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Vivaldi: Violating CoC on forum may close your email account
- throw10920 5y agoWell, that makes a third browser that I am aggressively discouraging people from using. I used to think that Chrome and Edge were the only bad guys in town...
- undecisive 5y agoI don't think they are evil, merely misguided. It feels like the "right thing" to have a CoC, and it only makes sense if you make it enforceable, and that only makes sense if you make it comprehensive. So I understand how we get to this point with totally good intentions - whatever misgivings I might have about CoCs in general. I use Vivaldi (not their email service, but their browser) and I like it a lot. I wish it were based on FF and not Chrome, but unfortunately it makes a lot of sense from an operational perspective. I've seen nothing malicious in anything they have done to date. So I'd rather they saw this and fixed it. And I'll still happily recommend people give it a go. But if they insist on keeping this wording in their CoC, I'll certainly advise people to steer well clear of the webmail service.
- unixhero 5y agoWTF is Vivaldi.com ?
- vegai_ 5y agoIt's a continuation of the Opera browser / service.
- selfhoster11 5y agoLiterally go to their website.
- jqpabc123 5y agoThanks for reminding me why I don't use Vivaldi.
- undecisive 5y agoYou see, I see this as a mis-step, and I think it's important to discuss such missteps. But I don't know enough about the internals of Vivaldi the company to know whether the company has bad attitudes and this is yet another manifestation of a draconion culture, or whether someone just tried doing The Right Thing (modern edition) and ended up legislating unintended consequences. In other words, I'd like to assume the best intentions, and they might yet choose to rectify it.
- jqpabc123 5y agoLooks like a standard vendor lock-in tactic to me. It makes it harder to switch browsers. But they all do this. Passwords and bookmarks that can't be exported or transferred easily are the usual suspects Vivaldi seemed big, bloated and slow the last time I used it.
- selfhoster11 5y agoThere's no lock-in here on the desktop version of the browser, even if they were big enough for that strategy to work. Passwords and bookmarks are freely exportable, and even if they aren't in the future, they can be transferred to another computer or extracted from the profile data without issues.
- selfhoster11 5y agoUsing Vivaldi hardly ties you to the mothership. At most, you'll lose sync access via their service, not brick your browser.
- jqpabc123 5y agoCorrect me if I misunderstand but they're not threatening to brick your browser, they are threatening to brick your email.
- undecisive 5y agoNot sure how I feel with this. On one side, not many people have Vivaldi email accounts, so probably not a big deal at this point. And if you're going to have a code of conduct, at least it's a CoC with teeth. On the other side, if someone doesn't like what you say on the forum for whatever reason (example reason given: Telling jokes or being sarcastic) and enough people report your posts, you may find yourself losing all access to your emails. That seems potentially disproportionate.
- sys_64738 5y ago> On the other side, if someone doesn't like what you say on the forum for whatever reason (example reason given: Telling jokes or being sarcastic) and enough people report your posts, you may find yourself losing all access to your emails. That seems potentially disproportionate. To be clear, it's specific to the Vivaldi forum from what I read.
- protomyth 5y agoCoCs seem to expand to people's behavior on their social media accounts even if stated otherwise.
- undecisive 5y agoYep - sorry if I wasn't clear on that, I didn't suppose any other forum was affected by this. But since their forum is one of the best ways to get / give help on the Vivaldi browser, and since I imagine most people who use vivaldi will have at one point at least searched for an issue on their forums (it's excellent software, but there are a few gotchas) it would stand to reason that some people would be more active than others, without realising that their penchant for sarcasm might forfeit them their email account.
- IiydAbITMvJkqKf 5y agoIf your e-mail provider openly states that they will ban you if you say something they don't like, nobody should use that e-mail provider. The risk is far too great.
- dotancohen 5y agoWhy is Vivaldi operating an email service to begin with? I do understand that Opera had an email client, but here the fields seem just too far apart to make sense.
