Just a quick search in Google Play Store shows several apps that are similarly named including "Threesome Dating App for Couples & Swingers: 3rder". While I don't agree that they should be policing this content at all I think the inconsistency at which they do it is even worse. They won't hesitate to remove an app or your entire account and once they do it's impossible to talk to anyone. Meanwhile other similar apps or developers of similar apps that got you banned remain in the store.
I've been banned from Google Play Developer portal since 2015 because I had an app that accessed an undocumented API of a 3rd party service: "we have determined that your app interferes with or accesses another service or product in an unauthorized manner." I had two different apps using the same API so I got 2 strikes at once and was immediately banned.
I've tried multiple times to contact Google to get my account restored, several times in the past few years since it's been so long, but they don't even respond and it's impossible to get a hold of a human.
Monopoly power right there (yes I'm assuming someone I don't know on the internet is speaking the truth - the assumption may be wrong). What percentage of the mobile phone market is now closed to you?
If you've got the supporting docs to that story it's a good one for any journalist who has an interest in silicon valley market power. Silicon valley monopoly power into a search engine will link up a bunch of newspaper stories about it. Start with the author of the one you think is the best and send them the docs and it may well be there as supporting evidence the next time they write about the abuse of monopolistic power. In general it's a bad idea to "trust" journalists so exercise usual amounts of caution.
I haven’t looked at the exact percentage but I know it’s huge, especially outside the US. I really think they should have a cap on how long you can be banned for. This was also way before Google reviewed apps so if you missed or interpreted something in their developer terms differently from them you risked this happening. I’m assuming that now that they review a reviewer would notify you and decline the app if it was in violation of any terms and you could make the necessary changes first.
I feel pretty helpless as ultimately Google has the power to decide who gets to play in their sandbox.
It's an example of Google abusing their market power and deserves to be verified, reported and become part of the public record. Also cited in various washington committees of politicians who are tasked with examining and recommending ways of dealing with the issue or not. Obviously it's up to you what steps you wish to take, whether you feel like curbing that and other kinds of market power abuse by google for the good of the country is worthwhile and whether you have the documentation to even make a contribution at all.
Right now it's totally unsubstantiated and i wouldn't even bring it up in a discussion about Google market power abuse.
Up to you. That kind of choice kinda sucks if it is actually yours to make (ie you have the docs) both options have significant downside for you. I'm sorry it happened to you. I'm sorry you're in this position. Good luck with whatever you decide.
Swinging is a relatively mainstream lifestyle (what, there was even an Ang “Hulk” Lee movie surrounding it). Polyamory is a more fringe culture. It requires a degree of thoughtfulness that’s way beyond my level of emotional intelligence. Swingers on the other hand can just be a couple with a high level of trust and companionship.
Then, having and raising children “properly” requires an even higher level of pair bonding magic.
There are no solutions for suspensions from app stores. The solution is to not use app stores -- build better webapps, use the open web.
We could be living in a world where no open web ever existed, where everything would be filtered through app stores and closed environments like Facebook (AOL).
We need to preserve the open web, it is our most precious ressource.
Due to my phone running low on storage I've had to uninstall some apps lately and switch to the mobile web version. In the process, I realized that many of these webapps effectively worked almost identically to their app counterparts with only very minor differences that didn't impact my usage at all.
Actually for some of them the main difference is that the webapp will push very hard for you to install the app with various popups while the app won't. You're basically being harassed into installing the app.
For everything that works as an app and is good enough in a mobile phone Firefox, I always chose the combo Firefox+Bookmark. This way I can also block half the trackers that are include in the app/webpage.
With this setup though you miss out on the 'benefits' of the notifications :)
I believe that putting everything online is not sustainable. It might be very difficult to believe for people who earn so much that they can afford 24/7 stable and fast internet anywhere they go, but there are places where even good old broadband dsl is unstable, in the west.
The reasoning of "appstore bad -> lets not use any appstores" is flawed. There are "appstores" like the ones on FOSS systems like linux (discover on Arch/Manjaro comes to mind), which show that you can make an appstore yourself.
All we need is to build a cross platform, community managed app store, which allows foss and non-foss apps, with a payment system. Thats the solution, not "make it a webapp".
There's no reason why a web app can't work in offline mode.
Think of a web browser as the ultimate App Store -- you navigate to any "app" by using your search engine of choice or by passing around links to the "apps" via email / messaging. Then, you bookmark your "app" so that it's available with one click.
Offline storage, offline compute, notifications, etc. are all things that we can do via web APIs just as easily as proprietary vendor code.
Sure, some things might need native experiences, but those are definitely the exception, not the rule. Even games and navigation and real-time video can be accomplished via web-only APIs.
You’re overstating the capabilities of web APIs. Good luck trying to make a real web app with 3D graphics, offline storage, offline compute, or push notifications. All of that stuff is totally gimped compared with native iOS and Android APIs. This is no accident; widespread cross-platform app development with no revenue cut would go against the interests of the browser engine vendors.
It's app stores as the single gatekeeper to a platform that's bad. I think it's actually fine if there's an app store where you can get vetted apps that have some official stamp of approval from the store owner, but it's also important that that store doesn't have the monopoly to that platform. It should be possible for users to choose a different app store.
Though I share your sentiments, that pattern worked very well at infecting machines with malware for 20 years because the average user is a bad judge of which sites to trust to install software on their device.
Then again, app stores haven't solved the malware problem, and neither have solutions like trusted publishers / signing executables / etc. I look forward to seeing a solution that isn't worst-of-both-worlds.
I remember installing software before app stores. Everyone was always afraid of malware but very few people I knew ever suffered from it. Most people used anti virus software, asked their friends which programs they recommended, or did some research of their own to figure out what was safe to download. All that was probably at least as effective as the “curation” that app stores provide. The problem is that now a lot of people implicitly trust apps from app stores and there is the added harm that there are now sanctioned forms of malware that serve ads, steal info and try to sell you exploitative in app purchases.
> Everyone was always afraid of malware but very few people I knew ever suffered from it. Most people used anti virus software, asked their friends which programs they recommended, or did some research of their own to figure out what was safe to download. All that was probably at least as effective as the “curation” that app stores provide.
That’s the opposite of my experience. I remember lots of malware - toolbars, search engine defaults, using malware bytes, ccleaner, antivirus programs, and a bunch of other crap I can’t remember to de-malware my older relatives’ computers when I was a kid. There was no way to prevent my elders from getting malware on their Windows computers, because they just had to click on everything.
Then iOS came out and I never spent another minute dealing with uninstalling and scanning for malware. Any software problems were solved by deleting the app, or turning the device off and on.
> code execution evolved to ransomware because cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency might have made it easier, but such scams are older than that. Just look at the whole range of tech support scams based on voucher codes.
A tech support scam can be unlocked by a competent technician for much less than the amount requested by the crooks. A ransomware attack with asymmetric crypto cannot be unlocked in a similar way, math simply won't let you (bar faulty ransomware that happens to reveal its key).
What fixed that is sandboxing. It's not really clear how much app stores do. And in fairness to Google, their malware scanning system is not tied to their app store. Stuff installed outside the store gets scanned too.
> I look forward to seeing a solution that isn't worst-of-both-worlds
Software repositories? Still not perfect in terms of security but better than manually searching for installer packages, deciding between the official download that requires some account registration or a slightly questionable download site and then hoping for the best. Same for updates - the way many third-party programs on Windows expect me to basically download and reinstall the whole program again unless the developer built their own custom auto-updater is ridiculous.
