'Hide It Hillary' mobile game banned by Apple, title like 'Punch Trump' approved
washingtontimes.com
washingtontimes.com
It has 43 upvotes in 41 minutes. For a rather bland subject, that's not half bad (point wise), potentially motivated by the political conflict involved, but that happens.
However, in the time I've queued it in my "morning reading", I've refreshed it quite a few times and watched it flag, unflag, flag, unflag at least 5-6 rotations as I've tried to post this comment. I'm legitimately curious as to why there's so much distaste for this with so little discussion. There is certainly very little evidence to the claim of the article, and that could be called out as HN has an excellent (I mean this honestly, comments are very quick to say "this article has no substance, here is why" and I see that as a plus) history of, but the overall question of the potential for political censorship through the increasingly few gatekeepers of walled garden web content does raise some meta questions I've seen HN discuss on many other occasions with far less prompting.
I guess I'm asking two things. 1. Although there is not much empiricism in the article, is there not a meaningful discussion to be had about the above; and 2. I'm curious as to what would incite people to want to flag so hard rather than let a thread get some immediate momentum and then die off from lack of content as it is like to. (It's not even as with the snowden releases where the entire front page was snowden for a good few weeks :) )
Little evidence? The claim is that this app was rejected and Trump satire apps are allowed - what evidence are you expecting other than the existence of the Punch Trump style apps on the App Store? Do you want a letter signed by Tim Cook saying that the App Store policies are intentionally biased?
A letter would be nice (to the QA testers who vet these games) but because I (having been a QA at one point who could have had the ability to make similar decisions about what gets into games with almost no oversight, training, or checks+balances, albeit for a much more no-name group) really doubt that's the situation, I would also be more swayed by demonstrating a track record for single-party support historically, and potentially contrasting with other app stores over that time period, since I could absolutely see this occuring due to what I mention. (Improper checks and balances, lack of clear guidelines, less formal/consistent vetting process)
My "there is no evidence" should be taken as "the article seemed more conviction by 'THIS IS WRONG' than conviction by 'we find these systemic issues, here is the support for them'. In fact, it loops back to my original comment, in that both the articles and the flaggers were making a statement while providing very little other than the statement itself to support it.
What do you say about that?
I mentioned this in another comment, but was downvoted for exposing obvious buffoonery.
It's very easy to make your case when you cherrypick one data point out of thousands.
Here's an app called Avoid Hillary[0] where you're Bill Clinton trying to dodge his wife. I honestly don't see how a boxing game with Donald Trump is any worse.
[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/avoid-hillary/id1009997468?m...
My experience with completely nonpolitical apps strongly suggests the app approval process is very arbitrary and inconsistent across the board.
It should be possible to come up with ~10 'clone' games (slap trump/hillary with a fish, hit trump/hillary in the face with a pie, etc) by swapping a few assets. Phonegap could be used to deploy the same simple javascript/html5 app on android and iOS. Submit each app to Google/Apple and see what the acceptance rates look like. I would think that would be enough to confirm or disprove the existence of any bias.
PS - Also noticed this was flagged & removed, then restored. Very glad to see it was restored as this is a very relevant thing to be talking about in the current political climate.
I think the cat is out of the bag on the punch X genre for now, but society's tastes can still change over time.
Anything else, that is policing content, seems self-serving (upholding brand image or whatever), dictatorial (imposing moral values, such as nudity == evil) and user-hostile.
I'm somewhat skeptical of this argument.
For the lower protocol layers we indeed do have common carrier status/net neutrality rules.
The upper layers ostensibly see competition. But it is competition with strong customer-lockin. Consider people for which a smartphone is a big investment. If they buy an iPhone then they're now part of apple's fiefdom and all their regulations and imposition of moral values.
No. Private enterprises have to obey the rule of law. If they don't accept an app, for example, because its developer is Muslim it will be discrimination. They can, however, ban apps with a green background just because.
Another different thing is that as Apple and Google have such a big impact on what people can use or not some extra checks can be in place. They are not a monopoly but a oligopoly.