- qybaz 5y agoI think Opera also had a mail and blog service, and a quite lively community. They are trying to replicate it, I assume.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoIs there something particularly pernicious about simultaneously providing an email service and publishing a web browser?
- pmontra 5y agoGoogle Chrome + Gmail? With hindsight maybe yes, but generally not. I'm surprised to learn that Vivaldi offers an email service. What for? I've been using Vivaldi for years for best-viewed-on-chrome websites and I didn't know they had their own email server. Maybe I knew they have an email client but I'm using Thunderbird and I'm not switching.
- coffeecat 5y agoIf your email provider doesn't ban you for sending spam, phishing emails, etc, then you better switch providers. Otherwise the service will attract spammers and criminals, and your outgoing emails will end up in spam folders.
- throw10920 5y ago
- resoluteteeth 5y agoThis is no different than how Google operates. It's once of the disadvantages of having one account for all services from a company.
- sascha_sl 5y agoIf you want Gmail but don't want the risk, you should really use a Google Workspaces account.
- QuarterReptile 5y agoCan you explain further? I've never heard this as a benefit of Google Workspaces.
- sgjohnson 5y agoWhat he really meant is having email on your own domain. If you have your own domain and Google bans you, you can just go elsewhere. If your @gmail address gets banned, it’s the end of it.
- charcircuit 5y agoWhat he implied is that you should own the domain for your email that way you can change email hosting providers without having to tell everyone and every service your new email.
- fortran77 5y agoExactly. I use Microsoft's email service. For $69/year I can point several domains (I think the limit is 99) to my inbox. If I get sick of Microsoft, or they block me, it's my domain and I can move it to another provider.
- DarylZero 5y ago$69/yr for service you could run yourself on a couple $5/yr VPSs just by configuring Postfix one time.
- Proven 5y agoSo what? Having an account doesn't entitle you to violating their CoC and serving a grossly misbehaving customer invites complaints from the rest, so why not cancel their email account? It's easier than having to deal with complaints of other users, or waste volunteers' time on dealing with the same offender. It's better to lose a bad user than a good volunteer moderator.
- blueflow 5y agoGeneral Advice: Stay away from people who think they can "fix" human behavior with rules and laws, Code of Conducts are no exception to this. Edit: "Mediation by courts" is the secret ingredient. Without a fair court, law (and by implication, Code of Conducts) are just a methods of fortifying the ruling peoples power.
- charcircuit 5y agoWhat if instead of fixing people you just kick them out of your community? I think this is the point of CoCs. Obviously doing this has pros and cons.
- crt1032 5y agoThe point of CoCs is to have a ruling class, often parasitical, that enforces double standards. Occasionally they try to kick out someone to cement their power. If you want to see how vicious they are, here is an account: https://www.fast.ai/2020/10/28/code-of-conduct/ https://www.fast.ai/2020/10/28/code-of-conduct/ Do realize that most victims do not dare to go public but accept the humiliation.
- stackedinserter 5y ago> Code of Conducts can be a useful tool, when thoughtfully created and thoughtfully enforced, to address sexism, racism, and harassment, all of which have been problems at tech conferences. This guy is a part of the problem.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- selfhoster11 5y agoCoC are what you make of them. Just like you can use bitcoin for good and for evil, so you can do with CoC.
- ungamedplayer 5y agoCareful, you are dangerously close to logic there.
- KaiserPro 5y agoOne of the big problems with Facebook, twitter, ticktok, reddit and snapchat is that its well known that they are loose in enforcing their own code of conduct. This means that most people can be utter shits to each other and not have any repercussions. In humans terms, they are the people that have loud house parties, and lets some people shit on the rugs. Regardless of the quality of the furnishings, the equality of the bill setup, the subtle neo-georgian architecture is all for nothing, because it's known as "the shit house." Freedom of speech is important. But as a company when most of your reputation is defined by your users, hosting a forum which turns out you be a cesspool directly damages you.
