In the description, you wrote "in support SOPA", instead "in protest to".
Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?
231–240 of 294 posts
Re: Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?
#232I just hope the reddit etc. blackouts are only going to be in the country, the US, that SOPA will be in. Not only from a personal perspective, since I am not in the US, but also for the US. We don't want to create the perception that US sites are unreliable because they can go down because of political activism over internal US issues. Companies are already going to some effort towards hedging their income from being dependent on single providers, e.g. Google traffic or Amazon sales.
Re: Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?
#233The answer is no, people who say yes are wrong. You black out your website to raise awareness to the cause. I think it is a fair bet that an extremely high number of HN users know a lot about SOPA / PIPA. So there is no point doing this to educate regulars. Perhaps news will spread. Sure, it will spread in the tech community. In the tech community knowledge of SOPA / PIPA is well known. Shock waves from HN being blac…
Aware, but passive. Which in sum means that all that awareness is completely worthless. No, really, it is. The fact that majority of Hacker News readers are against SOPA means absolutely nothing. NONE of you passively disagreeing with this legislation will do an iota of difference.
The question is always: what does it take to push people from awareness and complete inaction to at least some form of action?
Hacker News is, for the most part, an intellectual stimulus, a drug for your brain. Something interesting to feed it while you are waiting for your code to build or to fill that oddly shaped slot in your daily calendar where you can't find any use for.
If we can make use of the uneasy feeling you get when your stimulus is unavailable and direct that towards what you could actually do to make your opinion observable, that would be a very good thing.
Here's how a website like Hacker News should be blacked out:
pick the busyest day at the beginning of the week (mon/wed) and black out 30 hours. from 0600 in the morning to 1200 lunch-time the next day.
on the site display information on how people can take action in ways that are observable. How to find their representatives, how to write to them in ways that are constructive.
There should also be some resources available to identify the backers of this legislation. It IS okay to not give companies that want to limit your freedom your money. It isn't "overly political" -- it is the most civilized and honest thing you can do. So do it to the degree you are capable and tell others.
Make or find materials that can easily be spread on social networks, because this is important: I assume that a lot of people reading hacker news are members of a self-selecting set of people who are smart and care. Your friends will look to you for advice. You are likely to have an above average degree of influence in your social network.
You guys are important and influential. If you don't do anything, everyone around you is going to take their cue from you and do nothing.
So I respectfully disagree that blacking out Hacker News is pointless. I think it is important exactly because inaction from us speaks much, much louder than inaction from the gray masses.
Re: Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?
#234The answer is no, people who say yes are wrong. You black out your website to raise awareness to the cause. I think it is a fair bet that an extremely high number of HN users know a lot about SOPA / PIPA. So there is no point doing this to educate regulars. Perhaps news will spread. Sure, it will spread in the tech community. In the tech community knowledge of SOPA / PIPA is well known. Shock waves from HN being blac…
I agree that it would be "preaching to the choir" and with the name thing, but blacking out HN for a day might also convince HN readers to finally get around to writing their Congresspeople like they've been meaning to (but just haven't gotten around to).
If you must black it out, black it out for the USAians. Some of us don't have members in Congress to write to.
Re: Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?
#235I wanted to vote no, because it seems so Pyrrhic, maybe a little gimmicky: "See, we shut down a site you don't use!" But if you're asking people to make a sacrifice you're not willing to make yourself, you're a bad leader, period. I'm not saying HN is the bastion of the tech world. But if we're upvoting the Reddit shutdown (at least I did), and we can't turn around and do it ourselves, well, we're not made of very to…
Pragmatically speaking, maybe YC could come up with a statement threatening to move businesses outside the US to circumvent some of the provisions of the law. Shutting down HN - i doubt any congressman is in here to notice. In any case i could use a daily detoxification, so yes. p.s. Pyrrhic is not the right word, maybe futile
threatening to move businesses outside the US
This should be investigated more by tech companies. Perhaps US policymakers will sit up and listen then
Re: Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?
