Hacker News Reader

Comment by gyardley | Hacker News Reader

Spoken like someone whose business was never impacted by a search engine update, or whose email was never filtered by a major email provider.

While some platforms are more free and open than others, our livelihoods are all somewhat dependent on third parties. Hope for the best and plan for the worse.

View on HN

Totally agreed about search engine updates. I also agree that we all have some dependence on others as part of living in society, but that's at a different level-- I don't need to worry about Safeway returning "access denied" next time I try to buy a box of cereal.

I disagree about email filtering. A friend sending another friend an email that says, "Check out this cool thing I saw" does not get filtered by anyone. Email that borders on spam gets filtered, sure, but overall, email serves as one of the most open communication platforms we've ever had. It's a drastic difference from Facebook or Myspace.

Have you ever tried to send bulk e-mail? Even if you're doing everything right with double-opt-in, watching your sender scores, managing your bounce-backs, etc, etc, etc, you will get banned by some major e-mail provider (say Yahoo or Comcast) and spend days to weeks (sometimes months) working to get it sorted out. So, no, I don't disagree with the e-mail thing at all.

I was talking about interpersonal email ("A friend sending another friend an email"), but by chance, yes, I have sent bulk email. I don't dispute that bulk messages can be banned, sometimes capriciously, by the big guys. My point is that for social emails, i.e. emails between people, the email system is a very open, free system. Overall, that's the kind of system I want to base my livelihood on.

To give a concrete example: a few years ago, I set up an email server in my garage using an old computer that was being thrown away at work. I used all free software. It successfully sent email. None of my emails were blocked. I engaged with my social network, (my "friends") using it. If my ISP had blocked my email sending, there were many, many other providers willing to send my email for the price of the connection. Given that spam cannot be eliminated, despite decades of trying, I think it's fair to say that I won't run out of alternatives, especially given that the email I want to send is innocuous.

By comparison, I cannot set up a Facebook server in my garage. If Facebook blocks me, I'm done. If that was my livelihood, I'm fully screwed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com