11 ms·

AntiPolygraph.org appears to have been “de-listed” from Google on key searches

330 points by ap_org 8y ago

PSZD 8y ago
Is it appropriate to rank extremely high for something you're directly opposed to? Consider other polarized topics like abortion - should sites enlightening the user on why it is murder, instead of providing useful information, be presented front and center? I'm fairly sure this has come up as a controversy recently, but can't think of the exact topic. Certainly Google could decide whether it is appropriate on a case-by-case basis, but at that point it starts to be very explicitly political. Once you've stripped away the fig leaf of neutrality, their monopoly would look outrageous to a significant portion of the population.
- mmt 8y ago
  > Is it appropriate to rank extremely high for something you're directly opposed to? I'd say that's an important question, which I would answer with "yes", so long as it's understood that "rank extremely high" doesn't imply "at the exclusion of all others". > should sites enlightening the user on why it is murder, instead of providing useful information, be presented front and center Possibly. Though, I fear you may have presented a strawman (while betraying which way you, personally, are "polarized" on abortion). The question of what is useful information depends entirely on the keywords the user entered. Just the single word "abortion" could easily, reasonably, be understood to mean a request for information of general interest on the topic, including moral implications. On the other hand, it would be a stretch to expect that someone would want, say, instructions on how better to administer sedation during the procedure, absent additional keywords. Of course, there are going to be searches like "get an abortion" that are far more ambiguous than "get an abortion in my area", but I think it's better for something like a search engine (or government or society for that matter) to err on the side of inclusion than suppression. > Certainly Google could decide whether it is appropriate on a case-by-case basis, but at that point it starts to be very explicitly political Indeed, and that's a can of worms they likely don't want or need to open.
  - PSZD 8y ago
    > while betraying which way you, personally, are "polarized" on abortion I'm curious what side you think I fall on, seems to me it could be argued either way. I have no strong opinion on it and picked it purely because it's an evocative example. Perhaps too evocative! Some other examples might be terrorism, animal rights activism, transgender-as-mental-illness. Including both sides can be legitimately and understandably very upsetting for some people; in other cases we demand equal representation. Are situations like OP's an inevitable product of the tyranny of an algorithm, one that errs to the safer side of excluding results?
    - mmt 8y ago
      > I'm curious what side you think I fall on That abortion is not murder, as you made the example of the presentation of such an argument in opposition to the presentation of something "useful". I realize, of course, that the word could have been meant more narrowly (such as "strictly pragmatic"), but that tends be less likely, even on here. > legitimately and understandably very upsetting for some people; in other cases we demand equal representation. [...] > errs to the safer side of excluding results? That's the the thing, though, I don't believe in a "right not to be offended" or a "right not to be upset" (legitimately, understandably, or otherwise). As such, I don't believe that these divisive cases ought to be treated any differently than the other cases you mention. None of this is to say that controversial topics don't attract a distinct problem. They do: trolls (for various definitions of the term). However, I believe that's more an issue with the quality of the content rather than the content itself, since a troll could (sometimes just as easily) take either side.
      - PSZD 8y ago
        I do agree with this, but think there's enough societal pressure these days that it's very hard for a for-profit company to do.
        mmt 8y ago
        I'm not sure being for-profit has that much to do with societal pressure as being ad-revenue-driven. However, this profit (or revenue) above all else model is something Google's unusual stock voting structure was supposed to address.
astura 8y ago
1) There's no such thing as "the first page of results on Google." Your results depend on your location, previous searches, etc. 2) This site seems to think this is some mass conspiracy to remove sites critical of polygraphs, yet when I Google "polygraph" the vast majority of results I get are critical pieces. Maybe those sites are just as relevant or better? A lot are stories in major publications, so that doesn't surprise me they rank high.
ap_org 8y ago
On 29 June 2018, we posted an question about this on Google's Webmaster Central Help Forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/webmasters/YO0jYLfb-VM;context-place=forum/webmasters https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/webmast...
- JackCh 8y ago
  Are you aware that your website cannot be accessed from many Tor exit nodes without solving a google captcha?
  - ap_org 8y ago
    Yes, and we very much regret that. We're on a shared server, and our webhosting company recently added security software called Imunify360 that does this.
- pdkl95 8y ago
