Sci-Hub Twitter account suspended
twitter.com
twitter.com
[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210109003829/https://twitter.co...
[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/twitter-shuts-down-a...
There has to be some threshold but I just don't understand how this threshold hasn't been crossed for more people.
I don't want to see Twitter legislated or controlled. The counter balance and equilibrium should be doing crazy things causes a massive loss of users so crazy things do not happen. Twitter is not a public utility like electricity or drinking water. You actually need to drink water.
People won't quit because they'd be unable to tell people that they've quit.
Another take could be that we are just all very lonely and that when you stop using social media you are left with emptiness that is harder to fill with real connections with friends especially during covid.
It’s always funny to see people discussing “social media” as some insidious drug that other people use to get confirmation about their opinions from other people…
…as comments on Hacker News, a site that lets people post their opinions and have other humans acknowledge their existence and validate their opinions (upvotes == likes).
We can debate the differences between real names and screen names and pictures or no pictures all day, but when it comes down to it Hacker News is a social media platform and you’re participating in the very thing you’re describing. It’s time we stopped pretending that “social media” is only something that other people use, while the rest of us on HN and other social platforms are doing something more noble. It’s all the same.
1. Advertising. (Or lack thereof)
2. Moderation. Downvotes here literally slowly erase content that the community doesn’t like; I think this compliments the swift hand of dang in a great way.
3. Participation. This is just a WAG, but i think more HN users post comments or submit stories than Twitter users tweet. There is a very low percentage of users posting the vast majority of tweets. I like HN because I can actually interact, not just follow.
We really had realized most of the promise of online socializing with forums 20 years ago, IMO. Twitter is exhausting.
Most of the time downvotes are used to erase abusive content, but it's shocking how quickly some of the well-formed opinions in the content sections go gray if they don't agree with the popular opinion on HN.
At this point, I almost don't bother replying to HN comments if I know they'll just be met with waves of lazy downvotes.
The invisible hand of HN creates an echo chamber by teaching us not to post "content that the community doesn't like", which is often just comments that disagree with popular sentiment.
Not sure I follow this. Reddit focuses on the content just as much as HN. The nature of the network (and quality of content in general) is quite different from HN of course.
There's a lot to not like about Reddit, but it's the only social media apart from HN that I still enjoy using after quitting FB/Twitter/Insta/Snap.
So, this is the only social media I use.
On Twitter and Facebook you get to remove anyone that challenges your thought process. That’s what makes it so dangerous and euphoric. Everyone you see is clapping for your stupid ideas and people just live in different realities now because of it.
On HN we all get the same front page, same comments, etc. You might not like what gets the upvotes, but at least you saw it.
You’re right this is social media, but it’s not the cancerous “choose your reality” style that people usually are talking about when they decry “social media”.
Maybe not immediately, but Hacker News is absolutely an echo chamber. People who don't toe the line on certain popular opinions (e.g. social media bad) quickly learn not to comment because they know they'll get massively downvoted.
Hacker News upvotes and downvotes are supposed to be about whether or not the comment is a quality post that contributes to the discussion, but in practice they tend to function as "agree" and "disagree" buttons. Post something that is disagreeable on certain echo chamber topics and it's immediately met with downvotes, regardless of the quality of the content.
This effect is most obvious in posts about social media, big tech companies, drugs, and certain parts of the law. For example, I hesitate to even participate in posts about "LSD cures depression" stories any more because most of the commenters don't even read the studies and any comment that isn't 100% enthusiastic about psychedelics curing depression is met with a wave of downvotes.
Likewise, when I see a story about social media I can tell before clicking on the comments that it will be full of comments that start with "I don't use social media but..." and then a straw-man caricature of social media that doesn't match reality.
These comment sections are absolutely an echo chamber. People who disagree are barraged with downvotes and abusive comments, so they simply leave.
I actually had to change screen names on HN once already because I pointed out some flaws in a certain author's books, and one of that author's fans tracked me down and tried to argue with me on my personal e-mail address. Nothing like that has ever happened to me on any other social media site.
That’s not special to social media. There have been unpopular opinions among communities since before the internet. This all part of being in a large community based on interests. Learning how to deal with that is critical to learn how to function in society.
The other components of your reply complaining about the community having emergent plurality opinions completely misses the point. HN is better because these biases and things you disagree with are right in your face.
> I actually had to change screen names on HN once already because I pointed out some flaws in a certain author's books, and one of that author's fans tracked me down and tried to argue with me on my personal e-mail address. Nothing like that has ever happened to me on any other social media site.
People get stalked and harassed due to their Twitter posts all of the time by using their real name. Swatting is a thing. An argument over email is tepid in comparison to the real violence that happens from people using real identities on public social media every day.
HN for me, HN's social media feature (the POINTS) are as bad as twitter and i've banned myself from it twice because of how addicting it is for me. (blocking it in my browser, setting my noprocrast to billions, even blocking it in my DNS server).
