Hacker News Reader

Aware, but passive. Which in sum means that all that awareness is completely worthless. No, really, it is. The fact that majority of Hacker News readers are against SOPA means absolutely nothing. NONE of you passively disagreeing with this legislation will do an iota of difference.

The question is always: what does it take to push people from awareness and complete inaction to at least some form of action?

Hacker News is, for the most part, an intellectual stimulus, a drug for your brain. Something interesting to feed it while you are waiting for your code to build or to fill that oddly shaped slot in your daily calendar where you can't find any use for.

If we can make use of the uneasy feeling you get when your stimulus is unavailable and direct that towards what you could actually do to make your opinion observable, that would be a very good thing.

Here's how a website like Hacker News should be blacked out:

pick the busyest day at the beginning of the week (mon/wed) and black out 30 hours. from 0600 in the morning to 1200 lunch-time the next day.

on the site display information on how people can take action in ways that are observable. How to find their representatives, how to write to them in ways that are constructive.

There should also be some resources available to identify the backers of this legislation. It IS okay to not give companies that want to limit your freedom your money. It isn't "overly political" -- it is the most civilized and honest thing you can do. So do it to the degree you are capable and tell others.

Make or find materials that can easily be spread on social networks, because this is important: I assume that a lot of people reading hacker news are members of a self-selecting set of people who are smart and care. Your friends will look to you for advice. You are likely to have an above average degree of influence in your social network.

You guys are important and influential. If you don't do anything, everyone around you is going to take their cue from you and do nothing.

So I respectfully disagree that blacking out Hacker News is pointless. I think it is important exactly because inaction from us speaks much, much louder than inaction from the gray masses.

This rang very true with me. I'm willing to wager only a tiny percentage of HN users have communicated their opposition to SOPA/PIPA to their representatives. Something like providing links to appropriate resources would convert time usually spent browsing HN into time actually helping stop SOPA/PIPA.

Easy ways to take some actions:

https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr3261 click on 'Oppose'

https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/s968 click on 'Oppose'

Slightly harder:

http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/pipa_sopa (Sends modifiable form email to your Senator and Representative).

Add a comments to the PopVOX entries

Go viral and tweet/facebook/G+ the DemandProgress page.

Harder still:

- Lookup your Senator and Representative's phone number and make a personal call. This gets the most traction as a constituent.

- If you are lazy, sign up on Demand Progress. Eventually you will get an email encouraging you to make a personal call. The software will provide you with the number to call and who you are calling based on your zip code. You don't even have to use Google.

Having HN black out is a dumb move. Most techies are aware of SOPA/PROTECT-IP. Many non-techies do not. Explaining just a little bit to my non-techie friends gets them opposing these bills. When we black out HN, at most we're simply shutting down a source of addiction. Even if it reaches the ears of the legislators, at best it will be seen as children saying, "I /QUIT, and I'm taking my ball with me." A bunch of techies shut down their own community site in protest. Wow ... Failure to understand Rhetorics 101.

Having FB and Google black out on the other hand reaches out to people who are not aware of these issues.

Best if you can convince non-techies to oppose these bills and then to have them call up their Congressmen. Tell them that bills do not, in fact, save jobs and would make life difficult for non-techies still treading water financially.

You can always add a POPVOX widget to the site, so people can send a message to Congress directly from HN.

http://popvoxnation.tumblr.com/post/15753030372/protesting-s...

And this fun one: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/oe3mf/these_61_sen...

Calling out for Redditors to distributively discuss PIPA with senators.

Of course, applying pressure to your representatives is just one way. If you have access to influential people, you should educate these and then see if you can convince them to use their influence to visibly oppose this legislation.

Another vector is the press. SOPA is a non-issue in the press. It needs to get higher up on the agenda.

I regularly watch a few american newscasts and so far these issues have been absent. The anchors will gladly spend hours talking about silly, pointless bickering in congress, but will spend absolutely no time educating people on the issue that the prerequisites for a democracy are being eroded and being eroded rather quickly.

As a side note: The Economist publishes a yearly "Democracy Index". Last year the title was "Democracy in retreat". This year it is "Democracy under stress". Things are not looking good for western democracies.

