It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed.
Corrections in newspapers don't run the same as headlines, nobody upvotes corrections to reddit or Instagram etc...
I'd suggest that as far as iterating in the direction of finding the truth, this is a best in class example of how to do it.
People not reading the comments will then have a way of knowing this is false information.
You want to fight that battle?
When you wrote this comment had you read the journal article to see if the Press Release and Press Release Title linked on HN accurately represents the published journal article?
The main problem is that most of the original thread ballooned with upvotes because it became general "<big corporate entity> is bad" kvetching which is perennially popular and probably doesn't belong on HN at all. As long as these kinds of threads aren't modkilled, these things will happen, you just have to deal with it. Tagging them won't solve anything.
Edit: no, really, this is important: we're in the middle of the lesson of "social media can amplify things that aren't true and you should check them". Great. So, how do we verify things? What should we be doing? The counter claim link at the top of this thread is also just a random unsourced tweet!
"In such cases,Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the End-User."
That being said, my understanding of 'notwithstanding' in this context would imply that Apple reserves the right to retain its commission even when they refund the price to the End-User.
There's also some other attack vectors I can think of that this renders less likely, like "let's get my big YouTube fanbase to all buy this one app today, then refund it near the end of the refund window, thus pushing this app to the top of the store at no cost to my YouTube fanbase but at cost to Apple!" This would give Apple the cover to keep enough commission to cover the attack. Given the known shenanigans played on the app store, this seems less like some bizarre far-out possibility and more like something that would be a routine thing done by sketchier app developers if the terms didn't make it a bad proposition like this.
But in a normal day-to-day transaction, the logic works out in favor of refunding it even if they do nominally have the contractual right to refuse to do so.
No, but not having a clear policy makes it very easy for inaccurate gossip about your policy to circulate.
There is also the matter of prior probabilities; if you had asked me beforehand "How certain are you that if Apple refunds a charge, the refund is complete and they also refund their cut?" I'd have given you an answer in the 90%+ range, on the grounds that if they did something that nasty we'd have heard by now. Furthermore, if they did change that policy, I'd expect to hear about it precisely as a change in policy, rather than the sudden discovery that it's been like that all the time.
I am emphatically not holding these up as total answers to the question. I'm not sure there is such a thing. But these are reasons to consider this tweet likelier to be true than the original claim.
There is also the constant possibility "What if somebody knows about these signals and fakes them?" In which case the question is, who would have motivation to do such a thing? In this case I can't see how this Tweeter has any particular motivation to fake this matter, as this retraction mostly doesn't benefit them any. (I mean, I do respect them for it, but we still have the original error to consider. I don't have a concrete threshold, but you're still burning a bit of rep. To see it clearly, consider the strategy of "impress jerf by making lots of public mistakes and then publicly apologize for it"... I do respect the public retraction and maybe the first time it's even a net gain, but it's not a scalable strategy.)
Apple would clearly have a motivation to claim they don't keep the refund even if they in fact do, as clearly keeping that 30% would be bad PR, so this signal would weigh against them. Weighing for them, though, would be the sheer mass of people who could contradict them if they claimed not to keep it but in fact did; any app author of any significant size has direct experience with this and that's a large pool of people, which also includes some vocal people in it.
It an interesting topic for many HNers and such seems appropriate that it'll get on to the front page.
That being said, downvoting dissenting comments in the thread are extremely problematic. And is a common theme in HN. Which I think stems from the implicit assumption by many people that upvoting a comment or item means agreeing with it.
I had heard rumours that Apple did not refund the 30% previously, and seeing a developer of respected apps post it (along with a graph, although actually that didn't prove anything lol) and doing a quick Google (where the top result is "Apple's iPhone App Refund Policies Could Bankrupt Developers"), I thought made it seem legit enough to post, and thought it would get shot down quickly if it was incorrect!
Interesting lesson in the realities of post-truth as you say! Also with all the negative press about App Store policies lately, it didn't seem too far fetched...
It seems so easy to spread misinformation with this way of thinking going on. My point is not to blame you, I just wanted to point out that as long as we accept believable data as true, we’ll see believable misinformation on top of HN.
On reading the original post my gut feeling believed that this could be or is quite likely true. Why? Because it aligns with the continuous declining customer experience I've had with them for the last 5-7 years. Examples include declining product quality, difficulty getting them to service properly, getting busted for impairing performance on older hardware (planned obsolescence) all that feels like tall poppy syndrome, dark patterns and arrogance.
While that may be true, for me the gut feeling was in line with the fake news, which makes it even harder to spot (confirmation bias).
