I submitted a story about the tech industry’s poor understanding of consent [ADMIN EDIT: removed link], with a recent example prominently featured: Automattic’s decision to sell WordPress.com-hosted content to OpenAI and Midjourney, and their choice of an “opt out” mechanism rather than an “opt in” mechanism.
The call to action of this blog post was that tech workers need to push harder for human-respecting consent controls. The industry as a whole is plagued by this issue, and I included other non-Automattic examples in the post.
@pushcx closed it with the reason, “Lobsters is not customer support for Automattic.”
This is a disingenuous reason to delete the thread in question.
Lobsters is about programming, not the tech industry as a business. The line is fuzzy sometimes. I think this was slightly over the line to the business side because it’s about a bad business decision, not the technical side of the decision.
Yes, I regularly remove stories that seek customer service via public shaming. I don’t want Lobsters used to whip up a mob in an outrage and direct them at targets. It always feels righteous at first and becomes an awful tool for abuse.
I don’t think it’s right to call this a post seeking customer service. It’s a post calling attention to a policy change made by Automattic that immediately affected the privacy of all Tumblr users, and all Wordpress.com users. Users of those platforms have to revoke the consent that Automattic assumed it had - wrongly, in the view of OP. Is that outwith the scope of Lobsters?
tumblr & WordPress posts were already being scraped by AI companies, just like the rest of the public Internet, and users had no control over it.
Automattic just gave control to users, allowing them to increase privacy. The opt-in nature means there is no change in behavior unless the user chooses to take action, which seems reasonable to me.
It is explicitly opt-out, not opt-in. The original post rightly flagged this as a problem of the platform assuming user consent. Content scraping is already happening, yes, but as SoapDog said below, Automattic is directly profiting from this sale of data, and that data originally dumped by Tumblr included private and deleted posts, not just public ones. It’s unclear whether this was given to OpenAI.
As far as I am aware, it is “opt out” and not “opt in” and that is quite different. Also, the posts being scrapped by AI companies harvesting the Web is already a problem, but then the problem is with the AI companies. Automattic PROFITTING from users content by packaging it and selling it without consent is even worse and makes it their problem.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Don't pick a fight by demanding someone jump through hoops for you.]
What opt-in nature are you referring to? The post is complaining about Automattic creating a new default: selling your data directly to AI companies, without compensating you, unless you explicitly opt out. Sure, for most sites, AI scrapers could do that anyway just by ignoring your robots.txt, as always. But there doesn’t seem to be any opt-in facet to this change that I can see.
Naturally, for public posts, even if users choose to opt-out, their stuff still gets scraped unless they also pay-wall or login-wall the material. But it sounds like automattic is selling more than that unless you proactively opt out.
So I don’t see how Automattic is increasing control or privacy so far… can you elaborate more?
Sorry, that was a typo; I meant opt-out.
There is no change in behavior by default: your data was scraped by AI companies before, and it still is. The change is that you are now allowed to opt out. That sounds positive to me.
Before, only your public data was being scraped by AI companies. I believe that public data will continue to be scraped by AI companies regardless of whether you use automattic’s opt-out mechanism. It’s public, after all.
Now, automattic is offering those AI companies more of your data. And they will share that by default unless you opt out.
If all of the data you share with automattic is public, it seems like no change to me.
If some of the data you share with automattic is not public, it sounds like a significant downgrade to need to opt out.
tumblr in particular doesn’t really have non-public content (unless there’s some option I’ve never discovered in the 12 years I’ve been using it.)
[Comment removed by author]
Grabbed the link from the moderation queue to see what the fuss was about.
The post was not asking for customer service, but instead the change in said service was the catalyst for discussing a broader issue in Customer-Generated content and policy surrounding it.
For those wondering, a summary of the article: “Opt-out isn’t a good model when it comes to handling scrapers and similar, and in continuing to legitimize this behavior, companies that engage in this are eroding the discussion around the consent of a company’s handling of customer data. Automattic has decided to engage in this behavior, and I happen to pay Automattic to host my blog, but the issue is far greater and I felt the need to speak on it.”
This is voicing displeasure with a policy change and UX dark-patterns that enable technical actions which are not always in the better interests of users/customers/etc. This is not “uwu automattic locked me out of my tumblr for women offering plumbing supplies they suck go beat on their door”, it’s a discussion on “just how much leeway does a company have on the data that they store for a customer and when is it better to ask permission rather than require explicit disapproval?”
It’s a screed, not a discussion.
A discussion would include things like:
The blogpost doesn’t really do any of those things, and certainly not at a level beyond the most simple, knee-jerk, and facile.