If there's a day chosen on which anti-SOPA sites are urged to black out (which there is), I feel like HN would be obligated to comply based on the sentiments of the community toward the bill.

And so what if HNers know about SOPA? It's the action that counts. A page with information on how to contact your representative would be more effective here than on most sites, given all the relatively active, well-spoken, and well-informed SOPA opponents on HN.

If you do say no to a blackout, please offer a better alternative. It'd be depressing if the bill passed and we didn't do our best to stop it.

I strongly disagree with this.

The point of the protest is not only to let your regulars know (as you pointed out, they already know) but to let the world knows.

How?

When all the tech sites go dark, one can say: look, the entire tech community is strongly opposed to this thing, just look at these sites <insert list of links to high profile technology websites>.

The world doesn't give a toss or have an iota of awareness about HN.

Blacking out HN would be like switching off your computer in the privacy of your own home. Nobody knows or cares. All that would achieve is to remove an important vector for communication and information spread in the tech community.

I'm English and would be annoyed if a site I used vanished for a reason that is nothing to do with me. You don't like what your govt is doing, vote it out.

I'm English too but totally support US sites blacking out in opposition to SOPA. It will affect the entire internet if the bill passes and may be used as a template for other countries (Note: I don't think HN blacking out will have much impact so I don't support this particular question)

It is beside the point where you are based. The US are pushing this because they know that other countries will follow. So if they can't shut down a site because its out of their jurisdiction, in the long run they wont have too.

The UK have been trying to pass a load of crazy crap like this. If the US pass it then we will follow.

This is why everyone should be protesting against regardless of your geographical location, unless you want a web in which every country sees different.

We did have a government that believed in censorship, surveillance, ID papers, biometric databases and so on. Guess what, we voted them out, and the first thing the new government did was scrap all that.

It does have everything to do with you. If SOPA passes it will be a massive threat to sites that are used by everyone - where you live is irrelevant when sites you use start shutting down their user uploaded content or add draconian moderation measures out of fear of the possible consequences of being cut off by their payment providers or losing their US traffic, or when they close as a consequence of losing revenue from the US.

I'm English, this has everything to do with us. Clearly HN should go dark, for people from non-U.S IPs it should redirect to a site explaing the international implications.

That's been working great lately.

Is this guy serious? Ok, let's taylor the entire Internet to him. I would hate it if he became "annoyed". Oh and BTW, it's clearly an easy solution... let's just "vote it out".

I agree that it would be "preaching to the choir" and with the name thing, but blacking out HN for a day might also convince HN readers to finally get around to writing their Congresspeople like they've been meaning to (but just haven't gotten around to).

If you must black it out, black it out for the USAians. Some of us don't have members in Congress to write to.

How many people on HN aren't capable of easily getting around regional restrictions for websites?

This is a voluntary block, not a forced 'great firewall of china' block.

> The answer is no, people who say yes are wrong.

When you start an argument like that, I stop reading. Really, that's how you engage people?

Yeah, it'd have been better had he written "The answer is no; people who say yes are right."

>Shock waves from HN being blacked out won't travel to the general public or politicians.

I disagree. If certain big sites (google, facebook) black out then it WILL be covered by the mainstream media. As a result they're bound to publish "lists" of all other sites that have followed suit.

Every single site on these lists, whether Joe Public knows them or not, strengthens our cause.

Google + Bing + Yahoo turned off the switch for a couple of hours at the same time... that would be a statement.

I think that would only annoy people. They should make everything above the fold go dark, and make people scroll down to get their regular content.

Really? Doesn't every form of protest annoy someone or another? At least, they'd try to find why google/facebook was unavailable for a day and run into the draconian SOPA - something they thought wasn't their business at all.

Which headline you'd rather see in NYT tomorrow:

  > A leading enterpreneur community website goes black to protest SOPA.
  ``Our jobs would be endangered'', says PG.

or

  > While discussions rage on the merits of SOPA,
  a leading enterpreneur community remains calm.
  ``We aren't concerned enough to protest'', says PG.

