4 ms·

MathB.in Is Shutting Down

66 points by susam 2y ago

RandomDistort 2y ago
I know the law is often behind the trend because of the rate tech develops, but surely the old analogy for all technology is postal mail. Last time I checked, the postal service had no responsibility or requirement that they don't distribute certain messages or ideas? In some cases the government can ask to intercept them, but there's no regulation requiring them to scan letters for banned content. Why don't these same rules apply to online technology?
- LocalH 2y ago
  Because there are far more places to apply leverage, and they know they can get away with it precisely because online is "different". Why? Because they said so.
- macintux 2y ago
  I’m not going to discuss the merits of the rules, but postal mail seems a terrible comparison to the web. Global visibility, instant transmission of ideas, effectively free (as in beer) distribution.
  - croissants 2y ago
    Yeah, I think this is one of those domains where frictions (or lack thereof) matter. It is much faster, cheaper, and easier to send out a significant volume of material on the Internet than through the mail. In theory, somebody could send a bunch of obscene trolling letters, but having to lick all those envelopes seems to deter most of the people who'd be otherwise tempted.
- coliveira 2y ago
  I think the results would be similar if anyone was allowed to create their own mail delivery service. The politicians would create regulations so most people would not be allowed to run his mail delivery, and finally only a few regulated services like the postal service would remain.
- tdeck 2y ago
  > Last time I checked, the postal service had no responsibility or requirement that they don't distribute certain messages or ideas? Technically the Comstock Act hasn't been repealed in the US, and Republicans have been talking about enforcing it again. Democrats heard this and did nothing about it, because of course they did. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Act_of_1873 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Act_of_1873
- perihelions 2y ago
  It's even the opposite: the US Postal Service is *positively obligated* by the 1st Amendment to deliver content without discrimination. E.g. Lamont v. Postmaster General (1965) (US post can't create friction for US citizens subscribing to Soviet propaganda newspapers by mail). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamont_v._Postmaster_General https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamont_v._Postmaster_General (It's also prohibited from opening mail without a warrant, but that's an orthogonal question).
- DistractionRect 2y ago
  An ISP is closer to the post office than a pastebin site. A pastebin site is closer to a factory that produces and ships content to all that order it, and thus responsible for what they ship. It's unfortunate that things are the way they are, but I'm not sure there's a better option. If you give an inch, abusers will take a mile. I think AI is well suited to this role, especially with new models being cable of learning and updating their weights as they go without needing retraining/finetuning.
- triceratops 2y ago
  Please read this article https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre... then re-consider your comment.
omnibrain 2y ago
> If you have any important posts that you would like to keep, now is the time to copy and save them for yourself. Have you considered putting the site into "readonly-mode"? Or are you afraid of skeletons in then closet?
Discordian93 2y ago
Safety concerns are, as predicted by cypherpunks,being used to censor the internet and crack down on all independent platforms that dare operate outside big tech.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - jisnsm 2y ago
    What does this have to do with the OP? It’s not reasonable for his server to be taken offline every time someone decides to post some dox on it. Small community administrators don’t have the means to do round the clock moderation. The purpose of these regulations is to make sure only big tech can run an online service.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      “Your business model is not my problem” is a thing that is popular on HN/Reddit. The crows have come home from the pasture and the cows have returned to roost.
  - Jimmc414 2y ago
    The point I gathered was that while security and compliance burdens mentioned in the article are legitimate they are substantial enough of an increasing burden to outweigh the benefits for a solo maintainer.
- armchairhacker 2y ago
  I think the bigger issues for independent platforms are 1) bad actors and 2) people staying on big platforms. Bad content is more than a legal issue. If you have a public forum, you don't want people publicly posting hate and gore, being creepy, and DM-ing others threats. Your viewers will see hate/gore/creeps/threats, leave your site, tell others not to visit, and if the content is bad enough be scarred. You will be scarred. Your site will become filled with awful people. Then there's the issue of spam, which you must block simply because it will use up all your site's resources. But even with those issues, there are many, many independent platforms that exist today. The problem is that most of them are quiet. Why would someone post on a tiny forum, since almost nobody would read it? Most people don't, they either write in their journal, or post in a big forum where they're more likely to get attention. I think reachability specifically is the biggest issue, because you can make a forum invite-only, and this effectively reduces the amount of bad content to whatever you can manage (too overwhelmed? Invite less people). But people are even less likely to get an invitation to a forum, even if it's as simple as sending an email. When I think of creating a forum, I worry about strongly-worded emails from the law-enforcement and/or my hosting-provider. But I don't worry about prosecution, I worry about the emotional toll of just seeing those letters, the emotional toll of seeing the content, the effort of finding and removing it, and the effort of blocking (mundane) spam. Even then I'd still host a forum if I expected it to become popular, but I expect it to become deserted.
Wdorf 2y ago
In case anyone is looking for an alternative - I've launched https://latex.to https://latex.to here on HN last year. Since then I've added the option to save formulas in your browser via IndexedDB.
begueradj 2y ago
> After coding all through the night, as the sun rose on Sunday, 25 March 2012, the website was ready. Every now and then I hear people having developed a fully fledged software overnight, or on the weekend only... So far, I did not succeed to do that.
- veltas 2y ago
