That's all from the point of view that this tyranny is external. I'd actually prefer to look at it as something we're subjecting ourselves to. We're half-knowingly turning our tools against us; painting ourselves into a corner; becoming increasingly entangled by our conflicting goals. We're not the victim, but the fool.
Comp - computer/tech
Pet - sub-human, regarded as secondary if at all
Tence - (tense), as in past tense and you will be forgotten
Welcome to new bureaucracy, same as old bureaucracy.
Maybe cyber-kafkaesque, but that feels redundant, since the only difference is that it is being done by computers, rather than thoughtless people.
And if you can't say ahead of time what a judge should do with that law against that edge case, you have a legal vulnerability. Something that will cause "hard cases make bad law." Something that will be abused by the rich and powerful and against the poor and vulnerable. You have a bad law.
What you're advocating for is not thinking about the consequences of legislation before passing it.
And honestly, uninformed people talking about a law without doing an iota of research won't make a single difference in the world. Hacker News armchair amateur lawyers are not fighting for anyone, not even for themselves.
This reads like "these dumdums can't possibly understand the law because only lawyers can understand the law and everyone else needs to shut up."
How is that compatible with a democracy? Don't voters have to be able to understand what their legislators are doing on their behalf? Are we all just permanently screwed?
It's not as if these criticisms don't come to fruition. People said DMCA 1201 would be a bad law from the beginning, and it still is. Sex workers objected to SESTA even though they were the ones it was supposed to protect, politicians passed it over their objection, and the bad things predicted to happen then happened. It is the calls to "reform" CDA 230 that seem to lack any understanding of the law, the reasons for it, or even what it does.
The most common flaw in new legislation is the failure to account for unintended consequences from bad edge cases and perverse incentives. It is actually really hard to create a law without these things. The discussion of how to avoid them, or even if they can be avoided sufficiently to cause the proposed law to be a net positive in the world, is really important.
Here's another example. This year, the Supreme Court did some good in reining in the CFAA:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/supreme-court-reins-cfaa-van-bur...
This is your system working, right? But the CFAA was passed in 1986. We lived under that uncertainty, and it caused much turmoil, for thirty five years. That's bad. We should want for that not to happen.
It's not. It's more "these [otherwise very intelligent people] can't possibly understand the law because they haven't bothered to read it, as they're merely reacting to the description of it by another poster" and just posted their first reaction to it on a HN post. This is visible when the answers to their posts is "yeah... the law covers that".
People publicly criticising laws with informed articles (or even people repeating talking points from those) is very healthy, but VERY different from armchair commenters who use their own ignorance about a law as fodder for criticising it and for advocating for their own position (normally to dismiss the law altogether).
We are clearly talking about two very different things here.
Unlike you're implying, I also don't want to censor anything and I'm not advocating for anything. Discussion is healthy, uninformed discussion backing radical opinions is noise.
> Here's another example. This year, the Supreme Court did some good in reining in the CFAA:
I also don't see how this has anything to do with what I'm saying. Maybe I wasn't clear in my first post, but I'm pretty sure I was in my second.
I don't think you can separate them so easily. People make mistakes. They make assumptions. They lack information. That shouldn't make them ineligible to participate in the debate, because the debate is the process by which those mistakes and assumptions get corrected and people arrive at a consensus. If they just shut up, they'll still be wrong, but then no one will correct them, and no one with the same wrong assumptions will see the correction.
And they're not always wrong.
Constructive feedback: the first sentence isn't necessary. People will only see the anger and not the actual point. The second sentence stands on its own.
And it shouldn't be too surprising that this happens on HN. Programming has taught me to specifically pay attention to edge cases and evaluate how likely they are and what kind of consequences may follow. This same pattern of thinking then gets applied to other things in life. Laws are one of the closest analogues to programming.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
However, you have got my interest. What is the flaw in the reasoning?
Because the world is a very wide and varied place, with far more range of human situations than a set of rules is able to adequately deal with. Probably ever.
And if some individual's ability to find things or not decides what happens, then we're right back where we started, at a rather arbitrary system vulnerable to corruption. In which case, why did we even bother making this huge incomprehensible set of rules?
See for example the US Tax Code.
I don't see what about ContentID is related to the "Utopia of Rules" issue. ContentID seems more like a problem related to issues of capitalism, where a corporation will make decisions to maximum profits at the expense of any human or social impacts. Alongside the inability to effectively reign in corporations who make such decisions.