And for the average user I'd say technologies between flatpak and Snap are a decent step in the right direction - easier installation and updates, less trouble with dependencies(in theory), a bit of isolation and file access limits. Unless you want to explain relatives how to setup Qubes OS this is probably the next best thing within the near future.
You can still do that on android if you want.
I still like to have an option of walled garden platform where everything is vetted so flashlight app wont dump every single thing that I have on the phone just because it can.
That would be a problem if we would have no choice, but that is not the case.
Before smartphones, I was a "tech savvy" computer user. I would install lots of software on my computer from the internet. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend the same for people that looked to me for computer advice. Many people would go to a store and buy a box with a disc in it, which was something you could trust because incentives aligned. Stores would prefer to only carry trustworthy software (in a box) to maintain their reputation as a good store, competitive with other stores. But similarly, I would look to web sites I trusted for my software. The most sophisticated users would look to peer-reviewed, open source software, but this involves knowing either how to review it yourself, or knowing who else to trust as having reviewed it.
Smartphones could've evolved to work like the above, perhaps relying on a USB port for software installs, with options to install directly from developers on the internet, but Apple had already learned from iTunes how to use control to both ensure a pretty good experience for users while also getting a lot of money for it. Google may never have gained enough traction with Android if they didn't build the Play Store and introduce convenience and a sense of trust in that store.
So it's really hard to picture a way that this could've evolved without those stores, such that critical mass was reached on these platforms. It's also hard to envision a strong, competitive alternative. The "masses" choose convenience the vast majority of the time, and they also largely want to trust one source for their software needs. They do not want to figure out whether to trust lots of software providers.
There will always be bad actors who take advantage of concepts like "the open web", so how do you keep things open, but safe and trusted? Can you create a federated system that has "experts you trust" and "peers you trust" and then can go to their recommendations to see which software providers to trust? And wrap that into a pretty tidy interface that everyone can easily adopt? And have the trust system and the device platforms work nicely together to prevent "middle man" attacks?
Sony rootkit springs to mind. The only reason they had the attention it did was that it was so comparatively early in the days of the internet, that consensus on how bad it was was formed by computer literate people. It was also less of an endemic problem. It has nothing to do with aligned incentives.
For a counterexample, Apple has a walled garden that has the properties you want - curated by experts, no sideloading etc. Out and out viruses aren’t common but you still have various kinds of malware that’s hard to remove (and obnoxious in-app adds and dickish dark patterns)
I think web quality sandboxing for installed apps would mitigate security issues sufficiently to make less restrictive discovery and reputation mechanisms viable again.
> We could be living in a world where no open web ever existed, where everything would be filtered through app stores and closed environments like Facebook (AOL).
We could be living in a world where the App Store never existed, where everyone could install the software of their choice on the devices they own. Using the web instead of real apps is not the solution.
Yeah. This is a point I've been hammering for a long time now. The problems here are not technology related and it's a mistake to look for technological fixes. The same companies that can ban apps from an app store can also ban websites at the drop of a hat, and do. However their behaviour currently when banning websites is considered to be a legitimate use of power, so it attracts no attention.
There is nothing anywhere that would stop Google just adding websites it doesn't like to the SafeBrowsing blacklist. It's just a social convention that they don't. Yet, social conventions have been repeatedly ripped up over the last 10 years or so by political activists who abuse the word "safe" to mean "ideologically acceptable to us". SafeBrowsing is thus a very dangerous thing because Google's management has shown no ability so far to get a grip on the activist wing of their workforce.
Fortunately, there are two mitigating factors.
One is that Chrome at least on desktop lets you disable SafeBrowsing. Of course, they can change that just as easily as they can change the social norms around how it's used.
Another is that Microsoft has built a successful fork of Chromium. I'm using new Edge on macOS right now. It's not merely using Blink, it's actually Chrome but modified and is very serviceable indeed. In fact they just added vertical tabs. Microsoft seems, at least so far, to have avoided the worst of the culture wars and suspicions of bias. If Google did start to abuse Chrome, people who understood what was happening could quickly switch to Edge. Of course, iOS users are out of luck, as always.
However it may be too fatalistic to assume Android apps cannot be distributed outside the store. I've been hearing "people don't install apps anymore" for years now and it's never motivated with real data, just intuitions and anecdotes. People install apps all the time. The biggest breakout hit of the last decade was Minecraft which violated every aspect of hacker groupthink at once: desktop-first, no mobile version, distributed outside app stores, written in Java, no VC backing. I think people talk themselves into believing this isn't possible, but if people want to install an app, they'll do it. Companies that believe they can't survive without app store distribution are typically offering something completely undifferentiated. I don't know how many dating services there are for the polyamorous but I guess there can't be that many. All it takes on Android is to tick a single box and you can install apps (I'm not sure how they can self-update, but nothing stops you dynamically downloading code into your app on Android).
>There are no solutions for suspensions from app stores.
You can download apk files and install them. Windows users used (and still do, I suppose) to just download and install programs for decades. It's not ideal, but it works.
That's a solution as a user that wants to use simple apps, not as as an app based company.
The result there is the same for a lot of em.
It cuts their userbase massively and if part of your appeal is your userbase (social media, dating, multiplayer, etc) or depends on it (spotify and the like can only pay out so little and keep their costs low because they capture a sizeable marketshare) you need to be on there.
As for windows it's rather surprising that Microsoft hasn't tried harder to get more of a walled garden going given they were never shy of anticompetitive behaviour and mostly stems from expectations grandfathered in.
"...allegation that Andy supported a string of mistresses, who would often be loaned to other men in what he described as “an ownership relationship.” The complaint alleges Andy had at least five such mistresses, including one (dubbed “M”) who was “complicit with Rubin in running what appeared to be a sex ring.”
It's funny how the word "traditional" is thrown around. A traditional marriage in the biblical or medieval sense treated women as property, which is probably much closer to what Andy Rubin was up to than a consensual BDSM relationship!
Really the only point I want to make is that we shouldn't lump consensual "non-mainstream" relationships with abusive ones and call it "those freaks over there".
>Google's developer guidelines prohibit apps "that contain or promote ... any content or services intended to be sexually gratifying."
Very reminiscent of the language of the US Comstock Laws which started 148 years ago. One hundred and two years ago, a judge called those laws "haphazard and capricious".
Those words seem to fit in this case. And this is not the Victorian Era. I imagine Google would rather not be called to D.C. again to explain its behavior to a Congress that is unwilling to explicitly define it's expectations.
I sometimes ponder... they won't allow my sex chat app in the store - yet I find many apps are rated mature over 17 or something.. and a few of the top 20 search results for 'sex chat' I believe have an app in the store..
then you see this poly site kicked..
and I wonder if tinder and grindr are handing over a large enough chunk of change where the sex rules do not apply.
I mean a sex chat app is mostly about chatting when little chance of a real world meet up. However tinder and grinder are basically 'let's have real world sex tonight' apps right?
Someone from big G please tell me how to get an app in the store where people can talk about sex. Need a funny name? Need to be able to hand over a ton of money and location data?
I sometimes jest that it's a kind of conspiracy. Especially if being in the store is a ranking signal for any search results.
Of course I don't know, I just ponder these things. I've made a few bookmarks and screenshots with some research a while back, but no time to share today.
Tried to see if it's back in - but from their site that is linked from vice, the link to the play store shows:
Is twitter going further down the block / ban route now?