  Almost to a weird extent, this is the only software that most of us will ever be able to write, code that we could write the MVP for in a day. Because anything else is too hard to see to completion. There's something to be said about going for that MVP and then iterating.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- lelandbatey 2y ago
  Having done some weekend projects, you get it done in a weekend with usually two approaches: 1. Use "do it all for you tools" that do all the hard parts (e.g. Ruby on Rails+lots of gems, Django+lots of libraries, Drupal/Joomla + plugins, etc) 2. Cut scope to a huge degree (don't have any of those things, no users, just "if you make this request then X data is stored and you get redirected to a view"). This math-oriented pastebin was probably the second.
- coliveira 2y ago
  You need to focus on a single feature and relegate other issues either to existing services or for the next iteration.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Not "fully fledged" but "enough to be useful". After that you start having feedback that can guide gradual improvements.
perihelions 2y ago
This is the kind of outcome Section 230 (of US' Communications Decency Act of 1996) was intended to prevent. It's an unpopular opinion in tech circles, but this right here is why I support the very maligned Section 230—in fact, I wish it'd go much farther. I think it's a core human right to talk on the internet and to create websites: a right that should be protected, in practice, by granting powerful immunities to third-parties, like forum administrators. Else you end up with chilling effects like this one, chilling things no reasonable free society would want to chill.
- Kerrick 2y ago
  With containerization and cheap cloud instances, people can much more easily deploy their own instance of a service like this such that only they (and maybe their trusted friends) can log in. My wife has a private paste bin that she runs on her own subdomain. There are no concerns about content moderation because all of the content is hers, and traffic is so minimal that one VPS can run a bunch of these little services.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - lovich 2y ago
    I think reverting to only talking to your small social circle instead of the public at large might be one of those chilling effects the OP mentioned
    - dowager_dan99 2y ago
      maybe? but they also feel like completely different use-cases. It would be nice if we could solve the service discoverability problem and the service utilization problem independently. Just like the vast majority of businesses shouldn't be high-growth startups, most resources & communities should be intimate and relatively private.
    - Kerrick 2y ago
      The paste bin contents are visible to the public at large. The visibility of the content is no different than if she'd picked a public paste bin service--it just means nobody has to moderate anything because the uploader is the service owner.
jszymborski 2y ago
Anyone know in what jurisdiction these regulators are sending shut-down threats from?
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  UK
  - tempodox 2y ago
    No surprise, sadly.
    - artursapek 2y ago
      the UK is probably the most dystopian western country now
      - rurban 2y ago
        the UK always was the most censor-happy western country. Nobody remembers Ulysses, Lolita, Last Exit to Brooklyn? Or their British Board of Film Classification? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...
heavensteeth 2y ago
> Another alternative would be to encode the content of a MathB.in post and embed it into the URL, which could then be distributed with others. Upon visiting the URL, the application would read the encoded content from the URL, decode it, and render it. I made something like this a couple of years ago; it was only 60-something lines long. Very simple and a bit of fun to play with: https://github.com/ea935/maths https://github.com/ea935/maths
- WhyOhWhyQ 2y ago
  That link brings me to a 404 page.
armchairhacker 2y ago
Why not ask for a volunteer to transfer site ownership to? It's not ideal: the volunteers have to be vetted, and the selected one may still end up malicious, or nobody may be selected. But it's better than shutting down the site without trying.
rsync 2y ago
Everything about this post makes sense until I reach the part where they are closing the site completely. Why not just leave a read only, static, site up and running so that these links and paste don’t disappear? The moderation was the hard part, and for already moderated posts this cost has already been sunk. Further: if the site is just a time capsule, the operating cost would be near zero. Why not just leave the history in place?
- nine_k 2y ago
  That would likely require reviewing every item in the "time capsule", even in the parts that have passed moderation. Moderation is not perfect, and there is likely a risk that something crops up that has been missed, with more legal troubles down the line. Hence they offer to make copies of whatever material you might consider worth keeping, before the shutdown. Likely you can copy the entire site and keep it as a time capsule, public or not.
- lovich 2y ago
  You’ve made a fatal assumption that what is “acceptable” content is immutable and can’t be retroactively changed so that safe content is now unsafe content. They’ll never be free of the costs of content curation
  - armchairhacker 2y ago
    The odds of that applying to a math site are extremely low.
    - lovich 2y ago
      But not zero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
- nkrisc 2y ago
  That still requires ongoing non-zero effort and time, with no guarantees of zero problems for them.
mixedmath 2y ago
I made a partial replacement that doesn't allow user-submitted content at https://davidlowryduda.com/static/MathShare/ https://davidlowryduda.com/static/MathShare/. It just stores the content in the URL, and is limited by URL size limits. In practice this means you have approximately one page of text. I wrote about making this at https://davidlowryduda.com/mathshare/ https://davidlowryduda.com/mathshare/. I was trying out the LLM interaction that made it near the top of HN recently, and it worked very well.
koito17 2y ago
Time to archive as many links as possible. I know some people who have used Mathb.in to draft (or publish!) short, insightful articles on various topics in mathematics. Since I last read these articles as an undergraduate student, it may take a while to find the links. Thankfully, there are at least two weeks worth of time to find them. Thank you susam for 13 years of continuous service.
loktarogar 2y ago
I would be very interested in hearing the types/examples of moderation concerns that users posted. This has been a worry of mine whenever I accept UGC on a website, and it might be good for anyone who plans on hosting a similar service, a heads up on what to screen for. I am very sad for the loss of this service and thank you for work you have had to go through to keep it online.

