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It emphasizes that my first post already provided an answer to their "zinger" rhetorical question, and attempts to clarify in narrative terms why I would have a

It emphasizes that my first post already provided an answer to their "zinger" rhetorical question, and attempts to clarify in narrative terms why I would have a problem with the essential nature of this approach to abuse prevention. As far as refuting, well, you can't get an ought from an is. There's a first order principle we'd both disagree on, based around what kind of precedents to set, around what sort of world we want to live in. I no longer ponder a question I once had: "Why are so alarmingly many people on here okay with living in a world full of machines designed to increasingly profile people beyond their control and leave them feeling dehumanized by mechanical overrides?" Because I am quite confident the answer is: "This is 'Hacker' News. We'll write the software - we'll be in more control than the plebs. It will give our institutions power and ultimately benefit us". So what can I do to refute that, other than to say "No, the abuse carried out through these systems will be worse than any abuse prevented by them. It's a horrible, rotten thing to do to people and if we were good, we should accept significant material losses to do activism to prevent it from happening". But, due to prevailing attitudes of our times which I personally find to be quite complacent, I recognize I'm not going to be able to simply shake people awake about it. So be it, let my generation make its bed and lay in it.

Lascaille 5y ago
> I recognize I'm not going to be able to simply shake people awake about it Well, you aren't really concluding anything, you're just self-defining your truths. See, you said: >So what can I do to refute that, other than to say "No, the abuse carried out through these systems will be worse than any abuse prevented by them. You have to actually back that statement up, you can't just declare it. Unless you provide some explanation as to why you believe that, you won't be able to 'shake people awake' with what amounts to empty rhetoric.
- JetAlone 5y ago
  I suspect my prior points in isolation would miraculously become easily-understood and agreeable short-hand if they were oriented to the approved resolutions, but in the name of good faith, I will try to point to what should be pretty clear observations with minimal dispute that together cause me to believe "the abuse carried out through these systems will be worse than any abuse prevented by them": -Problems with transparency on big tech platforms, regularly affecting people's livelihoods. -Problems reaching humans with the authority to help - I don't think we want to use algorithms to stonewall people from getting help based on their emotional profile because it will cause even more distress. -Inevitable false positives causing immense frustration as in the case of this author. There may be some people may have a different cadence, different tics, maybe even some kind of disability that cause them to type differently and trigger these systems more often than others. -Existing algorithmically driven emotion related things like social media rage cycles being extremely bad for people's mental health (discussed on this website daily). -Very finely tuned emotional manipulation and control of the masses by morally corrupt authorities (but the CEOs are so benevolent, they even track our emotions, for our own good! There's never going to be systems designed to abuse people.</s>). My appeal here boils down to: the keyboard is my private device. My emotional state while typing on it is my private matter. No matter how much I may type like a maniac on my keyboard from the comfort of my home, any requests that fail should be due to physical restraints, and not emotional ones that seem apparent to a computer. And there should be legal walls protecting the privacy of my own keyboard and my emotional state from unwanted computer analysis. If my behaviour visible in my output in a community is judged to be abusive by the human moderator's discretion, they have the appropriate tools to kick me, and I am okay with that. And not just mine, who am I? Everyone! You, her, him, that group of children over there who are going to grow