I also ponder if twitter really does ban everyone that has ever talked about violence how many others will be booted in the weeks ahead. Then where will people go to vote up their favorite songs.
Just some occasional pondering.
edited to add some ' ' - and fix a mispelled word.
As someone who has used tinder in the past, no it’s not exactly what you describe it as. Sure, you might be able to find immediate sex if you are lucky and attractive, but it’s not so easy. Grindr, from what I’ve heard from my gay friends who use it, is a lot more casual.
Most profiles I came across on tinder specifically mentioned that they were not on it for a short term thing.
My understanding of the app comes from several guy friends and many girl-friends that seem to use the app for finding sex tonight.
Also running around as a part time lyft driver for a year or more, in a city that has rampant tourism, I have been quite amazed at how many people were meeting up with or leaving hotels/airbnbs with stories of just got in town and got on tinder and ... with some person from some other random state with same kind of story.
Even though we are bachelorette capital (unofficial) of the country, I have yet to hear about an upcoming wedding that started with a meetup via tinder.
I understand I am a small data point in millions, so this proves nothing - but my limited understanding.
Maybe my add in point would be that it very much depends on where you are as to the expectations of said app usage. And now that I think about this along with your statement and some of the other dating info I have learned from reading HN over the years.. perhaps time of day and location are very important factors.
Certainly tinder usage in a town of 500 is different that the options in a city 3 million. I am now considering that tinder usage at 1am leads to a different type of meetup than say the desires of someone getting on there at 6pm as well.
I'd love to see some stats from them like okcupid use to share.
What ever the percentage, I think we can assume that most people who meet up via tinder probably have sex before wasting too much - as say compared to a dating app like Devout-Christian-Family-Singles or such..
It's been a fairly shared knowledge I think in these parts anyhow, that if you want a relationship go for something like match dot com.. if you are in anything alternative dating wise okcupid, willing accept a percentage of dates will be with seriously crazy people; plentyoffish, really want to meet up tonight and see what happens, Tinder / grindr..
So I think my questioning of these policies is still fair, we don't have a list of explicit lines that google gives app/site makers. We know these things are being used for 'immoral' things - fornication, frequently, likely by the millions.. and it would be easy for google and match group to know when they are illegal as well (adultery) - so it's not a legal or moral thing they are drawing lines with.
It's got to be the money (?) or a small group of googlers that are choosing to be a level or prude in some places and level of give the finger to the church and the gov in others or something.
I remember some years ago when cell phone companies had actual lines drawn on a woman's butt showing how small a bikini could be for premium sms messages - when a tiny bikini was too small or not to not violate - at least those lines were drawn and shared with other for a level playing field.
These days it feels like the big money incumbents have little to fear from google and it's easy for smaller niche apps / groups of people to be shunned and told to open a browser instead.
Which is fine, just some things I think about once in a while.
Not to mention Reddit literally has dead people some places, also lots of sex talk, so how are they exempt from being removed? People like sex, it's a fact, so why are they trying so hard to enforce stuff like this? Is it really that hard to have some type of age verification for NSFW apps?
It's all about money and connections. I remember one of the clients app got banned from a known payment processor and then few months later a similar app was processing payments with that company just fine but it turns out it was created by someone knowing that payment company owners.
Having the centralized app store as the only way to install apps by default was always a mistake, a blot on the elegant "hackability" of Android as a platform. I wish Google's hegemony wasn't so prevalent and common people were at least aware that they can sideload apps on their Android phones.
It is probably possible to sideload only because it's not popular. If people were abandoning the Play Store en masse, I think Google would remove that in no time.
"Polyamory ...is the practice of, or desire for, intimate relationships with more than one partner, with the informed consent of all partners involved"
Sounds good, and has been the case for thousands of years.
But modern dating apps and social media are pushing us back to this practice in quite a big (and informal) way.
Its innate female nature for women to choose the best men (height, fitness, wealth, status, strength), and that's a good thing for the species!
But before the advent of social media and dating apps, they would settle for just average guys too.
Dating apps and social media has made it so that all women can now access that top 20% of men quite easily and completely ignore the bottom 80%.
This has lead to the counterculture rise of red pill, incel, mg-tow, etc.
I'm not on this one side or the other.
I'm just noticing there are more Polyamory type apps and behavior out there now, driven by technology.
Historically, monogamous societies are far more prosperous than harem-based societies. The reason is obvious: monogamy entices the entire male population to invest in their family and nation, have a good career, and build property and wealth. Without monogamy, a large segment of males have no such motivations, and they are uninvolved in society, detached from the future, and more likely to pursue self-pleasing leisure or even crime.
There is also the disease angle. STDs, including common ones like herpes, are a major factor in cognitive decline, early-onset Alzheimers, etc.
This is a strange leap from a (partially true) incel talking point that monogamy is a force for the sexual equivalent of “income distribution” (incels objectify it too much; attractiveness doesn’t really match that well to the [0,10] segment of the real line) by to polyamory, which is a sort of fringe culture. If you look at your HBD/manosphere/whatever sources — I haven’t seen any of that since Nick Land’s blog went silent — you’ll see the word “hypergamy”, which is what you’re thinking of.
Like many things usually dismissed as deplorable because they’re uncomfortable, incel culture is built on some kernels of truth, but the whole edifice is shaky, not true as a whole and not helpful psychologically. It’s really best not to dwell on these things, try to expose yourself to social situations and try to be happy. I’m not genetically arranged so to be a top runner but running is fun. Losing is fun if you just go for things without expectations.
Nope, not in my circle of friends and I didn't even know about Polyamory apps until this article. I've no doubt there are many of them but it is not something that interests me or something I've ever talked about.
Do your friends talk about it? Do any of them use these apps?
> all women can now access that top 20% of men quite easily
How? Surely, many of them are already taken and most will be faithful; after all that has got to be one of the attributes defining them as "best". I don't think its any easier for women than it is for men.
i don’t think that increased access to “top tier” men is the root cause of this feeling. it seems to me like choices for women around partners were largely made for them for most of history. this led to men from wealth and power to define the “good” traits. the traits we defined were largely based on status.
now that access to people with these traits is no longer based on who a woman’s guardian knows, but what’s available in the market a lot of dudes feel left out.
i really think this is an issue men caused, entrenched into our society, and then shot themselves in the foot when they lost control of the market supply.
if you don’t want the 80/20 thing to exist, stop furthering the narrative and push for non-physical traits to have the greatest value. i think an emotionally available, driven and focused, and caring person is way better for a partner than a hot rich one. as long as most people don’t feel that way we are stuck in the system we built ourselves
You're kind of right. A lot of marriages were historically done for reasons other than love. Most women aren't sexually attracted to their husbands but they still needed a provider. Now that women are economic equals to men they have no reason to ever settle for guys they don't like, which is most guys. If you've ever seen a woman use a dating app you know that they're all flooded with dozens of messages from hot guys who would love to have sex with them but would never considering marrying them. So women who don't need to marry average guys are happy to wait their turn for a sexual encounter with a top guy instead of giving a regular guy a chance.
The idea that we have the ability to "push" for what's desirable makes no sense at all and it's not possible.
attraction is almost completely defined by society, and how we talk about desirable traits informs that.
take weight for instance:
in late feudal/early industrial society a heavy set person was seen as very attractive. access to the resources to become fat was hard, so a fat person was rich and the weight conveyed power.
in the same feudal/industrial time pale skin was also seen as very attractive, because it meant the person didn't have to labor outside for a living.
now thin tan people are all the rage, but you're saying we don't decide on what is attractive as a society?