I am unaware of lobste.rs enforcing such criteria in the past or having a general rule against “screeds”. There’s even a
ranttag. And plenty of “simple, knee-jerk and facile” posts show up here and don’t get removed.So I think you will need to find a better argument against the post in question.
Your reading of my comment is incorrect.
My argument there is not with the submission (though I complain about that elsewhere), but with the comment I’m replying to: the comment is claiming that the post is a discussion, I claim the post is merely a screed–and not a particularly good one at that–and give some examples of what would elevate it.
By the way, the
ranttag also has some effects that hint that it isn’t the preferred content here:Some good rants make it through of course.
As do some bad ones.
The article in question seems very relevant and educational to the Lobste.rs community given the tech industry’s poor understanding of consent and widespread abusive practices around user data.
As far as I know, based on logic and personal experience, the tech industry understands consent quite well. Decisions to make things opt-out are not accidental. It’s a business decision made in consultation with legal, based on a desired outcome. There’s no technical question, and I doubt this is a surprising situation to anyone involved in implementing an opt-out like this.
IMO you provide an excellent example. You are confusing “do I have consent?” with “is it legal?”.
Their users consented to use of their data for providing blogging services. Selling that data to a 3rd party for other, unrelated reasons is unethical because the user did not know about this possible use when they signed up for the service. It’s unethical to automatically opt them in.
I don’t think he was. From what I’m reading, he was politely saying that those tech businesses deliberately ignore consent, and instead just look at money and law. Cynicism, not incompetence.
Now if I were asked to implement that kind of opt-out dark pattern, I would definitely consider answering “sorry, find someone else”. I could afford it right now.
I totally get that. I trust that is exactly the discussion that business had with legal (and corporate comms and marketing and government affairs). And the only technical option you have in this situation is to find another job. So while this is a completely valid and necessary topic, it doesn’t seem (to me) like Lobsters is the right place for it.
I agree. There’s no technical difficulty in making something “opt-in” instead of “opt-out”, and a discussion of why opt-in is better isn’t technical and isn’t going to make me a better programmer.
As I write this, it’s Wednesday in my time zone.
If, hypothetically, some open-source project announced tomorrow – Thursday – that as the Next Chapter of their Exciting Open Source Journey they’re switching to BSL or another “source available” license in order to better monetize the project, and
If, hypothetically, I were to write and publish a blog post the following day – Friday – talking about the philosophy and ethics of Free Software and Open Source and condemning such switches, and calling on people to vote with their wallets by ceasing use of such a project, then
Would you remove that post from lobste.rs?
I ask because so far as I can tell, such a post would not differ in form or aims from the removed post under discussion, yet posts which couch “customer service complaints” or “business news” in even the thinnest possible framing of being about FLOSS licensing and licensing ethics don’t seem to get removed the way this one did. Heck, sometimes just the pure “business news” of a license change announcement is left up as apparently on-topic.
And to register a personal opinion, I think the post being discussed here was more on-topic for lobste.rs – if viewed through the lens of “pertains to computing” – than licensing slapfight threads typically are. I also think the post being discussed here was on-topic for lobste.rs and should not have been removed.
There is nothing about this seeking “customer service”, Peter.
You’re right that your article isn’t seeking customer service, but I do think that the second part of @pushcx’ comment - “I don’t want Lobsters used to whip up a mob in an outrage and direct them at targets” - is a valid choice. It’s not the choice you made for your (excellent!) blog, but I don’t think @pushcx is making an invalid choice for Lobsters.
I’d already read your article via Mastodon, and liked it - and while I agree your article is not a request for customer service, I do think one could reasonably call it advocacy.
I do hope that you’ll continue to find value in Lobsters regardless of the outcome of this thread; I’ve enjoyed reading your comments here (as well as your blog), and I wish you the very best.
I am curious to know what you think of my analogy to posts about companies doing license changes, which to me are largely indistinguishable in form from the removed post under discussion here, but somehow are still allowed (despite being “business news” and not “pertaining to computing” and often being used to “whip up a mob” and “direct them at targets”).
It might be relevant that changes to blogging platforms affect authors more broadly, while license changes affect developers in particular. Lobsters caters to both to a degree, but more to the latter than the former.
Automattic is a store of data, they also have the details for those that are affected by the decisions done (and directly inform the users). All users are implicitly at the mercy of any changes in ToS, and must respond / care / etc within a reasonable amount of time.
A codebase’s only transaction with users is when those users acquire the code, at that time they can check the license and decide how they feel about it. They only need to check the license when acquiring the code, no other time. There is no mechanism to convey this information to the users otherwise. And it does not apply within a reasonable amount of time either.
