I am kind of peeved. I started a community there and diligently posted links to topical news, and it kind of became a reference to me. Like many others, I've put in some amount of effort.
Now it's gone, again. Without a head's up or a way to get a backup out of it, it seems like. Can't say I am a fan of that.
Kevin Rose didn't start Hodinkee, he started Watchville years after Hodinkee was already well established. Watchville merged with Hodinkee, at which point he became the CEO for 2 years.
From what I can tell Watchville was abandoned a few years ago.
That's exactly what they did to the old Digg back in 2010 -- massive redesign that effectively deleted all old posts, comments, and favorites without warning or opportunity to back up. I pretty feel vindicated choosing not to trust them again, though it's wild they didn't even make an effort to do better here when they claim to want to keep going.
I do have a lemmy account, but have not really returned to it in a while. Maybe I haven't found the right communities yet, but it had nothing about it that felt engaging. People upvoted, but nobody talked. No interaction. Digg felt more alive from day one. I replied to a post in a niche community with ~100 members and only afterwards realized it was @justin.
My experience with lemmy has not been nice. A majority of people there are just downright awful, and the mods are often power-hungry and overzealous in their actions. Many times entire servers are defederated from many others due to how a large percentage of their users behave.
Hm. It's unclear if the second comment is in good faith. If it's not, it's OK for it to be deleted. In my opinion there is a huge problem with Reddit mods: they are perceived as draconian, yet they actually remove only 1% of bad comments. It's pretty much impossible to moderate successfully on a per-comment basis in any sizeable community. So, the mods only moderate submissions.
You're right, and that is one of the lessons to be reminded of here.
My main point wasn't that, though. It's simply a bad and low-effort way to handle the situation, and like one of the other replies points out, there are better options. They could have just as well disabled posting and maybe even viewing of submissions and communities for the time being. Just shutting it all down immediately without notice leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I will not be among the people returning for their next relaunch. I am sure others feel the same way, and I don't think it is a wise decision to needlessly put off your early adopters if you're hoping for them to come back "next time".
Argh. Also quite irritated. I had 50/50 transitioned over to it despite the lower traffic because it was a calm oasis. The thing about bots is believable, though, because you could already see it happening. Dead Internet has been real for a while, and I'd love to seem Kevin and Alex do a followup on this.
Yeah. Sadly the default communities were flooded with blog spam, and that's just the part I noticed. A couple days ago a bunch of smaller communities also got a noticeable bump in members. That didn't change anything in my own community, but others apparently weren't so lucky.
I can see why the team got overwhelmed. I wouldn't want to have to deal with that.
I would love to just mount a directory via SFTP, so I can use my IDE alongside the far-away Claude. That would put this in the realm of daily use for development.
There really is no prize for being technically correct on this one.
Someone built this and is letting you have it. For free. There is no legal obligation or law of the universe here, sure, but if you're in the top 1% of benefactors of this pro bono work, you have the opportunity to do some good and make sure that others, like you, get the chance to benefit from this free work in the future.
There is a pretty straightforward argument to be made that this falls under the "with great power comes great opportunity" umbrella of moral reasoning, since this work empowered CA to create the game that earned him a lot of money.
There is no moral obligation, either - that’s my point. They chose to give it away for free. It’s the author’s explicit decision that there is no obligation placed on recipients.
Giving a fake gift that comes with unspoken strings attached (and “keeping score” in your head) is the passive-aggressive, immoral act. If reciprocity is expected, it is definitionally not a gift.
Releasing software under a free software license is a choice to give a gift to the world. If the author wanted moral obligation strings attached, the license would say that.
The license only says what you MUST and MUST NOT do. The comment you’re replying to talked about what they SHOULD do. These are different concepts and they are codified differently by humans: the former in licenses, the latter socially. You’re experiencing that process right now.
That’s certainly not a legal principle of any kind. It’s like the 17 pieces of flair thing, if they want you to have more, they should tell you, we don’t need some weird unspoken guidelines related to licenses, it’s why we have the license.
If I get tremendous value out of MS office 365 but my agreement with MS charges me only $15/month, should I donate some extra to them because of how much it helps my business?
> That’s certainly not a legal principle of any kind.
Correct!
Reread the original comment that kicked off this thread in that light and the overwhelming majority of replies and votes should hopefully make a lot more sense.
Edit: for the record:
> if they want you to have more, they should tell you, we don’t need some weird unspoken guidelines related to licenses,
Again check the original comment which wasn’t written by them but by a third party commenting on the state of a community.