  (ack! accidentally submitted early; major edits included with this header) The hypothesis about how the "anti-" prefix is being parsed is interesting; deploying some type of updated (probably machine learning) ranking algorithm with wild and unpredictable consequences to random subjects of that algorithm is consistent with other environments like YouTube (random & unexplained demonetization, etc). However, this doesn't change much; the results are the same regardless. Google is responsible for the decision to de-rank antipolygraph either deliberately or indirectly with their design of the ranking algorithm. If it was due to an algorithm, this is another example of the need for algorithmic transparency. You don't get to abdicate responsibility for decisions simply because an algorithm was used; the choice of algorithm (and the data used as input) is itself a decision.
rl3 8y ago
Google has had terrible search quality as of late. I'm finding myself using DuckDuckGo more and more just to find very basic things that used to be easy with Google. This is just in the last couple months or so. Not sure if that's the case here, but if it is I wouldn't be surprised.
- fucking_tragedy 8y ago
  Google seems to prioritize affiliate network blogs that aggregate basic information on a subject. This makes it difficult to locate information that exists on a term that isn't just surface level facts you can find by browsing Wikipedia.
- orbital-decay 8y ago
  I've found the quality to be dropping since they started to treat synonyms too loosely in the last few years. Google can mix two completely unrelated topics due to some word being a synonym for your search keyword... in a completely different context.
- nottorp 8y ago
  Quality has been going down in the last few years, not months, if you ask me. I've got a simple (for me) use case for which Google completely fails every time. It's mostly for programmers/sysadmins though. Paste an error message from a daemon, kernel etc in google and see what you get. With a little luck, 95% of the results on the first page won't be related to your problem. I'd say 20% won't be related to the piece of software you're dealing with at all. This can be sort of mitigated by selecting 'Verbatim', but for some reason you can't turn that on forever, you have to select it on every search. Add censoring of search results, and Google loses its usefulness completely.
  - Legogris 8y ago
    You know you can use quotes to get verbatim per phrase, right..?
    - gnicholas 8y ago
jmnicolas 8y ago
I would never have heard about this website if it hadn't been "censored" by Google. We can be proud to live in democracies, now I know why they envy us in the non free world! /s
- arendtio 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect ;-)
erric 8y ago
The Streisand Effect is real and hopefully for AntiPolygraph this just gives them a wider audience.
- DarkCrusader2 8y ago
  Maybe Google is not trying to censor them, but just changed their algorithms to not show antipolygraph when searching for polygraph as said by someone in the google forum. Their site #1 result when searching "antipolygraph".
inglor 8y ago
Well, to be fair the website looks like it does the most it can possibly do to avoid good SEO and search engine visibility. It uses `<meta keywords` and other techniques that apparently search engines like Google do not take into account. On the other hand the HTML of the page (view-source:https://antipolygraph.org/ https://antipolygraph.org/ ) does not contain any guidance as to what's the page's focus. No header tags are present, everything is `<table>` based and contains deprecated markup and almost all of the links it contains are internal. The markup is HTML4 which might be an indication to Google the page has not been updated in a while. The website can easily be found in Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aantipolygraph.org&oq=site%3Aantipolygraph.org&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.4647j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aantipolygraph.org&oq=...) - it just appears to not be ranked very high as it aged. Don't forget Google tends to favour newer and updated content to older content. The website also doesn't have a sitemap as far as I know which doesn't help with the problematic markup.
- contravariant 8y ago
  Then again it's the third result on DuckDuckGo when you search for 'polygraph' so it's not like it's that hard for search engines to find it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- nkozyra 8y ago
  None of these are particularly red flag SEO issues. The page is clean, mobile friendly, served over HTTPS. Google doesn't need to assume content update frequency based on the style of markup used, it literally spiders sites and reads their content, likely multiple times a day.
- FreeFull 8y ago
  Unfortunately all these changes mean that it's now tougher to find old websites with specific information that you're looking for on Google nowadays, in general. It feels like Google used to be much more useful for that ten years ago than it is now.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
vignesh_m 8y ago
I saw the site on page 3 after googling for "polygraph" Although searching for "the lie behind the lie detector" gives the first result as the correct one from anitpolygraph. Is it possible google didn't really do anything shady?
dazc 8y ago