I think they are very distinguishable.
There’s also a
privacytag here for use and abuse of one’s data – not even necessarily one’s confidential data. See, for example, threads about people leaving GitHub to avoid having their code used for things like Copilot.So I still don’t see a meaningful difference between the post being discussed here, and many things which have gone un-removed in the past.
(First: I really appreciated your post. I was a bit out of the loop because of other things eating my attention lately, and your post did a great job of both catching me up on things I’d seen on fedi but hadn’t carefully read yet, and contextualizing the underlying consent issues. Thank you for writing that.)
It clearly wasn’t seeking customer service, but if the mod message had said “lobste.rs is not your torch and pitchfork outlet” instead, I’m not sure I’d have batted an eye. And the two messages are really mostly equivalent, IMO.
I have no power here; I simply like this place and enjoy many of the discussions that can be had here. But I don’t really feel that this site is a good place to discuss your (IMO excellent) post. It could draw a good discussion here, but it could also (more likely, IMO) draw a really terrible one. The only reason I wish it got left up on the page is because I really feel the points you made need a signal boost in the industry.
But I’m pretty sure that I’d have needed to hit “hide” on the comments to avoid being drawn into a flame war.
Thanks for all you write. I always learn something when I read it.
I believe you, but note it’s indistinguishable from that. Someone could write that article or post it here with a different motive.
While I agree with the moderation decision, I was wondering if you would be open to rewording the mod messages in a more compassionate manner? I think they are a little abrasive, and the wording might be the reason why folks are getting upset.
Additionally, while all of the moderation actions are transparent, I think the guidelines for posting are difficult to find. They are buried under “tags and topicality” on the About page, mixed in with information about how the tagging and ranking system works. The orange site has a clear set of guidelines that one can find linked on the bottom of the site.
Thanks, this is all really good points. The About page started as a post about technical features and it really wasn’t clear what was happening in that section after years of edits. I’ve lifted the topicality info up to a top-level section titled Guidelines and expanded it with sections on the site climate (where I’ve tried to capture the site’s vibe in positive terms rather than a list of “do not”s), this topic of brigading, and self-promo. I took this language from the mod log, hatted comments/DMs, and meta threads, and I’ll need to do a comprehensive review of those at some point to flesh things out. I hope folks will suggest things I’ve missed or could’ve explained better; I’m particularly not satisfied that I had to handwave a bit about where to draw a line on brigading and would like to do better than this slightly “know it when I see it”.
I’ll try to echo this less frustrated language in future mod messages, or otherwise make those clearer and more actionable. Thanks for the criticism.
I am grateful that Lobsters is not an “outrage-driven” news site.
tech is political. while it’s cool to talk about the inches gained or lost personally, lots of the posts made on lobsters are about corporations making huge strides with paid dev teams.
And… just like how a corporation can cover miles by building something amazing, they can backtrack tens of miles by doing some policy that messes with developers or users.
Allowing “do this awesome thing with BigCorp” posts without also allowing “BigCorp is about to ruin XYZ feature you like” posts paints a disingenuous picture on how easily messed up things are by corporate interests.
I agree, this kind of post should be allowed.
If moderators don’t want to allow this kind of post they shouldn’t hide behind calling this “customer service via public shaming”. If discussing the ethics of software development is not allowed here, just say that.
There’s no software development discussion involved here, though. Everybody knows how to implement both opt-in and opt-out. The question is one of business ethics, not software ethics.
If you want to discuss the software ethics of making LLMs and crawling the internet to feed them in the first place, that would be much more on-topic, in my view, and require discussing some actual deep technical ethics questions. Like, how does limiting the crawl affect how they work? Is there any feasible way to put in guardrails on generation? Should the raw trained weights be controlled like nuclear secrets, and if so, how?
Current top link is “Why I use Firefox” which involves no software development discussion, points 2 and 3 of that article are explicitly about business ethics, the summary is largely about Mozilla’s business ethics, and the whole article itself is pure advocacy.
The inconsistency is what is bothering people, I think.
Both posts are admittedly close to the margin. However, the Firefox post is an “I like this tool” article. It describes both technical (
about:config, user data encryption and storage, the relationship between standards and their implementations) and non-technical aspects (which organizations are more or less trustworthy). It’s a little light on the technical side of things, so it’s barely topical—just inside the line. And people strongly agree with the sentiment, so they upvote, which is not necessarily a reflection of its topicality.@soatok’s article, on the other hand, is specifically about Automattic’s actions as a business and the (im)morality behind those actions. I may personally agree and sympathize with the author, but I can’t reasonably defend its posting here on topicality grounds. I also happen to agree with one of @pushcx’s other, oft-repeated reason for removing posts: this is not a torch and pitchfork store.
