Not saying this is the case, but I heard an argument made about this on the other side. Saying the ICE situation is manufactured by the Democratic party by not playing ball like they did in the Obama times. Instead they encourage protests and and "wait or provoke a violent outburst" that's "often triggered by carefully planned repetitive" tactics like blocking ICE vehicles "then be ready to film when" an inevitable violent act happens then "make a enraging video out of it and show only that in prime time to families dining".
Again, not saying that's the case, I'm not from the US so I don't much care, but it's funny to me that both side accuse each other of the same strategy.
I'm not from the US as well but that's true: those tactics are used on both sides, although they may be more visible where protesting happens more often, which is the case today with the Trump administration. It's part of the way governments attempt to reduce support to protesters by painting them as all violent.
> I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general these are older, cheaper games.
Fair point but I think there are quite a few of those: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind. Expedition 33, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ title.
But not sure these were on GoG day 1. Or they added them after ~1 year after they got most of their sales on Steam and already the piracy of the games started.
Arguably out of the big 4 (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc. All these are things everyone has access to precisely because Google is such a big player and can afford to lose money on innovation that fails. What did Microsoft and Apple gave us? Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone. Why is that?
1. Microsoft gets left alone - Really? You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.
2. Amazon - The government has looked into Amazon multiple times. It’s hard to see where Amazon does anything to illegally use its monopoly (they don’t use their shopping advantage to cross sell AWS in any way, or Vice versa). Amazon is genuinely not a bad monopoly (they have pushed down prices), but they are a terrible monopsony (basically destroying retailers that are not Chinese knockoffs), but monopsony protection laws are weak to non-existent world wide.
3. Apple - Apple is not a monopoly in nearly anything, which makes antitrust action against them very difficult. The EU has better laws around this, which has allowed them to force Apple to do the right thing in many cases (USB-C, opening up the App Store, although Apple complies in the worst ways possible, even though compliance has often been beneficial for them, like in the case of USB-C connectivity), but US laws are far too rigid to be able to really do much with them, as long as they are not monopolies.
> It’s hard to see where Amazon does anything to illegally use its monopoly
Amazon literally uses the marketplace data to determine which products to make Amazon Basic versions of.
I think the better argument of "Google isn't getting targeted" is that literally all of those companies have been sued in the past (and will be in the future and probably currently have cases being worked against them).
> Amazon literally uses the marketplace data to determine which products to make Amazon Basic versions of.
So does BestBuy, Kroger, WalMart, drug manufacturers, and literally ever single other industry where there are generics, private brands, and copycat products/services of all types.
Which is a problem there as well. The way I see it, just empirically, is that the marketplace needs separation from an actor on said marketplace, on a strict no-collusion basis. It’s two naturally opposing roles with a conflict of interest (by design - it can be a force for good). Every time I see this inbreeding, sure enough there’s corruption, laziness, perverse incentives, and at the end of it, high prices and poor consumer experience.
It can be train operators and rail, fiber owners and ISPs, insurance companies and pharma, or an App Store and apps, social media and ad delivery.
US antitrust law doesn’t cover this, but I believe in EU there’s stricter pro-competition enforcement (I don’t know enough to pinpoint the exact laws behind, but some markets really work here. Writing this post from a 10GBit symmetric residential line for €24/mo). At least you don’t see as much of this kind of false choice and nefarious market makers.
You're explaining it ok, it's just not a workable idea. You're talking about taking away a fundamental aspect of economics, which if even if it were possible would be a huge blow to efficiency of markets. It's like saying you don't like that people die at different ages so you're going to legally mandate everyone gets to live for 1000 years. It can't be done, and the ramifications if you could are earth shattering.
First, it's not possible because to do this you'd have to outlaw sales analytics. You'd have to ban companies from making decision on what to sell and what to price things at based on what is happening in the market. Even if you pass a law that says that, you'll never be able to prove a company did or didn't make a decision based on sales data. Imagine going to a grocery store in November in the USA and seeing 18,000 cases of sardines but no breadcrumbs or stuffing boxes because the ordering guy isn't allowed to know what is selling well and what is selling poorly. That's insanity.
Second, market efficiency. The cornerstone of the economics of trade is that goods should be produced by the most efficient producer and sold by the most efficient seller to a market where they get a good return. By blocking companies from doing this, you're saying pricing should be made blindly, and you can't change based on what other actors do, what the market does, what customer want, because that would be "unfair". In the 90s I was part of a small business that built and sold PCs. Dell's volume ability absolutely destroyed the small-business PC maker industry, including mine. That wasn't unfair, that's economics.