66 points by susam 2y ago

I know the law is often behind the trend because of the rate tech develops, but surely the old analogy for all technology is postal mail. Last time I checked, the postal service had no responsibility or requirement that they don't distribute certain messages or ideas? In some cases the government can ask to intercept them, but there's no regulation requiring them to scan letters for banned content. Why don't these same rules apply to online technology?

LocalH 2y ago
Because there are far more places to apply leverage, and they know they can get away with it precisely because online is "different". Why? Because they said so.
macintux 2y ago
I’m not going to discuss the merits of the rules, but postal mail seems a terrible comparison to the web. Global visibility, instant transmission of ideas, effectively free (as in beer) distribution.
- croissants 2y ago
  Yeah, I think this is one of those domains where frictions (or lack thereof) matter. It is much faster, cheaper, and easier to send out a significant volume of material on the Internet than through the mail. In theory, somebody could send a bunch of obscene trolling letters, but having to lick all those envelopes seems to deter most of the people who'd be otherwise tempted.
coliveira 2y ago
I think the results would be similar if anyone was allowed to create their own mail delivery service. The politicians would create regulations so most people would not be allowed to run his mail delivery, and finally only a few regulated services like the postal service would remain.
tdeck 2y ago
> Last time I checked, the postal service had no responsibility or requirement that they don't distribute certain messages or ideas? Technically the Comstock Act hasn't been repealed in the US, and Republicans have been talking about enforcing it again. Democrats heard this and did nothing about it, because of course they did. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Act_of_1873 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Act_of_1873
perihelions 2y ago
It's even the opposite: the US Postal Service is *positively obligated* by the 1st Amendment to deliver content without discrimination. E.g. Lamont v. Postmaster General (1965) (US post can't create friction for US citizens subscribing to Soviet propaganda newspapers by mail). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamont_v._Postmaster_General https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamont_v._Postmaster_General (It's also prohibited from opening mail without a warrant, but that's an orthogonal question).
DistractionRect 2y ago
An ISP is closer to the post office than a pastebin site. A pastebin site is closer to a factory that produces and ships content to all that order it, and thus responsible for what they ship. It's unfortunate that things are the way they are, but I'm not sure there's a better option. If you give an inch, abusers will take a mile. I think AI is well suited to this role, especially with new models being cable of learning and updating their weights as they go without needing retraining/finetuning.
triceratops 2y ago
Please read this article https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre... then re-consider your comment.

omnibrain 2y ago

> If you have any important posts that you would like to keep, now is the time to copy and save them for yourself. Have you considered putting the site into "readonly-mode"? Or are you afraid of skeletons in then closet?