This pretty much nails my decisions on both posts. An additional point in favor of the Firefox post is that it’s a popular development tool, though it’s a very small point here because the post didn’t go into it.
If Lobsters were the only link aggregation platform I would understand this perspective, but it isn’t. There’s so many places to get this kind of news, and being immersed in that world, we are bombarded with it constantly. It’s really nice to have a place that eschews explicitly political content, even if the desired content might be (or might not be) inherently political.
Choosing to ignore politics is ironically a type of political position itself.
First, it acts as a weak vote for, or acceptance of, the status quo by forbidding discussion of political change.
It also subtly discourages participation from those people who are way more strongly affected by politics, by asking them to ignore a bigger part of their life. Of course, these are typically women, minorities, the disabled, etc.
Being able to ignore politics is a privilege.
Please don’t accuse me of ignoring politics. I am strongly affected by inane political bs constantly among the more serious issues, and frankly, it’s exhausting to have that seep into every facet of every discussion platform. Is there not one website where we can talk about computers and we don’t have to worry someone’s going to defend colonialism/racism/patriarchy/theocracy/etc. because nobody’s talking about it in the first place?
Of course, this also isn’t exactly an argument, per se. Yes, ignoring politics is a political decision. So?
Yes, being able to ignore politics is a privilege. It is one I greatly enjoy. If you want people to give it up, you’ll have to actually convince them instead of just noting it.
If not discussing politics is a political decision, then it’s not actually ignored. A particular political stance was taken, one that’s not up for criticism.
This does not follow. One can have political stances - strongly held ones, even - and still not participate or desire to participate in political discussions. Moreover, they can do so on other forums and just prefer that one specific forum does not have those discussions. This is all perfectly consistent.
Right, I agree that “ignoring politics” or “apolitic” is a misleading description. I submit that just because it’s misnamed doesn’t mean it’s incoherent.
You’re conflating “this story shouldn’t be discussed on Lobsters” with “this story shouldn’t be discussed at all”. I haven’t seen anyone in the thread say that this topic should be censored, papered over, or ignored. Rather, people are saying that it should be discussed, but the place for it to be discussed is elsewhere. Hence @WilhelmVonWeiner noting that Lobsters is not the only link aggregator.
I am strongly affected by politics. Within the last month I went to the orange site and failed to prevent myself from reading one of the comment sections where almost all the participants expressed opinions against what I consider to be a basic civil right. While the article was eventually flagged, I do not feel particularly welcome there any more.
I appreciate having somewhere I can learn and reflect on best practices without encountering triggering and exhausting content.
Agree (although I don’t think it’s lobste.rs’s responsibility to fix it). FWIW, I read the links on HN but try to avoid the comments.
“I am okay with the status quo”
While this is often repeated, not everyone agrees with this statement. I’m curious where it comes from— there’s an old article called “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” that I found that is on the pro-tech-is-politics side, did that open and close the debate?
I think there are two reasons why tech is political - firstly is when tech is a consumer product, and second is when tech is directly-built infrastructure. Let me explain:
Under capitalism, immoral companies are intended to be regulated by the Free Market and not the govt, which means that we-as-consumers purchasing the product of a company are implicitly claiming that said company is moral. So by design it’s impossible to separate choice of consumer goods/services from politics.
Second up, our technology is often a pillar our society is built on. The social design of those pillars is the social design of our society - in contrast to govt, where policy is decided by elected officials, the particular social choices like adding a ‘notify me’ checkbox on forums is directly decided by the devs. For instance, Discord is widely used and stores huge amounts of documentation that just isn’t available elsewhere, but is not indexed by search engines; what happens to all the orgs and groups that use Discord if Discord goes bankrupt? And on the flipside, perhaps Discord shouldn’t be archived by search engines; Discord contains plenty of synchronous discussions and perhaps those discussions should be kept private? What should we as a society value more? We-as-developers are making these political choices.
I can agree that the practice of /making software/ is political— you have to make decisions with a group of people. But is the artifact /in and of itself/ political? This is what I disagree with. I think you can discuss technological artifacts without politics, which is why the “everything is politics” thing always confuses me. You can say our discussion is political, not because we’re actually discussing politics right now, but because we’re both choosing to use English— but it wouldn’t really be useful. I feel the same way about discussing the politics of an artifact unless it’s specifically being used for political means.
Peer-to-peer software is political, for example. In general, the topologies which organize people are political.