Huh? I am talking here about EU regulations that are in effect today, and giving examples of healthy markets. This isn’t some hypothetical thing, they do it different than (post-Reagan) US but it’s not like the US has no rules, so free market vs equal-outcome-tyranny is a completely false dichotomy here.
On topic, it seems like the US is focused on competitors ie preventing horizontal collusion and preferential agreements. At least after reading up a bit, that’s where EU is different, which considers vertical ones equally, such as supplier and distributors. In any case, that’s where antitrust seems to fall apart in practice – that depending on how you slice and dice the “market segments” you can craft a narrative where it’s impossible to prove even obvious perverse markets like health insurance - pharma.
> Microsoft gets left alone - Really? You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.
I've got some bad news for you: 2001 was 23 years ago. It's possible to not just be a legal adult (18) but also old enough to drink (21) and still not have been born yet when that was going down.
* Microsoft did just fight off a huge government battle on Activision. I believe they lost a battle on Teams bundling. Last week the FTC announced they were looking into Azure.
* Apple, their store & mobile browser has been a topic of monopoly discussions for years.
* Amazon wasn't allowed to buy Roomba just this past year. They've had tons of inquires over the past decade.
Who are the "they" in your question? Clinton's administration that started the enforcement action against Microsoft, or Bush' administration that ultimately presided over the conclusion of the case?
Similar thing will happen now: none of these actions will be pursued nor enforced by the new government.
> hey don’t use their shopping advantage to cross sell AWS in any way, or Vice versa
Isn't AWS directly sponsoring Amazon by essentially letting them run the biggest online retailer for free, which other retailers can't? And Amazon in itself is a terrible monopoly because it has unfair access to all user purchase data, while also selling their own amazon products on their platform.
AWS charges Amazon to use their servers as it does any other big business. If your department can’t be profitable taking into account your AWS bill, questions will be asked.
It happened to something related to an internal game studio (???)
When I was there, our department’s use of the internal system for creating sandbox accounts (Isengard) was charged against our profit and loss.
If you are a big enough customer, you can get rates similar to what AWS charges Amazon.
I'm not sure that misunderestimating the amount of time that's passed invalidates the point that it was pretty widely known before apparently being lost to the mists of time.
By that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity. Not to mention that multiple items on your list were bought by Google.
The world's biggest ad and surveillance company having control over the most widely used browser on the planet is a recipe for disaster. That's the only thing that matters in this discussion.
> By that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity.
So your argument is that Bell Labs should have never happened since it's the result of a monopoly?
My argument is that Monopolies are trade offs. In a world without monopolies you have very little innovation in peace time. Monopolies are bad for consumers but the trade off is that they can afford to innovate and push the world forward. It's not as black and white as people like to think.
Getting rid of all monopolies and having a market in perfect competition will make Bell Labs impossible and all the innovation that came from there. A ballance is required. "There are no solutions only tradeoffs" - TS
Edit: Clarify my question about Bell Labs happening.
In case I wasn't clear enough, my argument is this:
> The world's biggest ad and surveillance company having control over the most widely used browser on the planet is a recipe for disaster. That's the only thing that matters in this discussion.
And no, I don't buy that innovation can only happen through monopolies with a savior complex. That absurd amount of money those monopolies acquired through questionable means? It's going to lawyers, lobbyists, investors, and C-suites. It's being used to stifle innovation and uphold the status quo. Without the breakup of AT&T, the internet as we know it might not have even existed.
You have made the argument that monopolies are trade-offs only to the extent of muddying the waters about the matter. You have not demonstrated that the innovation benefit of monopolies offsets opportunity cost of the monopoly. If you want to make that case, you need to evidence it. You have not evidenced your claim that there is less innovation in low-monopoly situations than in high-monopoly situations. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
(I agree with your earlier sentiment that Google has a history of giving out more than other companies you listed.)
> That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Fair enough :) That's one way to think about it ^^ If this would have been a debate I would agree. But I don't have time for a debate so I threw an idea out there and expected people to do their own research and figure out if my idea has any teeth or not.
