We often denigrate US and his biggest companies like: Apple, Google or Microsoft.

So I agree since then in the politics nothing big has been changed but I'm glad to see that now we take care about things like https or generally how our data is protected.

Re: Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

#15

Post by sliverstorm »

spcoll wrote: post #4
rndn wrote: post #3

What's the reason this is being flagged?

"Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".

Do you remember when every other article on the HN frontpage was about one of the two? Not that they are unimportant subjects, but it wasn't Hacker News anymore, it was NSA News.

As other replies to you have mentioned, the discussion surrounding those articles were vitriolic and heavily partisan, to boot.

Re: Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

#16

Post by virtuabhi »

spcoll wrote: post #4
rndn wrote: post #3

What's the reason this is being flagged?

"Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".

Does this penalty acts on comments too? Or, is it limited to only submissions?

Now I don't know if this comment thread is (currently) at the bottom of the page because of +/- votes or a ploy to stifle discussion on NSA and Snowden.

Re: Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

#17

Post by AceJohnny2 »

grey-area wrote: post #10

Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law....Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures. There are lots of really interesting and…

I find his points about governmental accumulation of power to be close to and validating that made by Assange in his very interesting Wikileaks manifesto, "Conspiracy as Governance" [1]

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/http://iq.org/cons...

Re: Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

#18

Post by hueving »

john_b wrote: post #13
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically, HN tries to avoid inflammatory topics that cause a lot of ultimately fruitless discussion ("flamewars"), typically identified by news items with more comments than votes. Political topics are frowned upon for causing this. I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics, but mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from th…

The obvious counterargument to HN's policy is that the developers building the next generation of web services should be able to openly discuss mass surveillance and how our present technology enables it. And that, furthermore, this discussion is in the best interest of HN because developers on the whole are obviously passionate about the issue and will be a part of how it evolves in the future, one way or another. I…

>because developers on the whole

Careful. You are projecting here. This is the very reason that these topics get penalties. When it comes to politics, people assume that everyone must fall on a side and have strong feelings about a given topic.

A relatively small portion of the community ends up flooding everyone with stories related to these topics and it turns a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read about it. They can't say they don't care because that's seen as being ignorant to people that are passionate so it just alienates them.

Re: Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

#19

Post by username3 »

tobylane wrote: post #2

The AMA says that Citizenfour will be on HBO tonight, in the UK it'll be on Channel 4, 11:05 Wednesday and 4od after that.

And it's currently free.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_s...

The movie is currently available for free as the movie is used as a public evidence in a lawsuit

Re: Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA

#20

Post by nickysielicki »

>Much like physics post-Manhattan project, an entire field of research that was broadly apolitical realized that work intended to improve the human condition could also be subverted to degrade it. [1]

What an incredible analogy.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_s...

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