Are men any more attracted to a woman if she's tanned or not? Have they ever been? The status involved changes, and women find status attractive, but men don't care as much when it comes to what to fuck.
And have men ever not appreciated a nice, big ass?
For that matter, there's variance in what people like today; presumably there was before. And yet there are invariants- clear skin, symmetrical face/body plan.
Some of the differences in what's attractive (which breast/ass size is most attractive) also have to do with the life history strategy of the man in question. Pump and dump-oriented guys are more likely to find larger breasts most exciting (you have 10 seconds to pick the most genetically fit woman out of this lineup and 10 minutes to inseminate her; then you'll never see her again. What strategy works? Select for oversized secondary sex characteristics, female equivalent to peacock tails- costly signal of excess resources), whereas slower life-history strategy men will find smaller breasts more attractive and care about women's intelligence more (slow strategy- order, planning, division of labour, stability).
> you're saying we don't decide on what is attractive as a society?
Yes. There’s no “we” who gets to make a conscious decision about these things. Attractive people are not attractive because of some narrative that was constructed.
And that’s just for long term partner preferences. Sexual attraction is almost entirely dependent on biology.
Having never owned a smart phone I am curious if you need an app for this, or could you simply have an old school forum and people visit it on their phones browser? Is that even feasible? Too much friction?
It's certainly not necessary. A lot of apps are literally just the web site packaged up with a call to the built-in browser.
Apps like that are always a little clunky, especially if you want to use native features like the GPS or the camera -- both of which a dating app will want. They are accessible in the browser, but it's not quite seamless.
The experience isn't a forum. You want something a bit more tailored to dating. But it's entirely within the realm of a browser.
So why package it as an app? More than anything I think it's because people expect it. The experience is tuned towards interactions on a mobile device. That isn't a huge difference, but you're trying to compete in a tough market, and they want to feel perfect.
Like the difference between Tinder's "swipe" interaction (left for no, right for yes) versus a couple of buttons. The usability difference is small, but it's iconic. You could mimic it with a browser, but you really want to nail it.
Similarly, having the app right on your front screen rather than as just another bookmark... it makes it feel important. Small things that make a big difference when you're trying to sell an experience.
Experience is critical for a dating app. It's kind of a winner-take-all (or most) situation: the more users you have, the more likely a user will find somebody they want and who wants them. The better it looks, the more likely you'll be the one people want to spend time on.
Most apps could really be Progressive Web Apps, using html css and javascript with local caching and storage. Both angular and react can handle running PWAs as do many other frameworks, and it's not rocket science to make a PWA. Even Parler had a PWA people could use when they got pulled from the store.
The problem is that the extra few steps to install a PWA (which is really just a webpage bookmark you put on your home screen plus some local caching) are a lot of friction. The hilarity after Parler got pulled was non techies trying to describe installing a PWA to each other and failing at it.
You also lose a lot of "organic" search results with a PWA. You don't get the app marketplace searching/related results like Google Play or the Apple Store has if you aren't in the marketplace. If you do both marketplace apps and encouraging people to install PWAs instead of your app, that's now less downloads in the app store and therefore lower rankings. It's doable to make a PWA instead of or in addition to an app, and that means you're still a usable service if you get pulled from stores, but it's not straight forward or perfect right now. The push to make Google and Apple let apps stay in their stores is the wrong push -- instead the push should be for more straight forward PWA support.
Ease of use. Just as most people in the dating scene these days use apps ala Tinder, Match, eHarmony, Her, Bumble, &c this was just a service that specifically catered to those looking to be in poly relationships or to be part of a community of like-minded people (they had overall community experiences built in as well).
This allowed you to have separate accounts searching as a solo, double, or as a couple as well as built in chat and matching systems, traditional apps and forums are not exactly well poised for searching nor focused enough for these sort of relationships especially as most people are against* polyamory in most cases. Most typical forums on the subject only cater to the sexual aspect, even if not intended, and tend to bring in less than stellar users. This was an attempt to focus more on the relationship aspect (definitely more than the approved Grindr)
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
I did elicit laughter from very young people who saw me single-finger punching into a flip-top. I do recall when "portable" phones were carried in a suitcase. I'm not sure what order of magnitude change we have now with our phones, but certainly more than 10x. And since I also recall, with distaste, updating some dumb Banyan Vines email map on a daily basis, Gmail seems to me rather brilliantly > 10x.
Since a lot of platforms had an app version besides the website, people now expect it. Maybe app stores have a better reputation than the www does, with all the spam and phising that has been going on. So basically having an app is a way to reach people, and a signal that you keep up with the times.
This is the dangerous flip side to having two players be the gatekeepers as to what can and cannot be an app (yes, I'm aware on android apps can be installed outside google play technically... but the audience is tiny).
With Parler, for example, I remember reading tons of posts in support of taking the app down. But that same process can be easily used to silence apps like these.
This has nothing to do with Parler. Google has been auto-banning apps based on stupid blacklists and ML magic for years because they don't have a human review process (or if they do, it doesn't do good work). A couple of weeks ago it hit a Matrix chat app and it's been restored now. The shit storm will now lead to someone at Google escalating this and the app will be back soon. I'm pretty sure that banning Parler was a decision where a lot of people where involved.
Taking down Parler was certainly not justified, but I agree it was one step down the slippery slope that normalizes this kind of brazen gatekeeping on essential public utilities like app stores. Facebook played a much larger role in the planning of the riot at the capitol riots (https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/02/07/shery...) and they faced no consequences, presumably because they share the same political culture as Google and Apple.
It's also a gross overreaction to shut down Parler because the vast majority of people using Parler or supporting Trump did not participate in the riot. Tens of thousands were in DC that day for various rallies and protests, and thousands stayed outside the barricades at the capitol. A few hundred went past them as protesters (rioters?), but committed no additional crimes beyond trespassing, which is the same as past incidents at the capitol like the riots at Brett Kavanaugh hearings (https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/405500-212-protesters-to...). Ultimately only 10 were associated with the Oath Keepers (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/29/us/oath-keepe...).
And on the balance, Parler had 20 million users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler) and Trump had north of 70 million supporters. It's not justifiable to stop all those people from having a voice. How was it at all justifiable for AOC to demand Parler be shutdown, for tech companies to immediately fall in line by banning the app, and for other companies to also participate in a seemingly coordinated deplatforming effort? It's also chilling to consider that a sitting legislator can call for the shutdown of the speech of private citizens - that amounts to the government coercing bans of speech from private organizations, and is a first amendment violation.
Either way, here we are, in a world where people depend on their mobile phones as utilities, but are serviced by companies that are not regulated as public utilities. They need to either stop being gatekeepers, and act neutrally, or they need to be regulated to enforce that requirement. After all, they are effectively immune to competition.
> How was it at all justifiable for AOC to demand Parler be shutdown, for tech companies to immediately fall in line
That's not what happened and you know it. AOC wasn't a singular voice, there were lots of people calling for Parler to be shut down.
I'm not going to engage with the rest of it, but this point is important because it's being used to demonize another human being. You're repeating a narrative without scrutinizing it, please be more critical.
I am not American or follow US politics that much, but did she ask for Parler to be shutdown? If she did, even if others did as well, it should be ok to point her out on this. Specially (from what I understand from seeing some of her twitter posts on Reddit) if she is very vocal on Twitter (reminded me of accusing Ted Cruz of trying to assassinate her tweet) about these things and can rally support for it through social media.