Yet when I search for 'anti polygraph' [in uk] guess which site ranks top? Like I would expect. The site title is 'Learn How to Pass a Polygraph Test' yet the term doesn't appear anywhere on the homepage? I'd agree with the general sentiment that Google search is getting worse but this isn't a great example.
- asah 8y ago
  Adding to this: - search for [anti inflammatory] shows the site as first result and it's on page two for [polygraph controversy]. At the least, the blog post is misleading. - as per other comments, the site isn't mobile friendly, which has a huge impact on mobile ranking. - searching for [polygraph] the first page includes several listings discussing the controversy around polygraph results. The results are reasonably high quality stuff, i.e. valid choice. - a more valid test search might be [polygraph accuracy] or [polygraph controversy] to focus on the debate and less on testing centers and basic information. Disclosure: former Google engineer and worked at 3 search engine companies on various search products. I've done SEO professionally outside of Google, with success. I've also seen smart people botch SEO, myself included.
dewey 8y ago
When I do a search for Polygraph I get the results from Wikipedia, Vox, APA (http://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph.aspx http://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph.aspx), NYTimes on the first page. They are mostly critical articles about lie detectors and they all look more like something I'd want to read than AntiPolygraph.org that looks more like a conspiracy blog than well-researched information. I'd say the problem lies somewhere else, not by google censoring your content intentionally.
- pietroglyph 8y ago
  See [0]; this is a well researched book with a significant amount of actual evidence about the (non) validity of polygraphy, not a conspiracy theory. [0]: https://antipolygraph.org/lie-behind-the-lie-detector.pdf https://antipolygraph.org/lie-behind-the-lie-detector.pdf
- pessimizer 8y ago
  > looks more like a conspiracy blog than well-researched information. Are you basing this on how truthy the web design looks, or some aspect of the content?
  - dewey 8y ago
    This was purely my first—and very subjective—impression after opening the site. I was reading through the blog since this was posted and I'd say the content is interesting and is far from a conspiracy theory.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  Once upon a time, that layout was pretty standard on the web. I feel like there is not a penalty for older sites that don't have the resources to update and move from the 90s/00s. And something is lost there. Now all our sites are bloated with a shit-ton of Javascript. I turn Javascript off by default and are surprised by how many blank pages I get. (If it's a news site, I use archive.is instead of enabling it). Square Space sites don't load most images without Javascript.
- ap_org 8y ago
peter_retief 8y ago
I cant load the site at all?
reilly3000 8y ago
This is a complete falsehood. There is no mention of "Operation Lie Busters" or any kind of program to suppress information about lie detection circumvention in the linked document. No other sources were given. The site has plenty of reasons to not rank well in search, and secret government control over search rankings is at the bottom of that list in my view.
bradleyjg 8y ago
I vouched for this story when it was flagged dead and I wanted to note why I did. I think it's more likely than not that the "innocent" explanation is correct here. But even if that's the case it still says something important about how google works and those things are being discussed in the comments. Further even if the article is wrong, I don't see how it violates any of the guidelines. I think there's a tendency at HN to be very protective of google. I'm not sure if that's external fans or employees or what. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but I think it should be primarily expressed in comments rather than flagging or downvotes.
- DTND 8y ago
  >I think there's a tendency at HN to be very protective of google There's a tendency to be very protective of a wretched business model more than there is of google in itself. It may seem people come to google's defense a little too much on HN but that's only because google is the largest, most important corporation at the front of the business model that matters most to hners: advertisement and abusing user data. How else could any of the funded startups that provide free online services survive if they didn't get their money back through some other means? There is a vested interest on HN and other similar places on the web to show solidarity toward any individual or corporation whose livelihood depends on this because the second you start questioning companies like Google and Facebook, you start questioning the very livelihood of everyone involved here.
  - extralego 8y ago
    One of the first lessons activists (should) learn is the shortsightedness of judging the content of an individual according to what they do for a living; the means of survival they have trained and adjusted for. In an action, strategy will often overrule this but as a conscious exercised and ideally organized process. This along with overlooking petty symbolic straw mans like using cell phones to organize against cell phone companies is like learning to potty train; critical first steps toward maturity. In other words, evaluate components in proper and sufficient contexts. Software engineers might benefit from a similar conversation, to open more room for discussion around actual problem solving.

