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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

We've seen this twice in two days now. Facebook is blocking Tor except that maybe they're not. MySQL is now under a new license, except it's not. The alarmist headlines not waiting for a response from the newly-damned organization, instead issuing a retraction after everyone has freaked out.

Will the tech community ever get past the manufactured controversy and knee-jerk reaction we lambast the mainstream media for?

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More like Facebook is blocking Tor except it was an accident, and MySQL is now under a new license except it was an accident. The idea of shaming people away from pointing out, and yes, speculating on the motives for these changes is a terrible idea for a forum. And if these things hadn't surfaced on HN, do you think they would have been corrected so quickly? What would the the "newly-damned organizations" be posting a response to?

Will HN ever get past all of the whiny meta about what other people are posting or upvoting?

Kind of an aside, but still relevant to part of your post. Whining about the content and whining about the meta whining is part of any sufficiently old community. I can recall from communities I've managed, and from ones I've participated in there's /always/ metacommentary and metametacommentary. The best thing to do in these cases is not to engage it. But no, HN will never get past all the whiny meta and there's very little we can do about it except letting it slide :(

Quick Edit: This is one of the reasons why I love discourse, it encourages metadiscussion in a separate part, and while it doesn't keep it from contaminating, it seriously helps a lot to focus it and guide it.

That's one of the reasons I like Metafilter :).

benbeltrain: How does that work in Discourse?

lsiebert: How does that work on Metafilter?

Well, in discourse it's more convention than anything. But the first category created, is a `meta` category. But this explains it better: http://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-meta/5249/2

My criticism is on the authors of the articles, not on the HN voters. If the headline reads "Facebook blocks Tor, putting activists at risk", that's quite a damning claim. Maybe they author should check with Facebook. The commentors here at HN saying "it doesn't surprise me that Facebook doesn't care about activists" might not be constructive, but I'm not criticizing it because it's a forum like you said.

I'm not sure I agree that these things necessarily needed to be brought up on HN in order for them to be corrected. Just reaching out to FB may have done it. The author did not do this, instead issuing a retraction after the fact. Did anyone contact the MySQL team to see if this was a mistake before lighting the torches and grabbing the pitchforks?

The problem isn't the people here on HN. The problem is the authors of these irresponsible articles; authors who know that the more sensationalist of headline they write, the more likely the community will join their frenzy without question. It's meta on the tech journalist community, not the HN community.

The article headlines are not irresponsible. "Facebook blocks Tor, putting activists at risk" is true. The fact that the block was automated (and with luck, temporary) is also true but little help to the activists using it. Same logic goes for the man pages.

If you run a project that enjoys the wide-scale usership of Facebook or MySQL then grow thick skin cause people are gonna raise flags fast when things look fishy. Because your project really fucking matters to people and mistakes hurt, deal with it.

I'd wager that this helps your product more often than it hurts it.

You're completely right on the tor thing, but I think this MySQL one is different. I don't think this would have been considered a bug if there hadn't been negative backlash- if it had gone unnoticed or if no one had created a stink about it, then I don't think Oracle would have been nearly as eager to revert the change. Claiming it was just a build bug (that rearranged, and rewrote, their copyright and licensing info) seems more like a good way to back down from a bad change than anything else.

I would be willing to believe that they are planning on this change and just happened to accidentally release the change too early (and therefore can legitimately call it a bug). I would doubt they would go through all of the legal and organizational red tape just to revert the change when a couple hundred customers complained. Oracle can't and wouldn't back down that quickly.

News at 11, citizen journalists begin acting more like real journalists by jumping the gun on stories!

You heard it here first!

Isn't it more likely that in both cases, large companies changed course in response to overwhelming user feedback and are trying to cover their butts with "oops, just a bug"?

It's possible, but I would hate to assume that. I would guess that an article on HN wouldn't really be "overwheling user feedback" anyway, at least not for Facebook. During that event, it also came out that several other organizations did the same thing (Google and Hacker News, to name two) and that this was a known event. Surely reaching out to Facebook before setting their headquarters on fire would have been reasonable.

So no, I wouldn't say it's more likely. Possible, yes, but the question of 'more likely' depends on how quickly you think large companies like Facebook and Oracle are willing to change course based on a very minor PR event. I doubt it would affect their bottom line at all. The more likely event seems to be that it was us that got it wrong, not the other way around.

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