I initially encountered the idea in Zero to One by Peter Thiel. Feel free to dismiss it or research it further. I do not have time to provide statistical evidence :)
>so I threw an idea out there and expected people to do their own research and figure out if my idea has any teeth or not.
So noise? Ideas like this are exceptionally cheap and you didn't present any convincing arguments for doing any research. This is like _the_ problem with online discussions.
Noise for you maybe. I don't expect people with limited time to give me a scientific paper level details regarding every idea they have. If their idea is interesting I spend time researching it myself.
> So your argument is that Bell Labs should have never happened? It was a bad thing for humanity?
Yes! next question please. ;)
No in all seriousness. that's not what they said.
> My argument is that Monopolies are trade offs. In a world without monopolies you have very little innovation in peace time. Monopolies are bad for consumers but the trade off is that they can afford to innovate and push the world forward. It's not as black and white as people like to think.
I find this argument funny, as it states: "not as black and white as people think" to then paint a black and white argument...
Yes monopolies are not always bad. But one can't be serious and not acknowledge that for the most part they stifle innovation.
Also, I would say some of humanities best inventions and innovations where before monopolies. But hey, that's just my "black and white" view on history ;)
I fail to see how my argument was black and white when I say there's a trade off. Can you please tell me how my argument is black and white? Maybe we have different understanding of what a black and white argument means.
I never said that a person cannot appreciate the contribution while agreeing with the decision to break it apart. The idea was if monopolies are bad an Bell Labs is the product of a monopoly in an ideal world AT&T would never be a monopoly and Bell Labs would never existed, right? That's the first part of my question. The 2nd part was kinda asking if that's the case and Bell Labs should not have existed, why is that? Was it bad or good for humanity? If it was good then why should a good thing not exist and create so many crazy innovations. Did AT&T monopoly created so much bad in the world that it offsets the good Bell Labs generated?
This was my idea but answering 10 comments I left this short and indeed oversimplified version of my thoughts. I have since edited the comment to be clearer.
Why? What disaster? There can be no disaster when the product is free and there are many free alternatives with equal capability except for small conveniences. If you don't like Chrome because Google is being shady you can immediately seitch at zero cost. There is no disaster.
The disaster of global surveillance? Just because you don't pay with money doesn't mean the product is free. Expecting users beyond the HN crowd to have an informed opinion about the browser war is not realistic, especially given the substantial amount of dollars that Alphabet spent to market "Chrome == Internet". Which antitrust laws are supposed to prevent.
Yeah, that kind of sucks. I liked a sibling suggestion that splitting off YouTube would make more sense because at least it could be a self-sustaining product.
Thing is Google lost money for many years in YouTube. Nowadays I think it's profitable but it seems unfair to ask a company to take loses for a decade or more and then force to sell it when it's making profit. If we set that precedent nobody will take risks with the next YouTube like company that loses money initially.
So you believe that companies ought to get immunity from antitrust regulation simply because they made investments in the hopes that they'd be able to profit from their ability to dominate the competition?
Regardless, if the shareholders receiving stock in the a spun off company, so is not like their investment disappears. No one (should) care about some personified "Google" as if a particular corporate structure that happened to exist was actually a human being.
Also, Youtube prints an absurd amount of money, it isn't like this is some sort of change that is happening just at the moment that it finally making some money.
Curious, do run into any network/IO performance issues? Last time I checked, networking is horrible, I mean `npm install ` would time out when it works on the host without issues, and this was a well known issue. Haven't touched WSL for a while because of this.
The average joe can't do shit with open source. The average coder cannot sell the fruits of the progession, because of open source. And most individuals can't do anything with open source, since they lack funding. Who profit from open source? Big companies.
Don't you get it? The whole initiative is a trojan horse.
Chromium was in the wild for five years running on WebKit, and the Blink engine they use today is an evolution of that codebase, not a rewrite. Of course, Apple did not create WebKit from scratch, it was based on KHTML/KJS, but it was WebKit that Google Chrome was built on top of, not the previous project.
Microsoft: VSCode, Typescript, ONNX/ONNXRuntime (TensorFlow is pretty much dead), Github, npm (they bought it but so did Google with Android - m$ still paying repo/packages hosting bill)
Also worth to mention Meta:
Pytorch, LLama, React, React Native, Segment-Anything
Google didn’t “give back” any of those things to humanity. Those are all products that Google is selling to you in exchange for your privacy so that they can make a profit. Don’t mistake Google for some benevolent entity that deserves special treatment for being “good”.
