Don’t feel bad. It is nearly impossible to become wealthy in software without increasing the suffering of others.
I built ByteDance's censorship machine
91–100 of 107 posts
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having been raised in a democracy and raising my kids in a dictatorship, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding from both side. People in democracies cannot comprehend how anyone in a dictatorship could live anything else than miserable, and people in dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules. The funny thing is that, well, it mostly all dep…
" dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules." Han China is the most Imperial place on earth, and possibly has been since antiquity. 100x more ethnocentric and classically Imperial that America ever remotely was for example. Isn't it interesting that someone could contemplate even writing such a thing?
forget manifest destiny ?
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#93Censorship is imo Bytedance's lesser evil. The way this company destroys journalism is its biggest crime. Algorithm-driven "self-media" that ByteDance popularised (with Toutiao) has essentially wiped out news in China, anyone can write sensationalized and fabricated news-style stories on its platforms and compete with "mundane and boring" serious news，AND GET PAID, these self-media are so prevalent and low-brow that…
My doomer instinct tells me that it will be the future of digital media in Australia, in which Facebook will be the pioneer of this practice.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question is what should we, western nations, do about this? Should we keep hiring, sponsoring and giving away residency to engineers who made the decision to help building these platforms? Or collectively decide not to reward these behaviors?
Build distributed systems that can't be taken down. Social media could be built on IPFS and file coin and lib P2P. Protocols that have no ownership or entity to attack via political means. Email already works this way in a sense.
I'm not sure it can, given how many failed attempts there have been. I would like to try such a service though.
Email is not a good example because it is controlled by a handful of providers.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#95Censorship is imo Bytedance's lesser evil. The way this company destroys journalism is its biggest crime. Algorithm-driven "self-media" that ByteDance popularised (with Toutiao) has essentially wiped out news in China, anyone can write sensationalized and fabricated news-style stories on its platforms and compete with "mundane and boring" serious news，AND GET PAID, these self-media are so prevalent and low-brow that…
Is Fox News or MSNBC significantly better? I think people should be skeptical of any news platform which can easily be centrally controlled and manipulated. However, there is likely journalistic value to be found in some portion of those user-created news stories. "Vehemently reject"ing user-created news seems to overly discount the flaws of mass media journalism: filter bubbles and misinformation are not new problem…
I have yet to witness MSNBC pour their efforts into deliberate misinformation. They clearly have a bias, but they are at least peddling correct information.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#96This is what corporate media wants in America. The same people behind the Iraq war are now outrage machines trying to drum up support for censorship in the name of stopping a new threat... "homegrown Al Qaeda" wearing a MAGA hat. I know this will be divisive, but the NYT needs to formally retract their reporting of the attacks on the capitol: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-c...
What happened to Glen? He's clearly angry at media like NYT for narrative spinning and reporting mistakes. This entire article is about how they hastily reported Officer Sisnick was killed by the mob, but as of now we don't definitively know how he died yet. That's basically it. Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies, while blatantly failing to report on any egregious errors…
> Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies
No, it's not.
It's mostly targeting the Democratic Party establishment and centrist media. He’s still playing the role of a leftist critic of the elite centrist establishment.
Of course, it's hard not to notice that though he will still ritually make perfunctory negative comments about the Right in the course of doing so, the content of his criticism is carefully calibrated to match current right-wing narratives about the same outlets as he is criticizing.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have similar situations elsewhere. Folks rage about 'the media' (a term now so amorphous I can't tell what it means anymore, or if the person even reads / watches what they think of as the media), so we get lots of self research / internet sleuth type discovery on platforms like reddit. We had one on HN recently too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645 . I applaud the person for putting in the effort, but…
It was a sudden and dramatic shift. I spent years being critical of news establishments, due to things such as the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect," poor science reporting, conflicts of interest or a distaste with the progressively shorter articles and lower quality writing. However, as of the last few years, I don't feel comfortable talking about that with most people anymore. Terms like "mainstream media" or vocal distru…
The delusional fantasies aren't just YouTube though. It's in Fox News, it's in the op-ed section of the WSJ, it's propagated by political leaders. The entire conservative movement in the US right now is steeped in delusional fantasies. I don't see how this gets better.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#98Don’t feel bad. It is nearly impossible to become wealthy in software without increasing the suffering of others.
I’m at a loss to understand why your statement means this person, or anyone who increases the suffering of others in the pursuit of their own personal wealth, shouldn’t feel bad about doing so.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
" dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules." Han China is the most Imperial place on earth, and possibly has been since antiquity. 100x more ethnocentric and classically Imperial that America ever remotely was for example. Isn't it interesting that someone could contemplate even writing such a thing?
forget manifest destiny ?
Go ahead and compare 'Manifest Destiny' to Han Chinese Imperialism of the last 2000 years, that exercise will enlighten us all.
As part of 'Manifest Destiny', make sure sure to include the dozens of major states like Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Italy that the US liberated from other conquerors at great cost, and others it provides support for at some cost. Like Taiwan.
If the US were an Imperial Power, all the Oil in Iraq and in Saudi Arabia would belong to it.
Ironically, as the US 5th Fleet today provides protection for all merchant craft in the Gulf at this very moment, so that that everyone is free to move, buy and sell from/with whom they please - considerably more of that Oil goes to China than the US.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Fox News or MSNBC significantly better? I think people should be skeptical of any news platform which can easily be centrally controlled and manipulated. However, there is likely journalistic value to be found in some portion of those user-created news stories. "Vehemently reject"ing user-created news seems to overly discount the flaws of mass media journalism: filter bubbles and misinformation are not new problem…
I have yet to witness MSNBC pour their efforts into deliberate misinformation. They clearly have a bias, but they are at least peddling correct information.
I think "deliberate" is a hard thing to determine with available information, and Politifact has certainly has selection bias is what they check and some ratings are questionable, but I think this demonstrates that they don't always 'peddle correct information':
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?speaker=rachel-m...
I do think MSNBC's MO tends towards bending truth to make emotional appeals against ideological opponents rather than reporting outright fabrications, such as:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/mar/05/zerlina-ma...
Also, a lot of their Russiagate reporting was questionably and thinly sourced. I suspect it will be a couple more years before the public gets enough substantive facts to outright call their reporting and analysis on this topic "false" or "intentionally misleading" but they certainly had a number of questionable segments.