That doesn't make any sense to me (as an Irish person). A hundred years ago, sure. But modern Ireland is one of the richest and most privileged places on earth. The problems we have in modern Ireland - wealth inequality, housing crisis etc. - are decidedly problems of our own causing, and do not in any way equate to or reflect the struggle for rights and recognition of indigenous peoples around the world.
We do have our own indigenous minority who are treated badly by society - Irish travellers. There's a lot of racism in Irish society towards them, and we could do with looking at how other countries treat minorities, indigenous or not, and recognize for all that we like to harp on about our own poor treatment in history, we are doing exactly the same here towards travellers.
It’s odd to call Travelers “indigenous” because they don’t predate the settlement of Ireland by the current majority group. They’re Irish people who culturally diverged around 1600. It’s like calling Appalachian Americans Indigenous.
I don't think the semantics of the word indigenous are the important thing here, although I will say that officially, according to the Irish government, Irish travellers are an indigenous minority and attempts to discredit this are usually a thinly disguised attempt to discredit the credibility of the Irish travellers as a distinct ethnic minority - or, to put it another way, it's one of the more common ways that Irish people are racist towards travellers.
Instead, it's the racism and discrimination against an ethnic minority that we should focus on.
Calling them “indigenous” is a tactic to give greater moral weight to their political positions. While those positions may be meritorious, that doesn’t justify false characterizations in their service. Irish Travelers are ethnically no different than other Irish, nor does their presence in the country predate that of other Irish.
This is a great point, and I’m curious to hear what would be better alternatives. Like obviously there’s something great about having online connections with other people, but how could we do it better without surrendering to some big platform?
We could make a public platform. In the US this all but guarantees a protection from censorship. Third parties could offer moderation services. The brave could suck on the firehose!
The funny thing is that Usenet is already a highly censorship-resistant platform, and tools like NoCeM would let you subscribe to third party moderation streams!
I genuinely forget Usenet is still technically around these days. I dabble in the idea of using it here and there, but the ease and convenience of the modern www has spoiled me quite a bit. If I go to a decentralized platform, it's more likely to be something fediverse.
I think there’s a difference that depends on scale and privacy. If your network is private (or something more akin to p2p / messaging) this is much less of an issue, especially if you have strong blocking controls. Users moderate themselves.
I think the problems that Facebook, Youtube, etc are seeing stem from the fact that the content is much more public, thus in much more need of moderation.
In my opinion this is an argument in favour of shutting Facebook (and every other large social network) down. This sort of work is damaging and abusive, and nobody should have to endure it just so we can have social networks.
I understand there are some jobs in the world that need to deal with dark stuff (like law enforcement), but social networks just aren’t worth the human cost.
What you’re proposing is not just shutting down social networks, it’s shutting down any website that involves user content, anything that allows photo/video upload, comments, or any kind of user interaction. That’s impossible.
You point out that public safety jobs are view more “worth it,” and certainly they are, but that logic brings up the question of who judges what job is worth undergoing trauma.
In other words, is a subway or freight train driver’s job “worth it,” if they have to see someone commit suicide on the tracks? What about crime scene cleanup companies? Funeral services? Bus drivers? Truck drivers? Nobody’s going to agree on where to draw the line in the sand.
A more realistic solution might be to make comprehensive support systems, mental health resources, and treatment a legally mandated, completely free service provided to any employee that works in these kinds of fields.
Finally, I think there are most certainly people out there who are not as sensitive and affected by this content who would be candidates for these kinds of roles. Perhaps there’s a way to test for that sensitivity before the real job starts.
I’m actually not proposing shutting down any website that allows uploaded content, just large / public sites that require this sort of moderation. Not every site gets this stuff uploaded to it. The more private the network, the less need for this kind of company-led moderation.
As far as “worth it” goes, some people have to be exposed to it so long as we have law enforcement (but I’m certainly open to alternatives here). I’m not sure the train operator is a fair comparison, because seeing a suicide is an exceptional circumstance in their job, it’s not the norm. The content moderators, however, are sadly expected to be exposed to traumatizing content as part of their job description — it’s essentially the point of their job.
There are plenty of kinds of work we deem as hazardous to people’s health, and thus are either banned or regulated. I’m not sure if there’s a healthy way to expose people in these moderator jobs to the traumatizing content they face. It just doesn’t seem worth the tradeoff to endanger them like this.
Think like a legislator. How do you write this regulation?
> [shut down] just large / public sites that require this sort of moderation
Let’s say I start a restaurant review website that allows comments and photos to be uploaded. It does modest business for a while, I now have 50 employees. I’m following the law because my site isn’t big enough to violate this “no user content for big prominent websites” law.
Soon, it becomes big, like a major competitor to Yelp, and I’ve got 1,000 employees. But suddenly, this new law kicks in that says that I have to stop accepting uploads because my site is too high profile. Now, I lay everyone off and go out of business.
This just isn’t a workable solution, at least not in the particular way you’re proposing it be constructed.
And really, you’re asking the second largest advertiser on the web (Facebook), a Fortune 50 company, to just pack up its bags and shut down.
It’s not like I love Facebook or anything, but I’m sure their 45,000 employees wouldn’t be happy about that.
This is not just a facebook problem though. Taking your proposal to its logical conclusion suggests that the internet should have no user created content on it - or am I missing some possible middle ground?