Which I'd rather see is irrelevant; neither has a chance to actually appear in mainstream media, especially the second non-news hypothetical story.

Yes, Even I agree with you. IT is a no . Almost all of us know about SOPA/PIPA . Blocking HN will only hinder us in getting the news , many submit interesting articles that take a stance on SOPA that only help us. Instead start telling your friends and colleagues who are not tech savvy , how this will affect their lives. Thats what I have been doing .

Announcing a hacker news blackout could sway the big guys to do the same.

HN has nothing to lose by blacking out.

Google have advertisers and business to worry about. They also have the G+ vs Facebook battle to be concerned about.

If Google blackout and no one else does then what will people do during the hours Google is down? They would go else where... shareholders and investors would be very unhappy. Especially if you consider these people who pop to Bing may decide they like Bing better.

If Facebook / Google / Yahoo / Bing all went offline from 6-9pm in a rolling blackout across the states on one night. (i.e. blackout by IP based on states timezone.) It would have a massive effect.

Hell, they don't even need to completely blackout. Just randomly black out elements of the page.

American's are still afraid of communism right? Lets add a bar at the top of the sites.

"SOPA would mean that we would have to black out portions of the Internet. Do you know who else does this? CHINA. Are you a communist? Campaign against SOPA here."

It's a bit direct but I thought this was how US politics worked?

I like your idea of adding "SOPA would mean that we would have to black out portions of the Internet..." That would get attention.

As far as Google's advertisers, the G+ vs FB battle, and investors. It's either take a temporary stand now or get forced into taking a long term stand down later. What good is google ads if they can't run your ad? What good is a G+ vs FB battle if its really GOV vs G+ & FB? What good will it be to investors once their stock drops because google's ad rev (as well as other revenue sources) drops?

I was going to agree with VonLipwig until I read this. This may hold some truth to it - even if the world doesn't know HN (thankfully, I keep it on the DL myself) and even if all of HN's readers/contributors are fully aware of SOPA, showing solidarity may have some impact.

On the other hand, I think the GoDaddy exodus did more in a week than months full of discussions; 'big guy' corporations seem to really notice when we use our wallets to speak.

Based on that example, whom does HN control with its wallet?

Off the top of my head I think we could sway: AWS, Linode, Rackspace, Heroku and the likes -- are any of those supporters to begin with?

There is an excellent point to be made with going dark. If "we" go dark via css, (of course) the regular users will know how to get around it and the site will actually be up and running but not look like it is to outside observers. That sends the message: What looks like one thing (SOPA controls) won't actually stop the people who know what they are doing. That's not horrible in itself, but when you give up something so dear as due process to get it, it makes no sense.

If you support others doing it (google,bing yahoo) there is no reason not to do it yourself.

You can not control google or bing shutting down against Sopa, but you can at least control your own website and try to be supportive on HN doing so too.

I initially agreed with you. Pragmatically, as everyone said, HN already is aware of SOPA, shutting it down will be useless. However, at an ideological level (we want internet freedom), the tech community must manifest its protest in a form of coordinated show of disapproval, we cannot be silently and passively opposed to something, and expect the bill not to pass. The OWS movement would be the obvious example of such coordinated "show".

It's not to educate, it's to motivate. If HN is down, that's a way of saying "You should be calling your senator right now" if you're an American. For others it's just a reminder of how serious this issue is.

Any site with user contributed content could be kicked off the internet, and HN is one of those.

ahh it's the "a single vote doesn't really count" argument

The best way to keep everyone at home and thinking there is nothing I can do to change anything.

I wouldn't be surprised if governments around the world are using sock-puppet accounts on a variety of sites to spread exactly this sentiment and to keep the masses quiet. (For the ones about to call me crazy, read this before you do: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-oper...)

I agree.. HN users are aware of the danger of SOPA. Furthermore- while HN is cool and all its a complete nobody compared to the big services that each average joe knows. Yet exactly those are the ones where blacking out would make any sense at all.

Agreed.

If Hacker News gets up on the pulpit on Sunday morning and turns its back on the mainstream to give an impassioned message to the readership who is already there to sing on its behalf...

...well, you get it.