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Comment by webmaven | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what it says about me that my first thought upon reading this:

> an independent club owner in San Francisco tried to run a promotional video given to him for a band he’d booked, only to find Instagram’s filer blocked it. He was able to reinstate the video, 17 months after the band had come and gone.

Was "I bet that was jwz".

Indeed, a brief web search turned up this (via a recent-ish Cory Doctorow post on Medium):

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/05/fucking-facebook-3/

View on HN

Reminder to not link directly to jwz.org from HN. Here's a sanitized link: (or right click above and open in incognito)

https://web.archive.org/web/20220121083848/https://www.jwz.o...

Complementary to this, anyone can simply disable (or spoof!) their HTTP Refer[r]ers. Don't give surveillance adtech an inch.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer

Better to disable than spoof. Lots of CDNs and download mirrors are configured to allow blank ones (so techie folks can access) but disallow unapproved existing referrers (to prevent leeching bandwidth).

Yes, but Firefox' spoofing option that I linked sends the target URL as a self-referrer, which is benign. It's the same behavior as navigating internal links.

Not when going between sub-domains. dns.example.com will usually only allow referrers of either blank or example.com.

Oops. Here is Cory Doctorow's post (the jwz reference and link is about ¾ of the way down): https://onezero.medium.com/nonstandard-measures-cf47c67e8f05

Anyone know why they block HN referral requests?

Before when his posts got on the front page his own comments section would fill up with people who don't agree with him. He did not like this, so he made it slightly more difficult to see his content so that most people would just give up.

Basically he only wants people who agree with him to read and respond to his content.

Pretty sad way to live your life to be honest. Healthy discussion and reflection is what stops you turning into a pillock and more people need it.

Healthy discussion..

I suspect it wasn't that though. When someone clicks on an HN link to an article, and chooses to leave a comment on the article rather than discuss it on HN (or as well as) they're probably not posting a nuanced and we'll reasoned point. They're likely just firing some sort of flamebait rubbish rather than participating in a discussion. If that happened every time your site was linked from HN you'd get tired of it very quickly and start to think HN is full of man-children and brogrammers.

Ehhh, I get it. HN in aggregate has an oddly specific mindset that is honestly grating at times. I come here because I don't mind it that much, but I can imagine JWZ getting a fuckton of inbounds from HN, going "nope fuck that" and setting up a redirect.

In many spheres, yes, but not all. Sometimes the world/popular opinion really is wrong but is pushed with the guise of “healthy discussion.” When you meet a lot of different people, you realize we are all pretty similar… ask similar questions, make similar complaints. It also means we all have similar “healthy discussions” which can be somewhat antithetical to pushing in/discovering a new direction.

That said, I know nothing about this person.

If JWZ was the one submitting content here, I'd agree. But people are linking his stuff here and then talking negatively about him (or so he perceives), and I don't see what's wrong with making it harder to do that. Doesn't speak highly of his maturity level, but whatever, it's his site.

EDIT: I don't even agree with his political viewpoints; in fact I'm close to polar opposite. But I get it.

Nah, not listening to the opinions of morons is crucial. 16% of the population has an IQ less than 85. Listening to them is a way to ruin your life.

The implication of that statistic is that 4 in every 25 people you meet are statistically not worth listening to.

I can assure you the number of people you should ignore is way higher than that.

Mate, you want to take another crack at that lower bound calculation?

No idea what you mean ;)

It's not sad. There are too many people out there and most of their opinions are not worth hearing, let alone being listened to.

The signal to noise ratio of the world is awful.

That's why in real life we have a carefully curated set of friends (even people who contradict us!).

If you click through to JWZ from HN, you will see an NSFW picture with the following text underneath:

> Hackers News: A DDos by finance obsessed man-children and brogrammers.

>> Anyone know why they block HN referral requests?

> If you click through to JWZ from HN, you will see an NSFW picture with the following text underneath:

Maybe something to do with reading comprehension.

“A DDOS” (aka the “hug of death”) makes sense, but “man children and brogrammers”?

JWZ is one of those people who thinks it's edgy and cool to insult people. I found it funny about 20 years ago, now I find it merely embarrassing.

>man children and brogrammers

Accurate description of a significant portion of this site's userbase.

Oddly accurate.

They're not entirely wrong.

Because he has enough money to look down his nose at people he perceives to be motivated by money?

Rather, I would bet that his stance is that if you are motivated by something else than money, you shouldn't go through VC-backed funds to build your business, because sooner or later someone will squeeze as much money as possible out of your business. I'm thinking of Bandcamp as the most recent example, because there is no doubt that they had good intentions and a real vision, but there are many out there.

Whaaaa https://www.billboard.com/pro/epic-games-buys-bandcamp-acqui...

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