If you want to go that path, then Apple also “gave” iPhones to humanity, as well as AirPods, iCloud, iTunes, and is a primary reason that mouse-based graphical interfaces exist. Microsoft “gave” humanity the largest home operating system, the dot net programming languages, Microsoft Office, Xbox, and more. Should we give them all a “get out of jail free” card for their good deeds?
Even if you assume the situations are comparable and equitable, which most commenters are focusing on, there is still a problem:
There is no reason to expect the DOJ to pursue antitrust suits against all potentially relevant companies at the same time for analogous reasons. These are complex, labor-intensive cases that frequently play off precedent established by other earlier cases. The idea that Google is being "targeted," by implication unfairly so, is out of line with how complex antitrust law can be, and the simple fact that such cases are typically serialized rather than prosecuted in bulk.
Microsoft has the most monopoly. Bundle azure with office365, bundle teams with office365, bundle windows with azure, pushing bing, edge, OneDrive on windows. Why no one investigate them? Because they stay under off consumer minds, and has good lobby
> Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc.
Most of them are tools for making money for Google. Some others are on similar level that others are contributing to open source and the world. I mean you get Microsoft Office for free too, and even with more services than Google. And, most of Googles contributions started out one or two decades ago, but are just now moving into more harmful directions. Which is a relevant point with Google. The company today, is not the same it was 10-15 years ago when they were still heavily gaining goodwill.
> Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone.
They are also getting targeted all the time. Microsoft had a long, deep anti-trust-process around two decades ago, which still sees some restriction imposed onto them. Apple and Amazon do see some targeting, but more outside the USA or by competitors, which means there is less demand for official influence on them, at the moment. Additionally, their specific influence is simply not as big and harmful as Google has it on some parts.
As if Google didn't take anything from us. Google makes money selling your attention and brainpower to the highest bidder. Hands down. They are the biggest entity in the attention economy and their real customers are advertisers.
Google has two billion lines of code that determine the course of your daily life. It processes incredibly sensitive information, like every interaction you have with another person in a digital medium, and has a rootkit on basically every phone that collects "anonymous usage data" that is processed in a completely opaque manner and is subject to information "requests" from illiberal and sometimes even totalitarian governments, and a few open source contributions aren't going to change that.
Open source at Google is driven by engineers and contributors, not by executives or strategy. It's a fig leaf over one of the world's largest, most valuable, and well-guarded code bases that absolutely will not be made open.
None of them are good players for humanity. "Don't be evil" is long gone.
They don't pay taxes, pollute, give means to manipulate billions of humans, concentrate wealth in a few hands.
They all give with ulterior motives, never from the goodness of their heart.
While I don’t disagree with your argument, it is bad form to claim that companies like these don’t pay massive amounts of taxes, specifically payroll taxes. They do and it’s a huge amount.
I' m European. Apple got charged by the European Union for $14.4 billions of unpaid taxes between 2019 and 2021.
Back of the mapkin they employ 22k people in EU (data Apple), average salary $80k (Apple), taxes at 30% per employee (my own understanding). Thats $550M. So their payroll taxes is about 15% of their tax package. If you have any contradictory data, I would love it, but your point is moot for 95% of the world outside California.
Do you mean the tax dispute for the years 2004 to 2014, or is there another one for 2019 to 2021? One thing about this is that the Irish government made a deal with Apple and various courts have ruled in favour and against Apple in this matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple's_EU_tax_dispute
No it’s not. You have to give up your civil right to a jury trial via agreeing to a contract with Google. Just because something costs zero dollars doesn’t mean it’s free.
You also give up your identity; you cannot make a Google account from a VPN without providing a non-voip mobile number. Privacy has value too.
I'm sorry, I should have used more explicit terms: "free of monetary charge" is what I meant. Nothing can be free in this world. For some people not paying money for something but getting their privacy invaded is an acceptable tradeoff.
Google should allow this free tier where your privacy is invaded and monetized or a paid tier where your privacy is intact but you pay money for that.
All the permissively licensed works posted on the Internet, especially those in the public domain, speaks otherwise.
It's up to you to decide whether you want to trade your legal rights to "free of monetary charge" services, but please don't paint all the other "free with no strings attached" things with the same brush.
Quite the opposite. No government should be able to overrule your own consensual interactions by threatening to use violence against you to countermand your own choices.
