RyanZAG

Great point, and I think the question we should all be asking ourselves is how do we know we're not the ones pointing at rocks and shouting wolf at a myriad of issues we don't really understand - but believe we do.

As soon as it comes to anything political, we're all suddenly experts predicting gloom, doom or salvation over every single policy issue. Logic says every person is probably wrong on average half of the time, yet every person believes they are correct in their political team playing 100% of the time. That can't be healthy.

Tons of competition. I have a choice of multiple different fiber line providers, government copper phone line provider, a bunch of different wireless options, and then multiple different ISPs who run over those different fiber or copper lines or 4G towers.

Generally small towns would only have access to 1 fiber or copper line provider (generally Telkom our useless government supplier), but multiple ISPs running on that line so it's not that bad, but I live in the suburbs near a city so I have a lot more choice.

Yeah you definitely have bigger problems than net neutrality. I'm in the middle of Africa, 30km from the CBD of a small city, and I have 1gb local / 100mb international fiber with no caps or throttling for the equivalent of ~$85/month. Plus I can WhatsApp the tech support if something goes wrong and they'll drive over and fix it within 30 mins or so.

I also have a choice of about 8 different ISPs offering me fiber lines to my door who seem to be in a price war with each other at the moment.

I don't have net neutrality though. But surely the problem you're facing is ISP/government monopoly related, not the net neutrality bit? Or do you think it's something else causing the ISP issues there?

Sorry, I may be incorrect here, but from what I understand net neutrality only came into effect two years ago in 2015. All three of the companies you mentioned were up and running prior to that. So net neutrality enabling them doesn't seem to be correct to me.

EDIT: As for my country.. c'mon, low blow. Most of the people in my country are having some difficult problems with simpler issues than video streaming. We're getting there though, hopefully!

Ho! Amazing, thanks for clarifying. Your ISPs are pretty messed up. Are they government monopolies? I think your problems are far, far deeper than net neutrality, and just re-affirms my belief that net neutrality was a band-aid that needed to come off for you guys to wake up and fix your problems directly at the source. I wish you well in the fight ahead!

That's crazy! I'd have cancelled and swapped ISPs after a week. Guess people didn't really care?

EDIT: After reading more replies, it seems like you guys actually have no choice. Serious red flag that it sounds like net neutrality was covering up. I think you will be better in the long run with it removed, but you all need to get active and fix your ISP problem and create a free market.

How long did it stay blocked? I bet they unblocked it as soon as customers complained.

Definitely an interesting example though. Nothing like that has ever happened in my country without net neutrality, but then we have a fairly competitive market where a single carrier trying that would lose their customers very quickly.

As someone from a country without net neutrality, I have to say this hasn't happened. Generally you get very cheap or free plans that are sponsored by Facebook or others that give priority to Facebook, but ISPs are always happy to take a little bit more money for an unlimited plan that gives you full access. And at least in my country, they're not unreasonably priced.

Even without net neutrality, your single monopoly ISP could triple their prices and there would be nothing you could do about it. The fact that they haven't seems to show that net neutrality probably isn't going to affect you all that badly. No sane company is going to block Google Wallet or Netflix.

Feels like net neutrality isn't the problem - it's Spectrum that is the problem. If repealing net neutrality gets your country to fix your real problem, then I'd say it's going to be a massively good thing in the long run as top parent on this comment chain implied.

They definitely weren't wrong. But at the same time, it shows that this isn't a good argument against Facebook, and that it likely means we'll be using Facebook more in future instead of less. Probably to our detriment, but definitely to Facebook's profit.

Right! As the article points out very clearly, it's not the "more X" that stops people buying the new product. It's that to get more X, those cars gave up Y and Z which were really the most important parts even if customer's didn't convey that to the product research guys.

In this case, if the customers do say that more X is a good thing, then having more X probably would lead to more sales for B -- but B is probably deficient in Y and Z. You have to cover the required essentials for the specific product before you can improve on the nice extras.