Discordian93 2y ago

Safety concerns are, as predicted by cypherpunks,being used to censor the internet and crack down on all independent platforms that dare operate outside big tech.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
[flagged]
- jisnsm 2y ago
  What does this have to do with the OP? It’s not reasonable for his server to be taken offline every time someone decides to post some dox on it. Small community administrators don’t have the means to do round the clock moderation. The purpose of these regulations is to make sure only big tech can run an online service.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    “Your business model is not my problem” is a thing that is popular on HN/Reddit. The crows have come home from the pasture and the cows have returned to roost.
- Jimmc414 2y ago
  The point I gathered was that while security and compliance burdens mentioned in the article are legitimate they are substantial enough of an increasing burden to outweigh the benefits for a solo maintainer.
armchairhacker 2y ago
I think the bigger issues for independent platforms are 1) bad actors and 2) people staying on big platforms. Bad content is more than a legal issue. If you have a public forum, you don't want people publicly posting hate and gore, being creepy, and DM-ing others threats. Your viewers will see hate/gore/creeps/threats, leave your site, tell others not to visit, and if the content is bad enough be scarred. You will be scarred. Your site will become filled with awful people. Then there's the issue of spam, which you must block simply because it will use up all your site's resources. But even with those issues, there are many, many independent platforms that exist today. The problem is that most of them are quiet. Why would someone post on a tiny forum, since almost nobody would read it? Most people don't, they either write in their journal, or post in a big forum where they're more likely to get attention. I think reachability specifically is the biggest issue, because you can make a forum invite-only, and this effectively reduces the amount of bad content to whatever you can manage (too overwhelmed? Invite less people). But people are even less likely to get an invitation to a forum, even if it's as simple as sending an email. When I think of creating a forum, I worry about strongly-worded emails from the law-enforcement and/or my hosting-provider. But I don't worry about prosecution, I worry about the emotional toll of just seeing those letters, the emotional toll of seeing the content, the effort of finding and removing it, and the effort of blocking (mundane) spam. Even then I'd still host a forum if I expected it to become popular, but I expect it to become deserted.

Wdorf 2y ago

In case anyone is looking for an alternative - I've launched https://latex.to https://latex.to here on HN last year. Since then I've added the option to save formulas in your browser via IndexedDB.

begueradj 2y ago

> After coding all through the night, as the sun rose on Sunday, 25 March 2012, the website was ready. Every now and then I hear people having developed a fully fledged software overnight, or on the weekend only... So far, I did not succeed to do that.

veltas 2y ago
Almost to a weird extent, this is the only software that most of us will ever be able to write, code that we could write the MVP for in a day. Because anything else is too hard to see to completion. There's something to be said about going for that MVP and then iterating.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
lelandbatey 2y ago
Having done some weekend projects, you get it done in a weekend with usually two approaches: 1. Use "do it all for you tools" that do all the hard parts (e.g. Ruby on Rails+lots of gems, Django+lots of libraries, Drupal/Joomla + plugins, etc) 2. Cut scope to a huge degree (don't have any of those things, no users, just "if you make this request then X data is stored and you get redirected to a view"). This math-oriented pastebin was probably the second.
coliveira 2y ago
You need to focus on a single feature and relegate other issues either to existing services or for the next iteration.
nine_k 2y ago
Not "fully fledged" but "enough to be useful". After that you start having feedback that can guide gradual improvements.

perihelions 2y ago

This is the kind of outcome Section 230 (of US' Communications Decency Act of 1996) was intended to prevent. It's an unpopular opinion in tech circles, but this right here is why I support the very maligned Section 230—in fact, I wish it'd go much farther. I think it's a core human right to talk on the internet and to create websites: a right that should be protected, in practice, by granting powerful immunities to third-parties, like forum administrators. Else you end up with chilling effects like this one, chilling things no reasonable free society would want to chill.

