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Comment by rosser | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this kind of thing (the various Arab Spring uprisings, the Ukrainian revolution, &c) is very well served by the cacophony of amateur/citizen journalism that flows out of an individual event.

Sure, at the time, it's incredibly noisy, because there's so much primary source material being created, with such incredible depth and nuance. Once people start to be able to assemble a comprehensive understanding of what actually went down, however, it tends more accurately to reflect the reality of events, and makes it much harder for spin and propaganda to dictate the narrative. That's, I think, the ultimate goal of democratizing media.

But I'm also notoriously an optimist about this kind of thing, so, you know: cup of salt, please take with.

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> amateur/citizen "journalism"

No need to put journalism into quotes because it is real journalism what those people are doing.

You're right. Fixed. Thanks!

If you were to ask current mainstream american media sources they would claim it isn't journalism because they are 'activists'. Ala the treatment of anyone who is covering the Snowden leaks without being sympathetic to the US Gov.

A lot of what seems to be grassroots could be aided, and perhaps even orchestrated, by sophisticated groups with a political agenda, e.g. the CIA.

It would only take around 10-20 bloggers to create the illusion that the majority people in the country felt a certain way.

EDIT: and nowadays, they wouldn't just blog, they would post to Reddit, and maybe even HN.

True enough. But my extended social circle includes a number of people of Ukrainian nationality and/or descent. Everything I've heard from them (which is, granted, not a lot; I haven't been tracking these events terribly actively, let alone vis-à-vis their perspectives) tends to corroborate what I'm seeing in this blog post, at least.

There is a very significant pro-Western bias amongst educated people who have moved to the West.

If you just looked at educated Chinese immigrants during the last 50 years, you would never guess at the overwhelming support for the communist party.

There is an equally significant anti-Western bias among liberal university-educated people who were born in the U.S, so it mostly balances out. In addition, we now have maps like this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/01/24...

I guess I'd better become a citizen journalist to counteract it, then.

I doubt the CIA could have plot the political decision of Ukraine to turn their back on Europe. This is the cause of this, as far as I know. Ukrainians hoped to be able to work in Europe like their neighbour countries and this has been denied to them. Obviously that political decision was strongly "influenced" by Russia. This is why so many people are taking part in these contests. Every single Ukrainian is concerned by this political choice and unhappy of it. I don't think CIA could make such mass popular protest sprout and sustain in front of strong political resistance.

People just want to get away of misery. If Russia want to keep this country in its "federation" there is a very clear and "simple" thing to do. Keeping this country from joining europe by force is just delaying the final issue as it happened with Hungary and all these other countries. This Federation hold together by force will fall appart anyway soon or later unless Russia manages to offer equivalent job opportunities and salaries as Ukraininag could get in Europe.

The CIA is a poor example. The motivation isn't there, it's not really their style, and they are rather incompetent. More importantly, if it were an American plot of some kind, the US news media wouldn't be ignoring it, they'd be going on and on about a Ukrainian Democratic Revolution etc. etc. To orchestrate something like this and not hook it up with massive Western support would be futile.

There are certainly great pictures, but depth and nuance? You can't see people's ideology and in their faces. Pretty girls can still be crazy nationalists and fascists. Does age and gender really prove anything as the author seems to suggest?

He also says that the crowd is well organized. Who organizes them if they are so diverse? Who are the people who deny others access to some areas as he reports? There are very few answers in his report.

Yes, the pictures don't prove much, here you have to trust the author, he's spending quite some time in the heart of the events.

Pretty girls can still be crazy nationalists, that's true. The point is that if some crazy form of nationalism has taken so wide-spread popularity in Ukraine, it would be well-known abroad already. That's not the case, it seems that the only foreign force concerned with Ukrainian nationalists are Putin's medias.

Ukrainian nationalists are often overrated: their traditional message and goal is "Glory to Ukraine", anti-Moscow feeling is also strong (not surprisingly), and alas, some historical "domestic" antisemitism which almost never comes into real actions and sometimes is actively fought (Maidan now actively protects Jews from any assaults, our government has tried to speculate on this, Berkut are also mildly antisemitic - it's a common Slavic trait). What I have never seen is hate to others based on ethnicity or just being other.

From my little experience (I live in Kiev), people are organized informally and it's an amusing self-organization: a lot of my friends (including me) have been supporting peaceful Maidan with presence, money and food. Guys at Hrushevskogo do not have some formal organization, they deny access to interlocutors if they see you're unprepared for the hell at the front line.

If you have more questions, I'll be glad to answer.

I didn't mean to imply anything about the protesters one way or another. My point was purely about the reporting itself and perhaps about citizen journalism in general.

As a citizen of the European Union I am very much in favor of forming closer ties with Ukraine and eventually welcoming them into the EU.

But of course that can only happen if a solid majority of Ukrainians actually wants it. I'm unclear about whether or not they do and hence whether or not the protesters represent the will of the people.

> a solid majority of Ukrainians actually want it - you're right, it's a tough question. European integration support is at least 50% of the population; just before Yanukovych decided not to sign the association agreement it was more than 70% according to polls. People also pay attention to the EU position: if it is welcoming and constructive, EU gains ~20% popularity. The decision of Yanukovych was a shock to a large part of the country.

Also I have to admit that for many people Europe is a symbol of lawful and wealthy life among rich and friendly cultures. But symbols often fail when confronted with harsh reality. At the same time there's a considerable (more well-to-do) part of population who actually saw Europe and know what they want.

But Maidan is now not just about EU, though EU support is relatively high (100 000 people was at the only true _Euro_maidan in Kiev on November 24). Our burning need is to get rid of the current regime. Four years of Yanukovych's rule have been time of creeping, steady and all-embracing corruption: economic, business, political, juridical, legislative, social. Nobody thought that this would go so far, even people who voted for Yanukovych.

Ambiguous phrasing, sorry; the depth and nuance is (usually) a consequence of the volume of reporting that citizen journalism enables, not of any one report — though it can and does sometimes emerge from one insightful and fortuitously situated perspective.

It's, in a sense, a corollary of the ESR quip that, "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." (Yes, that was Eric Raymond, not Linus.) With enough independent, and independently motivated people documenting a given historical event, a deeper, more subtly textured view of that event becomes possible.

Agreed. The first-hand accounts of people who are there, writing/streaming what they're witnessing as they witness it, with little time taken for editorializing and narrative-making, is some of the most honest source material possible.

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