I must have missed this and I’m genuinely curious how this works.
How does it work with, say, a SaaS company? Does every employee and contractor retain a perpetual license to each line of code they wrote? If that company ever looks to sell, what intellectual property does the company actually have?
Technically, there are two kinds of copyright - I'll translate loosely from the Czech law, I'm not sure about the exact English equivalent. There are "person" rights and "property" rights. You can never rescind your "person rights". But that only means that no one can claim you're not the original author. That's about it. You can transfer "property rights" via licensing as you wish. The license can be exclusive and you can give a right to further transfer or sublicense the work to the licensee.
Also, each work is copyrighted by default. You're not allowed to use something that you just found on the internet if you're not granted a license.
"Monopoly" is a technical definition, not another way of saying "has a lot of money."
Google has been proved to be a monopoly precisely BECAUSE it gives away so much. By entrenching themselves with free products that outcompete just about anyone, they get access to a massive firehose of data that they then monetize with no competition in sight
Long story short: Giving away free stuff to cripple competition who don't have scale is anti-competitive (see: Microsoft IE case)
I meant OSS or free products. Windows / Office / Visual Studio are for profit products? GitHub was free before Microsoft bought it, they just made the private repos free as well. But arguably GitHub was better before.
But I do agree C#, VS Code and TypeScript are nice Microsoft OSS/Free gifts to the world.
One of the key issues. Google has not given me a phone OS. They have taken away my ability to chose a viable competitor, one that does not run on selling my data.
You're missing my point. In a perfect competition environment all profits go to 0. This is great for customers horrible for innovation. Innovation happens when there's enough capital to take huge risks and lose. Google had a ton of innovation attempts that flopped really hard and lost ton of money. Without the extra capital none of the attempts would have happened.
I'm not sure I agree with you on innovation. One of the largest drivers of innovation, historically, has been war and desperation. In those circumstances, you generally can't afford to lose. So the idea of innovation needing the comfort of a soft landing doesn't really seem to fit reality.
I agree that war pushes innovation the most, but I assume you don't want humanity to be in constant state of war. So how do you get innovation in peace time? I would argue if you're in a very competitive market and you're margins are 1-2% you cannot afford to go for innovation. Bell Labs which arguably is one of the most innovative places in peace time was the result of the AT&T monopoly. Most innovation comes out of monopolies or excess capital in peace time.
Personally, I think you have it backwards, hard competition breeds innovation. Large companies don't have to innovate so they don't. They coast, sometimes going many decades between major innovations.
For example, Google doesn't have to change Chrome in any meaningful way to maintain (or even grow) it's market share. So, they don't. Browsers haven't changed much in a good decade and a half. That money is much better spent on marketing.
> In a perfect competition environment all profits go to 0.
Competition drives prices down to the lowest sustainable point but not to zero. If one company drives prices below a sustainable (profitable) point that’s market failure because it starves the competition. It’s the thing Google did and the reason we have anti-trust law.
Google created a situation where they had no competition. Necessity being the mother of invention suggests that they innovate less in the absence of competition. Monopolies are poison to innovation.
We're not in a perfect competition environment ; profits are not to 0. There is an incentive for innovation.
Monopolies stifle innovation just the same. Imagine having an "amazon basics" product as your competitor. Or competing with something that embeds well in a closed off ecosystem like Apple's or Google's when 90% of your target demographic will value that integration.
I agree regards Google (just beware I'm a massive Google fanboy) but I think that Microsoft do deserve at least a little bit of credit.
Microsoft gave us (counting only OSS and things they effectively gave away):
1. Microsoft Basic, the first language of a large number of developers in the 35+ age group. This was effectively given away which is part of why it was so popular (it was a small, fixed-price fee instead of the per-unit licensing)
2. TypeScript
3. C# and the CLR
4. Visual Studio Code
5. Since 2010 they've made large contributions to Open Source.
Commercially they've also been strong competition to enterprise players like Oracle and IBM and of course have done a huge amount for gaming.
Apple are narcissists, they're all take take take. They do, however, provide very strong competition which pushes other players to improve.
I agree. Love C#, VS Code and TypeScript. Microsoft changed a bit lately. But there's a lot of history with Microsoft and the recent CoPilot ripping off OSS code and blocking C# support in VS Code are still mudding the waters.
