I would even argue against that. I find it hard to believe facebook has good intentions with this.
Remember, Mr. Zuckerberg is alleged to have called Mr. Trump the night of the election to congratulate him.
Let’s stop pretending like the tech industry is full of good intentioned people making an “oops”
Why can't HN be a place were we nerd out over new frameworks but engage in partisan political discussion over the impact of what we build?
The goal isn't to eliminate political discussion from HN, but to prevent the community from destroying itself. One reason people want to have political discussion here is that HN hasn't already destroyed itself for thoughtful, substantive conversation. This attraction makes it particularly vulnerable, so we all have to be careful. It's ok to comment on politics, but not ok to do it in the usual browbeating way.
One _cannot_ in _any way_ infer a lack of good intentions from a single alleged phone call.
Besides, if I were a titan of industry I would do my best to call whoever the hell got elected president the night of the election regardless of my particular party affiliation. Especially considering most corporations lobby both of the main political parties to hedge their bets.
I imagine hardly any corporation lets ideology trump pragmatism – partisan individuals (we do not need to name names) notwithstanding.
For the love of all that is holy, can we please please focus on tech and policy and put identity politics and tribal politics to one side on HN? Please?
The US has become bipolar, the Media has become hysterical, using war propaganda to infer the worst intentions and personal qualities to the adversaries, instead of using Truth using prejudices, condemning people without evidence or counsel for the defense.
It explains the electoral system problems: http://www.fairvote.org/problems and a couple of possible solutions: http://www.fairvote.org/solutions
It sounds like a low-tech solution but maybe "ranked choice voting" (a.k.a. proportional representation?) could shift the needle?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electoral_systems_by_c...
I don't have a problem with a phone call though. Although I would not have done it personally.
Case in point: https://www.google.com/search?q=majority+of+Americans+single...
The majority of Americans support single payer healthcare! Coincidentally (except it's not a coincidence at all) out of OECD countries the U.S. has the most amount of completely uninsured citizens (about 1 in 10!): https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=HEALTH_PROT but also pays on average more than anywhere else: http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/graph-of-the-month.ht... including this nugget: “Of all the OECD member states, only in the United States does voluntary health insurance and private funding such as households’ out-of-pocket payments account for more than 50% of the total”
When you realize that what the average person desires in the U.S. makes statistically zero difference on what laws get passed† it's little wonder that many have stopped voting.
And yet, what do the rest of us have to listen to on HN? Partisan bickering and identity politics. Spare us please.
† https://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-u...
Some additional data from the insurance side of things is that about 5% of patients account for about 50% of health care expenses and about 1% of patients account for about 25% of expenses. This is not something to primarily solve for, but it is something the insurance industry must account for.
Solving even for the some of the most basic cost insecurities of health care is hard, because some side of the industry always benefits from a particular angle of each inefficiency. You have to be willing to financially harm a large segment of that industry to make it better for everybody else. Realizing this each segment of that industry (all industries) will maximize identity politics and team identity as necessary to ensure the survival of their collective business interests.
"can we please please focus on tech and policy and put identity politics and tribal politics to one side on HN?"
It's amusing that you start off by establishing your own identity(European) and then ask others to stop engaging in identity politics.
What I am trying to do is to say that from a neutral perspective the politicking here is reaching a toxic level. It distracts from the real issues of giant monopolistic tech companies and other such real social ills. You think it's amusing, I think it's downright depressing that I should have to wave a white flag.
I agree with you but I also think given the prominent role FB had in the last US election and the uncertainty of its potential role in the upcoming election its ensures that peoples's emotions on the subject tend to run hot. Cheers.
As regards FB, is it a utility or a medium? If it is a medium then they exercise editorial control over the content on their platform and are liable for said content; if it is a utility then they should not censor any content (which they totally do – be it timeline manipulation or shadow-banning or deplatforming). Tech companies want it every which way – they want to behave like a utility but also censor (and monetize) content. Whatever they (FB, Twitter, YouTube, et. al.) are, they're leading an ad-fueled muddled existence. I really think we need anti-trust legislation to chop them into pieces and reboot with some much needed global competition. What we need is effectively an ITU‡ (which was founded in 1865 btw) for the 21st century.
‡ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunicatio...
I'm assuming this is the question of are they a publisher or a platform? They seem to want to be both depending on the context and who is asking:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-...
For racial and sexual minorities, in the current US climate especially, it's hard to avoid "identity politics" when you have literal mobs with torches yelling for your head. And likewise it's hard to not feel a bit betrayed (even if that's completely irrational) when corporations ignore this for the sake of maintaining good relations for profit.
Are you concerned changing cultural tides will put you on the wrong side of history? Or is it more of an existential angst about privilege? I think we're in agreement that current trends are very serious, although it appears for opposite reasons.
My initial comment called for less of this kind of thing on HN but it seems that some of use here will always be at pains to show the rest of the world how on the correct side of history we are. How tedious. What this has got to do with Facebook's trustworthiness score machinery I do not know.
This article posted is immensely relevant for the intersection of tech and political discourse, and in such cases, I would personally prefer to see more discussion on HN.
If the article is about new advances in Golang, sure, I'd hate to see talk of politics in threads.