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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

Oof, that hyper-aggressive whitewashing of the DRM proposal from yoavweiss_ was a harsh lesson in realpolitik. Nerds were bringing good faith arguments to a bad faith optics war and getting slaughtered.

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I don't think they were. After reading this my view of this person is just a corporate drone. Obviously this proposal is to serve the content owners, not the users, whatever the thoughts behind it are. And yes it may not be intended to block adblockers but it certainly can easily be used for that once it's ubiquitous. Attestation which is basically what this is, always implies a move of some measure of control from the user to the content or service provider. It exists purely because they don't trust the user. There is just no way this would have ended positively.

And why would I go into discussion with Google? They don't own the web and never will. And their business model means they (and their employees) will always be my enemy because their goals are opposite to my own. I can criticise but it doesn't have to be constructive. A "Just NO" is fine too. I would be very happy with a world where Google doesn't exist.

But in this case the nerds won which means the way it was done worked perfectly fine. Perhaps they will have stepped on a few toes at Google but I'm kinda glad to hear that.

Even more simply: let's not get dragged into debating the technical merits of something which is philosophically wrong. That particular person was trying really hard to reframe the whole argument into terms that would work in Google's favor -- if we just pointed out what was technically wrong with the proposal, why, they'd just fix those things and then we'd be good to go. But, it was philosophically wrong, because we've all understood the web to be fundamentally open and anonymous and not controlled by any one entity [1] for decades and most of us want it to stay that way. Even if WEI was technically sound, it would still be an enormous erosion of the principles of an open, anonymous, decentralized web. Any attempt to argue against WEI on its technical merits alone was just allowing Google to drag the whole fight into favorable territory.

> And why would I go into discussion with Google? They don't own the web and never will.

Oh, I think this is a big mistake. Google very nearly does own the web. Gmail handles, at last estimates, between 45% and 60% of email traffic, depending on who you talk to. Chrome or Chromium gets somewhere around 65% of the global browser market. Google gets around 90% of search traffic. Google ads. Google domains. YouTube. Google Cloud, which WPEngine for example runs on. Google Docs. Chromebooks. Android.

I really need more people to pause and reflect for a moment on just how much of the internet is currently owned by Google.

[1]: Well, ignoring ICANN, or Microsoft, or Google, or Cisco, or...

Hey, look, it's the bad faith optics war again.

For people wondering which of the links to click: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857676

It's mostly just the classic "nono if you don't agree it's because you don't understand" and "please educate yourself" approach.

At least they didn't try, "I don't have time to educate you about why you're bad!"

> "P.S. I'd love to discuss this with y'all like professional adults. Can we do that?"

You can tell somebody is a snake when they aren't from the South but use "y'all". It's become a sort of corporate snake shibboleth.

Uhhh, what?

I use y'all 'cus that's how all the kids in my school talked growing up.

I ditched a lot of the lexicon because after my family moved to the suburbs, I got made fun of by my new friends, literally calling me "less white". So no more finna', for example.

I will die on the hill of having a good second person plural pronoun though.

If you actually grew up using it, then you're not who I'm talking about. The word, like "folks", has become part of the affected dialect used by corporate ass-kissers to tell other corporate ass-kissers what they're about. Used primarily by slimy management, HR and PR types.

These types do not say finna, that isn't part of this affected dialect. If you say finna then you're not who I'm talking about.

…Okay, again, I really need/want there to be a gender-neutral plural familiarism like "guys", though, and "folks" fits great....

Once you've used English with a second person plural pronoun, you can't go back.

PS: "Yous guys" doesn't count

"y'all" is a bit fraught in the US because (incorrectly, in my opinion), in some parts the use is associated with certain unflattering cultural stereotypes. Not usually racial ones.

> I will die on the hill of having a good second person plural pronoun though.

I'm with you there -- we really need one, but I haven't found one that is broadly safe to use.

Here in the rural parts of Ontario (well not in my rural part of Ontario, but further north), that pronoun is "youse"

As a long boy visiting from Alberta I was astounded that this existed.

It might be dying out tho

> I's the by that build the boat.

> You's the by that sail 'er.

— Wait, that's singular.... I think? Does it change again when you go further east? ....Or actually, is the second line also "I"?

My take is that "uneducated" people with "undisciplined" language spontaneously create their own plural second person pronouns wherever they go because, well, the language has needed them ever since they were lost from Anglo-Saxon ("ge", pronounced "ye").

I vote we just bring back this "ye" and make it official.

Ah, indeed. The plague of prescriptivism, as a gross exclusionary method of filtering social status, holding us back…

Exists in Australia, has connotations of rural government (un)education, youse can rip it from my cold dead hands because plural second person is fabulous.

I certainly think that a lot but I sure as hell wouldn’t say it. It doesn’t help, that discussion never goes well.

Meh, it spreads a lot more broadly than the corporate snake people. And honestly I’ve never heard the corporate snakes use it myself (at least not before the example which you quoted), but I’m sure there are corporate snakes who do.

Look, it's either "y'all", "vous", or bringing back "thou" for the singular, okay?

Looks like yoavweiss was slaughtered, not the good-faith nerds.

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