Capitalism is the thing where there is supposed to be vigorous free market competition and ContentID would have no power. Because even if 70% of the services were getting it wrong, anyone could switch to any of the other 30% with minimal friction, and then the original 70% would fix their shit or lose market share.
Capitalism isn't a synonym for anarchy. It needs, for example, government enforcement of property rights. But it also needs antitrust. Constraints on vertical integration.
The lack of effective antitrust enforcement has allowed markets to concentrate. Which removes competitive pressure, which allows incumbents to make rules that benefit them and their business partners at the expense of customers who now have high switching costs. Enabling the "Utopia of Rules."
Even so, I would bet the vast majority Google's customers that are aware of ContentID like ContentID and want it to spread everywhere, to all companies in all nations. I mean, how likely is it that Ford (a big customer) would move to UpstartVideo.biz because they don't automatically analyze uploaded videos?
Which part of copyright law is the ContentID part? It's not in DMCA 512 anywhere I can see.
YouTube in particular had problems because in their early days they were, shall we say, not well-counseled on the copyright front, and were still getting sued over that. They were also trying to make nice with Hollywood to try to get them to license premium content.
Many competing video services don't have anything like ContentID. But they also don't have priority search results on google.com, so content creators don't want to use them.
And the "you're not the customer, you're the product" trope doesn't really apply -- in a competitive market, suppliers have a choice in who to sell through too. And Ford follows the eyeballs.
It's a measure to avoid legal ramifications under the DMCA and other acts.
> Many competing video services don't have anything like ContentID. But they also don't have priority search results on google.com, so content creators don't want to use them.
It's only a matter of time that they'll fold due to lack of interest, fold due to lawsuits, or implement ContentID or similar. Or they'll restrict and moderate uploads manually which has exactly the same effect, or perhaps even worse (still erring on the side of legal caution).
Why would there be "legal ramifications" for someone complying with the ordinary DMCA notice and takedown process?
> It's only a matter of time that they'll fold due to lack of interest, fold due to lawsuits, or implement ContentID or similar.
It has been decades. They're still there.
The lack of popularity is for the reason already mentioned. If your YouTube video gets on the first page of Google search results and the exact same video hosted on some other site doesn't, what are content creators going to use?
"Computer says no", "But on average over last 5 years I make 5x what you need me to earn", "Sorry, but computer says no"
Machine behaviour is only ever caused (i.e. syntactic), not reasoned.
When a human follows a rule, for example as part of a bureaucracy, then our behaviour is merely caused. But we can also be given reasons to not follow the given rule.
This is precisely why "I was just following orders" is not a valid defence; even soldiers are expected to use their reasoning to disobey illegal orders.
Related phenomenons keep coming up (cities for cars, ecosystems of tokens and identities dependent on remembering secret passkeys, and so on). Desires to profit and to not have to trust each other keeps motivating humans’ attempts to devise environments that are hostile to humans themselves.
[0] https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-human-built-w...
"You get what you pay for"
Get a record label or agent if you want or need “protection”
How about a term like "millennial business ethics"?
Seriously.
I know some will take this as an insult. I don't offer it in that way. Hear me out for a minute.
The generation that grew up without the internet was just as sophisticated --if not more in some areas-- than millennials. I have news for you, we were doing pretty amazing things with computers and hardware in the 80's an 90's and very little of it was about tricking people to click on ads. Go back and look at AI books from that era and you will find pretty much everything being done today...we just didn't have the hardware and the speed.
Excuse the digression. Growing up without the internet and with conventional brick-and-mortar, in-person businesses meant that person-to-person relationships were important. Nobody --nobody-- from my generation would seriously consider running a business where you absolutely ghost your customers and users. That's just unthinkable. That is not the way human beings related to each other in any pursuit.
However, for a generation who's reality has been looking at a screen and clicking buttons far more so than engaging with other humans in person, the idea of not bothering with real person-to-person problem solving might just be perfectly logical and sensible. Why bother? You can do everything with buttons on a touchscreen. Except, you can't.
To me this is a cultural problem. I have often imagine that some of the people who built these companies had the social skills and maturity of a brick. I know this isn't entirely accurate. Yet, how else does one explicitly make these choices? I can excuse social ineptitude as a sign of the time. The alternative would be to make such a choice while knowing just how harmful it could be. That is pure evil.
They have built mechanisms where destroying someone's business overnight, with no path to having a proper person-to-person business discussion, is deemed normal and acceptable. Talk to people who's lives were turned upside-down by the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google and you'll learn just how horrific this kind of thing can be on the receiving end of the algorithms.
