Lionsion

> Today yes, but with FB's technical capabilities, I can't see why they couldn't knock off a respectable (if not superior in most respects ... clone of YouTube in way under a year.

Facebook's challenge, IMHO, isn't technical, it's cultural. Namely: it's transparently selfish and seems to mostly act for it's short term advantage. It doesn't know how to share a pie. It doesn't seem to have a consistent strategy for people to build around.

> most producers would clone their content to FB very quickly, especially smaller ones who are pissed off at demonetization.

> and the trust they've lost in the last year.

Facebook let social games get out of hand, then it kneecapped all the social game makers.

Facebook kneecapped people who learned to depend on FB Pages to reach their audiences, to force them to buy ads.

Facebook just kneecapped video producers, probably worse than Youtube did. They kneecapped the news media as well.

If I was a video content producer, I wouldn't use a Facebook Youtube clone, even if it seemed better. I'd expect to get kneecapped, probably in the 2-3 year timeframe.

> A Giant, Purposeless, Unfocused Machine Learning System.

Timely, so very timely.

> Youtube seems to offer a better user experience than facebook for users who don't have an account or aren't signed into an account.

I think it's something a bit more general: Facebook is all about getting people to do, right now, what's good for Facebook, and it's willing to break things and get in your face to accomplish that.

Youtube, and Google generally, seem to be much more OK with just providing a consistent, approachable service; and letting the users use it naturally. In the long term, that seems like the better strategy because it doesn't burn trust like it grows on trees.

> What sort of bizarre hedging is saying that people are just acting "perhaps like" paid Chinese trolls?

You need to re-read my comment, especially the sentence after the one you partially quoted. What I was getting at was that someone who inadvertently behaves like a propagandist should re-evaluate their behavior and modify it, because it's destructive (if it wasn't destructive, why would the propagandist do it?). For instance, someone pushing hyper-partisan memes on Facebook should stop because Russians agents literally do that same thing as a disruption tactic.

> but I am not exaggerating when I say that I think putting these things on the record is important for everyone.

I have nothing to hide: https://web.archive.org/web/20180518222349/https://news.ycom...

Anyway, you are not acting like a stable, sensible person. You're getting too worked up. Please, take a break. Do something relaxing or fun. This is not a productive derail that anyone else would benefit from.

> Also I find it quite telling that Lionsion still refuses to respond to any of my points.

Ok, I'll bite. Here's my response:

You need to go outside and take a walk, because your "points" have been off topic, literally paranoid, and bizarrely personal. You're accusing me of being an "agent provocateur" and either a Chinese or Russian troll. That's crazy talk and utter nonsense.

Ignoring you isn't "telling," it's frustration and a lack of better options.

The truth is I'm a guy who was frustrated by a thread yesterday that was totally ruined by people who derailed it, perhaps like the 50 Cent Party would. Just to make it super clear: I don't think it was disrupted by the actual 50 Cent Party, but by people who maybe should consider learning to not act like it.

Edit: I apologize to everyone who reads this thread (or the dead comments below). In situations like this, the correct action is to ignore someone like my interlocutor, but that's difficult when he makes personal attacks. I should have held firm despite them.

> Would you like to respond to my points

No. Please take your points to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105121.

> in order to push your own agenda?

My agenda is to stay at least vaguely on-topic.

> Why is it that your account only 67 days old yet >75% of your comments are about China? Do you even comment on normal Hacker News topics that aren't related to politics?

Because you didn't look past two days of comments? Most of my comments over the past two days have been in this article and the other about Xinjiang, which are both about China. But you're right, I have an interest in it.

Anyway, this thread with you is clearly off-topic, so I'm going to stop it. If have further questions for me, you can study my other comments or figure out a way to privately message me.

You're literally trying to carry the same derail into a new thread where it's even less on-topic?

Here, I made a new post for you for your derail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105121. Please take it there.

> accusing the government of sending groups of real (let's define real as regular HN contributors with at least 10 karma pts) people to deflect/defend on a HN post is a technically a conspiracy theory.

I never claimed that in my comment, you should read it more closely.

What I did claim is that regular HN posters will often comment (for their own reasons) in a way that would make the Chinese propagandists and censors happy.

> pointing out the random articles dealing with China ever is also unrelated. (A freaking article about the Moon lander for pete's sake)

Which was observed to have had anomalous commenting behavior.

I think it's an important question to consider if the 50 Cent Party operates on non-Chinese forums, and the observation in that comment is relevant to that question.

> The topic is propaganda, that other countries and organizations like companies do that is related to the topic.

And the topic of the Xinjiang re-education camp thread, judging by the comments, must have been "everything bad that any country has ever done ever." /s

I think this one will stay, but mainly because the content is an inoculation against the kind of trolling that usually leads to China threads getting buried.

I do have an irrational hope that the inoculation will last for more than a single thread though.

> The thing is there's this strange, "uncanny" feeling I get whenever these things are shared too

I posted this because I got super frustrated with all the derails and distractions that utterly destroyed the Xinjiang indoctrination camp post from yesterday. If you don't believe me you can look at my comment history.

> The rating was sustained by constant comments by Chinese studying in the US and burnishing their reps with the Party.

I can believe it. The Chinese government apparently paying students to wave flags when their officials come visit [1]. Since they manage to do that successfully, it wouldn't surprise me if they do similar things with internet comments.

[1] http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/07/chinas-long-arm-reaches-...

