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>Their entire business is built on stolen content uploaded by anonymous users I don't know, whenever the topic of Kim Dotcom/Megaupload comes up people on hack

by mrlala 6y ago

>Their entire business is built on stolen content uploaded by anonymous users I don't know, whenever the topic of Kim Dotcom/Megaupload comes up people on hackernews act like he has done nothing wrong and is a victim. Now the community is against a business being built on uploading stolen content by anonymous users? Ok.

wffurr 6y ago
You know there are a lot of people on HN with different opinions, right?
- wittyreference 6y ago
  I don't think it's unreasonable that the stances that most regularly get highly upvoted to the top of the threads are taken as a gestalt 'HN opinion'.
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    It's not that consistent which stances get upvoted. Different stories attract different readers, and comment upvotes depend on the quality of the message as well as the content.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    it's a reasonable mistake to make, but it's probably not correct. dang made a good post about this recently. I'm having a hard time finding it now (he posts a lot), so I'll just paraphrase. a lot of (sometimes vile) positions are strongly advocated for by a minority of users, but only weakly opposed by the majority. that vocal minority will upvote any friendly post, while the majority will just shake their heads but not necessarily downvote every single post. so it's actually quite common for the top comment to be against the aggregate opinion of the userbase.
    - pc86 6y ago
      Edit: Surprised it took almost twenty minutes for the downvotes to start. It also proves my point perfectly. For what it's worth I'm not saying bicycle licenses are good or should be implemented. But it's the most well-understood example of this phenomenon. This is the argument about why "bicycle licenses" aren't a thing. The number of drivers who aren't cyclists dwarfs the number of cyclists by many orders of magnitude in most US states. In many municipalities, some cyclists regularly break traffic laws and cause (at best) frustration or (at worst) deadly accidents. This leads to drivers-who-aren't-cyclists making the seems-reasonable comment that you should need a license to drive a bike the same way you do for a vehicle. So let's say a politician supports bicycle license. This isn't enough to get anyone who supports a bike license to vote for them, because it's not a Top Ten issue for anyone on that side. But not only will every cyclist in their district vote against them, they'll campaign and donate to any opponent of that bill. If they even think you support the legislation they're writing checks to your opponent. I'm not making an argument on bike licenses in particular but I can see a similar effect where a minority percentage of HN feels strongly enough about a given topic that they upvote the articles based on title alone. When an issue is particularly divisive, the odds increase that people feel strongly on both sides so you end up with the #1 posts on two different days expressing diametrically opposed positions, but both very heavily upvoted.
      - hombre_fatal 6y ago
        Well, your example also isn’t up to democratic vote. There may be more compelling reasons why bike licenses don’t exist, like how it’s not worth the trade-off of liberty, how it wouldn’t achieve anything, you can already be prosecuted for causing an accident, the opinion of car owners against cyclists is usually just irrational hate rather than deliberated policy ideals, etc.
Lorkki 6y ago
There are a lot of people here. Are you sure it's the same ones saying both of those things?
mschuster91 6y ago
> I don't know, whenever the topic of Kim Dotcom/Megaupload comes up people on hackernews act like he has done nothing wrong and is a victim Of course he has done wrong, but the fact why people are standing up for him is he did not do it while being in the US. It is one thing if the US asks for extradition of a criminal who committed the crime in the US, but an entirely different thing if the criminal committed the crime in another country - and that doesn't even answer the question if what the criminal did is actually a crime in that country. It's already a legal stretch to arrest and punish pedophiles who fly out to Asia to rape children (because enforcing the laws against child rape should be something for the destination countries!), but the Dotcom and Assange sagas should not result in extradition.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Especially since Kim Dotcom isn't an American citizen neither. So a third country citizen did something in another third country that the US didn't like. Quite a thing to aks for extradition in that case, especially from a country that doesn't recognize the court in The Hague.
  - wolco2 6y ago
    The Assange witchcraft trails are still ahead. I wonder if Trump will do something like offering a parden.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      > I wonder if Trump will do something like offering a parden. Probably one of the only ones that actually will be positive in intent.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      I am still not what to think about Assange. WikiLeaks did great things in the early days, and I was half convinced the affair in Sweden was a set-up. If it was not, Sweden would have been the place to put him on trial. And not to use it as am excuse to arrest in Britain to have him extradited to the US. That being said, it seems WikiLeaks was at least complicit in Russia propaganda operations. And we have no way to tell whether that would have happened without the arrest. Complicated story. And still a trial I hate to see, if Assange gets convicted, there is no way to be sure that doesn't happen to other journalists as well.