* The Apple I arguably changed the course of computer history. [0]
* The Laserwriter and the Mac inspired desktop publishing -- the Mac was the first computers with a font library.[1]
* The iPod literally changed culture. [2]
* The iTunes Store made piracy less desirable changed the music industry forever. It also led the way with digital video streaming -- while Netflix was still mailing out DVDs. [3]
And iPhone? Changed the world. [4] People have a hard time remembering pre-iPhone days. Samsung literally copied the iPhone. A judge in South Korea, in Samsung's home jurisdiction even ruled that Samsung copied iPhone. Android would still be a failed camera operating system if it were for iPhone leading the way.
* Kubernetes -- we lived just fine without it.
* Chromium? Who cares. My life isn't any different with or without it.
* Google Office? Aa cloud-based productivity suite? Nothing groundbreaking there, another competitor could have (and have) built the same thing.
* Go programming language? Apple gave us Swift and Objective C -- languages that are used for software running on over a billion devices. Go is a niche language. If Go didn't exist, humanity wouldn't notice.
We can have a difference of opinion on the relative merit of these details, but the idea that Google gave the _most_ to humanity is absolute nonsense. Amazon for example, empowered many small sellers around the world -- giving them access to a logistics network that would be impossible for a small business to recreate. Instead of selling on Main Street, sellers now can sell to literally any street in the world. I'm not the biggest fan an Amazon, however that being said, their contribution to humanity is enormous, especially in logistics. It has also changed publishing forever in ways that provide a significant benefit to independent authors -- many of whom have made careers out of self-publishing because of Amazon.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but their contribution to humanity is undeniable. Excel is probably the most important piece of software ever written. I'm sure others can expand on Microsoft's contributions to humanity.
By the way, I'm not saying all of these companies are "good" or altruistic, I'm only rating them on "contribution to humanity."
You're comparing Golang and Kubernetes to products that happen to have big market share. There are loads of spreadsheet apps and smartphones out there. They are replaceable. The iPhone definitely advanced the field, but it wasn't a sacrifice on Apple's part. They made boatloads of money from it. How much money did Google make from selling Golang and K8s? A large negative sum. Yet those techs have contributed enormously to economic efficiency.
All of these companies provide values, that's why they are so successful.
In particular (as opposed to Google), Apple is giving us products where the user isn't just an entity that you try to get as much data from as you can.
Without Apple we'd be stuck with tiny initiative such as GrapheneOS on mobile, limited to a small subset of apps and phones.
With AI, Apple is also being privacy conscious, i think they are doing interesting work with their private cloud compute setup.
But does it mean that Apple and Google should get a free pass? Hell no!
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but if you're serious, I'm pretty sure the OP is talking metaphorically. It's just a slight annoyance he's not "emotional" about it.
I also fail to see how someone who is annoyed by code that doesn't follow well established standards is somehow not a good fit in the C-suite.
Why do people compare Netflix with cable? It's a completely different technology. There are more differences in the technology that similarities. It's similar to asking someone who's using a mobile phone to buy a 2nd mobile phone for work because "You don't expect to be able to use your land line phone at work as well, do you?"
Because cable and Netflix literally do the exact same thing and serve the same roles in the market, and just because it happens to be the case that it's trivial to give your Netflix account to everybody, and not just to your next-door neighbors like in the sitcoms, that doesn't make it commercially reasonable to do so.
I agree with what you're saying. I don't like racist/homophobic/transphobic behavior but I find it hard to reconcile that with free speech. And I think they only way you can change someone's mind is by allowing free speech and engaging in conversations with them to try to change their minds. Banning them would just make them look for other channels to communicate and find like minded people and their bad ideas will never be challenged.
You mentioned the "black little mermaid" and it's hard not to draw a parallel between a mod in a game that allows you to change the skin color of a character and the "woke" media race swapping well known characters like the little mermaid, Triss from the Witcher, Achilles, etc.
> I find it hard to reconcile that with free speech
I don't know what to say - if you're expecting "free speech" somewhere that has a big TOS you agreed to which doesn't say "hey this is the free speech zone, go nuts!" then you are in for a shock.
The Little Mermaid is an film for kids. Kids aren't "woke" - the only people who care about the skin colour of a fictional character in an animated film are adults. If someone's upset because they see a black person, they might want to take a deep breath and think really hard about what's really bothering them.
