Hacker News Blacking Out Logo | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Blacking Out Logo

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252 pointstluthra47 comments

Thank god there was a story about this. I'd never have realised. </sarcasm>

Really - Does the front page need to be filled with this stuff? We're aware of it already. Is it really that exciting?

Well, we are talking about potentially the end of the internet.

Even though it could mean the end of what we now call the internet I have to agree that having the front page covered with SOPA blackout pages is silly. People on HN are already aware of the risks this legislation brings. It's more important we make people who use the internet regularly but don't know much about the legislation aware of what's going on and what the problems are with it. These top news stories are likely news to only about 0.1% of HN.

If the correlation between SOPA awareness and HN user is indeed 99.9%, we need to find a website that has close to 0%. cough MySpace cough Could this bring web attention back to the decaying social network? Stay tuned.

I guess I really should stress my sarcasm more lol

I've never seen a news post which exemplifies the idea that the comments can be worth more than the article. Obviously this isn't news to any-one here but it gives a place to discuss the changes.

Karma++;

Yes it does need to be filled, for the journalist and tech writes who scour hacker news for their latest blog posts. Not too leave out the random person who discovers Hacker News today.

Actually, I had no idea it was blacked out. I use a CSS reset to make the whole website green-on-black without images like it's an old mainframe system.

Well, some people use stuff like these http://mashable.com/2010/12/01/improve-hacker-news-ui/ or these http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overlo...

I'm not from the US. Is there anything I can do to help oppose SOPA/PIPA?

So far I've assumed I'm not eligible to call US senators/ congressmen, or sign the whitehouse.gov petition. Am I wrong about this? Is there anything else I can do instead?

All the blackout messages I've seen today don't appear to have much info for the rest of the English-speaking world about what we can do to help.

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/114010/how-can-peopl...

Ought to black out all the headlines. Stand at the same level as Wikipedia and co. even if it's trivial to bypass.

Adding a link to a take action page would be good too.

The goal here is not blackout per se but to defeat these bills. Fully blacking out HN would hurt more than help. It wouldn't make more people aware of the problem, because everyone here is already aware of it. But it would make the site less useful as a place to discuss techniques to fight it.

I agree, but I also want HN to stay up for a selfish reason. I'm curious how much of HN's front page will be taken over by the blackout.

It's far more useful to have the site live and able to disseminate information.

That might be why reddit is only going dark for 12 hours.

I consider this a "black armband".

In the protest movement, there are those who self-immolate, suicide, or hunger strike. There are also those who rally in the streets, fly flags, wear ribbons, or armbands.

What matters is solidarity and communicating the message.

Given that I've heard discussion of SOPA/PIPA on NPR, BBC, and The New York Times already, notice has been made.

SOPA leads Google News, and I see 3800+ articles on it now. I expect more to follow. Google Trends and the news timeline are also informative: http://bit.ly/zRA1w4 (original link is far too long).

There were bits on the news on my radio stations this morning. That's mainstream, folks.

> I consider this a "black armband".

So HN is to SOPA as the SUV driver with the "Support Our Troops" magnet was to the occupation of Afghanistan/Iraq?

If it's the "Support our Troops ... end this war" variant.

And the SUV is a Prius. Or bicycle.

Is there anything to actually have a discussion about relating to this? Seems too navel gazing to me.

It strikes me as a reasonable compromise. It seems pg was paying attention to the recent poll, where quite a few HN readers expressed support for HN joining in the blackout, but where there were some good arguments for not blacking out HN today. By just blacking out the logo, it provides a stark reminder of the situation to any HN readers who needed reminding, but it doesn't take the site completely offline. Makes sense, since there were some good arguments that taking a niche site like HN offline wouldn't do much good anyway.

I dunno, I'm guessing pg just decided to go for a pragmatic, but still principled, stand. <shrug />

Even though probably everyone who frequents HN is already aware of SOPA/PIPA, I think it's more a show of solidarity with others participating (Wiki/Google) and a "lead by example" case rather than the idea that it might make a huge difference in the same way that some of these bigger players will.

Is there a link to more info somewhere? Maybe a small link on the right of the top header? At the moment it seems a bit 'in' to just blackout without an obvious link to more info.

Hacker News should go dark for the day. Site participation in the blackout is not just to inform users but to garner news media coverage of SOPA. Thousands of conscientious sites around the net are participating but Hacker News isn't.

The tab title also accidently got <span>'d

Sorry, fixed.

I'm not from the US and I thought someone important died again.

Yes, freedom gonna die soon.

OooooOooo... A black background with grey text! That's some pretty radical protesting right there. Should've turned off HN for 12 hours instead.

It's a good thing that twitter is not blocked, it helps spread the news about the protest. They could add at least a small notice though. Blacking out hacker news is mostly symbolic preaching to the choir.

When is Facebook going to participate? We already have Google and Wikipedia, it seems like Twitter and Facebook would also be all over this.

Twitter said they aren't going to do it. [1]

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/sopa-twitt...

I saw the argument yesterday that was made and it was good enough to convince me that Twitter and Facebook should stay up. They are important communication tools and they will be needed today when people are going to those sites so they can discuss this stuff. But, they could do like Google and at least acknowledge it. I am hoping that they will still do that at some point today though because in response to a tweet, Dick Costolo said, "watch this space." Not sure what he means, but hopefully it means Twitter will acknowledge it.

News item on NPR Tuesday night said "watch this space", so I'm hoping to see something at Twitter. Hrm. Tagline spamming tweets would be very cool in this case.

Looks like Amazon added a "Reasons to oppose or modify SOPA" link on their homepage.

I like this color scheme lol, but in all seriousness - I'm glad to see HN participating.

Maybe shuting down a couple hours is better than this, but the fact is people notice it

Is there any plans for Bing to do the same, like Google did to protest against SOPA?

Tech Crunch like HN is black, but not blacked out. Are these different messages?

Any response to SOPA is better than none.

ooo racey

This, along with the normal hell-banning of innocent user accounts.

Whoa... Meta

Yeah, but do you know Kung Fu? </matrix>

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