For some reason, the ethics of software development is not on-topic here; there’s no tag. It’s not clear whether this is a blind spot in the moderation philosophy, or a concerted desire to avoid discussion of ethical issues, but it’s well-known and many of us apply missing-stair reasoning when considering whether to submit stories here or elsewhere.
At the moment, there is an article on the front page here reporting on a lawsuit filed by Nintendo, and the discussion is centered entirely on software ethics. Is that post more acceptable?
It’s about the law, not ethics. People here might realistically contribute to a project like Yuzu. Piracy is a grey area and laws and rulings flipflop all the time, if you want to invest your time in projects in this space it’s important to keep up.
An opt out button for data sharing is black and white very legal and also unethical and Tumblr understands this very well.
Personally I would welcome such discussions here instead. It’s an educated crowd and I’m sure we would all gain from the exchange.
Unfortunately, being educated in some topics does not necessarily translate to other topics. Software engineers in particular are known for thinking their SWE skills are universally applicable to all questions of policy, finance, morality, etc. That kind of discussion mostly just turns into flamewar.
While that seems true, I think you’ll find that most people with a hammer see everything as a nail. Also, this community is generally much better at good-faith than others, I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing more discussions. Although, I’m not one for chiming in much, so my opinion maybe holds less weight lol.
Obligatory link: https://www.facebook.com/dilbert/photos/a.241456529241284/588662677853999/?type=3
Half a decade ago I wrote about why this won’t work.
We have neither the expertise, the tolerance, nor the diversity to have discussions here on ethics that are meaningful, civil, and which do not suck the air out of the room for the core focus of the site, technology.
I disagree with such a zero-sum view of the community here. For one thing, it grew by ~ another 6K people in the past 5 years, for another Lobsters entries are just that and you can hide them at will (the “air in the room” is not finite), but most importantly in the world around us tech is even more ingrained into everyday life, which means the fallout of poor tech choices even more directly impact people who don’t even care about its development. Case in point the fact that “user consent” is assumed, rather than requested.
Many of us here do care about the ramifications of tech (I hesitate to bring in the E word, but ultimately it’s about that of course), regardless of whether or not we have the direct agency to fix them (few of us are called Sundar or Satya). Speaking of diversity, there is plenty of that even in a tiny technical community like Lobsters. Those of us who focus on UX are directly exposed to users’ concerns and personas; the ones deep in the bowels of a compiler or query optimizer perhaps less so. But flagging a post as off-topic simply because you don’t agree with its views is disingenuous and a bit childish too.
I agree with that, which is why I don’t do it. I flag things as off-topic when they are about things that are not about technology for the active practitioner, or when they are written in such a way that I predict the discussion will derail almost immediately.
I wouldn’t, and I think we would lose from the exchange. These topics invariably turn into flame wars and make the sites that host them unpleasant to engage with.
These discussions are important, but I would suggest setting up a lobsters instance of your own that focuses on them.
+1. Grateful as I am to everyone who runs lobste.rs, post deletion (and moderators reframing followup questions about post deletion in their interest) was why I stopped posting here a couple years ago.
I’m happy to see these kinds of articles not appear here and agree with the moderation. HN, Twitter, mastodon, etc. are all quite happy to facilitate “discussions” to generate and energize angry mobs to aim at people or organizations to get their attention when the regular feedback channels fail. I come to this site largely because that doesn’t happen here. Not every site has to be a platform for exposing and righting the wrongs of the world. I guess if these kinds of posts do appear, hopefully there will be some kind of tag that will capture most of them that I can use to filter them away.
To give another angle on the same point: I frequent several, if not all, of the sites you mentioned. I don’t miss out on much that gets posted to Hacker News, or to r/programming, or even to Mastodon.
I don’t visit Lobsters instead of those sites; I visit Lobsters to have a different type of conversation on a more focused set of topics.
As a result, if the concern is that the post is being suppressed, I think interested readers won’t have trouble finding it.
Personally, I don’t frequent HN not because of the topics they allow, but because that place is filled with fascists.
100%. People here are talking about it like they just have a difference of opinion, but it is definitely not a place you frequent unless you’re already right-leaning at this point.
@pushcx does almost all the moderation, there’s a lot of it, and the aggregate result is good, and that’s why we’re all here.
If there’s any discussion to be had, I’d suggest it’s what features should be implemented to allow the community to in some way vote for reconsideration.
And then maybe someone who wants to could implement it. I definitely don’t feel like this is something that needs to change.