> If she did, even if others did as well, it should be ok to point her out on this
That exactly my point, the original comment points her out as the only or the main voice. That is just not true, it paints a skewed picture. She was either joining the choir of voices or preaching to it.
The goal of that characterisation is to demonize this one person into the source of this action. (ironically often combined with an irrational faceless "the left" to dehumanize further)
We can talk about what the influence is of a person in that position and whether it's ethical to join in such a call but that is a completely different can of worms and not what I was commenting on.
Stacking "this person did it" with "this person abused their power" is irresponsible without examining each statement.
But as a government representative, even if just a voice in a chorus, to promote something that may be against people's rights (I am not saying it is, just that some people may consider it - freedom of speech) and to directly influence companies to do what they think is right even (apparently) without any legal justification, a breach of her duties? If she is the most visible voice (social media breadth can also be used against you) shouldn't she also be one of the most singled out people?
In my country, even if the party agrees, usually who makes the comments more visibly (usually on TV) gets the 'blame' or ire of people. This is pretty normal and part of their duties as government representatives (otherwise they don't go to the media when they don't want the scrutiny of their words)
edit: Suppose the entire democrats are for doing something, but she tweets to her millions of followers about it, which creates social pressure from her followers for a company to do something, even if the entire democratic wing agrees, she as the 'inciter' shouldn't she also get the brunt of the ire? Or it is only for the good things you get credit (AOC defends better minimum wage, or student debt cancelation) but the bad ones no (democrats want to shut down parlour) ?
This is something I saw on US and European news. If 'America' did something 'bad', headlines would say 'Trump did this', if it was 'good', headlines would say 'America did this'. You can see this today, now a bit reversed, on cnn politics website. There are two positive headlines, both mention Harris and Biden by name, while the negative uses White House.
Is there not an open APK repository anyone can submit to? It could be a community run endeavor and research project even. We could develop software to detect APKs which exhibit possible malicious behavior and give them scores.
Worth noting that fdroid is an app and a couple of (default) repos, but you can add additional repos to the same app (like Debian; it ships with all-FOSS repos, but you can add more and apt will happily pull nonfree software from them).
Do you know any non-FOSS repos that can be added to FDroid? On my devices that don't have Google Play Services, I end up going to the APK Pure and APK Mirror websites which are super sketchy and loaded with tracking and ads.
To me, finding and installing apps is one piece. The most important piece, however, is updating the apps. For me, at least. Aurora handles this, and uses the play store as source.
The company I work for has forbidden the use of Google and their services such as GCP etc. due to how they treat their Play Store developers and other customer, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc. The business risk is too high when you rely on Google's services.
It's ok, google has the last word on what apps they allow on their platform. If this app wants, they can build their own mobile operating system, sell billions of phones all over the world, then sell their app on their os. Or they could also try what Epic games tried (and failed). They can build their own alternate play store and host their app on it. Google is not obligated to provide a platform to everyone and anyone.
In legal terms yes, but monopolies should be regulated for a good reason. How about your water supply company cutting you off, because they don't like that poster on your house?
The mobile OS market is a duopoly and only because it's the closes thing to a monopoly they can have without being broken up. Hence Google and Apple can have such high fees which sucks for consumers and app developers, etc.
Within their own platform (the android app market) they are a monopoly.
Telcos must for example provide net neutrality and are usually not duopolies even on the same country, not to mention world wide. Are there any significant difference between them and app stores?
Companies are not people, they don't have "rights". My car or my computer don't have rights. Call me humanist.
I can only speak for myself but when I say "private company can do whatever it wants", it's because they have been doing whatever they want for years - to the complete apathy of the general public. Every time platforms banned and/or censored sexual content and sex workers, even going as far as marking innocuous words like "lesbian" as porn to be filtered (I will never forget Tumblr doing this) - how many people "showed up"?
I understand that the media coverage of Parler's ban in particular was huge and that's why so many people suddenly give a damn, but it's honestly more than a little frustrating to see people talk and act as though it's the first thing that's ever been cracked down on for moral reasons.
This. At the time Tumblr banned adult content, HN found it mildly amusing considering how much of Tumblr was adult content, maybe a bit of a shame for kinky people but definitely not a rights issue. Then they came for the hate speech...
People pretend that this is something new. This has been going on for a while and it wasn't in the news because those who are complaining right now weren't directly at the receiving end. The same people who went around championing how it was ok to support "no cake for gay marriage" as it wasn't affecting them.
Hi, they are well within their rights (as usual) but we can still say it's bs and makes no sense.
The difference with the things you're likely defending is that this app does no harm and is only being blocked for puritanical reasons. Ethically they are similar but not the same.
Then maybe it's time to make laws that prohibit Google and Apple from wielding this power.
We're letting the majority of customers that are okay with these decisions punish the minority.
Platforms already wield undue economic power and impose stresses on small players that the utopia of pre-smartphone web didn't have. Dealing with these fat clowns is a joke. Natural technology by itself imposes no such limits. They've enshrined themselves in market position and laws, and they're printing monkey without adding benefit or developing the features app developers are driving.
It's time Apple and Google stopped being marketplaces.
Sure, I'll agree with most of that. I think most people do, including those on the other side of the political spectrum from you. This is why the binary political system in the US is insanely ineffective.
> Dealing with these fat clowns is a joke
Could you clarify this? I'm not following this sentence.
Platforms can't deny service. Freedom depends on individual choice.
The ACLU defended Parler. Most of the Capitol Hill planning happened on Facebook, anyway.
I'm a Democrat and voted for Biden/Ossoff/Warnock, but we can't censor Republican and conservative websites. That's letting power get to our heads, and baking in this sort of status quo will bite us down the road when other entities want to censor us.
Speak ill of foreign governments? I could see a world where that's prohibited. Let's not let it happen.
Freedom of speech, freedom to run your software on your own device, and rules for the platforms that enhance both of these liberties.
What sort of political crowd is happy with "private company can do whatever it wants"?
Both the right and left get targeted by abuse of corporate/monopoly power. Both Democrat and Republican state Attorney Generals have filed antitrust lawsuits against Google.
I've said it before, and I'll say it now: private companies can ban what they want! It's good for corporations to have ethics, even if I don't agree with said ethics, whether it's banning Gab or this.
It's their constitutional right, and it's a responsibility that comes with having the power they do.
no.... we put a limit into what private companies can discriminate against. Private taxis would routinely refuse you service because of your ethnic background
it still can happen, but it is illegal for good reasons
There's a constitutional amendment for that specific carve-out, though. The constitution permits that limit, it doesn't what many in this thread are proposing.
1) Decline to recognize thst Google is in any way a special case, and so treat Google like any other private business, like your brother-in-laws little one-man coffee shop.
2) Recognize that Google is in any way special and different from some other random small private business.
Let's say you subscribe to 1) :
On the surface level, being denied service in the app store because your app caters to people who are poly, is like being denied service in the general store because you're black, or Chinese, Or Jewish.
Your freedom as a business operator is that you are free not to operate a business if you can't stomach the thought of having to sell flour to black people.
So, if you think Google is just a private business like any other and with the same rights as any other, then they must offer flour to the black people too. They can't mysteriously be out of flour just for some people based on race, religion, sex, etc.
But of course, whether anyone subscribes to it or not, 2) is in effect. Google is not just a private business like a motorcycle repair shop or a hair salon.