In the case of a small car, customers would say they'd like it if it was bigger with more headroom and more carry space. If you solve this by increasing the actual physical size of the body, your product will fail. If you solve this by laying out the existing body to give more room, your product will succeed. Although even if you succeed in keeping the same amount of weight and body size and improving headroom, your car will still fail if it now looks ugly because of the changes.

The key is to consider the entire product holistically and focus on all of the user's needs at the same time. Don't just focus on 'more or less X'.

Why do you say the slices have gotten smaller? The absolute percentage of people in poverty in the world has had a very rapid decline over the last 50 years. So something we are doing is working.

> My boss getting a new Tesla or yet another house from the extra profits doesn't make me happy.

Hang on, last I checked everyone still gets employed in China; Denmark; Finland; Netherlands; Canada; Sweden; Norway; Ireland the same way they get employed in all the other countries. All the bosses in those countries you mentioned still drive the new Telsa and have bigger houses. So wouldn't this kind of socialism not actually be a solution for the OP's problem?

As stated by bigbugbag above:

> I can't help but strongly dislike rappler for being part of facebook's effort to destroy the internet with their internet.org thing

They weren't just users of Facebook. They were involved more deeply in Facebook and spreading Facebook.

https://www.rappler.com/technology/87234-rappler-smart-commu...

Isn't he more complaining about capitalists participating in capitalism until other people make more money than them, and only then becoming anticapitalists? It's not a group that has always been anti-Facebook. It's a group that has been on the inside pushing Facebook for a long time until other groups co-opted Facebook to push an agenda they don't like. Now they want Facebook to silence those people.

They're closer to crony-capitalists who like capitalism as long as it benefits them, and then want to pass regulations keeping everyone else out.

I spent a number of months there talking to people while doing remote work. It's a great place to visit - highly recommend it to anyone!

As for why I'm posting: all it takes for evil to win is for good men to stay silent.

The article itself provides no proof that the people they are calling fake are indeed fake. That counts as being deliberately malicious in my book, but I'd think it would count as being 'biased' in anybody's book. That's all I wanted to bring to people's attention. Often just pointing it out to people is enough to help sway them away from making a mistake, and trusting this article as being on the level would be a terrible mistake for anyone to make.

I don't believe that is true. You want it to be true, and so you've fallen for it. The only kind of fake news stories anybody falls for are fake news stories that support their own biases. Such as this article, but that goes without saying.

The article gives zero proof of any kind of fake accounts aside from fake profile pictures, and calls Facebook out for not removing the accounts, even thought Facebook says they have removed the fake ones. So clearly Facebook does not feel that those particular accounts are fake either.

Calling someone you don't like a "fake account" (as someone has already hinted about me in this very comment section!), does not suddenly turn it into a fake account. It's a real account until you provide absolute proof - especially when the supposed fake account has the same opinion as 80mil+ people in a country. Sorry.

The rest of your argument hinges on the idea that 80mil people are terribly stupid and can't tell fake accounts from real accounts - even though they live in the country - and have fallen for a ruse. While you, in your great wisdom - who has probably never been in the Philippines? - know them all to be fake without any evidence. That's a fairly poor argument in my opinion.

The article makes it sound like it's fake accounts who are against some in the media, but it's really the entire population.

The article calls out fake profile pictures on facebook as some indication of an artificial message. This is wrong - many people on facebook use fake profile pictures. I use a fake profile picture myself, although my account is genuine. Probably a third of your facebook friend list uses fake profile pictures - go check for yourself. The article also says they have collected a database of facebook accounts that post pro-Duterte messages as if this is somehow an indictment. With Duterte having an 80%+ approval rating across 100mil people population, many of whom have Facebook accounts, do you think a database of 2mil posters is somehow unexpected or fake?