Those unspoken guidelines aren’t any more or less weird than any other ones we share as humans. (Actually I’d say they’re far less so than most.)
> the former in licenses, the latter socially. You’re experiencing that process right now.
No, he's not, because there's no social contract on the internet. Making these analogies between real-world communities and "the Internet" is an obviously stupid thing to do if you think about it for five seconds.
And not only is there no social contract on the Internet, but because of its nature there cannot be, and attempting (futilely) to implement one is extremely harmful.
So, as a result, the license is all there is. If you publish it as open-source, users have zero obligation to contribute. If you want revenue, then use a commercial license and sell it.
It should go without saying, but the insane mental backflips that open source advocates go to in order to make wild claims like this harms their position, not helps it. Don't make absurd statements to try to ignore the fact that asking for money for your software with an actual license is the only reasonable way to get money for your software - it'll just cause normal people to take the entire movement less seriously.
What is going on with the total lack of decorum in HN comments lately? Is this a new phenomenon or am I just now waking up to how incredibly rude some people here act towards strangers?
Is this a meta comment to demonstrate your belief that basic human mores don’t apply on the internet? Quite frankly I find it more of a refutation.
Your response that contains only ad-hominem character attacks and fails to address even the weakest of my statements conclusively proves that your points are indefensible.
Neither is my comment particularly offensive. You seem to have trouble differentiating between refuting someone's points and attacking their character.
Maybe that's why you attacked me, because you wanted to argue with my points but can't tell the difference between the two?
You're a fascinating character. If you're ever in New York let me know because I would love to see how you are in real life. I'm actually quite sure we'll get along after a bit of alignment! Weirder things have happened.
> I didn't address them because I don't want to :)
Ahhh, yes, of course. Because the first thing that someone with a good response does is to never use it (especially if it's a cause they feel strongly about) and instead attack the character of the one who poked holes in their initial argument. Silly me.
People protesting ICE do not do so out of political concern, but humanitarian concern.
This seems like a minor nitpick as those two are intimately tangled up, but it matters to make the distinction. Standing up for others is not petty or self-serving and that's exactly what this sort of conflation can falsely imply.
Just because people have a revolutionary fetish and fantasize about being the ones to stop Hitler in 1933 (they would not have) does not make their delusions a reality. These dorks make anti-establishment vibes so lame. Just because you say something doesn’t make it real.
Hello there (new-account){name}{number}! When did you discover that {you, a real person} believed that the only way to protect the {women!} and {children!} was this new agency founded under Bush in the wake of 9/11?
Did you know that all {women!} (over 12 million every year) are actually most endangered by their intimate partners, who are predominately within their same race and class?
Do you think this is more or less concerning than this inflammatory anecdata you've created an account to provide? Do you think that domestic violence prevention (less than 1 billion) should be more or less well-funded than ICE (170 billion)?
> (Under the Trump admin): Teams responsible for violence prevention have been decimated, and a reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services has eliminated divisions wholesale.
It's virtue signaling plain and simple. People who crafted their identities around the current thing in ~2017 are religiously attached to having to be part of the in group and can't let it go, and it inevitably bubbles up like this.
This will no doubt rankle those who align with that group, but they are a pathetic remnant of a terrible period of rampant sociopathy.
Though you will no doubt assume you're getting downvoted because you're speaking truth to sociopaths, I just wanted to say I'm downvoting you because your comment violates multiple HN guidelines. Reminder, those are here:
It's disappointing to see such a long-term community member engage so thoughtlessly. I know the guidelines also say I should just flag and move on, but this will only reenforce your narrative, and I am hoping to break the cycle.
Politics in the US is so extremely binarized these days that I think it’s hard to assign motive for political issues beyond “my friends say that our team feels this way.” Which I would argue is much more political than anything fundamental.
Even if they are off by a factor of 100 it's a huge win and the point stands.
It's fair to point this out and worth the mention. Still, I'd like to think that the engineers behind this can at least gauge the benefit of this endeavor with some accuracy despite the discrepancy in available data, and stating the data that is available only makes sense.
I have always found the summary of Foundations of Geopolitics[1] to be an interesting re-read whenever some larger event involving Russia happened. It feels like the puzzle pieces have been coming together at least since Brexit, if not much longer.
Don't pay for it, unless you want to fund what Wikipedia describes as a "Russian far-right political philosopher [and] strong supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin".
Now it's gone, again. Without a head's up or a way to get a backup out of it, it seems like. Can't say I am a fan of that.
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