330 points by ap_org 8y ago

PSZD 8y ago

Is it appropriate to rank extremely high for something you're directly opposed to? Consider other polarized topics like abortion - should sites enlightening the user on why it is murder, instead of providing useful information, be presented front and center? I'm fairly sure this has come up as a controversy recently, but can't think of the exact topic. Certainly Google could decide whether it is appropriate on a case-by-case basis, but at that point it starts to be very explicitly political. Once you've stripped away the fig leaf of neutrality, their monopoly would look outrageous to a significant portion of the population.

mmt 8y ago
> Is it appropriate to rank extremely high for something you're directly opposed to? I'd say that's an important question, which I would answer with "yes", so long as it's understood that "rank extremely high" doesn't imply "at the exclusion of all others". > should sites enlightening the user on why it is murder, instead of providing useful information, be presented front and center Possibly. Though, I fear you may have presented a strawman (while betraying which way you, personally, are "polarized" on abortion). The question of what is useful information depends entirely on the keywords the user entered. Just the single word "abortion" could easily, reasonably, be understood to mean a request for information of general interest on the topic, including moral implications. On the other hand, it would be a stretch to expect that someone would want, say, instructions on how better to administer sedation during the procedure, absent additional keywords. Of course, there are going to be searches like "get an abortion" that are far more ambiguous than "get an abortion in my area", but I think it's better for something like a search engine (or government or society for that matter) to err on the side of inclusion than suppression. > Certainly Google could decide whether it is appropriate on a case-by-case basis, but at that point it starts to be very explicitly political Indeed, and that's a can of worms they likely don't want or need to open.
- PSZD 8y ago
  > while betraying which way you, personally, are "polarized" on abortion I'm curious what side you think I fall on, seems to me it could be argued either way. I have no strong opinion on it and picked it purely because it's an evocative example. Perhaps too evocative! Some other examples might be terrorism, animal rights activism, transgender-as-mental-illness. Including both sides can be legitimately and understandably very upsetting for some people; in other cases we demand equal representation. Are situations like OP's an inevitable product of the tyranny of an algorithm, one that errs to the safer side of excluding results?
  - mmt 8y ago
    > I'm curious what side you think I fall on That abortion is not murder, as you made the example of the presentation of such an argument in opposition to the presentation of something "useful". I realize, of course, that the word could have been meant more narrowly (such as "strictly pragmatic"), but that tends be less likely, even on here. > legitimately and understandably very upsetting for some people; in other cases we demand equal representation. [...] > errs to the safer side of excluding results? That's the the thing, though, I don't believe in a "right not to be offended" or a "right not to be upset" (legitimately, understandably, or otherwise). As such, I don't believe that these divisive cases ought to be treated any differently than the other cases you mention. None of this is to say that controversial topics don't attract a distinct problem. They do: trolls (for various definitions of the term). However, I believe that's more an issue with the quality of the content rather than the content itself, since a troll could (sometimes just as easily) take either side.
    - PSZD 8y ago
      I do agree with this, but think there's enough societal pressure these days that it's very hard for a for-profit company to do.
      - mmt 8y ago
        I'm not sure being for-profit has that much to do with societal pressure as being ad-revenue-driven. However, this profit (or revenue) above all else model is something Google's unusual stock voting structure was supposed to address.

astura 8y ago

1) There's no such thing as "the first page of results on Google." Your results depend on your location, previous searches, etc. 2) This site seems to think this is some mass conspiracy to remove sites critical of polygraphs, yet when I Google "polygraph" the vast majority of results I get are critical pieces. Maybe those sites are just as relevant or better? A lot are stories in major publications, so that doesn't surprise me they rank high.

ap_org 8y ago

On 29 June 2018, we posted an question about this on Google's Webmaster Central Help Forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/webmasters/YO0jYLfb-VM;context-place=forum/webmasters https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/webmast...

