[1] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131031/12394625090/feinst...
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Websites like Reddit and HN are extremely vulnerable.
Hijacking my comment here to talk about a big concern of mine. This EFF article argues that there's a place for Anonymity on the Internet [2], and I think most of us agree. Especially if we emphathize with those in Iran, China, Syria, and the like.
But anonymity is also the key to websites like Reddit and Twitter (including HN). These websites represent breakthroughs in sociology: memes; open, real-time, transnational, popular (upvote/downvote, retweetable) discourse.
It's not an understatement to say that Reddit, Twitter, even H.N. are some of the greatest manifestations of the Internet-age -- look at the impact they have had on mainstream media and raising the bar for popular discourse.
(Ex.1: I would argue that the Snowden revelations would not have persisted in the public conscious nearly as long if it hadn't been for Reddit's continued rage. Ex.2: As it is, news outlets hawk Reddit/HN for story-material, and build the story's narrative with Twitter.)
But what HNers must realize is that: The mainstream Internet __can not become__ the Tor-visited Dark-Net that many believe is inevitable -- WITHOUT losing its positive sociological impact.
Yet without the perception of anonymity, sites like Reddit will stop flourishing.
Reddit's culture thrives on anonymity, throwaway accounts, and people being themselves without representing themselves.
There are two issues at play. Now obvious: 1.) Reddit usernames can be mapped to people's actual identity. Not as obvious: 2.) Users up and down votes can also be mapped to their identity. Reddit as a dev-team has retreated from the idea of providing HTTPS for its voting/web API, so people's actions (aside from comments) can be mapped as well. I tried to raise this point 5 months ago [3]. I know there's an argument to be made that SSL/HTTPS is useless anyway (just use Tor!, they say), but the bigger question remains:
Can a mainstream community like Reddit exist in tomorrow's Internet?
People and the press are paranoid about Facebook/Google privacy because its users identify themselves explicitly, but the reality is no different with sites like Reddit - just the perception. Just think about how much more is shared on a site like Reddit by its members because of their pseudonyms! Few people aside from the avid Tor users have realized this.
Reddit is the internet "as we know it," and I feel the Internet is about to change.
In hindsight - Google's initial "no pseudonyms" policy for Google+ was prescient -- though the company eventually capitulated to popular demand for them. [4] Perhaps they wished to save each of us the unsavory realization that aliases exist in name-only (pun intended). :/
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/online-anonymity-not-o... [3] http://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1n73s0/again_reddit... [4] http://www.ibtimes.com/google-allowing-nicknames-pseudonyms-...
You may want to consider the economics of why the Internet has turned out the way it is. Why do these companies feel they need to collect so much personal information that it can be abused?
I think the answer is clear. There is no money to be made from a decentralized and free Internet by Silicon Valley...
Up until recently you could have made all sorts of arguments about the rights of women or minorities and how another form of segregation will settle into place -- because it's "natural"
I am sorry for my tone, sir. I didn't want to educate you or spray my opinion in your face. But please understand me, it drives me mad when people still believe that it's natural that the World, the Country, or the Cities must be ruled by one leader. To me it's as if somebody is truly believing that the earth is flat and want's to convince everybody else about that.
Small group, large group, we're all monkeys.
- The evidence seems to be that the bigger the government, the wider the gap between the rich and the poor. This might sound counter-intuitive, but that's the date we have. The rest is pure speculation. It could be that there is some hidden variable that makes the rich/poor gap and government grow at the same time, but it's not enough to just repeat some dogma;
- I am for communities, but the only point of communities is to make the individuals that compose them happy. If a community is thriving by some metric but the individuals that compose them are unhappy, the community is pointless of even counter-productive.
I think there has been a very pernicious, detrimental focus in recent history on ensuring "happiness." Life is not about being happy. Communities do not exist to make people happy.
A thriving community is one that provides needed support to its members, "needed" and "support" being variables defined by those members.
> The evidence seems to be that the bigger the government, the wider the gap between the rich and the poor. This might sound counter-intuitive, but that's the date we have.
Define "bigger". Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, all have governments that are significantly more activist in the daily lives of their citizens, and the wealth gap does not exist in those countries like it does the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA...
I don't know many that would say, per capita, these governments are "smaller". But they do actively redistribute wealth, a large part through social health care, higher education and retirement systems.
Countries with most Billionaires:
1) USA – 409
2) China – 317
3) Russia – 88
4) Germany – 61
5) England – 56
6) India – 53
7) Switzerland – 41
8) Brazil – 33
9) Taiwan – 32
10) France – 31
10) Turkey – 31
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_500_reichsten_Deutsch...
Billionaires certainly exist in every country. The count of billionaires in a particular country, however, does not actually talk to the wealth gap in a country. I'm simply stating that it is suppressed by wealth redistribution, and is not reliably a function of the size of a government, nor am I sure how one would go about meaningfully measuring the size of a government.
I am familiar with the argument and you are free to think that, of course. My view is that happiness is our ultimate internal gauge. Any alternative to wanting to be happy is typically some form of religion (including some political ideologies). I am willing to sacrifice for the people I love or even for strangers, but that's because it makes me happy. Most people will arrive at the same conclusion if they're honest with themselves.
> Define "bigger". Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, all have governments that are significantly more activist in the daily lives of their citizens, and the wealth gap does not exist in those countries like it does the US.
I define "bigger" as government spending per capita. Take this graph:
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=7373
Then compare it with this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...
Give the NSA disclosures, the size and activity of the US military and the fact that the USA has the largest percentage of its citizens arrested of all countries in the world -- the majority for victimless crimes, it's maybe hard to argue that the other countries you mention have bigger or more intrusive governments.
I live in Germany and the only intrusion in my life is that I don't have to pay for health care.
Notice that I'm not anti-american by any means. I actually admire America and many of its achievements, and this is why its current direction depresses me.
Could you please link to this evidence? Certainly that doesn't seem to be the case in Europe, and in terms of relative equality in the 20th Century United Kingdom, I think it's the reverse, thanks to big government expansions such as the NHS.
It sounds counterintuitive because it's absolutely unabashedly false. Nordic countries, whose governments are bigger than any, have greater equality than 3rd world African countries, where government is non existent.
This is just more libercrazian BS; the data that you have is completely whack, which is probably why you didn't bother to cite it.
But that will never happen, because bureaucracy doesn't shrink. Period.
This explains my libertarian-leanings --> laws aren't written by the people, they are written by those who stand to benefit most directly from their passing. And the devil of a bill is always in its details, which laymen (sometimes even the congressman presenting the bill) can't understand/decipher. Read the Pulitzer-prize winning biography "The Powerbroker" if you want a lesson in how to abuse the public's ignorance through the cunning drafting of legislation. There is no CTRL-Z in DC.
There are movements, gaining traction, to introduce state-sponsored "internets" - because this is the path we have prescribed to the world. Yet such a profound outcome was not mindfully chosen by the people, it was incidental to the law.
We therefore have forfeited the greatest invention of our time through our collective lack of understanding and/or vulnerable&reactionary mindsets.
I'll be spending the rest of my life ruminating on this simple fact: the internet is sick, and my government is the disease.
[1] - And now that caricature-metaphor has a literal face, drawn by one of NSA's own--if you ever wanted to know what Big Brother "looked like."