Some extreme examples for an existence proof: sell DIY pet euthanasia kits, sell candy with bits of embedded glass, bury leaky canisters of toxic waste in the local water table...
Some less extreme examples to help move closer to the line of allowed/disallowed behavior: refuse ER treatment based on ability to pay, refuse to provide phone service based on phone number dialed, refuse to seat a patron based on skin color, refuse to bake a wedding cake based on religion or sexual orientation.
So, having established the existence of restraints on corporate bevavior, and the diversity and reasonableness of many of those constraints, where would the line be drawn for companies like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Google that have an oligopoly on most online communication and mobile software distribution?
If you're correct in your assumption that no bias exists, either both or none will be approved. If n=2 isn't enough, this should be easy to run with greater sample size.
Now it's the norm.
I wish we could actually discuss the issues raised by situations like this, without the pitchfork and flagging brigades coming out. You would think a site focused on technology could discuss IT security, hacking, and the potential influence of technology companies in shaping and directing political opinion. But unfortunately it tends to get shutdown before anything can get started.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11843347#11844960
> The system used to say [flagged] only when the story was both heavily flagged and dead (closed to new comments). Now it says [flagged] if the story is heavily flagged, dead or not. Flagged-but-not-dead was the case here. That's why you didn't see a 'vouch' link, btw; there's no need to vouch for posts that aren't dead, since the purpose of vouching is to unkill them.
Which does sound like it actually happened. However at current time it shows up in the app store.
If we are going. To live in a world where public discourse takes place through private avenues we need to decide as a country which takes precedent, property rights or speech/expression.
1. The two apps were probably reviewed by different people, and approvals from Apple have always been all over the place depending on the reviewer.
"The independent developers said getting approved with Google took less than one hour, while Apple’s denial came after an eight-hour wait."
2. 8 hour wait? Wow. I remember when the App Store had an 8 day review time. Let's keep in mind that Google rarely has a human review it's App submissions, Apple has a human review all of theirs, including updates.
In any case, the second half of this article is a Clinton hit piece, dropping all mention of apps and app stores and recounting again the Clinton emails story and focusing on negative reactions to it.
This was flagged and dead and should be again.
Strange. It almost sounds like you're afraid of this article for some reason?
And I'm saying that as someone who abhors Trump and is trying to get everyone I know to vote for Hillary. I just hate double standards is all.
I'm afraid that we're not able to discuss interesting technical issues without the overtone of this presidential election's good-vs.-evil campaign (and both sides see themselves as good and the other as evil). We couldn't even have a rational discussion about a secretary of state not being able to use a mobile device with official email. It quickly became a discussion about the evil, corrupt secretary of state killing innocent ambassadors by using a private email server. Every interesting technical issue - and, in fact, every interesting political issue, about how the most powerful government in the world can't provide useful email services to its secretary of state, and how we got there - was drowned out by the good-vs.-evil talk.
I'm afraid that comments about the candidates instead of the technical issues will dominate. I can't even come up with a more silly example than the present one: something happened to Trump but not Clinton, or Clinton but not Trump, and with no evidence that this is about the candidates, it must be that one of them is evil and silencing dissent or paying off Apple or something.
I'm afraid that the tenor of us-vs.-them, good-vs.-evil arguments from the rest of the internet is infecting HN.
I'm afraid that well-reasoned criticism of the political candidates is getting ignored just because so much of it is ill-reasoned. If we expect every single article to have paragraphs of "BTW Hillary sux" or "BTW Donald sux", how do we expect to have actual, serious discussions of where the candidates are good or bad.
I'm afraid that articles like this are becoming normal.
Yes, I'm afraid of this article.
IMHO, the article is flawed, and clearly from a biased perspective, but there's enough of a valid point in there for it to stand.
Calling that a "hit piece" does not, to me, seem particularly reasonable.
Election news apps almost always show Trump in screenshots. It is hard to argue there is no supply of Hillary content if they are preferentially rejecting such apps.
Anyway, Apple's vetting process doesn't seem to be helping get minority (of developer resources) content into the store, and that seems relevant to HN.