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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering what type of system all the naysayers would have in place that would properly balance the requirements of google, the law, the community, and the individual users - and how they would scale that to ten million+ users.

If you can describe it, design it, deploy it, and operate it - you might have the beginnings of a multi-billion dollar social network on your hands. Rather than rant at google/facebook for their inadequacies, go out and ship something that will truly demonstrate how wrong Google/Facebook are.

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That's like me telling you that certain food sucks and then you telling me "you do it then". The food sucks, I didn't say I could make it better. If I could I would. However, the food still sucks. Just because I cannot fix it doesn't mean that it doesn't suck.

If you can't even point in the direction of a fix, then there is the possibility that the food can't be made better. If it genuinely can't, I think you have to revisit the question of whether or not it sucked in the first place.

To take an extreme example, if you told me a debugger sucked because it couldn't predict in advance whether or not running your program would end with an exception, I'd tell you that you didn't have a reasonable or useful scale for debugger suckiness.

>>If you can't even point in the direction of a fix, then there is the possibility that the food can't be made better

So what you are saying is that if something sucks and cannot be made better than I should not say it sucks. Maybe you should not even be making the food in the first place. Start from scratch and make something totally different. Saying that something sucks is a valid criticism. Saying why it sucks would be even better so that the person taking the criticism understands why but that is besides the point. If something sucks, it sucks. Caveat: suckiness is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure it sucks for the person who's account gets closed and he doesn't even know why.

>>To take an extreme example, if you told me a debugger sucked because it couldn't predict in advance whether or not running your program would end with an exception, I'd tell you that you didn't have a reasonable or useful scale for debugger suckiness.

Yeah, suckiness is in the eye of the beholder. You believe it doesn't suck, I believe it does. To be fair, your example is a really extreme case and that is not what we have here, therefore it is completely irrelevant.

I think you have missed my point.

I absolutely agree there is a degree to which suckiness is in the eye of the beholder, but there are still measures of suckiness that are unreasonable and useless. Going back to my debugger example, the standard of suckiness proposed is provably impossible to satisfy (it is equivalent to solving the Halting Problem). That's not just an "eye of the beholder" difference.

The next step is realizing that unless you've thought about how you might fix the suckiness and made a good-faith effort to understand the constraints the cook is operating under you don't know where on the reasonableness scale your definition of suckiness falls.

You can say the dessert sucks because it doesn't have fresh mangoes, but if mango season was months ago should the cook take you seriously?

Yes and the chef should consider adding mangos during mango season.

Do you know how many things sucked until we had the knowledge and/or technology to make them better? A lot, I reckon.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to complain that cars sucked because there was no place to safely put hot coffee whether I knew a solution was to put 50 cup holders in the car or not.

> "I'm wondering what type of system all the naysayers would have in place that would properly balance the requirements of google, the law, the community, and the individual users - and how they would scale that to ten million+ users."

This exists - it's called paying for something you use every single day, and is a core part of your existence (both online and off).

Why more people aren't self-hosting or purchasing email hosting services (and yes, that includes SLAs and proper customer support) is beyond me.

Many people - like me - can't self-host email since they don't have a fixed IP address.

And paying for an host, why bother? Just get a domain and then you can change your DNS MX records in a hour or so if Google ever bans you.

This will make more sense when services you pay for are free from this kind of stuff. As it is, well, people pay for cars now and look at all the outright ripoff crap people go through from mechanics who charge exorbitant amounts to do simple repairs, all the while leaving the car in the shop.

Hey if you don't like the broken car that we sold you, go to an iron mine and mine yourself the materials to make one yourself! </sarcasm>

I've seen this false argument too many times on the internet. When can we be done doing this?

Except in this case it's a free car that you've used for years with free gas.

In exchange for being a product. Not very different from in exchange for money.

It's completely different. I don't see how you can't make the distinction between paying lots of money for a product and doing what essentially amounts to filling out a survey for a free prize. The comparison is apples and oranges.

I can make the distinction. Although they are obviously different, there is an obvious similarity, the exchange of two valuable thing. Money for a car. Exposure to advertisements and loss of (some) privacy for a service.

Black and white is rare.

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