Seeing those points go up, a stupid as it is, is that "euphoria" mentioned above. If I notice that little number jump then I immediately want to know "wow, what comment of mine did people like" and similarly if it goes down I immediately get defensive and want to go respond to whichever comment was downvoted.
This time I wrote a chrome extension to remove the points which for me as a force multiplier in it's addictiveness.
I think you're overstating it.
HN is social media (we’re here posting things and socializing, right?), so I’m assuming you’re referring to Twitter and Facebook type sites instead of social media in general.
I admit that I’ve used sci-hub a lot, and I strongly agree that publicly funded research shouldn’t be hidden behind paywalls.
However, ethical debates aside, I also have to admit that sci-hub’s activities are violating copyright law, whether we like it or not. I’m not going to pretend to be surprised when public companies choose to suspend accounts which violate their policies. If anything, it’s helpful to have consistent guidelines for what is and isn’t against their policies. Obviously they can’t have perfect enforcement of every Tweet and every account, but I can’t really blame a company for consistently enforcing policies which are consistent with the law.
As for social media: I’m a light Twitter user, but I don’t go to the site for Twitter itself. I go for the connections I’ve made on the site. Most of the people I know who are boycotting Twitter for whatever reason aren’t people who actually liked using the site in the first place, so their boycott isn’t really much of a statement.
Likewise, I don’t use Twitter or Instagram or HN or any other website as my exclusive source of interaction, so one site’s enforcement of their honestly quite consistent policy isn’t some sort of dire threat to my freedoms. By now, we’re all well aware that no website is perfect and no social media platform can keep everyone happy at scale. If I rage quit every site that did anything anywhere that I didn’t fully like, I wouldn’t have many social platforms left (HN included)
Refusing to use any platform unless they act in perfect lockstep with our own desires is not a realistic expectation at scale.
The issue with having as you mention guidelines in line with the law, is that it prevents people discussing it. Which is an absolute necessity for lively democracies.
You're going to tell me that you can discuss the law without breaking it. But that's a very debatable point. Generally the law moves because of pressions from interest groups that would be beneficiary from a change. So banning them would in effect ban the most vocal proponents of changes and those that really understand the fine details and issues and that can meaningfully make the debate progress.
Personally I just want to share my photography with friends. Social media works great for that. I'll probably never quit.
Only if those techies make it worthwhile. How do we make something like private RSS feeds as easy as facebook?
But if you've made up your mind that it's all rubbish, by all means don't let me interrupt.
So it’s good if you like a feed of things tied to your direct interests, that Twitter allows.
I’m interested in Sci-Hub. I don’t want to use Twitter for part of my interested and the ??? for other things.
This reminds me of criticisms of "metoo". Yes, i'm sure someone somewhere got a raw deal. But as far as I can see the people banished deserve it, and the overall ecosystem is better for it.
Obviously, you’re free to think what you like but this seems like a sad and limited worldview. Assuming that everything removed from my perception deserves to be removed.
The system largely works, from what I can see. Getting thrown off Twitter for 24h isn't that bad of a mistake even, given the scale of the challenge they face to enforce their TOS to billions of accounts.
As someone who left for a long time and looked at it with a fresh set of non-desensitized eyes, I can tell you with absolute certainty that FB is bad for your mental health.
I think the trouble with social is that it's really hard to tell people what they don't want to hear. Anyone who lived through the 80s knows how pissed a smoker would get when you'd tell them they're killing themselves. You felt like an asshole. Same with Facebook, Insta, Twitter, etc. Tell someone who's into it (most of us) they're self harming, and it doesn't exactly improve your relationship with them.
But I think the ship has sailed. These are companies making north of 100 Billion per year (in FB's case) with massive lobbying cannons, who are now entrenched and ingrained in our culture and day to day life. It may sound overly dramatic, but I think the truth is that, this sucks for the species boys and girls.
[Sorry, had to add the boys and girls. Little Starship Troopers hat tip]
(I took a month off HN, this is my first comment coming back.)
after spending time 'there', i feel drained
They have apparently not done enough to warrant a mass exodus to greener, more privacy (and human dignity, intellectual honesty) respecting pastures. What's a few dozen PII data leaks, or misuse of the former information provided explicitly for authentication; or what's about massive poorly regulated if not ignored misinformation campaigns on such platforms, poorly automatized reporting systems but also manual trending manipulation et similia? And it may never be enough for some, otherwise it's a continuous slope of degradation that will continue unstopped until its momentum ceases by gradual abandoning of the platform, most likely in waves as every new controversy happens or becomes public.
There is nothing people who have "quit social media" like to do more than virtue signal about the dangers of social media on more niche social media platforms. It gets a little tiring.
Instead, it’s become an easy billboard for companies to post their news. The alternative, of course, would be to make their own websites and post news there. However, it’s far simpler for users to search a company on Twitter than to guess around for their website URL on Google (god forbid you have multiple sites).