JackCh 8y ago
Are you aware that your website cannot be accessed from many Tor exit nodes without solving a google captcha?
- ap_org 8y ago
  Yes, and we very much regret that. We're on a shared server, and our webhosting company recently added security software called Imunify360 that does this.
pdkl95 8y ago
(ack! accidentally submitted early; major edits included with this header) The hypothesis about how the "anti-" prefix is being parsed is interesting; deploying some type of updated (probably machine learning) ranking algorithm with wild and unpredictable consequences to random subjects of that algorithm is consistent with other environments like YouTube (random & unexplained demonetization, etc). However, this doesn't change much; the results are the same regardless. Google is responsible for the decision to de-rank antipolygraph either deliberately or indirectly with their design of the ranking algorithm. If it was due to an algorithm, this is another example of the need for algorithmic transparency. You don't get to abdicate responsibility for decisions simply because an algorithm was used; the choice of algorithm (and the data used as input) is itself a decision.

rl3 8y ago

Google has had terrible search quality as of late. I'm finding myself using DuckDuckGo more and more just to find very basic things that used to be easy with Google. This is just in the last couple months or so. Not sure if that's the case here, but if it is I wouldn't be surprised.

fucking_tragedy 8y ago
Google seems to prioritize affiliate network blogs that aggregate basic information on a subject. This makes it difficult to locate information that exists on a term that isn't just surface level facts you can find by browsing Wikipedia.
orbital-decay 8y ago
I've found the quality to be dropping since they started to treat synonyms too loosely in the last few years. Google can mix two completely unrelated topics due to some word being a synonym for your search keyword... in a completely different context.
nottorp 8y ago
Quality has been going down in the last few years, not months, if you ask me. I've got a simple (for me) use case for which Google completely fails every time. It's mostly for programmers/sysadmins though. Paste an error message from a daemon, kernel etc in google and see what you get. With a little luck, 95% of the results on the first page won't be related to your problem. I'd say 20% won't be related to the piece of software you're dealing with at all. This can be sort of mitigated by selecting 'Verbatim', but for some reason you can't turn that on forever, you have to select it on every search. Add censoring of search results, and Google loses its usefulness completely.
- Legogris 8y ago
  You know you can use quotes to get verbatim per phrase, right..?
  - gnicholas 8y ago

jmnicolas 8y ago

I would never have heard about this website if it hadn't been "censored" by Google. We can be proud to live in democracies, now I know why they envy us in the non free world! /s

arendtio 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect ;-)

erric 8y ago

The Streisand Effect is real and hopefully for AntiPolygraph this just gives them a wider audience.

DarkCrusader2 8y ago
Maybe Google is not trying to censor them, but just changed their algorithms to not show antipolygraph when searching for polygraph as said by someone in the google forum. Their site #1 result when searching "antipolygraph".

inglor 8y ago

Well, to be fair the website looks like it does the most it can possibly do to avoid good SEO and search engine visibility. It uses `<meta keywords` and other techniques that apparently search engines like Google do not take into account. On the other hand the HTML of the page (view-source:https://antipolygraph.org/ https://antipolygraph.org/ ) does not contain any guidance as to what's the page's focus. No header tags are present, everything is `<table>` based and contains deprecated markup and almost all of the links it contains are internal. The markup is HTML4 which might be an indication to Google the page has not been updated in a while. The website can easily be found in Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aantipolygraph.org&oq=site%3Aantipolygraph.org&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.4647j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aantipolygraph.org&oq=...) - it just appears to not be ranked very high as it aged. Don't forget Google tends to favour newer and updated content to older content. The website also doesn't have a sitemap as far as I know which doesn't help with the problematic markup.

contravariant 8y ago
Then again it's the third result on DuckDuckGo when you search for 'polygraph' so it's not like it's that hard for search engines to find it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nkozyra 8y ago
None of these are particularly red flag SEO issues. The page is clean, mobile friendly, served over HTTPS. Google doesn't need to assume content update frequency based on the style of markup used, it literally spiders sites and reads their content, likely multiple times a day.
FreeFull 8y ago
Unfortunately all these changes mean that it's now tougher to find old websites with specific information that you're looking for on Google nowadays, in general. It feels like Google used to be much more useful for that ten years ago than it is now.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

vignesh_m 8y ago

I saw the site on page 3 after googling for "polygraph" Although searching for "the lie behind the lie detector" gives the first result as the correct one from anitpolygraph. Is it possible google didn't really do anything shady?

