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1. Breaking rules When the article starts out with the story of Youtube, you read about the lists the moderators working off of to keep certain materials out

by dba7dba 11y ago

1. Breaking rules When the article starts out with the story of Youtube, you read about the lists the moderators working off of to keep certain materials out of Youtube. And something was missing on the list. Any guess? Yes, copyrighted material. I knew a guy who used to work at a competitor of Youtube. That startup was started by a Hollywood veteran (naturally), meaning he was very conscious of respecting copyrights. Youtube didn't care about copyrights, which started the upward spiral of more viewers, more uploads, and more viewers. The end story is that Youtube took off, being bought off at a billion and making the founders rich. Mixed feelings about this. Break rules to beat others in the game, and you end up winning. And most will agree this is not cool. And yet, because of rule breakers (some, not all), our world is advancing. A comment I read in a comment section, that I saw that was funny. "When someone else cheats, it's adultery. When I cheat, it's romance" After this this story, I've come up with following: "When someone else break rules, it's cheating. When I break rules, it's innovation" 2. No chance for moderation And then there's the other part in the world of moderation, in which certain stories are not even given a chance for moderators to review. NYT (New York Times) has abundant and quality comments on news articles. However, if you hang out there long enough, you will notice a trend. Certain stories that don't help the goal of NYT don't get comments section at all. And if a story's comment section gets filled up with comments that seem to be hurting the agenda of that particular article, the comments section closes rather quickly. And then there's Fox News. They don't even allow any way to post comments. This kind of social engineering has been going on since humans became social animals, but with technology in the mix, those in power get more powerful.

erichocean 11y ago
> "When someone else break rules, it's cheating. When I break rules, it's innovation" IIRC pg wrote an essay defending that concept, more-or-less (and where by "I", he meant "startups").
CM30 11y ago
Your point about breaking the rules to become successful is an old, old trick by community managers. I knew an awful lot of large forums that originally took off by posting ROMs/torrents/music/film downloads and then carefully excised them when the site had tens of thousands of members and might actually be visible to the copyright owners. It's a pretty good way to become large rather quickly, since illegal or legal questionable content brings in a lot of visitors. Then you just remove it, and watch the network effect/inflated stats lure people to your site. "IIRC pg wrote an essay defending that concept, more-or-less (and where by "I", he meant "startups"). " I also heard it mentioned as 'asking for forgiveness rather than permission'. Or more cynically, get big enough that you can afford to fight the inevitable lawsuits.

by dba7dba 11y ago

erichocean 11y ago

> "When someone else break rules, it's cheating. When I break rules, it's innovation" IIRC pg wrote an essay defending that concept, more-or-less (and where by "I", he meant "startups").

CM30 11y ago

Your point about breaking the rules to become successful is an old, old trick by community managers. I knew an awful lot of large forums that originally took off by posting ROMs/torrents/music/film downloads and then carefully excised them when the site had tens of thousands of members and might actually be visible to the copyright owners. It's a pretty good way to become large rather quickly, since illegal or legal questionable content brings in a lot of visitors. Then you just remove it, and watch the network effect/inflated stats lure people to your site. "IIRC pg wrote an essay defending that concept, more-or-less (and where by "I", he meant "startups"). " I also heard it mentioned as 'asking for forgiveness rather than permission'. Or more cynically, get big enough that you can afford to fight the inevitable lawsuits.