> And I think they only way you can change someone's mind is by allowing free speech and engaging in conversations with them to try to change their minds
... if the person you are engaging with is open to having their mind changed. If you ever tried that with online trolls, you would quickly find out that's not really going to happen when person on the other side doesn't want that and can just decide to waste as much of your time as they can.
I agree. And ideally this is what all emails should look like. But you're ignoring the context. Do you know what that guy was going through?
Maybe his wife just cheated on him, divorced him and took half his money, his kids don't want to have anything to do with him, his bank took his house and he just crashed the car. And he tried to use Notepad++ and the same old issue happened and he snapped and sent that email.
99 out of 100 times he would have send the email you mentioned here but he had a horrible day and vented in the email. Does it make it ok? No. Is it understandable? Yes. Should we discard the feedback because he was frustrated? No.
Yes it does. I'm petty and proud. If they wanted it fixed, they would've taken the personal responsibility to have been born with a brain big enough not to be rude.
This suggests a new attack vector on software projects; if I wanted to cripple a competitor, all I would have to do is to first find a real important bug it their software, but then report the bug rudely enough that the developers then want to punish me personally by not fixing the bug. I would then have guaranteed that the bug in my competitor’s software is not fixed, and people will use my software instead.
In other words: Trying to punish rude users by not fixing the bugs they report is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
This is a super-contrived example, but I could still fix the bug, just not specifically for you, on your schedule. The odds that you'd find an issue that impacts more than the odd crank are so thin that this isn't anywhere near a top concern.
Using that logic, I could just as well argue that since you don’t pay me to debate this with you, you don’t deserve a reply from me, since I am not your indentured servant.
In other words: There exists roles and relationships, with attached obligations and expectations, other than those involving money. Free software development is such a relationship, as is this debate.
If you were to post rude comments in Hacker News, you probably wouldn’t get a response, because it would be delete. It kind of proves the very point you’re opposing - being polite begets good responses, rudeness to being ignored.
I have zero expectation that you’d reply. Most conservations on hn don’t end because they wrapped up neatly but because someone had something more important to do and walked away from the conversation.
There are obligations other than money, but none of those exist here. There’s no contractual obligation. He put out something for free and doesn’t need to take an iota of criticism on it by people freeloading. He obviously can, and if he wants certain goals like increasing his user base it might be the smart move to respond to these type of people, but there are no obligations.
A social obligation, in short, is something which a person would be rude not to do, but is not required by law. I’m sure you can think of examples. I am putting forth my opinion that fixing bugs, regardless of how rude a bug report is, is a social obligation.
HN is one of the best places on the internet to politely post a critical or opposing view and get a reasoned response though; doesn't that strike directly at your point? Perhaps that's exactly what I'm doing righbt now, because you weren't a rude jerk? ;)
If I have more problems reported every day than I can fix, the only productive way is to work on issues that people actually put time into reporting in a nice and well worded manner. Because usually only those people give feedback if something is fixed to their liking, stick around for long enough to actually test the fix and are reasonable enough to understand limitations or discuss alternative solutions.
If the only issue my application ever had was reported in such a rude manner, there might be a case to be made to fix it, even though it was reported in a hostile or rude manner. It might make the application better for people who didn't report the issue. But maybe it is more valuable to just spend that time on something fun or enjoyable like coding on something else or eating cake. There is no reason to waste your free time on rude people, when they have the option to just be nice and save you all the anger.
I don’t see why the attitude of the reporting user should be a factor in determining the priority of the bug they are reporting. Surely the severity of the bug, and how many people are likely to be affected are the relevant factors. Sure, if the issue is not well explained, hard to pin down, or might otherwise require cooperation from the user, you have to weigh that into your consideration. However, many users do get surprisingly cooperative once you show them that you actually care about fixing the issue they are reporting; many users are used to being ignored, and might start out having a bad attitude merely by habit.
Even worse than rude, it would be unproductive. If you were to recieve a report about a critical security flaw, would you ignore it simply because the reporting user was rude in the report? I should hope not. So why should normal bug reports (and confusing UI/UX issues are also bugs) be treated any differently?
Please read my entire comment, not merely the first half.
To be excruciatingly explicit: Bugs (and confusing UI/UX) experienced and reported by rude users also affect many non-rude users. If one wants one’s software to be the best it can be, then one should listen to all bug reports; the attitude of the reporting users are irrelevant.
What if he doesn’t care about the “best it can be” because his product is already so widely used? What if he thinks “my product might be a little worse, but I’ll feel a little better”.
