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Comment by Godel_unicode | Hacker News Reader

If by content you mean specifically news and product reviews, that's certainly possible. If by content you mean "long-form writing on a specific subject", then you're quite wrong and the parent is right.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/

High quality content comes from two sources, similar to high quality software. It either comes from an organization which makes and sells high quality content to make money (the new York times::Microsoft) or it comes from individual contributors who create it out of passion for the subject (wikipedia::FSF)

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People will produce "long-form writing on a specific subject" but usually only if they have an axe to grind. They are not necessarily independent and their work is not necessarily subject to the editorial checks and balances that you get from a properly set up news organisation like, for example, the New York Times.

You're moving from a situation where stuff is mostly trustworthy to mostly untrustworthy.

Free software is not a good analogy. It works regardless of the social and political opinions of the people who write it. I don't think it would have as many users if this were not the case ;-)

Free software is not a good analogy. It works regardless of the social and political opinions of the people who write it.

This is completely false: every act of writing or releasing Free software is a political act. That's the point of doing it, of giving your labour away. Free software only exists because of the social and political opinions of its authors.

"Everything is political" is fine in theory but, the reality is that Rails or Node.js or Bash or Linux works equally well for dictatorship filtering the internet and the dissident speaking out despite it.

Software is a tool. The idea that hammer is imbued with the political views of the person who crafted it is a bit of romantic mysticism. The political actor is the person using the software.

To put it another way, if my software cared what my political opinions were, it wouldn't be used. One of the greatest freedoms afforded me by Free Software is freedom from others' political opinions on how to use said software.

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