- Pxtl 5y agoThe problem is when you have companies that bundle multiple services under an account and ban them wholesale. Like, if I screw around on Reddit enough to get banned, I lose my Reddit account. If I screw around on YouTube enough to get banned, I lose my YouTube account, my email account, my domain name, my cloud stored files, my music, and my cellphone apps.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- skinnymuch 5y agoI didn’t screw around on YouTube but I did get banned from YouTube for some odd reason last month. The rest of my google account is still working. You’re right though. I had this HUGE sinking feeling for the initial moments when realizing what had happened. Regretting not having moved my Gmail away yet and so on. This is still a huge risk. Maybe if whatever YouTube trip I ran over was more severe, my entire Google account would have been banned.
- SCHiM 5y agoAnd now remember that a substantial amount of us had accounts on both services before they merged. I'd like to see them slapped hard for this in the future. Was I supposed to read multiple dictionaries worth of legalese to understand that they now unilaterally have the right to ban my (now not so important) google account if I call someone a troll on youtube?
- ineedasername 5y agoIt's odd (and clearly problematic) that they link forum access so closely to email access. There's no reason they shouldn't be able to ban abusive trolls from a their forum without shutting down their email as well.
- unloco 5y agoI feel like this is one of those rules that was made to target problematic individuals, but after awhile will be misused and then all hell breaks loose.
- isitdopamine 5y ago> Don’t use content likely to offend people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or political views. Stating that I voted for Trump (I didn’t) is likely to offend many people. The breadth and vagueness of these CoCs is astonishing! The then-go-somewhere-else argument also does not apply, since de-facto monopolists are also starting to apply similarly silly CoCs…
- jrochkind1 5y agoLosing your email for spamming is how it worked in the original old internet.
- undecisive 5y agoYep - losing your email account for misusing your email account makes sense. Losing your email account for being too sarcastic on a forum about your browser software seems weird, to say the least.
- selfhoster11 5y agoYour email was not the center of your digital identity either, because you simply didn't have one. Now you need an email for interacting with the government and basically anything that isn't a low-importance smartphone app. Killing someone's email access causes a lot of grief, and requires a lot of work to undo. It's a disproportionate punishment for acting mean (or even racist - racists are still human beings and still should have the right to keep using their email for personal comms unless they seriously and repeatedly cross the line).
- vegai_ 5y agoThis sounds absolutely fine to me. Have you tried not breaking their CoC?
- undecisive 5y agoThis is sarcasm. You have just broken their CoC... be thankful it wasn't on their forum!
- vegai_ 5y agoYes, I'm ever so grateful. But less sarcastically, I didn't broke their CoC because, as you pointed out, I wasn't writing on their forum.
- undecisive 5y agoAbsolutely. There has been some beautiful, deadpan sarcasm on this thread and I'm here for it...
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago> Don’t use sarcasm and jokes that can be misinterpreted. Yes, I too greatly enjoy sterile feel-ok communication only.
- undecisive 5y agoSomebody clearly disagrees with you, but you certainly aren't alone! [When I wrote this, you had been downvoted. Though it only occurs to me now that the sarcasm might have been completely lost on some people!]
- Traubenfuchs 5y agoThere is some back and forth going on. Apparently it's quite a divisive opinion. That is ok! You can disagree and just downvote. You can disagree and explain why. You can disagree and explain why and downvote. You can leave a nasty, offensive, insulting message at your own peril -and I can take it.
- pigbearpig 5y agoSounds like they are a browser company that doesn't want to run reddit in their forums. That's their choice. You get a warning, then can lose your account.
- undecisive 5y agoYeah, I just worry about the way they've lumped them together. I know some people who are sarcastic with every sentence they write. And I worry that unless the moderator's messages are very clearly worded, they may not realise that their activity on the forum could delete their email account.
- selfhoster11 5y agoExcept they should be locking just the forum account, and not nuking your entire online presence connected to that email account.
- MrStonedOne 5y ago> That's their choice. This is a hacker news post, not a lawsuit. Nobody is arguing that they don't have a choice or the legal right to do this, calm down man. We are arguing they are a fucking asshole for doing so. You can have a legal right to do something, and still be a fucking asshole for doing it.