A marketplace owner doesn't just own a business that must service everyone equally, they actually own the street that all possible businesses and all possible customers must use. That makes the marketplace owner an order of magnitude more liable for their actions, in the way that the state is for the ordinary phyical street.
Now their decisions not only abuse an individual customer (an app developer) but exert control over entire populations.
It is ENTIRELY reasonable and rational and fair to have strict limits, high standards, and onerous even draconian oversight on anyone in any such position.
The state weilds that same sort of control over ordinary streets and businesses and customers, and because of that, the state is actually very limited in what it can do, and must always be able to justify why it does anything. (in theory anyway, on paper anyway). If the state wants to say that some business can't operate, it has to be prepared to defend that decision legally.
Google and other large operations have set up environments where they have state-level control over state-level populations with corner coffee shop-level autonomy.
> On the surface level, being denied service in the app store because your app caters to people who are poly, is like being denied service in the general store because you're black, or Chinese, Or Jewish.
No it's not! Your race is innate, sexuality is innate, that isn't.
Your argument is so transparently ridiculous that I highly doubt you're operating in good faith.
The color of my toothbrush is also a choice. What business or organization or government office is, or should be, allowed to discriminate on that basis?
You want to rent a new appartment. You have your money and job and credit score and reputation as a good tennant all good to go. But the owner needs to know what color your toothbrush is, and apparently yours is the wrong color.
I wonder what whether you consider religion innate or a choice? I somehow just magically predict that you currently benefit from the fact that other people allow you something you don't allow other people.
Using your clearly not ridiculous and clearly good faith argument, I should be free to, say, run a motor vehicles office in your city, and deny you a drivers license because I consider any sincere belief in any religion to be evidense of mental incapacity, and for everyone's safety we can not have irrational people operating vehicles around other people. They might decide that God told them to run someone over, or they might not value life properly because they don't think dying is really dying.
I suspect you don't think I should be allowed to make that kind of call over other people.
Tell me more about ridiculous arguments. It's truly fascinating.
Literally? No, but the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the constitution otherwise, at least over the last century. It would take a well-worded amendment to explicitly state that certain organizations of persons are different from persons in general.
The US Constitution only applies within the US, it offers no rights in other territories and Google's actions might be in violation with laws in those territories
They of course have that right, but they have made a choice to expand into new territories and have to obey those laws
They've knowingly entered other markets and if they fail to follow the law there, they're on the hook for it - even if they decide to leave after the fact
I understand you support Google's right to choose where they do their business - I support that as well. Do you also support sovereign states to pursue legal action against a corporate entity, that willfully breaks their laws?
If Google would rather leave than uphold my rights, then I'll be happy to see them leave
The problem is the iPhone and Android platforms are the only two ways to reach many customers. Web isn't first class, and there's no open standard or easy way to distribute native apps.
1990-2010's Internet didn't have this problem.
Nobody cares if Xbox bans your game. There are a dozen plus other platforms. But if Apple or Google say no, you're toast.
We need a bill of rights to protect us against megaplatforms.
> The problem is the iPhone and Android platforms are the only two ways to reach many customers.
Neither has a monopoly, or anything close to a monopoly. Duopolies are legal.
> Web isn't first class, and there's no open standard or easy way to distribute native apps.
This isn't a bad thing. People who want native apps from a source other than Apple or Google can pretty easily get them: Cydia's existed longer than the App Store has, and Google makes it easy to sideload anything.
The world doesn't owe you a business model, and you can't take away people's rights because you want a better way to sell your wares.
This shit we have to put up with shouldn't be legal! I dream for the day that the DOJ forces Apple and Google to make an interoperable native platform. Or when it forces both to spin off their app marketplaces. Or requires them to allow easy installs from the web.
> People who want native apps from a source other than Apple or Google can pretty easily get them
That's not at all correct. You can count the percentage of people that can do this on one hand.
> The world doesn't owe you a business model, and you can't take away people's rights because you want a better way to sell your wares.
The world doesn't owe you clean air, either. But thankfully we've decided to artificially limit business to make the world a better place.
> This shit we have to put up with shouldn't be legal! I dream for the day that the DOJ forces Apple and Google to make an interoperable native platform. Or when it forces both to spin off their app marketplaces. Or requires them to allow easy installs from the web.
You're begging for a way to enforce capitalism while taking away Apple and Google's right to practice capitalism. You're not promoting this altruistically, you're promoting it because you want to make money. Why should anyone support your right to make money over Apple's or Google's?
> You can count the percentage of people that can do this on one hand.
Anyone can do it, so long as they have access to a search engine.
> The world doesn't owe you clean air, either. But thankfully we've decided to artificially limit business to make the world a better place.
You're arguing for this as a way to limit businesses in favor of your businesses, though. You're just passing the buck! What you're advocating for helps no one aside from you (and people in your profession) and hurts consumers.
I don't like using Google or Apple products, so I don't. Vote with your wallet, don't vote for taking away rights.
>You're begging for a way to enforce capitalism while taking away Apple and Google's right to practice capitalism.
Capitalism and it's benefits isn't necessarily self-sustaining and enforcing in the same way that total democracy can still have a party participating democratically to end it.
If you allow every anticompetitive market practice depending on the sector you quickly loose the benefit of open competition that one might expect from capitalism.
> What you're advocating for helps no one aside from you (and people in your profession) and hurts consumers.
If people in his profession include the countless companies developing stuff for these platforms then obviously yeah and that's not a bad thing.
If Google and apple can kill competition if they enter a market on their platform then that reduces competition.
If they can use their platform to prevent competition in a segment of it where they are established then that stops competition.
Competition serves the consumer but is not inherent.
The high fees that google can ask due to their market dominance get passed on to the consumer and thus do not benefit the consumer.
The market dominance is something they can retain and enforce with minimal competition due to a mix of their clout and anticompetitive practices.
Funny, "The world doesn't owe you a business model" is exactly what I would say to google and apple about their app stores.
Maybe even the full "The world doesn't owe you a business model, and you can't take away people's rights because you want a better way to sell" even though that invites unproductive sidetracking about to what extent a free market is a right.
> People who want native apps from a source other than Apple or Google can pretty easily get them: Cydia's existed longer than the App Store has, and Google makes it easy to sideload anything.
It might be easy for tech-savvy people but not for the average customer. Installing Cydia on an iPhone requires jailbreaking, I think. Sideloading is easier but you have to jump through a few hoops to be able to install apps.
> The world doesn't owe you a business model, and you can't take away people's rights because you want a better way to sell your wares.
I may be misunderstanding this but how does this take away people's rights?
> It might be easy for tech-savvy people but not for the average customer.
Having domain knowledge is pretty helpful in everything. People who don't know what they're doing shouldn't play with explosives, for example. Plenty of ten year olds have jailbroken their devices, just check the jailbreak reddit. If they can do it, anyone can. Just read about it first. Epic Games got hundreds of thousands of little kids to sideload their app on Google's operating system.
> I may be misunderstanding this but how does this take away people's rights?
Forcing someone to host something takes away their right to free speech.
Monopolies are also legal. But it's not unusual for industries which are dominated by a small number of players (ie monopolies or oligopolies) to face additional regulation or regulatory action aimed at preventing them from abusing that position, especially when the service provided is viewed as "essential" in some way. I don't think it's an unreasonable position to hold that the app stores should be subject to this type of regulatory oversight.
private does not mean not public. private reflects ownership, not public dependence on a service. there's a whole class of private enterprises which can't do almost anything just because they want to - they're called utilities. water, electricity, garbage collection, internet search, software distribution come to mind as good examples of utilities.
