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Your comment gave me a headache. To which address should I send the bill for this bottle of ibuprofen I used to treat it?
by caesil 3y ago
Your comment gave me a headache. To which address should I send the bill for this bottle of ibuprofen I used to treat it?
- lijok 3y agoI welcome you to debate it.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThe comment was the debate. Your comment (information, like software) created an externality on the reader which they would now like to bill you for.
- lijok 3y agoHaha, you're right. It went right over my head. I'd be happy to pay for their ibuprofen if they can prove the adverse effect my comment had, and if it continues having adverse effects, I'll make sure to take my comment down or improve its quality so as to stop causing the adverse effect.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoAre you sure you're willing to do that? This website is read by hundreds of thousands of people. If even 1% of them have been adversely affected by your comment, you could be on the hook for thousands of dollars. And you've posted many other comments in this thread alone.
- lijok 3y agoYeah, it would be pretty bad for my wallet. Would make me reconsider posting low quality comments going forward, potentially increasing the quality of the forum long term.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoOr cause it to shutter because nobody is willing to post comments for little or no compensation when it could cost them that much.
- lijok 3y agoI'm sure there would be a few, high quality commenters whose risk appetite was sufficient for them to post high quality comments confidently
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoWhat if you still want the medium quality comments? Publishing information has both externalized benefits and externalized costs, and we don't have a good way of internalizing the benefits or the costs, but if you only internalize the costs you're surely going to deter things that were net positive. It's also assuming that the unrecoverable positive externalities correlate with the deterrent. But because they're unrecoverable, they wouldn't -- something with an enormous net benefit can be deterred by a small cost because the benefit was going to someone other than who pays the cost.
- lijok 3y ago> What if you still want the medium quality comments? That's a good question that I don't have a good answer to. I would encourage people to strive less towards publishing what they want to be "production ready" OSS, and direct the efforts more towards building smaller building blocks with clear indication it's not to be used in production and extensive documentation on what work needs to be done to productionize the software for given applications. These are just my immediate half-baked thoughts on that question. I had not considered that there might be a demand for medium quality software. > Publishing information has both externalized benefits and externalized costs, and we don't have a good way of internalizing the benefits or the costs That is an incredibly well formulated point. This raises some interesting thoughts that I'll need to mull over. > if you only internalize the costs you're surely going to deter things that were net positive I think that's fine, right? Unless you are demonstrably deterring a ridiculously outsized net positive, that's just the unfortunate cost of risk management.
- tremon 3y agoI'd be happy to pay for their ibuprofen if they can prove the adverse effect But that is not what this regulation would have you do. It would require you to actively monitor your HN comments for adverse effects and proactively publish up-to-date fixes and disclaimers on how to avoid those negative outcomes. The affected parties don't need to prove harm, they only need to prove that you failed in your support/maintenance duty.
- lijok 3y agoI appreciate your comment, but that's not really what's being discussed in this particular thread.