- FpUser 5y agoI've had my own domain / email since like forever. I've no idea why would anyone entrust such a vital things to any single private company.
- rfrey 5y agoBecause none of my email would get delivered if I didn't.
- fortran77 5y agoOwn your own domain, but have the email serviced by Microsoft, Google, etc.
- FpUser 5y agoThis is what I do, maybe it was not clear from my post
- vidarh 5y agoMy domain was hosted by Google. It's now hosted by Fastmail. Even if you don't want to operate your own email, having your own domain gets you most of the upside by making it easy to move.
- Maxburn 5y agoExactly, you own it and can move it wherever you want and keep the same address.
- Maxburn 5y agoOwning your own domain and email account doesn't mean you have to host it yourself, most email hosting providers will handle that. BUT if you get kicked off of one of those you can take your owned domain to another email hosting provider and be up and running again with the same address. That's a pretty important differentiator IMO.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
- throwaway599281 5y ago[flagged]
- outime 5y agoI suppose it's the same as using your Google account and leaving a bannable comment (or just one that automation considers like such) in YouTube, Google Maps or the old Google+ - you'll lose access to your email account as well. It just highlights how important it is to have essential stuff like email separated from bundles like Google, Vivaldi or any other company that can finish your virtual existence all of the sudden.
- JohnBooty 5y agoI'm in favor of CoC's and removing offenders from a community. I've managed an online community in the past and I'm convinced communities can't work unless there are standards. (For reference, we banned ~10 users out of ~20,000. Not exactly ban-happy. I also believe that overzealous enforcement has a chilling effect.) However, deleting somebody's email account for non-email offenses is a poor choice. The "offender" may be relying on that email address as a point of contact for family, to pay bills, etc. And community standards, while necessary, are unfortunately always going to be subjective to some degree. Considering the large number of services that depend on an email address to determine one's identity... we need something else. I don't know the answer there. I should not lose access to my ability to pay my bills just because a forum moderator doesn't like what I say.
- _pmf_ 5y agoA support forum for a commercial product is not a "community".
- duiker101 5y agoI disagree. If users can comment/contribute, and it's not just a private direct line to support, then people will start to hang out and talk and learn about each other, and that's a community, no matter the subject.
- selfhoster11 5y ago#offtopic channels attached to otherwise strictly topic-oriented chat servers can build up quite a community.
- fortran77 5y agoExactly. Take them off the forums after, say, 3 warnings. But leave their access to the service up.
- gwbas1c 5y agoI suspect that a Vivaldi email account is for conducting Vivaldi business. IE, it's assumed that you have a separate email account for personal business. The same could be said about a work email account. You shouldn't mix work and personal business.
- znpy 5y ago> Don’t use sarcasm and jokes that can be misinterpreted. I mean I see the point of having a CoC but how can you be absolutely, positively and definitely sure that a joke cannot be misinterpreted?
- undecisive 5y agoYeah, I presumed the only sensible reading of that sentence was "don't use sarcasm and jokes, as sarcasm and jokes are things that can be misinterpreted". Don't get me wrong - I understand that with an international community, sarcasm can be problematic. For example, the ruby community had lots of "fun" just over a month ago with a joke on a mailing list intended to be poking fun at traditional chivalry, that many mistook to be sexist. Then further jokers submitted pull requests changing the CoC wording in humorous ways that looked fine to non-native eyes, claiming those changes would fix the problem, and so the maintainers accepted those changes, until the sarcasm was pointed out clearly. It was pretty embarrassing for all involved. Is the only solution to ban all jokes and all sarcasm? I don't think so. But as a sarcastic pr*k at heart, I may well be biased. I certainly don't think you should lose access to all your email over it though.
- pseudalopex 5y agoThe joke was maybe a date bug was written for women who calculated their age. The joker said they thought all girls would appreciate it. They said they didn't insult blondes. They said no one was hurt if the list was 100% male. I didn't see anywhere they said it was supposed to be about traditional chivalry. Even people who defended the joke linked it to a current stereotype. What made you think it was about traditional chivalry?