On this planet, today, if these three companies ban your from using their services, you do not exist. Period. Try running a business without using these channels (and their associated properties) for marketing and delivery and see how well you can do.
I am not a big government guy at all, quite to the contrary. However, I have, for some time, felt that this particular issue is one that needs truly intrusive government intervention. Companies of this scale and importance should not be able to kill your business on any given Monday and just ghost you forever. That is just plain wrong. And evil.
Don't forget that Content ID was created because of legislation, YouTube didn't invent DMCAs.
I have friends who invested their life savings in starting businesses on Amazon, only to be shut down without warning and losing it all as a result. Another one had their product cloned by Amazon once he achieved success, they shut down his account and absolutely ghosted him. No way to talk to anyone about any of it. He lost his home as a result. I know people who had their Google accounts suspended with no reason given and no way to contact anyone to resolve the matter, some suffering serious business consequences. Similarly with Facebook and FB advertising.
Such decisions are not made by people with the benefit of healthy human engagement in their lives. This behavior is evil, brutally so.
Capitalism doesn't forbid sensible regulation, it just hasn't happened as politicians don't really understand the space.
China, which runs a completely different economic system has similar issues.
Separation of ownership from management. Tradeable claims on the firm. Legal personhood of the firm. Private property. Free trade between countries. Market determined prices.
But it’s lazy and wrong to use it as a synonym for greed. Despite Gordon Gecko, greed is not good. Just seeing something we consider bad and saying “Capitalism” is a pose and not an argument.
It doesnt forbid but it strongly inhibits. A system under which you are able to acquire vast resources then creates the ability to use those vast resources to sway the political process in your favor.
Even when the regulations exist (e.g. antitrust) regulatory capture will inhibit their enforcement.
It's surprising how many people consider this process to be somehow irrelevant or out of scope when you analyze how capitalism functions. It's a core feature.
Communism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
Totalitarianism: There were several regulatory oversight failures in Germany during their stint with Fascism
Right?
Is Life a bad word? No. It's a beautiful word. Does it contain the good, the bad and the ugly? Of course.
Is Capitalism a bad word? No. It's a beautiful idea, and it works significantly better than anything else humans have ever been able to think of on a mass-scale. Does it contain the good the bad and the ugly? Sure.
It's getting very old.
Many forms of commerce have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that capitalism is the worst form of commerce except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
But honestly, GGP replying with a one word answer "Capitalism" and to paraphrase your reply >"The system has brainwashed you" does no one here any good. Please expound on what system you would like to see implemented and why it would not have this problem. You will probably have to defend your ideas but that is what debate is for.
Do you not see the double standard in this very post of yours? You're chastising him with 'please recommend what system we should use then' and at the same time claiming the advantage to capitalism is that it's an imperfect system, yet still better then anything else we've come up with.
If you believe human beings have not thought of any better systems or ideas, then why would you ask him to produce one, other then you would just shut it down with that same argument? It just seems intellectually lazy. If you believe this then no one could ever sway you. At that point don't pretend to be interested in hearing alternatives, just say you've made up your mind.
While I agree simply saying "capitalism" and hand-waving at "brainwashing" are both not great conversation starters, your demands are equally unhelpful, no matter how nicely you phrase it.
One does not require a solution to a problem in order to identify a problem.
Here's the main differences I see:
1. Capitalism is a social construct. It embraces human greed and builds upon it. That's why it works so well.
2. Communism is merely a short-term con scheme (granted, on a rather large scale). It embraces hypocrisy, pretends to shun greed, steals everyone's chips and runs, while making people build some idealistic nice stuff which all collapses to dust and misery the moment the top runs away with the money.
3. There is no 3. People like to wank about with all sorts of flowery ideas about capitalism minus the greed, but that's just communism really.I suppose there have also been some failed states that devolved power to a variety of local systems; maybe it's some of those that you have lived under?
One of the sensible #3s you might be missing, by the way, could be something along the lines of "free markets with enough regulation to protect the commons and enough social spending to invest in the populace (encouraging future innovation and mobility) and enough of a safety net to limit desperation (to keep the pitchforks out of the ownership class's stomachs)"
2. Capitalism is merely a short-term con scheme (granted, on a rather large scale.) It embraces hypocrisy, encourages greed, steals from the poor and gives to the rich, while making people build some idealistic idea of competitive fairness while burning the entire planet to shreds while the top run away with the resources and quality of life.
3. There is no 3. People like to pretend they understand world history and economics with all these false ideas that lack context of how capitalism is better, when it's just propaganda that hides the resources and military strategy that went behind the current layout of the world economy.
