I don't see how private citizens discussing their political views is "substantive", there is nothing remotely controversial in that footage, this is just fodder for partisans.
You've repeatedly created accounts with a propaganda agenda for Google. You've been doing it for years. We've banned you before, and I've banned this account. Doing this is abusive regardless of what company you're promoting or what your motive is.
Would you please stop? HN is for curious humans to exchange thoughts in community. Few things undermine curiosity or community more. We frequently ask users not to accuse each other of astroturfing or shilling without evidence, but when we do find evidence—and there's a lot of it in this case—we go from tolerant to severe pretty quickly.
(All: this is not about the thread topic, politics, or Google in general—only a malignant kind of forum abuse. I hesitate to post it in an already-controversial thread, but the data are so clear that I decided not to wait.)
You're implying that you have an admin UI that lets you see all our other logins? (matched on IP or cookies I guess?) Or did you do a one-off query just for that guy?
Since YC applications are attached to HN accounts, do you guys check comments made on alt accounts too?
Tracking is useful for moderating but I want to confirm that I can treat my throwaways as throwaways.
I don't know what dang's answer will be, but why would you assume that you are allowed or encouraged to treat your "throwaways as throwaways"?
The written FAQ doesn't exactly encourage them: "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create them routinely. On HN, users should have an identity that others can relate to. "
Separate from dang's moderator tools, you might also note that there are strong claims that textual analysis can reliably associate related accounts even without inside information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17944348
The no-throwaway rule is probably to prevent people from making a new account for every comment.
I am not at that level of paranoia yet, but I do rotate my accounts once a year to avoid accumulating too much information under one username. This is usually enough to prevent stylometric analysis. So I just need to worry about people with access to HN database/logs/moderation tools, assuming HN itself never gets compromised.
I guess I just want some reassurance that the tracking is being done responsibly and is considered privileged information only used as needed to keep the site working (moderating is pretty fair) and nothing else. Bonus points if the session logs aren't kept forever (something something GDPR compliance?).
You've repeatedly created accounts with a propaganda agenda for Google. You've been doing it for years. We've banned you many times before, and I've banned this account. Doing this is a serious abuse of HN, regardless of the company you're promoting or what your motive is. Would you please stop?
HN is for curious humans to exchange thoughts in community. It's hard to imagine anything that undermines curiosity or community worse than this. We frequently ask users not to accuse each other of astroturfing or shilling without evidence, but when we do find evidence—and there's a lot of it in this case—we come down hard pretty quickly.
>Inbox was obviously a place the gmail team used for experimentation
What was "obvious" about it? Here's how Google introduced it: "Inbox by Gmail is a new app from the Gmail team. Inbox is an organized place to get things done and get back to what matters. Bundles keep emails organized."
Do you see anything about it being an "experiment" to eventually throw away? Not to mention Gmail already had the Labs feature for experiments.
In fact, what 2 Google representatives had said at the time was:
""We hope, in the long run, that most of our users will be on Inbox." (Alex Gawley)
"We care deeply about Gmail and Gmail users, but in the long run, as we add more features to Inbox and respond to user feedback, we hope that everyone will want to use Inbox instead of Gmail. Ultimately, our users will decide." (Jason Cornwell, Inbox's lead designer)
I couldn't have said it better myself! They tried to sell it as the possible evolution of Gmail. Not some 'experiment' that would partially flow into the Gmail they asked us to abandon for Inbox in the first place.
I don't understand why any of this was necessary in the first place, the only reason I can think of is this being on the wishlist of a powerful lobbying bloc.
There is something suspect about the EU's cavalier attitude in churning out internet regulations, they generally favor old industries and incumbents.
Newspapers are dying and try to find a way to make money from their content. They find that the big user distributor Google doesn't give them their fair share and therefore try to make him pay. They get supported by other content producers and now we all are facing another absurd law.
I am a big fan of the GDPR, because it protects the rights of the users. But this time they are building a law to ease the fight of large corporations, affecting everone else in the process... not cool.
I think the upload filters are meant to serve a peeking hole for EU governments to listen to what people share on the internet, as this bypasses the encryption. This will enable governments to stop content harmful to the regime from being shared and also track individuals who are working against the government. This all happened before in all socialist regimes. I remember it well, when I was phoning someone there were censors actively listening to the conversations. This is being transplanted on the internet. It is ironic how people fought this through the 80s only to have it reinstated.
The one case where I can see it being useful is when 1 news site has some exclusive content that they post, and then every other news site copies the story by linking to the original and paraphrasing the whole thing. I see this happen a lot and I can totally see how it disincentives creating original content when every other news story just copies the story and users only read the first article they see about it.
Google being a monopoly that applies biases to the results it shows (in a way that has no public accountability) is a significant problem -- as well as the fact they implement features which effectively take away revenue from websites by showing their content without giving them page views. That is (ostensibly) the justification for these kinds of laws. I think that they are flawed because they focus on further copyright extensions that I find draconian, but the problem itself I think is pretty obviously a real problem.
I don't agree with the legislation in question (the upload filter is an awful idea, and the link tax is a really bad way of attempting to solve a real problem because it clearly exists to make sure German publishing houses get even more money).
But I don't see why this is relevant to my point that there is actually a real issue here, and ignoring it is going to cause even more laws like these to be passed because the narrative from publishers (that they are losing business because of internet companies that have a cavalier attitude about the people they are cutting off) is not entirely fictitious. When's the last time you saw Google telling large websites about changes in PageRank that will negatively impact them?