I appreciate the vote of confidence, but that’s a little reductive. I have previously made mistakes and am not perfect now, so meta discussions are useful. If it’s useful for this one, here’s a list of all stories removed like this one (not pasted inline for length).
On the topic of reconsideration, people have messaged me or occasionally started meta threads. The second query on that gist lists all undeleted stories.
I’m not in creative mode today, so I’ll just point out: HN has a [vouch] feature for things other users flagkill. Maybe there’s some inspiration to be found there?
I don’t think so - have you seen the state of that place? “Lobsters is focused pretty narrowly on computing.” works great. Keeping the focus specifically on technology and it’s application to engineering problems, with minor wiggle room, is a factor with strong influence on the quality of submissions on this site.
Yes and whilst the comment sections do tend towards the abhorrent on occasion, HN is much more useful to me than Lobsters because it has a wider range of topics posted on any given day. As a software developer, I am (and should be!) interested in business ethics, the politics of software, etc. and a place which has those links is going to get more of my time, even if I had to wade carefully.
It’s nice that the Internet is large enough that someone like you, who benefits more from a broad range of topics, and someone else who benefits from a narrow focus on computing both have sites that fulfill their particular needs, without needing to force either side to conform to the other’s mileau.
Mmm… while I overall enjoy lobsters, I’ve grown fairly annoyed with the content policy (or lack of a clearly defined one) and many of the moderation decisions. This has been a point of frustration for years for me, and is why I don’t end up participating more.
I check the moderation log pretty frequently and this seems pretty standard. I can see he pros/cons but I do see the value in the consistency.
The only thing I wish we would change is let me see the original URL that the action was taken on. Totally fine if I have to be logged in and have to click couple of extra times to reduce the SEO value of spamming. But I do want to see he original link so I can asses if I agree more often.
It’s usually possible to find the link to a removed story by simply searching for the title in a search engine of choice, or by searching on Hacker News.
Or you can do what I do and read https://lobste.rs/newest.json every 10 minutes 😉
I appreciate that Lobsters is a link aggregator that focuses primarily on technology as such, and less on social and political questions surrounding technology. I do think those questions are important! I support efforts to bring attention to them by creating and circulating blog posts. I just don’t think here is where they should be discussed. I don’t think @pushcx removing a link implies that it shouldn’t exist or be discussed, just that the appropriate forum for discussing it is elsewhere.
Hacker News, while it also focuses on technology as such, has also grown a culture of discussing those social and political questions surrounding technology, so it would be more appropriate to post and discuss it there. It is a more active forum, so the reach of your post would be wider. The overlap between Lobsters and Hacker News is, as I understand, fairly large, so you wouldn’t be missing many people.
True, but one problem with HN is it also has more of a pro-startup, pro-capitalist bias, and definitely has heavy-handed moderation when it involves YC companies.
Also, I think the quality there has gone downhill, so I think Lobsters covering the same topics would still be worth it, IMO.
imo the bias of Hacker News is obvious, and therefore easier to parse out and ignore, so I don’t think it’s an acute enough problem that Lobsters needs to be uprooted from its niche and compete with HN in its own.
On the other hand, if someone launched a Lobsters instance specifically focused on questions of business and technological ethics, that could be very interesting. It would allow empirical testing of whether the voiced opinion is correct that such topics wouldn’t take over or boil over into flamewars.
I don’t have to remind you that anybody can register an account and post on HN (and it shows). Here we’re all made more accountable by the invite tree mechanism, which is why you see less vitriol if at all.
That invite-only structure isn’t exclusive to Lobsters. In fact, the code is open source, and several sites have built on its foundation.
Of course, setting up a new instance is complicated by the fact that a free @pushcx (or substitute of choice) is not included.
I’m with Peter here, though I don’t fully support the reasoning.
As much as I think tech and its social impact are worth discussing, this is very far from the topic of this page: programming. In the end, it’s a management policy decision and those behaviors are oder than computers. I am around many forums and in many of them, I can discuss topics of manufactured consent and similar quite easily and they will very likely pop up. I actually enjoy having a place where this is not the dominant topic.
I understand and quite support the call for tech work mobilization and unionization. Hell, my mother was a union lead. However, not every place needs to be a rallying ground. It is okay to decide lobste.rs isn’t it, with literally thousands of other discords and places available.
This is not a bad moderation decision - it’s pushcxs house, his rules. It’s consistent with how the place is run and as others have written: probably everyone has had a moment of “yeah, i would have left that on the page”, but there’s very few cases where I actually run into this issue.
What do you mean exactly by disingenuous? Are you implying that the moderator gave a fake reason for deleting your post? Or that there was an ulterior motive? What do you suppose that ulterior motive was?