Kerrick 2y ago
With containerization and cheap cloud instances, people can much more easily deploy their own instance of a service like this such that only they (and maybe their trusted friends) can log in. My wife has a private paste bin that she runs on her own subdomain. There are no concerns about content moderation because all of the content is hers, and traffic is so minimal that one VPS can run a bunch of these little services.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lovich 2y ago
  I think reverting to only talking to your small social circle instead of the public at large might be one of those chilling effects the OP mentioned
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    maybe? but they also feel like completely different use-cases. It would be nice if we could solve the service discoverability problem and the service utilization problem independently. Just like the vast majority of businesses shouldn't be high-growth startups, most resources & communities should be intimate and relatively private.
  - Kerrick 2y ago
    The paste bin contents are visible to the public at large. The visibility of the content is no different than if she'd picked a public paste bin service--it just means nobody has to moderate anything because the uploader is the service owner.

jszymborski 2y ago

Anyone know in what jurisdiction these regulators are sending shut-down threats from?

BoredPositron 2y ago
UK
- tempodox 2y ago
  No surprise, sadly.
  - artursapek 2y ago
    the UK is probably the most dystopian western country now
    - rurban 2y ago
      the UK always was the most censor-happy western country. Nobody remembers Ulysses, Lolita, Last Exit to Brooklyn? Or their British Board of Film Classification? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...

heavensteeth 2y ago

> Another alternative would be to encode the content of a MathB.in post and embed it into the URL, which could then be distributed with others. Upon visiting the URL, the application would read the encoded content from the URL, decode it, and render it. I made something like this a couple of years ago; it was only 60-something lines long. Very simple and a bit of fun to play with: https://github.com/ea935/maths https://github.com/ea935/maths

WhyOhWhyQ 2y ago
That link brings me to a 404 page.

armchairhacker 2y ago

Why not ask for a volunteer to transfer site ownership to? It's not ideal: the volunteers have to be vetted, and the selected one may still end up malicious, or nobody may be selected. But it's better than shutting down the site without trying.

rsync 2y ago

Everything about this post makes sense until I reach the part where they are closing the site completely. Why not just leave a read only, static, site up and running so that these links and paste don’t disappear? The moderation was the hard part, and for already moderated posts this cost has already been sunk. Further: if the site is just a time capsule, the operating cost would be near zero. Why not just leave the history in place?

nine_k 2y ago
That would likely require reviewing every item in the "time capsule", even in the parts that have passed moderation. Moderation is not perfect, and there is likely a risk that something crops up that has been missed, with more legal troubles down the line. Hence they offer to make copies of whatever material you might consider worth keeping, before the shutdown. Likely you can copy the entire site and keep it as a time capsule, public or not.
lovich 2y ago
You’ve made a fatal assumption that what is “acceptable” content is immutable and can’t be retroactively changed so that safe content is now unsafe content. They’ll never be free of the costs of content curation
- armchairhacker 2y ago
  The odds of that applying to a math site are extremely low.
  - lovich 2y ago
    But not zero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
nkrisc 2y ago
That still requires ongoing non-zero effort and time, with no guarantees of zero problems for them.

mixedmath 2y ago

I made a partial replacement that doesn't allow user-submitted content at https://davidlowryduda.com/static/MathShare/ https://davidlowryduda.com/static/MathShare/. It just stores the content in the URL, and is limited by URL size limits. In practice this means you have approximately one page of text. I wrote about making this at https://davidlowryduda.com/mathshare/ https://davidlowryduda.com/mathshare/. I was trying out the LLM interaction that made it near the top of HN recently, and it worked very well.

koito17 2y ago

Time to archive as many links as possible. I know some people who have used Mathb.in to draft (or publish!) short, insightful articles on various topics in mathematics. Since I last read these articles as an undergraduate student, it may take a while to find the links. Thankfully, there are at least two weeks worth of time to find them. Thank you susam for 13 years of continuous service.

loktarogar 2y ago

I would be very interested in hearing the types/examples of moderation concerns that users posted. This has been a worry of mine whenever I accept UGC on a website, and it might be good for anyone who plans on hosting a similar service, a heads up on what to screen for. I am very sad for the loss of this service and thank you for work you have had to go through to keep it online.