#236The answer is no, people who say yes are wrong. You black out your website to raise awareness to the cause. I think it is a fair bet that an extremely high number of HN users know a lot about SOPA / PIPA. So there is no point doing this to educate regulars. Perhaps news will spread. Sure, it will spread in the tech community. In the tech community knowledge of SOPA / PIPA is well known. Shock waves from HN being blac…
Aware, but passive. Which in sum means that all that awareness is completely worthless. No, really, it is. The fact that majority of Hacker News readers are against SOPA means absolutely nothing. NONE of you passively disagreeing with this legislation will do an iota of difference. The question is always: what does it take to push people from awareness and complete inaction to at least some form of action? Hacker New…
This rang very true with me. I'm willing to wager only a tiny percentage of HN users have communicated their opposition to SOPA/PIPA to their representatives. Something like providing links to appropriate resources would convert time usually spent browsing HN into time actually helping stop SOPA/PIPA.
Re: Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?
#237Yes, HN should go dark AND should show a prominent message with suggestions about what the visitor can do to protest the law
Re: Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm English and would be annoyed if a site I used vanished for a reason that is nothing to do with me. You don't like what your govt is doing, vote it out.
It is beside the point where you are based. The US are pushing this because they know that other countries will follow. So if they can't shut down a site because its out of their jurisdiction, in the long run they wont have too. The UK have been trying to pass a load of crazy crap like this. If the US pass it then we will follow. This is why everyone should be protesting against regardless of your geographical locati…
We did have a government that believed in censorship, surveillance, ID papers, biometric databases and so on. Guess what, we voted them out, and the first thing the new government did was scrap all that.
Re: Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?
#239The answer is no, people who say yes are wrong. You black out your website to raise awareness to the cause. I think it is a fair bet that an extremely high number of HN users know a lot about SOPA / PIPA. So there is no point doing this to educate regulars. Perhaps news will spread. Sure, it will spread in the tech community. In the tech community knowledge of SOPA / PIPA is well known. Shock waves from HN being blac…
Aware, but passive. Which in sum means that all that awareness is completely worthless. No, really, it is. The fact that majority of Hacker News readers are against SOPA means absolutely nothing. NONE of you passively disagreeing with this legislation will do an iota of difference. The question is always: what does it take to push people from awareness and complete inaction to at least some form of action? Hacker New…
Of course, applying pressure to your representatives is just one way. If you have access to influential people, you should educate these and then see if you can convince them to use their influence to visibly oppose this legislation.
Another vector is the press. SOPA is a non-issue in the press. It needs to get higher up on the agenda.
I regularly watch a few american newscasts and so far these issues have been absent. The anchors will gladly spend hours talking about silly, pointless bickering in congress, but will spend absolutely no time educating people on the issue that the prerequisites for a democracy are being eroded and being eroded rather quickly.
As a side note: The Economist publishes a yearly "Democracy Index". Last year the title was "Democracy in retreat". This year it is "Democracy under stress". Things are not looking good for western democracies.
Re: Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?
#240The answer is no, people who say yes are wrong. You black out your website to raise awareness to the cause. I think it is a fair bet that an extremely high number of HN users know a lot about SOPA / PIPA. So there is no point doing this to educate regulars. Perhaps news will spread. Sure, it will spread in the tech community. In the tech community knowledge of SOPA / PIPA is well known. Shock waves from HN being blac…
Announcing a hacker news blackout could sway the big guys to do the same.
I was going to agree with VonLipwig until I read this. This may hold some truth to it - even if the world doesn't know HN (thankfully, I keep it on the DL myself) and even if all of HN's readers/contributors are fully aware of SOPA, showing solidarity may have some impact.
On the other hand, I think the GoDaddy exodus did more in a week than months full of discussions; 'big guy' corporations seem to really notice when we use our wallets to speak.
Based on that example, whom does HN control with its wallet?
Off the top of my head I think we could sway: AWS, Linode, Rackspace, Heroku and the likes -- are any of those supporters to begin with?