- undecisive 5y agoYep, let's be specific, the comment in question was: # Maybe this has been written for women, having calculated their age ;) Given that this person is clearly not natively english-speaking, there is a possibility that you are absolutely right. I know he - and others - doubled down on the unhelpful "nothing to see here" thing, though I didn't read the full mailing list. Reading it charitably however (which nobody ever seems to want to do) it may well be saying that someone else is calculating a woman's age. This would lead me to suppose it is a common chivalrous humour (at least round these parts) linked to the idea that you should never ask a lady how old she is, which is to send birthday cards with exaggeratedly low numbers. e.g. you might send a 60-year-old lady a birthday card saying "Happy 21st birthday (again)" - but you would never do that for a man (often the opposite, in fact). Now then, you could argue - and some have - that this is still a form of sexism. Indeed, orthodox feminism* dictates that all forms of chivalry are antiquated and cause more harm than good, and there are some good arguments to support that, while many staunch feminists point out that it is a real shame to have to legislate against kindnesses towards women (especially when even if true social equality is ever achieved, often the biological encumbrances bias life against women anyway.) So yes, you may well be absolutely correct. And even when "people who defended the joke linked it to a current stereotype" they might be doing so with full understanding of the charitable reading. I should also point out, I have never spoken to this chap, I have no idea what kind of person he is. Is he a raving misogynist? No idea. Does he spit on the cake at women's birthdays? Maybe. Is he a cat pretending to be a human? Probably. All of these are completely and entirely beside the point though. The reaction was to legislate away from attempting compassionate dialogue. I don't know what would have happened if someone off-thread had said "Hi, just to let you know, some people might be reading this as X and I'm sure you didn't mean that - can I recommend you get ahead of it and say Y before someone gets offended?". Maybe it would have been exactly the same. Instead, a bunch of people invoked their right to offence, and insisted that the CoC be changed to codify that right. * [Just to clarify, I meant orthodox feminism in the sense of feminism that follows the arguments to their logical conclusions and adheres to them strictly, rather than what Google seems to think I mean]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pyjarrett 5y agoIt feels more and more like "Eternal September" is actually coming to an end.
- motohagiography 5y agoIt's like people don't get that arbitrary and shifting rules with inconsistent enforcement are by design, so as to make the people subject to them police themselves, which is more effective at managing a community than real rules. This can even be appropriate with limited scopes like single forums and services or monolithic communities. Until a kid can understand language it's how many children and most livestock are managed. However at scale, it's objectively insane. Simple and evenly enforced rules provide a lot of freedom, where arbitrary discretion and making examples with disproportionate punishment incentivises submissiveness, and worse, toadyism. For adults the disproportionate policy approach is the definition of an abusive relationship anywhere else in reality. I realize this is just about a browser I had barely heard of, and there's zero danger of me ever becoming a user, but it's a general platform governance and culture question worth articulating as a dynamic for other issues.
- undecisive 5y agoI fear you have constructed a tectonic collision from a small mammal's soil-based home. If you are arguing against the phenomenon of CoCs in general, then I agree - they are a blight, rife with overreach and often easily misused to justify prejudice or condemn innocent misunderstandings. While I won't deny the emergent behaviour of self-policing based on fear, I suspect the origins of the CoC are actually less subtle and more an attempt to assign power to marginalised and persecuted groups, without recognition that actually causes a net increase in inequity, that power corrupts and in turn causes more persecution thanks to the bad taste left in people's mouths when being victimised unfairly due to prejudices mislabelling themselves as anti-prejudices. But that's an aside. Power will always be, inequality will always be, prejudice will always be - and the point of the CoC was never to improve that, merely invert it. It has, in some ways (along with other cultural and corporate shifts) worked beautifully and now has dominance over the Open Source community landscape at least. I don't see us putting that particular genie back in the bottle any time soon. But we can try to keep the potential harms in check. And raise the alarm when we see potentially dangerous overreaches. In the current climate of escalating prejudice on both sides of the fence, I'm not sure there's much more we can do.
