luiscleto

> We need some regulations;

But the regulations are already in place. In the UK especially there are very strict and broad-range hate-speech laws. And most of the content referred to as problematic already breaches the ToS for the platforms mentioned. And evidence suggests those companies have already been pouring resources into trust and safety teams to detect and stop such content.

Getting rid of "problematic" user content on social networks for the masses is a very hard game of whack-a-mole as people quickly adapt their way of sharing content when it's being blocked. Ultimately you'd have to destroy the value of the social network altogether to ensure you block all of it.

This is just going to give legal power for government PR campaigns whenever a particular "problematic" opinion gains too much traction, since it's so vaguely defined that any website with user content could be penalized at any time at an official's discretion regardless of context and whether it's true hate speech or not. All the actual problematic crap (real hate speech, actual abuse/mutilation videos, etc.) will never gain that kind of spotlight and will continue to find new ways to circulate faster than it's stopped.

> But it also covers harmful behaviour that has a less clear legal definition such as cyber-bullying, trolling and the spread of fake news and disinformation.

So, basically any site with user content can be fined/blocked at any time at the official's discretion.

> This argument would be stronger if the game industry didn't also feature a large number of insanely well paid executives.

But why would a surplus of developers need to correlate with a surplus of executives?

If anything it makes more sense to see a larger rift between workers and executives/investors because the costs for developers have been driven down by competition among them.

I may concede that overall it could be better with a union, but lets not pretend this will mean all current game devs will make more money. You will have less game devs who will be making more money (narrowing the gap to execs in the industry) while others get driven away from the profession.

> It's all accounting! I can't emphasize this enough--you can pay the employees 2x as much, or 10x as much, or 1/2x as much, and Fortnite will be EXACTLY as fun as it is now. That's what people are outraged about.

Yes, but there is a difference if it takes 20 devs to make it and there are only 10 available vs there being 200. Competition among the devs as to who gets to make it means each of them will tolerate worse conditions to get the offer over the other. Effectively driving down the costs of producing the game. With a union in play, the cost of production would be stopped from going down.

I'm not necessarily arguing that it is worse with a union than without. But an expected side effect of forcing high costs (high wages in this case) would be that it would make it much harder for aspiring game devs to enter the field.

> you unionize because it will get these people paid better and feel happier at basically no economic cost

This is not true. Again, unions might produce a better outcome, I don't know otherwise for sure. But to think that you can tweak the economic system to behave exactly as you want it to, producing all the positive outcomes with no negatives, is absurd. We can often fail to achieve anything similar with simple software systems, much less with something as intricate and complex as humanity.

> I don’t think it’s about supply and demand for game developer pay either

If there was a shortage of game developers, employers would be forced to give much better benefits and compensation to retain and hire staff (and probably there would be a lot less games and studios). There may be more to the analysis, but I don't agree that you can ignore supply and demand and turn this into just oppressor greedy guy vs oppressed exploited worker instead.

I guess in that case it would come as a bigger surprise that I'm from the EU, and from a country where unions are quite well established, and have never been to, studied, or worked in the US.

They don't need it. They do it because it's more profitable. If you don't want those conditions they can easily find someone else willing to accept them due to the huge hiring pool available.

Edit: you're far less likely to risk burning out your employees if they are hard to replace.

> Unionisation may help, but the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion', and to go where their skills are appreciated/where they're treated better/fairly compensated

This. Unionisation is basically an attempt to reject the reality that there isn't enough demand for all that labor to be valuable at/above market-average.

Ultimately I don't think there is a right answer and which way you choose is up to you. But it sounds like a "you can't have your cake and eat it too" situation.

Lucky are those who are passionate about things the majority of the labor pool hates but many businesses need.

Edit: Just to prevent misunderstandings, this is my opinion on Unionisation in this particular industry where there are many (private) companies. It can be a different story if your only employers are not driven by profits and losses or are not in a competitive market (e.g. a government) and I wasn't trying to make a sweeping generic statement like "all unions are always bad"

I'm from Portugal (where we've had somewhat similar experiences to Spain with the mentality for unions).

When I was young I believed they were good as it was what I was taught and fell in the socialist-leaning mentality of much of the country.

Having started to learn about economics, entering the industry, and seeing the arguments many people make for unionization have definitely led to me to swing much harder to the "unions are evil" side of the argument.

That said I do believe they are a double edged sword of sorts. When the only employer for a certain profession is the government for example (i.e. not driven by profits and losses, or not a part of a competitive market) unions can actually help make things fair and get a point across that otherwise would not be visible. But in general they are much less efficient than profits and losses in a competitive market and in those situations will lead to a decline in growth that you would otherwise not get.

So, we won't find a correlation between people who go to prison and propensity to immoral behavior? Or even intentionally mislabeling immoral behavior as moral.

HN should be wise enough to know that correlation is not causation, and that statistical differences in behaviour between groups do not necessarily describe an individual from the group. But that does not invalidate OP's point.