For what it’s worth, your post is one of many that have been deleted for “customer service” reasons. I read the moderation log regularly and these types of posts are often deleted. From that perspective, I wouldn’t assume the moderator was acting maliciously against you, or targeting you specifically. It seems to be a consistent policy enforcement.
I believe you’re referring to your blog post. Some points:
@pushcx (and our community, lol) make moderation calls I disagree with all the time. However, I don’t need ideological conformance to still get value out of his stewardship and the community as a whole.
I’m with Peter on this one. This is mob-whipping, even if for a cause I am somewhat sympathetic to. lobste.rs is specifically not for mob-whipping. From the ‘about’ section of the site:
Some rules of thumb for great stories to submit: Will this improve the reader’s next program? Will it deepen their understanding of their last program? Will it be more interesting in five or ten years?
It’s a pity OP has chosen to dramatically flounce out of the community for the time being, but the moderation of the original article out of the queue does not strike me as inconsistent, or out of line with community mores.
I disagree with this moderation action. What Automattic is doing is merits posting and affect a ton of people. Complaining about opt out schemes and dark patterns is not the same as seeking support, I find framing it as a “support request” quite disingenious and odd.
I don’t think the reason given is very good. I am uncertain about the rest. In general, I would like engineering ethics to be more of a thing in the tech world. But it’s not obvious to me that this is about technology—the two important questions I see are (1) whether we should enforce ethical behaviour on our employers, and (2) where to draw those ethical lines. The first could apply to anyone in any field, and the second could as well but is weirder here because we’d be a bunch of tech people discussing the impact of our work on non-tech people, who would I guess be somewhat underrepresented.
Okay so I just read the blog post, after typing the above, and there are like four sentences about tech workers pushing harder for human-respecting consent controls. It really does read to me as mostly being about Automattic. Given that I think the modlog reason is fair enough, honestly.
Anyway, I personally agree with your blog post (although I think “doesn’t understand” is… charitable). I like the video you linked too. But… well, I don’t know. This is important and I’d like to think we could have a good discussion about it here but I also think the narrow focus is a large part of what keeps this place nice. Trying to keep politics out of tech is itself a political decision, of course, and I don’t in general think that tech work is ever really value-neutral. But when something political does slip in here, those threads usually make me sad, and so I’m kind of glad there aren’t more of them.
I enjoy your articles and I appreciate this one. But I do not know of any digital forum in which moral discussions about what businesses ought to do or what the law ought to be that do not devolve into something awful. It can feel like a slap in the face to have something removed, or to see that topicality rules are not applied with perfect consistency. But this place, with its stubbornly narrow focus on technical inquiry, feels, in spite if its growth, like a respectful, constructive community. I suppose there could be an ethics or similar tag for posts of this kind so members can filter them out, but if it became topical for posts, it would presumably also become topical for comments, and from there take root, spread, and displace the technical inquiry that brought us here in the first place. I would sooner see the law and privacy tags removed as no longer topical than move in the other direction.
I’m split. It’s not customer support, but it seems more evening-news than tech-specific.
Tech workers just can’t enact the kind of push back necessary. You can’t expect Phillip Morris employees to slow down big tobacco. You can’t expect ad tech SWEs to end advertising. KFC employees pushing for vegan menus. It’s absurd. You need the whole market to recoil, like for pop-up ads, to get top-down change. There is a public square for shaming them (as necessary as it may be), but this isn’t it.
A bad call, in a way, but I’d let it stand.
@soatok I want to start by saying I have found your posts extremely valuable over the years. I search to try to understand various cryptographic choices and your posts show up.
I read the original article as well as the given moderation reason and can’t entirely fault the moderation reason, though I think the article could be rewritten to at least adhere to a ‘rant’ tag.
I would be more interested in a discussion of how, as an engineer, I can have an impact on an opt-out versus an opt-in decision at my place of work. The included advice is actionable but I don’t follow how it will have the intended effect.
I like there’s a 50/50 split on this. Shows diversity in the community.
I think nothing more needs to be done or said, just a lesson or situation to take in and mull over.
The moderation here is terrible. I was really quite dismayed when the story on a blog entry I wrote was removed by moderation.[0] The reason was ridiculous and reductive (“Business history is off-topic”), to which I would encourage anyone to read the blog entry for themselves and be their own judge.[1] But worse than merely moderation that I disagreed with, it was the way that it was done that was so off-putting – by fiat, without discussion (public or private). I find HN to be much, much better in this regard: moderated by actual human beings with whom I have had meaningful private discussion. I don’t always agree with their decisions, but I agree with the way that they conduct themselves – and I know that they are fostering a community, not nurturing their own ego.