> All governments do propaganda, this is a well known fact....Even companies astroturf.

This paper isn't about that kind of propaganda, where a particular narrative gets pushed. It's about an insidious kind of propaganda where an unrelated or semi-related narrative is pushed to distract from some topic.

> Why is this downvoted?

Probably because it can be interpreted as a similar kind of propaganda to the kind the article describes (e.g. lets get everyone riled up about Israel such that they forget about China). I can see the loose topic-similarity aiding such a goal.

It might be a fact (I don't know), but certainly it detracts from your point. I think you should edit out the stuff about her.

I agree as well. Maybe she's uneducated and unintelligent, I don't know anything about her, but there are more polite ways of saying that and it distracts from the overall point.

> Whenver there is any negative story about china, the downvotes happen immediately and "defends of the honor of china" pop up magically throwing dirt everywhere.

Maybe a little, but the main thing I see in stories like that is dozens of comments that that derail the comments into a "the US is just as bad!" flame-war, and kill discussion of the negative story.

It's really effective, because Western users are often ignorant of China and/or indifferent to it, but will happily jump into a flame-war about Western countries when presented with the bait.

I doubt it, since that's not at all what the paper describes. Here's a quote from the abstract:

> In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime's strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We show that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of the these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime.

You should actually read the paper. An IP user making edits to a controversial Wikipedia page is nothing like what this paper is talking about. To summarize:

1. The Chinese government has a massive, coordinated effort to post on social media to serve their propaganda goals.

2. That effort attempts to distract from things they don't want people to consider, rather than just loudly pushing the party line.

I agree. Distraction can be really disruptive to having meaningful, productive discussions. I think many people even do it reflexively even if they're not getting paid or instructed to. There was a recent HN post about terrible reeducation camps in Xinjiang [1]. Almost no one talked about the heartbreaking story or what it might mean, as most of the comments were tired derails into "the US is bad, too" territory and responses to them. I'm pretty sure the story got quickly buried because the flame-war detector got tripped. I'm sure the Chinese censors' hearts would flutter a little if they learned about that.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17091072

This link doesn't work for you?

https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/how_the_chinese_...

It's the "article" link on the page, and it works for me right now.

> My point was simple. Despite the systems of trade, a catastrophic shock in trade or production systems could literally kill millions in a way that is more brutal and horrific than instant obliteration.

Systems have trade have made the market economy of the US more vulnerable to many kinds of "a catastrophic shock[s] in trade or production systems." IIRC, there are only a few days of slack in the US food supply chain. That's down from a month or two during the cold war (where I think there were mandates for reserves).

> What we just saw was a public alpha. There will be a beta and a final version of this system. The rewards are too great for every state-level actor to ignore and fail to develop election manipulation tools using any new technology they can get their hands on. Big data may have doomed democratic process in an irreversible way. The next couple of decades will be telling.

What we saw was the first export version for the West. Authoritarian regimes have been honing many of the same propaganda techniques on their own populations for some time.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency (they were involved in the 2016 election interference, but they've long been doing similar in Russia and Eastern Europe).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party (Chinese equivalent)

I think it's important for Westerns to study the details of these propaganda programs, so we can recognize and respond to the export versions.

More links:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

https://gking.harvard.edu/50c

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/business/international/ch...

https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2011/06/future-banned-on-sina-...

https://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/documents-show-how-russia... (from 2014!)

> On complexity vs sophistication: During the cold war, a US company noticed the USSR had stolen the plans for a natural gas pipeline system, but not the software.

I think this account might be a bit wrong. The one I read said that the CIA acquired a "shopping list" of Western technology that the USSR wanted to acquire. It included the pipeline control software, so they arranged for a trojaned version to become available to the Soviet shoppers.

Apparently this was a pretty common Soviet activity. Their electronics technology was behind the West's, in general. IIRC, many US semiconductor designs has little cartoons on the dies to taunt the Soviet reverse engineers.

> The most sophisticated software in history was written by a team of people whose names we do not know.

Isn't this hyperbole? I'd grant that Stuxnet is probably the most sophisticated malware ever written, but calling it the most sophisticated software is a big stretch.

Stuxnet seems to be the product of a competent, professional, and well-funded software engineering organization that writes malware and understands the domain of computer espionage. That was unprecedented in the malware space, but it's not if you include other domains.

> It's mission was to destroy some expensive industrial centrifuges and set back Iran's nuclear program. And it destroyed some centrifuges precisely as it was designed to. At that point discovery is inevitable, but whatevs because "mission accomplished".

I think it might be considered a partial success, but mostly failure. It did successfully set back Iran's nuclear program and destroy some centrifuges, but it spread too widely so it was probably detected much more quickly than desired.

Also, if it had been discovered only at the nuclear fuel plant, Iran might have kept quiet about it out of embarrassment, allowing it to be deployed elsewhere. Instead it was picked up by a major AV vendor and dissected very publicly.

> Yesterday and today look identical to me?

Yesterday's had the carrier logos prominently displayed. Today's has not carrier logos that I can see.

> The last school was closed in the far distant year of 1996. Do you really think Canada in 2018 is that far removed from 1996? What exactly happened in that intervening period that will prevent such an atrocity in the future?

Do you think the school in 1996 was doing the same things as the schools in, say, 1896? Don't you think it's more reasonable to see the 1996 closure as the end (or near the end) of a longer, continuous process, not a binary state change?

Unsurprisingly, things are more complicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...