While that's an interesting approach for compensation which might mitigate knowingly bad/irresponsible decisions, it doesn't look like it would address the core issue here of having to choose a metric to base compensation on.

Maybe the gaming effect would be lessened by that compensation approach, but at a very large scale org, I doubt that it would. Although, it would be interesting to see real life studies of this, in case such practices have already been tried out.

> employees themselves has to be responsible for their output in such a way that higher output leads to more money for them

But what metric would you use to measure output that solves the gamification problem?

Even for contractors or sales people (where you could use the sales volume), this could lead them to favor short term results and compromise the long-term health of the company (e.g. by favoring quick, low-quality solutions by contractors, or selling features that don't yet exist and creating unsustainable roadmaps by sales people).

Reminds me of Goodheart's law[1].

We have known this for a long time, but it is hard to have an alternative system which scales well with huge organizations. For startups and small companies, I could see an informal system working pretty well, but as the company grows to hundreds or thousands of employees, it becomes necessary to standardize and have some kind of metrics used for reporting and evaluations. This will inevitably shift the company's culture towards gaming those metrics.

Somewhat like grading systems in education. High grades don't necessarily mean you will be capable of generating more value to society than average grades or even low grades. And students often become good at improving their grades without that actually adding much value. But there is a correlation. And we don't have many better (non-experimental) alternatives that I'm aware of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

They can apply large pressure on the state, true. But so can labour unions (and probably so would guilds). It is still not true state ownership as competition does thrive (even if they still have obstacles).

Edit: There are probably even better examples of lobbying than climate change as that has a ton of confounding factors that make it hard to deal with besides just oil companies. But I see no reason to assume distributism would make the issue better. Taxi drivers protesting against Uber comes to mind.

I originally thought this was going to be an April fool's satire on using Microservices as a religion.

> "Distributism favors the dissolution of the current private bank system, or more specifically its profit-making basis in charging interest"

Does not sound very Swiss to me.

> "Further, some distributists argue that socialism is the logical conclusion of capitalism, as capitalism's concentrated powers eventually capture the state, resulting in a form of socialism"

This greatly resembles Karl Marx's criticism of capitalism, which has failed to hold up to reality so far.

Frankly, this sounds a lot like repackaged socialism using labor unions and guilds rather than a central government. Might not be as bad a state socialism (i.e. they might actually be able to manage the businesses better), but I sincerely doubt it would solve any of the major problems we see today.

While you do have inequality in capitalist systems the "elites" tend to rotate, with empires falling apart and new ones taking their place. Wealthy families maintaining their wealth and power are the exception and not the norm.

Introducing guilds or more unions will likely make it much harder for competition and innovation to thrive, introducing a huge barrier of bureaucracy interested only in maintaining the status quo for their own benefit.

I don't drive or cycle (on a regular basis), and I haven't been particularly exposed to generic rage towards cyclists. I don't think I see cyclists as any less human than cars and their drivers, or bikers for that matter. Yet of all the aforementioned groups, the only ones I've learned to be especially cautious of (and to which I linked negative preconceptions) are cyclists.

This was never a problem for me when living in the Netherlands, where there is good infrastructure and rules. (At least after getting past the phase where you simply need to adapt to the ridiculous number of bikes when compared to other countries).

After moving to Dublin, it doesn't matter if you're on the sidewalk, pedestrian-only bridges, or crossing a pedestrian crossing when the light is green, you always have to watch out for bikes because you never know when one is heading right into you, regardless of how many traffic rules they need to be breaking to do so. From my own anecdotal evidence I've learned to expect worse/reckless behavior from cyclists compared to any other road user.

I'm sure they aren't worse people that anyone else and this is probably aggravated by the severely lacking infrastructure over here, but I seriously doubt "dehumanization" is the root cause of the problem here (even if it may contribute to a vicious cycle). From a driver's perspective, better infrastructure would probably also make them stress less over accidentally causing serious harm to a cyclist over something that would otherwise be their fault.

That said, I don't have stats or studies to back any of this up and this is all assumed from my own observations.

However, the fact that there is a problem, does not legitimize doing something regardless of what the something is.

I haven't seen any support for the articles which actually shows the effects of the policy will be good, rather than arguments saying "it's meant to be good". Which is a fallacy that affects many politics which later end up having adverse effects.

But ultimately bureaucrats are happy whenever there is an excuse to increase bureaucratic power.

Edit: spelling

Further edit:

For the particular point you're putting out, to justify the EU policy you have to at least show that 1) those media outlets would receive all that traffic that those FB posts generated if the FB posts didn't exist in the first place, 2) that this outweighs costs from abusing that policy (claims over fair use, e.g. youtube copyright system) and content that simply will not get reshared, even if fair use and linking to the source material, out of fear of triggering the safeguards mechanism

> How does that nullify any changes?

The impact on society won't come from the number of crowdfunding platforms, but from the number of campaigns and their reach. My point with 1) and 2) was that neither is necessarily affected by this.