You've never actually been on the receiving end of communism, have you? Seems like you just enjoy prescribing it and bashing what actually works (as all communists do).
You stole my words verbatim. As all communists do (steal). Because they are completely devoid of any and all creativity and individuality. It's in the word itself. But hey, if we say that owning stuff is bad, we can get away with stealing as much as we want, right? Genius (not).
Look, you can keep calling the black colour white, but it doesn't make it so.
The only reason anyone can call communism good and continue to justify its horrendous monstrosity DECADES AFTER it flopped and sprayed diarrhoea everywhere, is because of incurable guilt consciousness. Which all communists have, because they know they're worthless.
"Communism is a social construct"... my ass. There's never been anything more anti-social or more vile. Trust me, I am well aware of the other horrors of the 20th century. This one tops them all.
Even the USA has a lot of socialist policies that primarily benefit the wealthy(ie. Taxpayer funded mortgage deductions)
I think that's why these statements sound like cheerleading for the status quo.
It wasn’t live tweeted, but we do, actually, have records. Some people were even there!
This reminds me of this article currently on the front page:
https://quillette.com/2021/11/29/the-universal-structure-of-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29408567
People think about and perceive reality in "stories" (processed heuristically), because that is how we communicate about it - in journalism, in conversations, on social media, almost everywhere (there are exceptions: software, hard sciences, etc [1]) - from the day we are born to the day we die. We don't really know any other form in daily practice, so we do not realize it - it is the fabric of reality. A (simplistic) alternative would be speaking to each other like ~autistic, emotionless, hyper-pedantic, object-oriented, robotic AI agents...which human beings tend to dislike, strongly.
In this example, I've made an allegation (and made reference to one example of a story that (allegedly) involved propaganda):
>> It's like propaganda (Our most sacred institution) has killed people's imagination and hardened their hearts.
Now, I am countered ("debunked" in modern day increasingly popular subjective parlance, as opposed to "disproven" in objective parlance), by a ~story (which based on my experience, would "rank highly" among observers, perhaps due to its consistency with other stories: "records", "fact"-based journalism):
> The twentieth century and its experiments in alternative resource allocation and community building are not propaganda, it happened.
> It wasn’t live tweeted, but we do, actually, have records. Some people were even there!
In no way did I objectively/physically assert that the entirety of "The twentieth century and its experiments in alternative resource allocation and community building" are propaganda or that they did not happen.
In no way did I say that "the" (a rather cognitively magical word) events (the specifics of which we do not know (and do not realize we do not know), even completely leaving aside the infinitely complex underlying causality) of January 6 did not happen.
However, to various agents/observers within this system that we live, I did say these things. It did not actually happen, but due to the nature of reality [2], if they are perceived as happening (which can occur in many ways), they then become Real (as opposed to True), and are then cognitively processed, stored, recovered (on demand), and perceived as reality itself. And if many agents agree upon a story, it then becomes "Truth" (and perceived as Truth), and then documented as Objective History.
tl;dr: Plato's Allegory of the Cave may have some truth to it.
[1] Interestingly, these domains tend to be massively more accomplished than the rest of reality. Whether the unusual way they deal in perception (extremely simplified: objectively rather than subjectively) has anything to do with that, I will leave as an exercise to the reader.
[2] Reality is a very interesting word. In Scientific Materialistic oriented cultures, it is typically perceived (recursively, as "reality") as consisting of physical objects, and events involving physical objects. Reality does indeed consist of these things, but that is but a slice of the entirety of it. However, ideas such this can be easily debunked, because they "are" (another cognitively magical word) "woo woo" - and thus the local minima of Maya is maintained indefinitely.
Ironically, this too is a story. Which story is more true, is also left as an exercise to the reader.
The internet is an example. Data is abundant and can be copied and distributed infinitely at virtually no cost. People actually have to impose artificial scarcity on data in order to retrofit an economic system into the virtual world.
This should include how the royalties are split when multiple properties are connected to the same Ad (ex: one video that contains a song and a commentary). Right now, for their convenience they only pay the stronger party (usually the song rights holder) and ignore the other party. I think they should be legally required to split the revenues fairly.
Is it a hard problem to solve and risk a lawsuit hell? Sure, but they did solve way harder problems when they had the incentive to do so and certainly have the resources to solve this one. It's also rather easy to solve 90% of the problem and not being blatantly unfair, and I think 90% is way better than 0%.
