Amazon Is Booting Parler Off AWS | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Is Booting Parler Off AWS

buzzfeednews.com

484 pointsmuglug10 comments

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993.

That's a shame. App store and hosting are both interesting, important but different topics.

Oh yes that's quite true. But the threads on app store vs. hosting have not been different in any interesting way. The threads on all these stories are generic; they do not observe those finer distinctions at all. People just use whichever one they run across to post their top-of-mind thoughts on the generic topic. It's as if the generic topic has the greatest mass and all the nuanced bits get sucked into its gravitational field.

That's just the way internet dynamics work, and given that, it makes sense to merge the threads.

This is really disappointing. Essentially, at this critical point in time for the industry, you're just giving up, merging everything sort of related into one giant story, hoping people will go back to discussing Rust again?

I came here by first reading the story on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/ku6jdx/amazon_to_drop...), then trying to find what I expected to be a front-page story on HN; failing - then finding this via a search.

Edit: While I agree that the debates are kind of going in circles.. there's also the informational aspect. I guess this could be alleviated if the title was changed to to indicate that AWS was a part of it. E.g. say AWS instead of Amazon. My first reaction when seeing the new title was that the Amazon Fire store had blocked this app. I'm sure it has by now, but that's not so important to many people.

.. anyway, that's a moot point by now - the story is on page 2-4 or so.

These topics are being massively discussed on HN and have been the whole time. Obviously we're not trying to suppress them. It sounds like you didn't see it, but at the time I merged these threads last night, there were something like 8 or 9 major duplicates of this story between the front page and page 2, all essentially the same discussion. That's one of HN's failure modes and something the community certainly does not want.

When there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT), we merge duplicates and downweight follow-ups [1] until there's Significant New Information (SNI) [2]. That's been the approach ever since the Snowden avalanche of 2013 [3], when many users rightly complained that HN was overrun with copy after copy of the same discussion, and a stampede of copycat submissions repeating the same things, media outlets reporting on each other's reporting, and so on.

You can argue that AWS is in a different category than app stores and that therefore this article was indeed SNI. I actually agree with that. But as I said, the thread wasn't any different. There's also the aspect that part of our job is to prevent this site from going into meltdown and destroying itself in hellfires of flamewar rage.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20informa...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Well, yes, you're right, I was asleep/away when that apparent meltdown happened.

I'm still kinda amazed that there hasn't been a front page discussion regarding AWS/Parler. I've tried really hard to understand your points, but I can't really follow your logic.

> You can argue that AWS is in a different category than app stores and that therefore this article was indeed SNI. I actually agree with that. But as I said, the thread wasn't any different

There were two top-level comments (and three commments in total). That seems like it may be a bit of premature to judge from?

Is the solution to make a new post in a day or two, with some nuance?

I suppose I may be forgetting things in a sleep-deprived blur but I'm pretty sure there were dozens of comments in this thread when I merged it, and I remember double checking them carefully to see if there was anything specific in this discussion. There wasn't. It was all generic, and indistinguishable from the stuff in the other threads. That's what tilted me toward merging it: yes, the specific detail of this story was significant, but no one was paying any attention to it. Genericness and repetition are the enemies of curiosity.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

If past experience is any indicator, you needn't worry about missing any opportunity to discuss any of this. Nobody is trying to deprive you of that, and from experience I can tell you that the worry is on the other side—that HN will become inundated and overwhelmed by it. It's our job not to let that happen.

p.s. If by "three comments" you mean the ones that are still here, they were posted after I merged the original set.

To Azure with them, I guess!

Buy directly from other stores and don't shop from Amazon.com. I'm not supporting Amazon or Apple products for trying to silent my free speech.

Free speech doesn’t mean any speech. Free speech only means you can’t be arrested for saying “let’s kill mike pence”.

It doesn’t mean that the people who’s property you’re saying it can’t boot you off. property being a physical or internet property e.g “my house, AWS, Apple, Twitter, google, FB”

They all have terms of service, they can boot you off if you violate them. They don’t even have to uniformly enforce the terms of service.

If you want to say “hang mike pence” then host your own site on a server with a DNS provider who is complicit with your activity.

thedonald.win is a great clone of Trump subreddit. Kudos to them. I don’t agree with their content but they’ve figured it out how to host content that incites violence.

Parler relied on AWS and violated their terms. That’s on them. Their house, their rules.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com