> likely when you remove them from huge platforms with massive market share, like YouTube

It's really super hard to fully remove an idea from social media platforms. It's like playing whack-a-mole. They tend to find more ways of spreading the information.

If the discourse itself is moved to another platform, my concern is that it might be a much more hospitable environment for such ideas to fester. And I'm not certain we will significantly reduce the spreading of these platforms.

Context: I work in Trust and Safety and am genuinely concerned with how to best address these issues, which I fear has fallen to the same pitfalls as many political discussions (i.e. get the favorable public opinion to stay in power for the mandate even if it means sweeping the dust under the carpet and let it build up)

I completely agree. That's why I was trying to distance my argument from the perspective of whether GoFundMe made a good or bad decision.

I just wanted to bring up the point from a societal perspective, since it's society as a whole who often calls for actions like this from big companies (making it a "good" decision for them even if just for the PR). Are we going to see a positive change in society from this, is it just irrelevant in the end, or could we even be making the issue harder to fight in the long run?

I don't necessarily have a strong opinion on what the answer to that question is, it's just genuinely a question.

Starting this with a few disclaimers:

1) I unequivocally believe all anti-vaxxers are wrong, 2) I absolutely support efforts to fight their misinformation, 3) I don't even necessarily think it was a bad decision by gofundme to do this;

Now, what I'd like to question is the effectiveness of taking down those campaigns. My points:

1) I doubt that an average user scrolling through gofundme would see and decide to support such a campaign, I'd imagine most of the funding comes from the links being directly shared

2) The above makes me think such campaigns will simply move to a GoFundMe competitor and be equally (un?)successful, effectively nullifying any changes

3) Gives more attention + victim points to anti vaxxers

4) If their discourse is further pushed out of mainstream platforms, does it actually reduce the spread of their ideas or just limit their exposure to counter-arguments and public condemnation?

Edit: formatting

Yes, it's a good thing for sites and apps to be accessible.

No, it's not an obligation of any kind (nor should it be).

For companies that have grown enough to be providing services to (and profiting off of) a large enough part of the population, it would make sense to expect them to put resources into this. For someone working for free, trying to get an idea off the ground, or servicing a very niche subset of the population (i.e. a very restricted market) this blanket statement makes no sense and the costs it would add to make it an obligation would likely only cause a decrease in quantity of what is available (which, if deemed valuable, can be made more accessible later on) rather than an increase in quality of what's available.

I noticed the [1] in your comment but it seems to be missing the actual link? I'd be interested in reading about it.

Reminds me a bit of the observations by Michael Shellenberger who went from https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/It-s-the-oi... to https://quillette.com/2019/02/27/why-renewables-cant-save-th...

Like many other topics today, discussions around energy and renewables has become so ideologically driven that it's hard to find any actual decent discussions.

1) Unless the people who sign the petition had not voted (or voted for brexit, in which case you could even see it as a x2 effect) you can't "make the difference" using these numbers as they doesn't necessarily show any sway.

2) Why would there need to be a pro-brexit petition if brexit won the vote? That is unless cancelling brexit suddenly becomes the way that decision-makers want to go for (and note that there are pro hard brexit petitions)

Disclaimer: I do not reside in the UK, and I no longer click on every article in the ever-flowing torrent of brexit-related news, so my knowledge of the ongoings may be outdated

By that logic if every individual in the 16,141,241 signed the petition it would suddenly make it 32,282,482 vs 17,410,742?

I'm not trying to downplay the significance of the petition or its size, but I don't believe math works that way.

The problem is defining those limits. And if you give a regulatory agency the power to do it, odds are they will push too far.

It starts with fringe sites that most people would agree on, but the existence of those regulators depends on there being more things to censor. It's in their own interest to expand the scope of the censoring, and the people attracted to those positions and that "power" will be the ones who have things they wish to silence.

In addition to this, as the scope creeps you risk forcing the later groups into the same channels as the ones first banned (e.g. people who enjoy dark humor being shoved into the same platforms as people who unironically spread hate and violent messages). It seems to me this will be facilitating radicalization rather than help prevent it - an analogy could be made with people arrested for petty crimes being radicalized or made into full blown criminals in prisons.

Before thinking about whether it's actually right or wrong to block access to "problematic opinions" online, I'd like to see satisfying research that government censorship actually works and mitigates these problems, rather than just sweep the mess under the carpet while it keeps building up to an eventual serious problem.

I wonder if remote work opportunities could become significant enough to slow this trend and make more people prefer smaller/quieter towns to the big city life while still holding jobs for big industries.

Does anyone happen to know if this effect is/can be a thing or do remote workers still flock to big cities anyway? I imagine this could eventually lead to lower rents in cities (but also lower salaries due to increased competition in cheaper places)

They shouldn't unless it becomes an economic advantage to do so. That's the point of the free market. I don't think it's the government's place to force it in either direction.

Adding costs doesn't mean it is more expensive to you specifically. Just for the economy in general. There are advantages to having cashless payments only. One that comes to mind would be for places in dangerous neighborhoods (which affect low income households more)