They didn't get it wrong because they know who butters their bread: customers. Developers are rightly prioritized last.
Fun to give this Paul Graham essay a read again [1].
Being a walled garden is independent of privacy. The calendar app on macOS Calendar app allows me to share my calendars in an open format (ICAL) and interoperates with other calendar apps through that specification. It respects my privacy by not sharing anything I don't ask it to without being "walled".
Signal is open and secure; iMessage could be a non-proprietary format and remain just as private.
> all the press coverage of some app developer crying about App Store rejections or onerous rules.
As far as I'm aware a lot of these weren't for privacy matters [1] and are sometimes a little much [2] (this one is specially absurd: [3]).
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/apples-widened-ban-on-temp...
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16992830/apple-emoji-crack...
[3]: https://medium.com/@alariccole/apple-literally-stole-my-thun...
PS:
> all the "open always wins" from the FOSS types
I don't think that means what you think it means. FOSS and privacy are tangential matters.
I totally agree (because it's true of course). But do recognize that it's in Apple's interest to conflate the two. To make it even more interesting, add "secure" to the list of matters.
Actually, the only way privacy can be guaranteed is with code you control running on a machine your control. Free Software (and not Open Source) has everything to do with privacy, as it is about control.
Apple doesn't have a social network. They also don't rely on advertising and 3rd party data brokering.
It's easy for Apple to be the 'good guys' here when they have physical products as their profit generators.
FOSS would have worked better in the Facebook case too as people and developers would know/discover a) where their data is and b) what risks it faces
Of course part of the answer is that new comments have no votes so a quick downvote will make them grey, but there are frequent strange cases.
One thing for sure is that a lot of people downvote based on disagreement rather than a comment's quality - which in my opinion is not right (and I think against the intent of a downvote), but that's a different issue.
From what I gather (but I don't have any comments at hand), the mods do pay attention to voting behavior, both to detect up-voting rings and to penalize those abusing downvotes. Their usual recommendation, when coming across a comment you think is unfairly downvoted, is to silently apply a corrective upvote.
FYI, want to start off with that to help indicate the likely reason for any downvotes you got on this post.
> One thing for sure is that a lot of people downvote based on disagreement rather than a comment's quality - which in my opinion is not right
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it doesn’t make it any more valid than other’s and doesn’t make it a fact either.
> (and I think against the intent of a downvote)
@Dang has said on multiple occasions that the intent wasn’t as you are assuming. Apologies I don’t have a link handy at the moment.
Thanks, I did know the price, no problem.
> @Dang has said on multiple occasions that the intent wasn’t as you are assuming. Apologies I don’t have a link handy at the moment.
I would be curious to read dang's opinion on this if anyone has it, it's not in the guidelines.
> Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it doesn’t make it any more valid than other’s and doesn’t make it a fact either.
Yes, that is the definition of an opinion.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20downvote&sort=by...
A couple of the more recent comments:
Although it's possible that there's some confounding happening here, such as the handful of people who hit refresh on HN hundreds of times a day are also ones who can't stand certain political viewpoints. But it seems unlikely. Far more likely is that there are a handful of downvote bots in operation on a keyword basis.
It's not a huge deal to me, but it does seem kind of obvious.
I do this :)
Who's calling me?
Is not possible since they turn downvotes off after 24 hours.
/pedant
As someone who incessantly refreshes HN and spends a fair amount of time on the Comments page, I see no reason why it wouldn't be people seeing new comments to older discussions via the Comments section rather than bots. Although I am a demographic outlier in multiple ways, I cannot possibly be the only person routinely cruising the new comments section.
The giveaway, imho, is a downvote on a completely inoffensive comment, combined with certain other increasingly common patterns.
Between those two facts, I think downvote bots aren't a terribly likely explanation. You would need to establish an account with downvote privileges and then hope the mods don't revoke its downvote privilege in short order. It seems like a lot of work for probably not much pay off.
That doesn't mean there can't be downvote bots, but it just seems to me a much more likely explanation is people cruising the Comments page.
They tried, and failed.
> They also don't rely on advertising
They tried that, too.