I never worked on iOS apps, but my consumer experience with Apple was such that I would have expected exactly this kind of behavior. They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one.
I just assumed that a company that treats their consumers like this also doesn't treat developers fairly.
Granted, this is my experience from a decade ago. I've never bought anything Apple since. So maybe they've changed.
Do they regularly sell keyboard replacement parts? If not, why expect them to "sell you one"?
And the laptop was "out of warranty", wasn't it? How does "barely" change this?
Because we all want to live on this planet for a few hundred years?
I expect a company that produces things to either supply spare parts on demand, or allow a third party to produce them.
Even more so, when the device I bought costs >1000$
Sure, legally they don't have any obligation to do so, but many things are legal but ethically wrong.
I didn't expect it for free, but a lot of companies want to keep their consumers happy and will fix something that's just out of warranty, especially if it's a part that should last longer than 2 years, like a keyboard.
"Fake news" is a regular thing on the tech/HN community.
The whole hype around technologies (e.g. Mongo/NoSQL, etc) is just that.
As Alan Kay put it "Programming is a Pop Culture".
There is no hype for NoSQL or MongoDB on HN. In fact it is the complete opposite with every one trying to push SQL and PostgreSQL for every use case under the sun.
I wasn't giving an example of a current hype -- just of a hype.
Not trying to call you out, I just think the consistency + choice of hobby horse is funny, and you always stand out as the one person defending MongoDB: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I always wanted to know though: why? What compels you, threeseed?
Do you have a reference for the original of this? I can find people quoting him on it but not the original. I'm also wondering: compared to what? What would it mean for programming not to be a pop culture?
Get nothing
Go back set second date to 2005 ->
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
Win?
As I read it, compared to hard science and engineering for example.
>What would it mean for programming not to be a pop culture?
Less cults, less subjective opinions, less influence of marketing and marketeers and brand names, less "fans" and "fanboism" of some particular brand/product/methodology, etc, for one...
https://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wi...
Do you have a link for this?
https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/nachrichten/region/daumen-ho...
Many threads in HN reflect the tribalism that now permeates society. There are plenty of people on here that will upvote a comment or story simply because it paints Apple in a bad light. Same thing happens to Google, Oracle, and to a lesser extent these days, Microsoft.
It doesn't matter if a piece of information is true, it just has to align with someone's personal-conceived biases.
We have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we are better than the people who get sucked in by political trolls on Facebook just because we work with computers.
it was pretty disturbing for me, i had held this place in very high regard prior to that experience.
Indeed we are, it's also the interesting thing about confirmation bias in communities. In any community, they seem to always believe any news that is immediately negative about the subject that they haven't researched about or want they don't like as the real truth.
It's up to us to do our own research with actual evidence rather than sources such as: 'X suggested', 'sources say', 'my friend who works at ABCXYZ' or because it has 1000+ retweets, upvotes, etc.
Generally, a healthy dose of skepticism is needed on social media content like FB, Twitter, HN, etc.
There have been a lot of articles where even the comments were entirely "nothing about this is right" and that's not counting opinion / perspective articles, like cold hard facts wrong.
It's really frustrating to see on HN.
Social media caters way too much to feelings and biases.
Maybe it's a lesson to temper outrage before knowing facts.
Will there come a point where the only way to prevent violence from demonstrable falsehoods and flamebait social media posts would be to protect people from themselves and their ignorance?
If that amounts to censorship, then maybe the focus will have to be deflecting the rioters than forcibly removing the information.
I thought about this a lot recently. Why We Sleep is still legal to buy in bookstores but people have shared anecdotes of friends who have read it and gotten insomnia and anxiety from the advice in it, and in the end so much of the book that was responsible for triggering that anxiety was provably false or unsourced. So why do we still let people read it, if them doing so is a net negative? Because they didn't do enough research, so it's on them if the book causes harm? That's strange, given that people on the other side wish there were public retractions or ways to stop people from reading the book. It feels like the people that did the research are just unable to do much but watch the damage such misinformation causes to unfold because the misinformation is already in such wide circulation that it can't be prevented from being read by people who, if they got possession of the book and read it, would believe it fully and inadvertently do harm in some way.
So if a person is just not going to do the research, which I'm not sure is possible to be helped in every circumstance, and the only difference between their life or other innocent people's being impacted negatively or not is whether or not they become aware of the misinformation and read it, then what's the solution? Is there a solution at all?
And given Apple’s stance against the bread and butter of less scrupulous companies (privacy intrusion and data mining), it would be no surprise if there are many other people who are literally paid to make them look bad at any cost.