How on earth does the size make any difference to the supposed problem? Even if we somehow had a stable and viable size capping system to whatever nebulous concept of "too big" there would still be people exposed to the same content. Not to mention in the US said restrictions would get a "haha no" from the courts on First Ammendment grounds against arbitrary limitations on speech by source.
Why not just require social networks to verify identity and verify users are 18+ before allowing them to make an account? Furthermore, maybe even introduce a direct, easy-to-understand, hard-to-misuse law, enforceable locally (e.g. in the US it be a state law) that says committing fraud to join a social network is a misdemeanor with a $1,000 fine. Facebook can then report fraudsters to local police.
People would be less inclined to post this type of content to Facebook if it their account was very connected to their real identity, if they were 18+, and if there was meaningful punishment for making fake accounts or accounts with stolen identities.
I think this line of reasoning is victim blaming. It’s not the author’s fault that Instagram works the way it works. I think she’s entitled to want them to do a better job.
I don't disagree that this type of advertising is unsavory, but I do think it is a bit simplistic to call people like the author victims of evil oppressive Instagram and call it a day.
I notice that in today's society people make an awful lot of demands on the services and apps they use, while not directly paying for hardly any of what they consume.
Facebook/Instagram definitely has a lot more power than any individual user, but it doesn't have more power than all of its users. If people were offended enough to actually walk away from the platform en masse, I bet we would see substantial reform pretty quickly.
The "if you don't like it, leave" argument is cruel when applied to cities, countries, or essential services, but I think it is pretty fair when we are talking about totally superfluous apps that don't even cost anything.
She's consuming free computing resources in exchange for the implied social contract of having ads presented to her. If she doesn't like that, she has to find a way to subvert that contract or stop using free services. She'd have more of a leg to stand on if she was a customer of Instagram.
No, we can talk about it - my point was that the conversation is probably more easily had in person or via blogposts where guard-rails can be set so people don’t talk over or past each other. When the topic is so vast, it’s more useful to have specific debate than to have armchair musings back and forth. It’s just more difficult of a conversation to be carried out in the latter form.
>I think most people grow up missing their actual potential as thinkers because the environment they grow up in does not understand these issues and their tradeoffs....
This is the meta-thing that’s been bugging me: how do we help people realize they’re “missing their actual potential as thinkers”?
The world seems so content to be an oral culture again, how do we convince / change / equip people to be skeptical of these media?
Joe Edelman’s Centre for Livable Media (http://livable.media) seems like a step in the right direction. How else can we convince people?
Marijuana helped me realize there was a lot about myself I didn't understand and launched my investigation into more effective thought processes. I've become much more driven and thoughtful since I began smoking as an adult.
I stopped assuming I knew everything, and a childlike sense of wonder returned to my life. I began looking beyond what was directly in front of me and sought out more comprehensive generalizations. What do atoms have in common with humans? What does it mean to communicate? Do we communicate with ecosystems? Do individuals communicate with society? What is consciousness and intelligence? Is my mind a collection of multiple conscious processes? How do the disparate pieces of my brain integrate into one conscious entity, how do they shape my subjective reality?
I found information, individuals, and networks to be fundamental to my understanding of the world. I was always interested in them before, but not enough to seek them out or apply them through creative works. I discovered for myself the language of systems. I found a deep appreciation of mathematics and a growth path to set my life on.
I was able to do this exploration at a time when my work was slow and steady. It came along a couple years ago when I was 25, which I've heard is when the brain's development levels off. I feel lucky to have experienced it when I did because I was totally unsatisfied with my life before then.
Since then I've found work I love at a seed stage startup where I've been able to apply my ideas in various ways. I have become much more active as a creator, including exploring latent artistic sensibilities through writing poetry and taking oil painting classes with a very talented teacher. I've found myself becoming an artist in my work - I've become the director and lead engineer at the startup and am exploring ways to determine and distribute truth in the products we sell, and further to make a statement on what art is in a capitalistic society (even if I'm the only one who will ever recognize it). I've also become more empathic and found a wonderful woman and two pups to share my life with, despite previously being extremely solitary. Between work and family I have less time for introspection now, but I expect I'll learn just as much through these efforts.
Ultimatey, I've learned to trust my subconscious. I was always anxious and nervous about being wrong in any situation before, but now I trust that even if I am wrong in the moment my brain can figure out good answers over longer stretches of time.
I don't know how far cannabis led me down this path but it definitely gave me a good strong push.
This is almost exactly my experience! I don't think HN talks about it much, but cannabis is a great way to approach intuitive depth on subjects. For me it was ego, math, music, civics and information theory concepts.
When I started, it was at a job that I absolutely hated (rewriting mantis to be a help desk system), and it helped me get out of it by opening up better understanding of low level systems. That eventually led to high frequency trading systems tuning and some pretty deep civics using Foia.
Not that it was a direct contributor, but I do consider it a seed towards better understanding of the things around me. I don't necessarily feel happier, but I feel much more content.
Great article although I think it’s worth mentioning the pattern of checking the iOS system version for method availability (e.g., `if ([[[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion] floatValue] >= 8.0)`) should be avoided.
I think it’s a better practice to query the object in question if it responds to the desired selector. This way, if the method ever goes away (in say iOS 10), you won’t send the wrong message to the object/class.