- 5y ago
- cblconfederate 5y agoThe internet has done away with the concept of rehabilitation in favour of the capital punishment. The difference is you can have multiple lives
- mrkentutbabi 5y agoEverytime a company makes a decision like this, I keep wondering whether they always pull it out of their ass or do they really make the effort to research or engaged on the community first.
- tupolef 5y agoVivaldi is not at fault. It is the users who should review their usage. As long as you are still part of an organization, or keep your own little piece of internet alive, there is no reason to prevent delivery of messages to your address. Just like with mail in the real world, if you can be found at a public location, mail can be delivered to you there. There is only jail and army to filter your mail. The free-of-charge nature of these services is just a reward for your membership in an organization, there is nothing permanent or guarantee here. To the people who want a free-of-charge address, find a public service or a respectable association that at least guarantees reception. If not, keep a low profile, you are under voluntary surveillance. Services like Vivaldi or Gmail and consort have the worst level of freedom, out of 6 levels : 1. My domain / My server / My IP - Freedom. They can just list you on antispam service if you manage badly. 2. My domain / My server / My ISP IP - Freedom but nomadic. Your ISP can cut off the relevant ports or break your contract. But you just have to change ISP. 3. My domain / Public or community non-profit organization. - Potentially Freedom but nomadic. Unfortunately very rare, public or community organizations offer their own domains instead. 4. Domain and servers of a public or community non-profit organization. - No Freedom, but they sometimes guarantee a minimum service and a perenniality. 5. My domain / Private for-profit organization. - Freedom but nomadic and if you get kicked out of such an organization, it is likely that you will be kicked out of another one too. 6. Domain and servers of a private for-profit organization. - No Freedom at all. They do what they want with you.
- lucideer 5y agoThere's two issues I see here: 1. The forum and webmail are separate services, linked by a single account. You can lose access to your email by being banned from the forum; this is problematic, but not unique to Vivaldi (you can lose access to your Gmail by being banned from Youtube). I do think this is something that all services with a CoC should work on making granular though. 2. The CoC is incredibly vague. I am broadly in favour of the recent trend of introducing CoCs across projects, they're incredibly important when written well, and they are mostly written well in my experience. This one is not. It seems like it was thrown together very quickly to provide moderators with far too much power and scope, and overreaches to the extreme.
- johnisgood 5y agoI do not have an e-mail account with them, but if I really needed it, because stuff like this can happen I would most definitely avoid using their forum, or I would use it under another name. The CoC can get rid of anyone they wish. While I do not think that they would want to get rid of me, because I am a no one, I would probably avoid their forum if I had an e-mail account. If I really, really wanted to post something, then I would do it under a different account, so if my account that uses the forum gets banned, they will not close my e-mail account.
- rhabarba 5y agoGood CoC: "If at anytime you choose to do something that a rational person of average intelligence could reasonably consider your actions as "Being a dick", you are in violation of this code of conduct." [1] Horrible CoC: "Don’t use sarcasm and jokes that can be misinterpreted." [1] https://github.com/karlgroves/dontbeadick https://github.com/karlgroves/dontbeadick
- gego 5y ago...at least you can get a copy of your data through a GDPR request...
- undecisive 5y agoI did wonder that. While technically that's true, in reality I believe: - They are under no obligation to keep your data if they delete your account - They are under no obligation to give you your data in a human-readable format - If they are unable to securely validate your identity, they would have a stronger obligation to refuse - There are caveats for when extracting your data would be disproportionately difficult. For example, if they encrypt emails individually at rest and then throw away the decryption key attached to your account login record, I don't know what legal recourse you would have. That's not to say categorically you're wrong. I suspect you might be right, and I imagine that Vivaldi themselves might be extremely helpful. It's quite a new service though, and I haven't seen any evidence one way or another.