I have a similar shock or fascination when seeing how little the HN crowd understands the benefits of UBI (when tied to inflation + VAT) - there's seemingly been little critical thinking done from foundational principles, and the same common misunderstandings repeat. There's enough momentum of people with little understanding jumping to post that those comments all gain the most traction, and it's too much to jump into discussion with.
A good comparison of differences in abilities and then innate failure/mistakes that we can all make - Elon Musk, who understands exponentials and economies of scale via his success as a marker, and stating he decision makes from first principles, is in support of UBI. He says it's inevitable with technology-automation, and then comparing that to his tweeting some arguably misinformed or shallow on the details about COVID-19 - perhaps not having as full or clear as a picture as he should before someone with his reach posts about something so serious. To me however it's really all just signals for the state of the union, and these are canary moments that highlight how reactive people are and how ill-informed they are - due to not having a hierarchy of trusted sources that most of us follow. Is there someone who's as successful and trustworthy competence wise as Elon is with EVs (etc) but for viruses? It was supposed to be Fauci in the US, right? But he first lied to Americans saying masks don't work - and that lack of integrity is harmful and blinding.
Another word for this is groupthink.
Was it really better before? The cognitive biases behind fake news are not knew. Maybe there were there from the beginning, but we are just getting better at spotting them?
(Twitter is apparently experimenting[1] with the former approach)
[1] - https://www.theverge.com/21286855/twitter-articles-prompt-un...
The downvote is just used as a very low effort sh.tpost without content these days. It's risk-free and even more detrimental to actual discourse than its sibling.
HN specifically prohibits remarking on this when it happens; the guidelines say: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."' I understand that the intent of this is to create a polite environment, but the end result is one where uninformed opinions are welcomed.
It's even to the point that some people will proudly proclaim that they didn't read the thing they're responding to, often paired with a complaint that the linked content is too long, or that it didn't account for some gotcha (which it accounts for, just not in the first few paragraphs).
To be clear: you may be informed on a topic, but if you don't read what you're responding to, you aren't informed on what you're responding to. And over time, people whose only source of "information" is uninformed comments are going to be uninformed on topics as well, while believing that they are informed.
> It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed.
But neither community consensus nor gut feeling have anything to do with truth. Primary sources, scientific observation, and to a lesser degree, logic and expert opinion--those are what we should be trusting.
I've also learned that intelligent people are a dime a dozen. There's no barrier to intelligence--you're just born smart, and fully half of people are born with above-median intelligence--so the relative value of intelligence is limited. Knowledge, on the other hand, is hard to come by: even if you're extremely well-informed on one subject, there are hundreds of subjects upon which you are completely uninformed. Intelligence can help you become informed if you apply it to learning, but as often as not, intelligent people just use their intelligence to skate by without having to learn things. I know that for a lot of my early schooling, I didn't apply myself to learning because I could get away without work due to my intelligence. This didn't pay off, and in my mid-twenties I had to really learn how to learn.
Nowadays I would rather be informed than intelligent.
EDIT: Note that in the "fixed vs. growth mindset" theory, "knowledge" is just the growth version of intelligence--I'm making a distinction between intelligence and knowledge, but that's not necessarily the terminology other people use.
The problem happens when people assume that if someone isn't technical, that they aren't intelligent. There are plenty of very intelligent people who can't write a line of code. One of the smartest guys I know is a roofer.
And there are all sorts of caveats here. "Being technical" optimizes for a narrow type of intelligence: bearded sysadmins with no social skills exist in real life. And the opposite is true too: lots of technical people who are socially adept exist too.
/s
"Apple is evil" might be wrong, but "Apple reserves the right to be evil" is still closer to the truth than "Apple is not evil".
For all of this community's focus on civility, clearly it, too, falls victim to mob mentality.
HN as a community is far too accommodating to a lot of silliness simply because it gets votes. Remember yesterday's "news" that Intel was moving TSMC? And don't even get me started on the political nonsense HN upvotes. We should all be taking a good long look in the mirror. If we're not going to learn from incidents like this, at least a bit of self awareness would be nice.
It’s a literal breath of fresh air. I’m close to done with community sites that allow upvotes/downvotes.
(You'd think getting a refund is trivially verifiable, too, but who's going to go to all that work?)
Not that well.
He's saying the post claiming that Apple kept the 30% was fishy (and false). I don't know about a cult, but in this case, the criticism was unfounded.
Ironically, your comment is an example of a cult of the anti-cult - always looking out for signs of that other cult.