I agree that he’d be under an ethical obligation to listen to a rude security report. But it doesn’t follow that he must therefore listen to all rude bug reports.
As a user of free software you can hope all you want, but you have no right to an expectation that this is the priority. Your right end with the decision to stop using the software, which is exactly what Don said to the original email
maybe when we are all replaced by robots that is true, but its not possible for the average person to take abuse constantly and keep a level head. That's not how our brains are wired
Only true if you're expecting the the person who provided feedback to behave like a robot and exist without any kind of emotions.
Loose analogy, I don't watch videos with people buying a bike with no breaks, fall and get hurt, then go to the vendor and calmly explain to them that they should modify their bike design so the breaks function and think, that customer is behaving like a human being.
See what I did there? :) My analogy might not be great, I give you that. But frustration is a normal human behavior. Granted I strongly believe you should try to vent a different way and then give clam feedback, you can't discard feedback just because the person giving it is frustrated.
We should be able to distinguish between frustrated good feedback and just abuse. I know I was able to get feedback from very hostile messages. And last time I checked I'm not a robot. So it's as skill you can gain.
Open source developers should disregard hostile feedback out of principle, for their own sanity. The feedback might be valuable, but it's ultimately not worth mining for because they get very little for their work, donations at best. Commercial customer support stuff at least get a regular income for their trouble.
Yeah, frustration breeds frustration. So I agree that it's better to disregard it if you can't handle it.
But I'm just wondering, is it possible to ignore the form of the message and listen to the content? Looking back the stoics were very good at controlling their own emotions and dealing with insults. Insults would just not get to them, they would bounce right off them. Is this a skill we've lost as a society?
It seems that nowadays we're focusing external, not internal. Instead of developing a thick skin we're focusing on changing the behavior of the people who's insulting us. To me that seems like a pointless endeavor. You can't change someone else behavior if they don't want to cooperate. And without a thick skin, all it takes is one jerk to ruin your day. With thick skin the insults from a jerk bounces off you and your day is still a good day. So, it seems to me that we should focus inwards instead of outwards. Not saying it's easy. Just saying humans were capable of that in the past, nowadays I don't hear anybody talking about it.
Isn't it smart to invest in Nuclear? Sure, there might be drawbacks right now but if we invest in research and improve it we might find a way to make it "greener"?
Also we seem to be focusing on space exploration again. To take off we're always using fossil fuel. I'm going to take a wild guess and assume that you cannot take a ship into space with wind and solar. Also a wild guess but if we develop nuclear enough we might get smaller generators that are able to help a ship take off and then continue to have energy while in space. I know too little to make these claims but I'm sure the smart people here can help me understand if I am wrong or correct :)
While yes, this is currently true even for SpaceX whose Falcon family uses RP-1, for the future the situation looks different - Starship uses liquid oxygen (which can be obtained by air liquefaction) and methane, which can be synthesized at high efficiencies [1] in a laboratory scale or captured from landfills.
Andrzej Sapkowski in the Witcher books, through Geralt, said something that might apply to this situation: "Evil is evil [...] Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I’m not a pious hermit. I haven't done only good in my life. But if I’m to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all"
Agreed, I think the utilitarian approach that goes something like "let N and M be two integers so that N > M, then N human lives are worth more that M human lives" (with subtleties related to age and so forth) is very, very dangerous. It can lead to all sorts of atrocities in the name of some greater good. My approach is to never pull the lever unless 1) I would get killed or 2) humans would get killed vs something non-human on the other track.
This quote is very popular, but the moral of the story you are referencing is the opposite. Geralt rejects this point of view at the end, because inaction is also action.
I think is so popular because of the Killing Monsters trailer.
He does end up actually making a choice. But the choice is not between killing Renfri and Stregobor (which was the initial lesser evil choice) but he chooses to stop Renfris' gang from killing innocent people to draw Stregobor out. Renfri could have then left and look for another opportunity to kill Stregobor. Geralt told her at least two times to leave and she refused saying she made her choice, attacked Geralt and died. So Geralt ended up killing Renfri but as a result of her choice, not his. And he did stop Stregobor from taking her body and study it (which was his initial intent). So he did definitely not take his side. I would argue Geralt chose between good and evil, not between two lesser evils.
Again, not saying that's the case, I'm not from the US so I don't much care, but it's funny to me that both side accuse each other of the same strategy.