The problem here is not convenience, it's that copyright was designed for an era when it was kind of hard to copy things. The DMCA was a good shim to make it feasible for Internet companies to even exist, but it's not enough to fix things in a world where literally every single bit of IP can be copied or downloaded in less than a day.
If, for example, Congress required content owners to submit copies of their works to some centralized US copyright database as a condition for being eligible to receive damages from platforms, that would go a long way to fix things on its own. Expanding the explicit set of fair use exemptions and allowing them to matter outside of a court would also be a big help.
Note that the system also has advantages. As a publisher you are protected from lawsuits most of the time, the worst case outcome is that you don't get revenue from a video or that you get banned from YouTube.
I'm not saying that the tradeoff is optimal for creators but I don't see how what YouTube is doing is illegal. Unless you try to assert that you were forced to accept the ToS because YouTube is effectively a monopoly. But I find that a really hard argument to make.
Which for example brings up the obvious approach of to sue YouTube for copyright infringement as they don’t have the rights to display your video if their not paying you. I expect you would lose that argument, but it might not be thrown out of court.
Google is respobsible for decisions they make, it's their problem that they use faulty automation.
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-aims-end-cookie-banner-terror-and-is...
>>Over the years, countless YouTube users have complained that their videos have been claimed and monetized by entities that apparently have no right to do so but, fearful of what a complaint might do to the status of their accounts, many opted to withdraw from battles they feared they might lose.
This fact and the aggressive-anti-support policies should setup Youtube for a class action suit.
Merely to avoid the expense of actually sorting out who is the actual copyright owner, Alphabet (& others) setup a system that systematically enables this type of fraud against artists, and provides no way to resolve it, and so they happily pay millions to fraudsters like these instead of the actual owners.
It'd be nice if the actual artists could get paid and if Google etc. could get the point that some things require actual support. Unlikely, but it'd be nice.
Think about the infrastructure required to allow direct human contact for someone like Google, Youtube or Facebook.
Just a regular ISP in my country of Sweden needs an entire call centre to handle the calls it gets from customers.
Now scale that up to the levels of Google.
I can totally see why they've made the decision to avoid consumer contact. Their consumers are the entire internet.
I know this is controversial but one solution would be to break their monopoly up so that smaller companies could handle consumer contact.
Go back, pre-internet, and Bell Telephone surely had a sophisticated and expensive tech-support, customer-support department. They managed.
I think we've just come to begrudgingly accept that outsourcing, automating everything is okay. It's okay now to let the customer find your support phone number, navigate your phone tree, spend 30 minutes or more in a phone queue for, in the end, no real help.
Doesn't mean we have to excuse it.
Those services were a lot more expensive to their users as well. If everyone paid $xx/mo to YouTube I’m sure the customer support would be a lot better. But then most people wouldn’t be users in the first place.
If you can't provide a service safely, equitably, and predictably at a given scale, maybe the answer is "don't do that".
Your ISP can afford to do so...
But yes, as they have a monopoly, they can afford not putting any call center anywhere.
Yes, I can.
Youtube knowingly traffics and sells stolen goods and services. Youtube's officers and directors know it. The key words there is knowingly. Arrest Youtube CEO as a head of a criminal enterprise. Bust her door pre-dawn and drag her out into the slammer. There's zero difference in how we should deal with Incs be that Mafia, Inc. or Youtube, Inc.
The mere prospect of that will quickly solve all the technical problems. It is all about motivation. Youtube's executives currently are not motivated to solve the problem. The government needs to provide the motivation.
Humans can be bribed, manipulated, or lied to. This introduces a whole set of new problems. It just turns "YouTube algo removed my channel because I got report bombed" to "A YouTube employees removed my channel after they were social engineered".
I think I lean in this direction, too. Customer service should go hand-in-hand with having customers in the first place. If you have grown so outrageously large that you have no feasible way to plumbing some of your astronomical profits to servicing those who facilitate your profits, then maybe you have grown too big.
So they have an unfair advantage over competition by avoiding the cost of customer support? Am I meant to feel sorry for them?
The other day, I really really needed to get in touch with a human at Amazon to resolve an issue (Amazon issued me a refund, apparently in error). After an hour of researching how, I gave up.
The last time I needed to get in touch with a human there was 15 years or so ago. I was able to send an email to an actual human there, who responded! And was able to resolve the issue after 3 or 4 emails back and forth.
Now, all you get is a "Chat AI" who can't help you.
It's the beginning of their end folks. And that's a good thing (Martha Stewart voice).
(The other canary in the Amazon coal mine: their search engine results seem manipulated.)