PG: Twitter made a mistake in banning Sci-Hub | Hacker News Reader

PG: Twitter made a mistake in banning Sci-Hub

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115 pointsbreck35 comments

There's no substance to the tweet. It wouldn't appear on HN except for the person that posted it. It's hard to see how something like this is going to generate useful discussion.

It kind of reminds me of Axe Body Spray's condemnation of the event of January 6. We were all waiting with bated breath until you weighed in Axe, and we're glad to know that you don't approve:

https://twitter.com/axe/status/1347325351668682752

Their hand was forced by someone posting a photo of a can of axe body spray being left behind by the mob.

Seriously? Oh, man, I almost feel bad for making fun of the tweet now. Thanks for the background on a tweet that came to me quite indirectly (what, you think I follow Axe's Twitter account?).

A defense attorney has to 'believe' that their client is innocent, or at least what they did wasn't so bad and gosh are they sorry, and can't we let bygones be bygones?

In a similar way, advertising people have to believe that their company matters a great deal. Even if it's just Drakar Noir for a younger generation.

I don't know what Paul's excuse is. Then again, I send stuff out into the universe all the time with no expectation of people actually acting on it. Sometimes, as they say, you need to get something outside of your head so it's not inside anymore (so you can stop dwelling on it).

Especially when there's a thread on HN about this very topic. He could just post his thought as a reply to that topic and generate discussion.

Perhaps naively: I long for the post-Trump period mostly because we'll be able to discuss these things without this individual looming over every single discussion about censorship.

Exactly. Reminds me of “Tear down this wall”. Nothing came of that. /s

Comparing the banning of a Twitter account to the fall of the Berlin Wall is one hell of a false equivalency.

I think you missed my point.

It's time to #AbolishCopyright and #AbolishPatents.

Tear down the walls that keep information in the hands of the 1% and keep the masses in the dark.

(Speaking as someone who could live quite comfortably in the 1% but doesn't feel it is right)

You quote one of Ronald Reagan's most famous lines, and you're telling the reader they missed your point if they didn't take it to be about copyright? Did I miss the real "/s"?

> You quote one of Ronald Reagan's most famous lines, and you're telling the reader they missed your point if they didn't take it to be about copyright? Did I miss the real "/s"?

The OP wasn't paying attention to important context. It would be like if someone at Reagan's speech said,

"There's no substance to that line. It wouldn't have been on TV except for the person who said it. It's hard to see how something like this is going to generate useful discussion. Is it the color of the wall or the dimensions of the wall that he has a problem with?"

PG, a man with a huge reach, nothing to gain (and a lot to lose) from taking a stand on such a controversial issue that the public is far from knowing what the just side is, who doesn't mince words and thinks deeply about topics until he arrives at the truth, just came out and stated his support for Sci-Hub. Beyond the practical matter that he is at least an acquaintence of @jack's, perhaps even a friend (I have no knowledge of their relationship, other than I had a YC dinner a long time ago with them), and this might lead to @Sci_hub's reinstatement, it is an inspirational message for those of us who are fighting so that every child has access to the world's best information. YMMV, but I personally would consider the abolition of copyrights and patents to be bigger than the reunification of Germany in the long run.

Context matters. The substance is deep.

I still don't get it, but thanks for putting in the effort to try an explain it.

I agree it's sort of a weird stretch ;)

They sold a lot of copies of that album. Only took 10 years for it to go from talking/singing about it to actually happening, and even then it was supposed to take longer, but for once an accident of poor public planning worked out in humanity's favor.

They didn't actually mean tear it down now, they meant we should form a committee to discuss a plan to fund a study to determine how you'd go about tearing down the wall.

Then some busybodies showed up with crowbars and hammer drills and concrete saws and it was just chaos in the streets.

Preach. Cancel Paul Graham. Defending Sci-Hub is a dog whistle for people who want to preserve hate-speech! That's literally defending fascism!

#cancel_pg

I agree with PG. Twitter could've taken a stand. But as it seems now they are too mired in partisan politics and grandstanding to pay any attention to other news.

I think Jack Dorsey should step down. Twitter has become a magnet for trolls with an axe to grind. He inserted himself far too much in the politics of the day and got just what he wanted it seems. What a negative and dark place Twitter has become.

Silver Lake and Elliot have both wanted Dorsey gone from the moment they took big positions in TWTR. They now have the board seats to pull it off. After the disastrous past week for the stock, I can't see any other shareholders wanting to keep him on.

When you're dividing your time as CEO between two companies, the presumption is always going to be against you. Unless he manages to deliver some truly astounding quarterly numbers in the immediate near-term, I'd be pretty shocked if Dorsey isn't canned by the end of the year.