by mrlala 6y ago

wffurr 6y ago

You know there are a lot of people on HN with different opinions, right?

wittyreference 6y ago
I don't think it's unreasonable that the stances that most regularly get highly upvoted to the top of the threads are taken as a gestalt 'HN opinion'.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  It's not that consistent which stances get upvoted. Different stories attract different readers, and comment upvotes depend on the quality of the message as well as the content.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  it's a reasonable mistake to make, but it's probably not correct. dang made a good post about this recently. I'm having a hard time finding it now (he posts a lot), so I'll just paraphrase. a lot of (sometimes vile) positions are strongly advocated for by a minority of users, but only weakly opposed by the majority. that vocal minority will upvote any friendly post, while the majority will just shake their heads but not necessarily downvote every single post. so it's actually quite common for the top comment to be against the aggregate opinion of the userbase.
  - pc86 6y ago
    Edit: Surprised it took almost twenty minutes for the downvotes to start. It also proves my point perfectly. For what it's worth I'm not saying bicycle licenses are good or should be implemented. But it's the most well-understood example of this phenomenon. This is the argument about why "bicycle licenses" aren't a thing. The number of drivers who aren't cyclists dwarfs the number of cyclists by many orders of magnitude in most US states. In many municipalities, some cyclists regularly break traffic laws and cause (at best) frustration or (at worst) deadly accidents. This leads to drivers-who-aren't-cyclists making the seems-reasonable comment that you should need a license to drive a bike the same way you do for a vehicle. So let's say a politician supports bicycle license. This isn't enough to get anyone who supports a bike license to vote for them, because it's not a Top Ten issue for anyone on that side. But not only will every cyclist in their district vote against them, they'll campaign and donate to any opponent of that bill. If they even think you support the legislation they're writing checks to your opponent. I'm not making an argument on bike licenses in particular but I can see a similar effect where a minority percentage of HN feels strongly enough about a given topic that they upvote the articles based on title alone. When an issue is particularly divisive, the odds increase that people feel strongly on both sides so you end up with the #1 posts on two different days expressing diametrically opposed positions, but both very heavily upvoted.
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      Well, your example also isn’t up to democratic vote. There may be more compelling reasons why bike licenses don’t exist, like how it’s not worth the trade-off of liberty, how it wouldn’t achieve anything, you can already be prosecuted for causing an accident, the opinion of car owners against cyclists is usually just irrational hate rather than deliberated policy ideals, etc.

Lorkki 6y ago

There are a lot of people here. Are you sure it's the same ones saying both of those things?

mschuster91 6y ago

> I don't know, whenever the topic of Kim Dotcom/Megaupload comes up people on hackernews act like he has done nothing wrong and is a victim Of course he has done wrong, but the fact why people are standing up for him is he did not do it while being in the US. It is one thing if the US asks for extradition of a criminal who committed the crime in the US, but an entirely different thing if the criminal committed the crime in another country - and that doesn't even answer the question if what the criminal did is actually a crime in that country. It's already a legal stretch to arrest and punish pedophiles who fly out to Asia to rape children (because enforcing the laws against child rape should be something for the destination countries!), but the Dotcom and Assange sagas should not result in extradition.

hef19898 6y ago
Especially since Kim Dotcom isn't an American citizen neither. So a third country citizen did something in another third country that the US didn't like. Quite a thing to aks for extradition in that case, especially from a country that doesn't recognize the court in The Hague.
- wolco2 6y ago
  The Assange witchcraft trails are still ahead. I wonder if Trump will do something like offering a parden.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > I wonder if Trump will do something like offering a parden. Probably one of the only ones that actually will be positive in intent.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    I am still not what to think about Assange. WikiLeaks did great things in the early days, and I was half convinced the affair in Sweden was a set-up. If it was not, Sweden would have been the place to put him on trial. And not to use it as am excuse to arrest in Britain to have him extradited to the US. That being said, it seems WikiLeaks was at least complicit in Russia propaganda operations. And we have no way to tell whether that would have happened without the arrest. Complicated story. And still a trial I hate to see, if Assange gets convicted, there is no way to be sure that doesn't happen to other journalists as well.