up in whatever world we leave behind! And in the particular, I am not okay with what happened to the writer of this article - the technology should serve us if it can, and when in an emotional state like the author was, who would have clearly benefited from having the technology serve him in that moment, and my proposed law would make it so! Internet trolls and bots determined to post abuse will just modulate their cadence and try again. The juice of slowing down someone mean is not worth the squeeze of making this system and subjecting everyone to reminders that their every keystroke is being watched and analyzed. Honestly, feels like we've come a long way, that this is now a controversial take on a major tech forum; and the destination for our continued journey is a very bad place. I doubt this will satisfy you any more than my post before, but what's one more run-around?
  - Lascaille 5y ago
    >what's one more run-around? I have no idea, I recognise them instinctively and just skip to the end. Nobody's talking about any of your red-herrings. The topic is a rate limit set high enough that no human could accidentally trigger it. Let's discuss that topic or agree not to discuss.
    - JetAlone 5y ago
      Ah, so my doubt was correct, you're dissatisfied! Even when I assume good faith and try to lay out the points as best I can, to give my best shot at justifying my argument like you asked, they're suddenly all "red-herrings". >The topic is a rate limit set high enough that no human could accidentally trigger it. No, that's not the topic I was writing about. Discussing this would be a change of topic, because this entire time we were talking about a system that the author did accidentally trigger while making perfectly legitimate use of the system to try and restore his account in an understandably emotional state, and the machine profiled his typing cadence, IE the rate at which he was typing, as basis to deny him service. Here is the excerpt: "I still hadn’t heard back from Instagram so I sent them another complaint, angrier this time, typing with a great noisy clacking of the keyboard, warning that the longer they took to act, the more they put their users at risk. This wasn’t about me, I wrote, except, implicitly, in all the ways that it was about me. I slapped the send button and a warning box immediately popped up that said: ‘Facebook’s systems determined that you were going too fast when taking an action. You must significantly slow down. You are engaging in behaviour that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users.’ So now I was the troll? Me, with my burner, my bugging device, my fake account and my self-righteous mission? It was an outrage." I specifically said I was okay with rate limiting physical constraints that make service more efficient like post bandwidth, but I am not okay with using any kind of analysis of user's direct button inputs themselves to assess their likely intentions. >Let's discuss that topic or agree not to discuss. Deal. You have decided not to talk about what I was actually talking about in the first place, and I refuse to agree to switch topics to "that topic" IE your obviously shifted goal post, and we both move on to greener pastures. https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-rate-limiting/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-rate-limiti... Above is a great post about what rate limiting is. Rate-limiting is not about monitoring key presses, it is about requests sent to the server. At the bottom of this page, they describe "bot management", IE trying to detect a bot by inputs made in the page. An example would be ctrl+f'ing quickly to search through a page on twitter for something particular, causing your account to get locked. Which can also be infuriating, and is a lot more like what I'm talking about. Everyone who posted in thread besides from me has been "getting it twisted", by conflating rate-limiting with input monitoring when I have been unequivocably stating the distinction between the two as soon as the "zinger" accusation was first made. But that's how they do it on hacker news, one "You're against X?" or "Ah, then you must be for Y" derails the entire conversation and people with the reading comprehension and good faith to put it back together are just absent somehow. Hecking Genius.