Nothing. I have FB account as it was the only means for me to find and connect to a person but other than that do not really use those networks.
there is a new p2p client being developed (in Go) that makes sci-hub papers accessible via DOI https://www.reddit.com/r/libgen/comments/ompcvk/need_help_fr...
it could use some help with indexing & IPFS integration (or just code review), see e.g. https://github.com/Trim21/sci-hub-p2p/pull/23
Having said that, any alternative way to access sci-hub would have to use a p2p architecture just like this.
The clients are bad nowadays. Old utorrent could easily seed many thousands of torrents. With utorrent web I don't even know how to get the torrent files or magnets out. I hear some ppl with seedboxes run multiple clients and restart each periodically. Thats not how things are suppose to work.
Can some other system fix those dynamics and become a more robust way to archive data? Maybe. Or maybe the problem is due to how people think. I like to think though that a system where downloads are not tracked by seeders would be more conducive to archiving.
I use to seed say 100 old things, sort by seeds, if there are leaches and no seeds give it 5-10 kb until a copy exists again (everything else I don't seed) I've also had things complete after years.
Disk space is cheap. It seems doable for clients to periodically run over archived torrents and seed the dead ones. In stead the whole list is actively parsed for every action.
Say someone has a youtube channel with 500 videos. Also distributing the videos over bittorrent shouldn't have to cost much. But then they have to jump a lot of hoops, run a client with 500 active seeds in it. Its so user-unfriendly a different [more dedicated] medium is probably a better idea at this point.
- more and more research institutes have a public repository of articles.
- plenty of authors put their own (preprints of) papers on their personal website, a preprint server like arxiv, or researchgate.
- lastly, you can mail an author and request a preprint. Not all will reply, but plenty will be happy that someone noticed their work and send a copy.
For a single paper, googling for the pdf, failing that, searching for author page / institutional repo doesn't take much effort. A few minutes, I'd guess.
That still becomes prohibitive for >10 papers sought. Then you need institutional access, something like Sci-Hub, or a lot of patience.
Mailing works as a last resort option.
Honestly, part of the reason i jump through such hoops is to justify not including a paper. I have institutional access and all these options. If none of that suffices, I feel justified in considering the alleged article as not part of the scientific record.
That's a fraction of the citations on most interesting papers. I'm not a practicing scientist (now or ever) so my access patterns are different but every time I explore a topic in academic journals that process becomes prohibitively expensive almost immediately. Even when I had institutional access it was a pain in the ass - without SciHub every doi is a game of subscription roulette.
Asking by email.. too many publications at the moment.
For some reason, they're also slow to respond to emails.
For any papers published before 1965, even with maximal renewals available at the time of publication, the works would now be in the public domain under copyright law at the time of publication. Otherwise, many works published prior to 1976 which were either only renewed once or never registered would similarly have lapsed to public domain, or always been so.
That's a huge effectively-lost trove of knowledge.
But none of the stuff should be behind paywalls in the first place if it was funded by the government of any nation. Good luck fixing that.
> In 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT. Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, where he committed suicide. In 2013, Swartz was inducted posthumously into the Internet Hall of Fame.
It is impossible to talk about this without getting emotional, especially on a site like Hacker News, so I won't.
I can just imagine how negatively this effects scientists and researchers in the developing world, that lack so much content because these miscreants have absconded with so much from us. They did not create this content, they are worse than accursed gatekeepers, serving only to compile the work of others, then extract blood. Infernal blood sucking parasites are what these companies are.
By nature of my well heeled employer I have access to almost everything. However, I think it is unconscionable now, how much of it is paywalled, rent-extracted, and hidden from view. That so much of the world is missing out on this information because some extortionists want $ for something they had minimal, if any, involvement in creating.
There's a bot which repeats the Twitter account:
That's not updated in over a year.
Alexandra Albakyan's personal Twitter account remains effective AFAIU:
The reason for the suspension is related to Twitter’s “counterfeit policy.” The social media platform doesn’t list any concrete takedown requests but simply mentions the policy violation and the fact that its decision can’t be appealed.
“Your account has been permanently suspended due to a violation of Twitter policies, in particular the Counterfeiting Policy. This decision is not subject to appeal,” Twitter writes, translated from Russian.
(January 8, 2021)
https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-founder-criticises-sudden-t...
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
What would be nice would be a distributed table that functions as an index specifically for these documents, that way researchers with access could pin to IPFS themselves and add the keywords and content hash to the table. This would be basically unstoppable.
If you run a node, you could block hashes of content you don't want hosting. Other nodes can still host it though.
If that's the case, I don't see how it is a problem. The user should be able to decide what content their node hosts.
Edit /s for those missing the point
Do people 'really' think that they 'own' their Twitter accounts when they can be taken away in an instant?
Your line wasn't cut.