See now here's the thing. I don't care who is "along side". No really. I don't. It's not that interesting. There will always be a total bastard who agrees with you. So what?
I don't like prejudice. I don't like hatred of people and all the names it goes by but this makes zero difference to me.
I recommend acting on principle and then not caring at all about who agrees. I really admire and respect the mostly Jewish ACLU lawyers who defended American Nazis' rights. Actual swastika wearing Nazis! Defended by Jewish lawyers. Because Nazis rights are your rights and my rights. I know nowadays the catch cry would most likely be "You're literally sticking up for nazis!" No. No! They stuck up for /your/ rights to criticize nazis and march about it.
A bunch of Jewish lawyers with close family ties to the holocaust trauma in a very personal way /still/ did that on principle. I find it inspiring courage and unwavering commitment to doing the right thing. That kind of heroism is worth considering every now and then. And for the record, no, I do not like nazis at all, in any way, either.
Various other hideous groups take the place of the Nazis at times. Westboro Baptist Church, "terrorists", drug-pushers, serial-killers etc etc. You should still have your principles and see their rights as yours when your rights are weakened because "they" are completely unlovable.
Edit: it unfortunately looks like you've been using HN primarily if not exclusively for ideological battle for almost a whole year. We ban accounts that do this, regardless of which ideology they're battling for or against. The reason is what I just mentioned: it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
If you'd please review the site guidelines and use HN as intended, we'd be grateful.
There are literal nazis who use the internet. And yet you still want to be able to log on. That is interesting. But a lot less interesting than you seem to think.
I'm sure even you agree with me about something and that fact alone is unlikely to change my mind about whatever-it-is either. And I'm sure literal nazis agree with you about something and probably more than one thing. I counsel you not to care, while noting that doesn't make nazis any better as human beings.
See how it works? Principles. They're just great! Sugar free, non-fattening goodness. Try some today!
I don't know if you are deliberately missing the point in a calculated troll and I'm being an idiot feeding it, but in case you're actually genuine try this one on. It's good to think about.
Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, yeah them, successfully ran civil liberties cases against Jim Crow and also effectively fought racially segregated schools in court.
Do you stick with the idea the civil rights movement was good and to be supported, Jim Crow and segregation bad and to be opposed or abandon that idea because Fred Phelps is also an A1 top-shelf homophobic asshole?
There's the principle. I genuinely don't care that Fred Phelps supports the idea that race should not be important. It has no influence at all my belief. None. Martin Luther King, yes he has had some influence. Phelps? I genuinely don't care what he thinks about it when it comes to my thoughts on racial inequality. I don't count Phelps as a friend, I utterly reject the idea that I have anything to do with him at all.
But if you stick with your principle of making sure you're not on the same side as horrible human beings you've got to abandon supporting the struggle for racial equality.
Or the other choice is to abandon principle altogether. You have no rights, I have no rights, rights are granted whoever is liked and before you can say "How the f&^k did that happen?" The strongest always gets their way and their is no rule of law, no democracy, no freedom and no justice at all. You can probably find some pretty famous examples in history where this has been tried and how that went.
Combating the existence of the horrific is always used to take rights away and leads to something far worse.
And also, as an aside, it so happens that I am not a republican but I do know for a fact that rather a lot of registered republicans literally went to war against nazis and fought them bravely and well with some of those registered republicans paying for it with everything. So in taking on all republicans like you just did, look who you are beside there. The real thing that needed actual war to solve. It's just silly.
Make your argument using logic from facts. Is this a thing that is right and that I support for the right reasons? That's enough. Even when you're being shouted down. Even if some nasty idiot agrees with you for all the wrong reasons.
And here's the kicker, you can still absolutely call out those nasty idiots who claim to agree with you for being what they are! Phelps is a nasty bit of work. The civil liberties movement was and is great. Done. Easy.
But if you stick with your principle of making sure you're not on the same side as horrible human beings you've got to abandon supporting the struggle for racial equality.
A strange argument. You could just call out extremely bigoted people, who sometimes sneak into well-intentioned projects in order to get moral cover. where is it written that you have to cede ground to the bigoted person? You allude to this in your final paragraph but frankly, that seems like handwaving rather than really engaging with the issue.
Combating the existence of the horrific is always used to take rights away and leads to something far worse.
Extremely questionable. It seems to me that this justification is often raised in lieu of engaging with a deeply unpleasant subject.
If you check "yes" next to showdead on your settings page you can see what I was responding to, which I'm pretty sure you've missed here. Dang taken exception and actions in this thread so it's best not to piss him off if possible so we probably should leave it and I've left this to the next day to give cool off a chance etc.
> It seems to me that this justification is often raised in lieu of engaging with a deeply unpleasant subject.
I go exactly and completely the other way with that.
Engaging in discussions of rights. In this case whether its ok to arbitrarily deny access to a huge section of the market to a developer without explanation, recourse or anything remotely resembling due process. With rights it tends to be the other way around entirely. Hence the length and painstaking nature of my contributions to this thread.
"These people are awful, oppose them" And you look and they are awful so think no further about it. Don't engage at all beyond that.
As opposed to engaging with something that /is/ very deeply unpleasant and necessary. "Our rights are also the rights of people we greatly and deeply dislike because they turn our stomachs. If we are to have rights, these people we find reprehensible must have the same rights or they are not actually rights at all." Which led to me citing the example of Jewish lawyers at the ACLU with close proximity to the massive trauma of the holocaust defending rights they believed in _even_ when the test case was for Nazis. That's engaging very, very deeply with a very, very deeply unpleasant subject. And they did that and did it well despite the fact it must have been just horribly and deeply unpleasant having to explain that point of view to relatives who survived the holocaust and know what the insides of those death camps looked like when they were operational. Imagine doing it. Imagine explaining that.
So yeah, the exact opposite. Engaging deeply with rights is unpleasant. Throwing your hands up and saying "to hell with these idiots, I don't care, they're awful!" is not engaging at all. (And it is always a very tempting response that plays well to our emotions.)
If you check "yes" next to showdead on your settings page you can see what I was responding to, which I'm pretty sure you've missed here.
I have had showdead on since about 2010.
Which led to me citing the example of Jewish lawyers at the ACLU with close proximity to the massive trauma of the holocaust defending rights they believed in _even_ when the test case was for Nazis.
This interview is quite interesting because it includes discussion of Glasner (the legal theoretician you are picking as an example) being confronted by a Polish (& Jewish) Holocaust survivor who had moved to Skokie and did not care to repeat the failed tactic of forbearance.
"Our rights are also the rights of people we greatly and deeply dislike because they turn our stomachs. If we are to have rights, these people we find reprehensible must have the same rights or they are not actually rights at all."
This is a circular argument, which ignores the fact that the people in question define themselves by their specific intention of removing the rights of others. This idea that the best way to fight Nazis is to set a superior moral example has repeatedly proven a failure. It's not deep engagement, it's inflexible absolutism that clings to a fine general idea (rights for everyone) rather than examining its limitations and developing a system for responding to the breach thereof. I'm also in favor of personal liberty against authoritarianism and institutions like prisons in general, but this has limits because some people have a demonstrated propensity for severe and asymmetrical violence.