After my adventures with the atrocious moderation here, I have more or less stopped reading lobste.rs – and certainly stopped submitting. I keep half an eye on things just so I’m paying attention when one of the technologies that I work on is being discussed, but won’t do more than that (I’m making an obvious exception here!). It’s honestly a shame: I was bullish on lobste.rs because I thought that it could form a real alternative to HN – but as it turns out, it’s just the very worst of HN without any of its redeeming qualities. No thank you!
[0] https://lobste.rs/s/hnlghh/what_punch_cards_teach_us_about_ai_risk
[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2023/11/26/what-punch-cards-teach-us-about-ai-risk/
Maybe you need to look in a mirror. The moderators here are also actual human beings and you’re acting pretty entitled.
I don’t think this is correct, and this particular link is a good example. HN also had this link and a moderator penalized it to remove it from #8 on their homepage.
We only know this happens because of third party projects that watch the HN homepage and attempts to document the site to reverse engineer ambiguous events like user flagging vs mod penalties. While I’ve also had nice email conversations with dang and think highly of him, I see the round-the-clock link/comment removals and I think he must be supported by an uncredited team. To HN’s motivations in fostering a community, Paul Graham created Y Combinator Startup News saying “our hope is that by creating a community at news.ycombinator, we’ll be able to get to know would-be founders before they apply to us”, later saying that YC works “to create new deal flow, by encouraging hackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own startups instead”. While their motivation is not declared quite as plainly as I’ve put it by putting these two quotes next to each other and I hate guessing at motivations, I’m confident here because I’ve been contacted two or three times by VC firms asking to acquire Lobsters explicitly to compete for deal flow.
I read your comment overall as concerned about transparency. Lobsters is open source, lists all mods, logs mod actions, messages users of mod actions with a ‘reply’ button, has a chat room with all the mods present that discusses meta issues like whether links should be removed, and supports the same with an on-site tag. All of these came up in this event and HN does none of them.
For finding a community, maybe it’s useful to mention soatok moderates his own social news site that’s getting off to a good start. Online communities aren’t at all a zero-sum game; I hope it does well for itself.
I was just thinking about suggesting a Lemmy/fedi instance as an alternative to this site, and am glad @soatok has stepped up already. I’ve subscribed to pawb.social via another instance and I’m interested to see what turns up.
Hm, this seems like a disproportional response from your side to me? Even you disagree strongly with the moderation policy, I’d expect to see a bit more of “assume goodwill”. The “ego” part is uncalled for. The “actual human” I hope is just a misunderstanding of how the moderation is technically implemented, and not an actual dehumanization.
On the object level, your post is great, and it is important that it is widely read but it is definitely off-topic for this particular forum. It absolutely was moderated 100% with accordance to policy and actual practice of the moderation here.
Regarding the way moderation is conducted, I don’t think it’s reasonable to pre-entirely discuss each and every moderation decision before it is applied. For cases where discussion is warranted, DMing mods or, well, starting a meta thread works.
More generally, it is a feature that this site that it is not hacker news. Moderation policies are intentionally different. It’s ok to prefer HN! It’s a misunderstanding to argue that Lobsters ought to be like HN.
Adventures with an s? Maybe I’m reading incorrectly but your post makes it seem like you were optimistic about the site until you had one bad experience. Were there other moderator decisions that significantly eroded your confidence in the site?
This does seem surprisingly rattle-out-the-pram of you, whose talks, podcasts and software I greatly enjoy. I enjoyed that blog post but I can also see why its Venn-overlap with the more tech/cs focus here puts it in the firing line for moderation, compared to most of your other submissions.
I of course can see that the abruptness of it might be jarring, but I’m comfortable with attributing that to it being done by one person on a volunteer basis, rather than someone ‘nurturing their own ego’. I will miss your input here, for what its worth, and would ask you to consider that your conclusion [abandon lobsters] might be a little flakey if it really is on the basis of the one example you cite (thought you mention ‘adventures’ so perhaps there have been others).
I’ve yet to encounter any approach to moderation that is universally liked. It’s important that the people who dislike any approach to moderation challenge it, and essential that they do so kindly.
I have flagged your comment as “unkind” because comments on this thread that predate yours make it clear that moderation here is done by humans. It’s fine for you to disagree with them, but unacceptable for you to dehumanise them.
It’s unfortunate that @pushcx considers this off topic, but I think you might consider Hans Reiser’s letter from prison. He was massively entitled and unable to communicate kindly. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/T/#u
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