I agree that Dorsey should step down, but not for that reason. Twitter has been in the very center of the political and media zeitgeist worldwide for the last decade – and there's nothing wrong with that – but they still haven't managed to convert that into a sustainable business.

It's a free product with a $40 billion market cap (up 150% in the past 5 years), earning over $1 billion/year in net income -- in what universe isn't that sustainable?

On what planet does stock appreciation demonstrate a sustainable business model?

Trump leaving Twitter (or rather, having the microphone yanked out of his tiny hands) is going to impact the engagement that the platform facilitates. It remains to be seen what that impact will be, but I don't see how it can be positive.

Section 230 has been criticized from both sides of the aisle -- including by the President-Elect [0]. Without that protection, Twitter would almost certainly have to spend more on moderation, or worse yet, cull the flock of troll and bot accounts and take a MAU hit.

Oh, and BTW -- it's a $36B market cap this week.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070403/joe-biden-presid...

The sustainable part comes from the fact that their revenue is $1B more than their expense every year. Some hypothetical about sad conservatives hurting their engagement doesn't negate the fact that it's a massive profitable business.

Revenue numbers are backwards-looking and don't tell us much about sustainability of growth, especially for an information technology company whose income can turn on a dime.

Regarding "sad conservatives" (lol), my view is that companies like Twitter know where the troll/bot/disinformation accounts lie, but don't like to remove them unless necessary because deletion is an acknowledgement of the problem and also a hit to MAUs. Forced moderation by regulators would provide impetus to clear out those accounts and also curtail the frothy indignation upon which Twitter feeds.

The chief churner of that indignation in recent memory, for audiences on both sides of the aisle lest we forget, has been Trump. He has also been the glue of Twitter's relevance, and the beginning of his presidency marked the turnaround of a decline in Twitter's stock.

I realize that the pre-Trump era was a long time ago, but if you look back to what people thought about Twitter the company circa early 2016, it was not positive. Their stock was on a one-way ticket to the dumpster, they were laying off staff with frequency, they were losing popularity to Snapchat of all things, people were pumping out articles about who was going to buy them out. If you want to know why it took them so long to ban Trump, it's because Trump winning the presidency and making it his primary speech platform propped up the whole company.

You can try to minimize this all you want, but it's not clear to me that Twitter is some runaway train that will survive without him, ignore the fact the government is starting to sniff around.

> Trump leaving Twitter (or rather, having the microphone yanked out of his tiny hands) is going to impact the engagement that the platform facilitates. It remains to be seen what that impact will be, but I don't see how it can be positive.

A bunch of right-wing trolls leaving for greener grass increases the civility on the platform and thus the attractiveness for everyday people, plus it leads to political good-will in a large part of the population, and especially a more friendly environment for brands to advertise in... few brands want to appear next to Qanon posts, a problem that Youtube and Facebook both have publicly faced in the last years.

Jack and Zuckerberg both need to be fired, worse kind of leaders. These places that were supposed to be platforms for open discussions are now mired in politics.

I believe they’re fairly successful at their data offerings though, and actually making a profit. Isn’t that sustainable?

Why isn't it a sustainable business?

What a negative and dark place ( insert any social media here) has become.

Another relevant thread on Sci-Hub Twitter Ban https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779367

A mistake as in it's not something that should be banned?

Or a mistake as in now people will realize that giving Twitter power over what you can and can't say [in public] online might be problematic?

Hm, but what are the actual changes that PG suggests? For example, would PG suggest changing HN's rules so that Sci-Hub is a first-class source of articles? This very submission notes that it is not just from "twitter.com", but from "twitter.com/paulg", so there's no technical obstacle to this functionality. Similarly, would PG suggest changing HN's rules so that links to paywalled sites are automatically replaced with links to unpaywalled versions?

FWIW I am in favor of all of this, but I am not really sure that PG actually wants to follow through; rather, this is a bland partisan position statement meant to allow PG to say in the future that they have always been a big supporter of Sci-Hub.

> This very submission notes that it is not just from "twitter.com", but from "twitter.com/paulg",

That's not because it's PG. The change was made relatively recently to include usernames for some sites, I think github too. Otherwise "twitter.com" is too uninformative.

Here's the announcement for that feature:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24754456

Yes, you're correct. What I should have said is that, since we can do special things for twitter.com, we should be able to do special things for URLs which point to Sci-Hub. I don't know at which point things become legally uncomfortable, but it currently only takes three clicks to turn a DOI into a Sci-Hub link even without HN's assistance.

> I don't know at which point things become legally uncomfortable,

I think that's at the point that HN does special accommodations for the use of Sci-Hub. Converting links to unpaywalled versions would be the same.

I don't follow PG, so I might be wrong, but consider that this tweet is very terse. I think one can't extrapolate much from it.

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