You know, we have abundant examples of self-professed Nazis committing multiple murders, as well as documentary evidence of Nazi strategists offering both rationales and recipes for doing so. They consider themselves to be in a war for racial survival and have racked up quite the body count in recent years, as you are no doubt aware. And while they're widely reviled, they're still treated with great forbearance - I'm not aware of any any mass murders of neo Nazis, and though a lot of them have been sent to prison lately in the USA, its on the basis of specific crimes already committed.
In my view, once someone states an intention of systematically exterminating other people on categorical grounds, they've renounced any commitment to universal rights and so give up any moral claim thereon. Parading around with a Nazi flag is equivalent to threatening fatal harm to others, notwithstanding a lack of specificity on the method and timing. Arguing that this is nevertheless protected speech is equivalent to saying 'we require innocent blood to be shed before acting, and turns the moral concept of free speech into a grotesque human sacrifice cult. It would be bad enough if this manifested purely as martyrdom, but many free speech absolutists have (without thinking it through) decided that it's OK for other people to be sacrificed on the alter of absolute liberty.
it must have been just horribly and deeply unpleasant having to explain that point of view to relatives who survived the holocaust
No doubt, but far short of the unpleasantness of actually being brutalized or killed by people who loudly announced their intention of doing that. I don't see any free speech absolutists crashing Nazi meetings crying 'kill me first before you commit a worse transgression.'
This was egregious and not cool. Please don't take HN threads into flamewar, and especially please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.
I have never argued that we have used the term whiteliste or blacklist for a long time.
What I am arguing against is that the author of the comment suggests in a passive aggressive way that the above commenter using the term whitelist is somewhat backwoodish while the majority of society ('we') has progressed to a preferable wording. This is simply not true and it is offensive.
Completely independant from the discourse whether the proposed change of wording makes sense or is of any benefit I refuse to stand by when self-righteous people try to over generalise and try to force their point of view onto 'us'.
Language does not change by dictating the change or by forcing it onto others by derogating them, as has happened in this example ('we use the better word, you are so backwards').
Language is a convention that gradually changes through a process called speaking.
If you prefer the terms banlist and allowlist, then by all means use it. It might also be ok to simply state in a polite and unoffensive manner that oneself would prefer these terms.
If I hear these terms often enough there is a good chance I'll pick it up. I have zero stake in keeping the terms whitelist or blacklist over the proposed terms banlist and allowlist.
All the same to me.
It is simply not ok to offend someone with the intention of enforcing non offensive language to them.
I'm not a huge fan of the way it was stated - my response shows how I tend to frame the discussion - but at a certain point you do have to be an activist about other people's usage of language.
While I would not say someone using blacklist or whitelist today is the same as someone using a racial slur, it took people actively admonishing others for using racial slurs to push them further and further out of common use.
I think it is totally fair to say that using them is backwards, and that we should progress to using terms that don't place negative connotations around words that are the color of peoples' skin. I wouldn't say that someone doing something that is backwards makes them as an individual backwards, however - I've got plenty of habits that are backwards. I try to rectify them - sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don't. I don't feel personally attacked by someone commenting on those things when they happen, however, and instead take it as further reinforcement that there's always room for personal growth.
> at a certain point you do have to be an activist about other people's usage of language
You don't! That's the key insight of multiculturalism - it's totally okay that others don't think or act or speak the same way you do, and there's no need for you to impose your own cultural norms on them. The only alternative to multiculturalism is monoculturalism, where everyone struggles to make their culture dominant and we have to meekly follow whoever wins the struggle.
> at a certain point you do have to be an activist about other people's usage of language.
Well, part of that game is people getting pissed off that you want to police their word choices. Don't be surprised that some of us will become more offensive in response to attempts at sanitizing control. You'd have to be a retard to disregard that factor ;P
I live in a country which has none of the racial tensions present in the US. There may be some social tensions, but they're not along the black-white divide and there is no history of black slavery here.
So why should I have external forces impose on my use of the English language, when those forces are concerned exclusively with what is happening in the US. Especially when what I am saying has 0 racial connotations.
Meaning might be mostly relative, but you can't push all responsibility onto the speaker. As a speaker, I can't be held responsible for what you're hearing from your bubble and you're obviously doing 0 effort to meet me halfway.
So we can no longer use words that are colors inside of an idiom incase people think you are talking about race? You have to find some kind of line of reasonability. Sure, are there lots of remnants of racism/sexism rooted around our culture. But does that mean just nuke anything that has a color in it?
Heck, you aren't even thinking of the consequences of your actions suddenly turning non racist words into having racist meanings. What do you think will happen post "blacklist" "culture"? You go from 100% of the population using the word "blacklist" with literally 0 race connotations, to maybe 80-90% of the culture using ban or block list, while some 5-10% of the country either keeps saying blacklist or starts using n*ggerlist because you have now added some new racism into the language.
Want some really really recent examples? "Banning" the use of retard, now has everyone calling each other autists. Which is waaaay worse lol
We should likely avoid putting negative connotations to words that correspond with the colors of peoples' skin, yes.
Does every person with black skin care about the use of blacklist or whitelist? Of course not. Do some? Of course.
If some percentage of the country moves to be actively racist in their usage of the word, well, it becomes quite clear who they are, and we've got plenty of other remedies for dealing with them. Everywhere I have ever worked active racism was a terminable offense, and using slurs like that would make it readily apparent who was being actively racist. It becomes a readily apparent red flag for anyone dealing with them.
By no means do I think this sort of change solves all of the issues faced by underprivileged groups in America or around the world, but it's an easy thing to do that can make an incremental improvement in the lives of people that can use it.
Nobody has "black" or "white" skin. I'm no word historian but I'm willing to bet that the association of white/black with positive/negative is far older than the slang usage to refer to skin colors; certainly more deeply baked in the language. I wouldn't even be surprised if the metaphorical meanings informed the skin color usage, due to racism. And you'll never eliminate that metaphor from the language, not without doing excessive cultural violence[0]. If you have a problem with the overlap, better to deprecate "black" and "white" as skin color terms at all.
I have nothing to lose other than the fact that I am allowing my language to be policed by individuals who are arbitrarily pattern matching words so that they can pat themselves on the back for being "good".
The unconscious bias you speak of does not exist I believe. I think that the "everything is political" rhetoric has simply amplified the inane pattern matching of individuals who are obsessed with pushing this agenda. They think they see patterns that don't exist and try to justify their intent with vague arguments about unconscious bias.
For the same reason I don't want Google to tell me if I can use the polymory dating app.
Not a native speaker and tech community is global, as is HN. Everyone doesn't have to dance in order to satisfy white activists from Silicon Valley and their current social dogmas.
While this is a pithy response, even if Samuel Hacker wasn't fictitious, it would still not be a particularly good one.
In the United States alone, there are more than 40 million black people. You do understand the difference between 40+ million English speakers who must hear and see the color of their skin be used in a negative connotation vs. what would be incredibly obscure connotations if it was even true?
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Honestly, if we could get a group of people, 4chan?, to try to complain about apps and get lots of them banned maybe there'd be more legal pressure to stop Google and Apple being the arbiters of what's allowed on your phone.
I've been banned from Google Play Developer portal since 2015 because I had an app that accessed an undocumented API of a 3rd party service: "we have determined that your app interferes with or accesses another service or product in an unauthorized manner." I had two different apps using the same API so I got 2 strikes at once and was immediately banned.
I've tried multiple times to contact Google to get my account restored, several times in the past few years since it's been so long, but they don't even respond and it's impossible to get a hold of a human.