Hacker News Reader

Comment by vectorpush | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this fascination with internet petitions. Hasn't it been demonstrated to the point of absurdity that our government does not care?

Before anyone claims "OH, so we should just do nothing instead????". Posting a dubious e-signature to an internet petition does nothing. There are people out in the streets sleeping in parks getting pepper sprayed and arrested because the government can't simply ignore it (unlike every single internet petition).

Filling out a whitehouse petition is like getting punched in the face by your boss then slipping a folded piece of paper into the complaint box he put in the break-room next to the donuts.

View on HN

Internet petitions establish in everyones minds that people are for the petition. That's a real effect, whether it is to de-legitimize the government's "reaching out" campaign of the online petitions, or to bolster support by showing other supporters how many others out there support their cause. It's not real in the sense that it will do the thing that the petition is for, but it's real in the sense that it builds support for the thing.

The fascination is with poisoning the well. A lot of people have the interest and energy to do exactly one thing politically, and in this age of OWS and global uprising it's in the interests of the status quo to eliminate the effect of this low-hanging fruit. The people who create and post internet petitions are evil and/or stupid, without exception.

So you're saying that some online petitions are actually meant to diffuse dissent about the thing they're petitioning? That would be a stroke of evil genius if it's true. Doesn't strike me as being the case so much as their being driven by naive idealism, but in the case of the whitehouse one, it's at least conceivable. In the long run, it's probably just going to demonstrate to a lot of people that online petitions are mostly counterproductive.

All internet petitions are simply polls with identifiable voters, making their marks on a non-binding ballot. That petitions are portrayed as effective political acts causes people with only one political act in their schedule to waste their effort.

Online petitions exist to harvest email addresses so they can hit you up for donations and volunteering during the campaign. They're an easy way for campaign staff to build a mailing list of people politically engaged enough to be worth spamming.

This is definitely one of the reasons for online petitions. I doubt that's why Whitehouse.gov exists.

Did you read the petition? It seems like you're missing the joke in this one...

What joke? Four, well reasoned and exceptionally well written petitions have gone up to this very website and the administration responded with insultingly dismissive answers that did not, end the end, address anything.

The "joke" is that the petition links to copyright-infringement hosted on imgur.

Under SOPA, whitehouse.gov would be taken down because someone posted this petition :)

While I agree it's a good "joke", it's unfortunately about as useless as pointing out that people who stole billions and caused a global financial crisis are walking free while people caught stealing a TV are serving years in prison.

Unfortunately, just like every other law, SOPA will only be applied when some high power decides is should be. (and in the case of whitehouse.gov, it never will be)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com