dazc 8y ago

Yet when I search for 'anti polygraph' [in uk] guess which site ranks top? Like I would expect. The site title is 'Learn How to Pass a Polygraph Test' yet the term doesn't appear anywhere on the homepage? I'd agree with the general sentiment that Google search is getting worse but this isn't a great example.

asah 8y ago
Adding to this: - search for [anti inflammatory] shows the site as first result and it's on page two for [polygraph controversy]. At the least, the blog post is misleading. - as per other comments, the site isn't mobile friendly, which has a huge impact on mobile ranking. - searching for [polygraph] the first page includes several listings discussing the controversy around polygraph results. The results are reasonably high quality stuff, i.e. valid choice. - a more valid test search might be [polygraph accuracy] or [polygraph controversy] to focus on the debate and less on testing centers and basic information. Disclosure: former Google engineer and worked at 3 search engine companies on various search products. I've done SEO professionally outside of Google, with success. I've also seen smart people botch SEO, myself included.

dewey 8y ago

When I do a search for Polygraph I get the results from Wikipedia, Vox, APA (http://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph.aspx http://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph.aspx), NYTimes on the first page. They are mostly critical articles about lie detectors and they all look more like something I'd want to read than AntiPolygraph.org that looks more like a conspiracy blog than well-researched information. I'd say the problem lies somewhere else, not by google censoring your content intentionally.

pietroglyph 8y ago
See [0]; this is a well researched book with a significant amount of actual evidence about the (non) validity of polygraphy, not a conspiracy theory. [0]: https://antipolygraph.org/lie-behind-the-lie-detector.pdf https://antipolygraph.org/lie-behind-the-lie-detector.pdf
pessimizer 8y ago
> looks more like a conspiracy blog than well-researched information. Are you basing this on how truthy the web design looks, or some aspect of the content?
- dewey 8y ago
  This was purely my first—and very subjective—impression after opening the site. I was reading through the blog since this was posted and I'd say the content is interesting and is far from a conspiracy theory.
djsumdog 8y ago
Once upon a time, that layout was pretty standard on the web. I feel like there is not a penalty for older sites that don't have the resources to update and move from the 90s/00s. And something is lost there. Now all our sites are bloated with a shit-ton of Javascript. I turn Javascript off by default and are surprised by how many blank pages I get. (If it's a news site, I use archive.is instead of enabling it). Square Space sites don't load most images without Javascript.
ap_org 8y ago

peter_retief 8y ago

I cant load the site at all?

reilly3000 8y ago

This is a complete falsehood. There is no mention of "Operation Lie Busters" or any kind of program to suppress information about lie detection circumvention in the linked document. No other sources were given. The site has plenty of reasons to not rank well in search, and secret government control over search rankings is at the bottom of that list in my view.

bradleyjg 8y ago

I vouched for this story when it was flagged dead and I wanted to note why I did. I think it's more likely than not that the "innocent" explanation is correct here. But even if that's the case it still says something important about how google works and those things are being discussed in the comments. Further even if the article is wrong, I don't see how it violates any of the guidelines. I think there's a tendency at HN to be very protective of google. I'm not sure if that's external fans or employees or what. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but I think it should be primarily expressed in comments rather than flagging or downvotes.

DTND 8y ago
>I think there's a tendency at HN to be very protective of google There's a tendency to be very protective of a wretched business model more than there is of google in itself. It may seem people come to google's defense a little too much on HN but that's only because google is the largest, most important corporation at the front of the business model that matters most to hners: advertisement and abusing user data. How else could any of the funded startups that provide free online services survive if they didn't get their money back through some other means? There is a vested interest on HN and other similar places on the web to show solidarity toward any individual or corporation whose livelihood depends on this because the second you start questioning companies like Google and Facebook, you start questioning the very livelihood of everyone involved here.
- extralego 8y ago
  One of the first lessons activists (should) learn is the shortsightedness of judging the content of an individual according to what they do for a living; the means of survival they have trained and adjusted for. In an action, strategy will often overrule this but as a conscious exercised and ideally organized process. This along with overlooking petty symbolic straw mans like using cell phones to organize against cell phone companies is like learning to potty train; critical first steps toward maturity. In other words, evaluate components in proper and sufficient contexts. Software engineers might benefit from a similar conversation, to open more room for discussion around actual problem solving.