What are you thinking of -- iTunes Ping? That was never really intended as a general-purpose social network.
On a general note, I find it frustrating that a lot of the discussions around this area end up with people talking past each other. Some people are concerned about advertising, others about privacy, others about using user data, others about open source software/hardware, others about encryption. They've got some overlap when it comes to specific features, but often get conflated, making the discussion even more difficult. One thing I've appreciated about reading your comments is that you often are able to cut through that quite decisively. Thanks!
>“I don’t believe they are interested in this capability because they have a strict policy around what they do with user data,” Crawford said. “IAd has great assets and great capabilities, but they are going to follow Apple’s policy to the letter of the law.”
So they crippled a potential new revenue stream because of their privacy policy.
[1] https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/13/drawbridge-hires-app...
Will be interesting to see what happens with Apple if the i-products do ever decline significantly. (I believe their Brand is strong enough to sell their other services effectively so long as they get the price right).
When iAd launched, it required mid six digit buys for ads. Users complained that they only would see the same half-dozen ads. Over the course of the next two years, that was steadily reduced, low six digits, fifty thousand, and the complaints stayed the same.
Before iAd shut its doors, you could get ad buys for a minimum of _fifty dollars_.
I tend to be a bit skeptical that instead of the platform being a failure, Apple realized after a few years of cutting buy prices that "hey, privacy is important".
That sounds a lot more like a PR soundbite.
And I don't think a former iAd exec has any reason to be doing PR for Apple when the purpose of that WSJ story and his cooperation with it was to pimp his new job/startup.
Perhaps so. And only a few companies bought ads, which pissed off their customers (the ones that Apple is "fighting to protect") because of the repetition.
So Apple lowered the barrier. A failure to realize.
Not sure how this is a dispute of what I said, or somehow proves that iAd wasn't a failure, but a planned exit.
> And I don't think a former iAd exec has any reason to be doing PR for Apple when the purpose of that WSJ story and his cooperation with it was to pimp his new job/startup.
If you think that Apple (or any company of that size) doesn't have non-disparagement agreements with any corporate officer or down to SVP level, at the _very minimum_, you're mistaken.
Even those "we screwed up" articles you see are very carefully stage managed. They're (almost exclusively, save some very isolated high profile situations) scripted as a PR effort to manage customer satisfaction.
What about iMessage?
Facebook has open-sourced a few internal projects, but none of them had much to do with our personal data.
In fact, it's difficult to blame the API when the problem was that the data was collected in the first place. Surely Zuckerberg has some political opinions of his own, if CA hadn't triggered this media storm what would have stopped him from supporting his own favorite candidate internally? In fact, what's stopping him from doing that right now? Would it even be illegal?
Can you produce any quote from any Free Software or Open Source developer or advocate that supports your statement in this context of Facebook being better than Apple because they're "open"? Because even though both companies are terrible at freedom, they're terrible in very different ways, turning any comparison into a false equivalence.
Nobody is complaining about being able to install a Facebook app that harvests your data. The issue is it could also harvest your friends' data by default.
Although honestly I think this is all manufactured outrage. The fact that this could happen was totally public in 2012 and the public weren't outraged about it then.
1 - I've yet to learn about a major open source project stealing data from its users.
2 - Open source guaranty the users have the right and access to check how it's data can be used. Apple's products do not. Actually, we discovered they were part of the PRIMS program, which means basically they gave ALL your data away already while actively lying about it (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...).
3 - FOSS people like interoperability and choice, which is one of the major problems they blame Apple not to take care of. This has ZERO relationship with privacy.
So on one hand you have privacy savvy communities, giving their free time and work so that everybody can use it to built a better word an understand transparently what's going on.
On the other hand you have a multi-billion dollar black box giving away user data, using massive PR to pretend they are privacy oriented while they make money out of locked in devices.
Now I get people enjoy the Apple product experience.
I get they make a lot of things right for this experience, especially for user friendliness, and integration.
And I certainly get they made the industry progress from a technical point of view.
But do not compare their moral scale to the one from the FOSS folks. This is literally insulting them.