Lascaille 5y ago

> I recognize I'm not going to be able to simply shake people awake about it Well, you aren't really concluding anything, you're just self-defining your truths. See, you said: >So what can I do to refute that, other than to say "No, the abuse carried out through these systems will be worse than any abuse prevented by them. You have to actually back that statement up, you can't just declare it. Unless you provide some explanation as to why you believe that, you won't be able to 'shake people awake' with what amounts to empty rhetoric.

JetAlone 5y ago
I suspect my prior points in isolation would miraculously become easily-understood and agreeable short-hand if they were oriented to the approved resolutions, but in the name of good faith, I will try to point to what should be pretty clear observations with minimal dispute that together cause me to believe "the abuse carried out through these systems will be worse than any abuse prevented by them": -Problems with transparency on big tech platforms, regularly affecting people's livelihoods. -Problems reaching humans with the authority to help - I don't think we want to use algorithms to stonewall people from getting help based on their emotional profile because it will cause even more distress. -Inevitable false positives causing immense frustration as in the case of this author. There may be some people may have a different cadence, different tics, maybe even some kind of disability that cause them to type differently and trigger these systems more often than others. -Existing algorithmically driven emotion related things like social media rage cycles being extremely bad for people's mental health (discussed on this website daily). -Very finely tuned emotional manipulation and control of the masses by morally corrupt authorities (but the CEOs are so benevolent, they even track our emotions, for our own good! There's never going to be systems designed to abuse people.</s>). My appeal here boils down to: the keyboard is my private device. My emotional state while typing on it is my private matter. No matter how much I may type like a maniac on my keyboard from the comfort of my home, any requests that fail should be due to physical restraints, and not emotional ones that seem apparent to a computer. And there should be legal walls protecting the privacy of my own keyboard and my emotional state from unwanted computer analysis. If my behaviour visible in my output in a community is judged to be abusive by the human moderator's discretion, they have the appropriate tools to kick me, and I am okay with that. And not just mine, who am I? Everyone! You, her, him, that group of children over there who are going to grow up in whatever world we leave behind! And in the particular, I am not okay with what happened to the writer of this article - the technology should serve us if it can, and when in an emotional state like the author was, who would have clearly benefited from having the technology serve him in that moment, and my proposed law would make it so! Internet trolls and bots determined to post abuse will just modulate their cadence and try again. The juice of slowing down someone mean is not worth the squeeze of making this system and subjecting everyone to reminders that their every keystroke is being watched and analyzed. Honestly, feels like we've come a long way, that this is now a controversial take on a major tech forum; and the destination for our continued journey is a very bad place. I doubt this will satisfy you any more than my post before, but what's one more run-around?
- Lascaille 5y ago
  >what's one more run-around? I have no idea, I recognise them instinctively and just skip to the end. Nobody's talking about any of your red-herrings. The topic is a rate limit set high enough that no human could accidentally trigger it. Let's discuss that topic or agree not to discuss.
  - JetAlone 5y ago
    Ah, so my doubt was correct, you're dissatisfied! Even when I assume good faith and try to lay out the points as best I can, to give my best shot at justifying my argument like you asked, they're suddenly all "red-herrings". >The topic is a rate limit set high enough that no human could accidentally trigger it. No, that's not the topic I was writing about. Discussing this would be a change of topic, because this entire time we were talking about a system that the author did accidentally trigger while making perfectly legitimate use of the system to try and restore his account in an understandably emotional state, and the machine profiled his typing cadence, IE the rate at which he was typing, as basis to deny him service. Here is the excerpt: "I still hadn’t heard back from Instagram so I sent them another complaint, angrier this time, typing with a great noisy clacking of the keyboard, warning that the longer they took to act, the more they put their users at risk. This wasn’t about me, I wrote, except, implicitly, in all the ways that it was about me. I slapped the send button and a warning box immediately popped up that said: ‘Facebook’s systems determined that you were going too fast when taking an action. You must significantly slow down. You are engaging in behaviour that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users.’ So now I was the troll? Me, with my burner, my bugging device, my fake account and my self-righteous mission? It was an outrage." I specifically said I was okay with rate limiting physical constraints that make service more efficient like post bandwidth, but I am not okay with using any kind of analysis of user's direct button inputs themselves to assess their likely intentions. >Let's discuss that topic or agree not to discuss. Deal. You have decided not to talk about what I was actually talking about in the first place, and I refuse to agree to switch topics to "that topic" IE your obviously shifted goal post, and we both move on to greener pastures. https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-rate-limiting/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-rate-limiti... Above is a great post about what rate limiting is. Rate-limiting is not about monitoring key presses, it is about requests sent to the server. At the bottom of this page, they describe "bot management", IE trying to detect a bot by inputs made in the page. An example would be ctrl+f'ing quickly to search through a page on twitter for something particular, causing your account to get locked. Which can also be infuriating, and is a lot more like what I'm talking about. Everyone who posted in thread besides from me has been "getting it twisted", by conflating rate-limiting with input monitoring when I have been unequivocably stating the distinction between the two as soon as the "zinger" accusation was first made. But that's how they do it on hacker news, one "You're against X?" or "Ah, then you must be for Y" derails the entire conversation and people with the reading comprehension and good faith to put it back together are just absent somehow. Hecking Genius.