From my time in the Philippines, everyone on the street supports Duterte because he's given them a sense of safety again. For many in western countries, this kind of feeling is unknown because you've likely never walked the streets expecting to be killed at any moment - you have working police and institutions that keep you safe. For many years, the Philippines did not have this, and they see Duterte as having helped make them safe. This breeds an almost fanatical devotion for obvious reasons, and most Phillipinos on social media will defend him with ferocity. The article tries to associate this as something bad and fake. But it's not, it's real and genuine. You can open up Twitter right now and go to Trump's feed and you will see people who hate him and many who wish violence on him. That doesn't mean those people are fake - and the people supporting Duterte aren't fake either.

Here's a quick video on how regular people in the Philippines feel about articles like this one: https://youtu.be/siAjsu0ZmKE?t=429

This is an extremely biased piece of journalism that almost anyone on the ground in the Philippines would disagree with. Very dishonest and should not be trusted at face value.

There's an interesting psychological effect there. Maybe before people buy it, the idea of it being a bubble is first and foremost in their mind. After they buy some, and they see it make them money, it's probably not a big concern for them anymore.

Once they've convinced themselves that it's a valuable investment and have purchased multiple times, the very idea that it could be a bubble is something they will be purposefully be blocking out to keep their view of themselves as rational actors intact.

So you'd probably be surprised how many people will very quickly refuse or mock the idea that Bitcoin could be a bubble. This is especially so if people do the usual thing and actually merge the idea of being a 'Bitcoin investor' into their own personal self image. At that point, all bets are off, and a Bitcoin crash can quickly become a suicide event. It's why we have laws around investments and gambling to try and protect people.

That's true. Maybe the issue is that when there's only a 'down' and an 'up' button, people infer everything into it. Maybe we should have an 'up' button for interesting posts, a 'flag' button for posts that don't add to the discussion, and 'agree' and 'disagree' buttons to make it clear that it's a different thing from upvoting a comment.

Then people could turn on or off some way to see which posts are heavily agreed or disagreed with without downvoting interesting posts just because you disagree. You could even have a system where you mark people you respect and then only see which posts they agreed with to get a more personal feel? Might be an interesting discussion board idea to pursue.

Certainly, although it's clear that the largest part of the context would be the audience that the comment is exposed to. And it also shows that the upvote and downvote feature is not used correctly here either - it's used to promote or hide comments that the viewer agrees or disagrees with.

Just the same as Reddit. It's a deeper issue than just being 'reddit', and it's more about online discussion in general.

HN isn't all that different, so it's probably about more than just reddit.

For example, you can post the same remarks criticizing functional programming in a post about C# or Java and get upvotes, while the same post in a Haskell discussion will be downvoted. You can try the experiment yourself to verify it.

This applies to companies as well - you will be upvoted for pro-Microsoft or anti-Google posts in a news topic about Microsoft, and the reverse in a news topic about Google. This is because people who use Microsoft products will be very interested in Microsoft news, but not interested enough in Google news to go and downvote opinions they disagree with there.

I did not delete anything. What are you talking about? Also I'm not from USA.

It's not really about equivalence. It's about insulting some other political affiliation for something your political affiliation is guilty of. And the key word is insulting: you're not trying to change anyone's mind. You're just out to condemn and belittle. It's very ugly as seen from my perspective, and the downvotes for pointing it out are ugly too. Especially when you can't downvote away people with disagree with you and expect it to help your cause. And even more so when I don't even disagree with your politics, just the broken partisanship involved.

Your type of tribal thinking is a cancer that will cause much hardship for your country in future.

You do know you're quoting an American left-wing comedy show host, right? It's a great quote, but it's not exactly a good argument.

I think you can definitely get correct and incorrect facts, but doesn't it break down when insults at one group are allowed, but insults at the other group aren't? That seems like just being an asshole.

And from what I can tell, both of your political parties are in full science denial. Republicans deny climate change, and Democrats deny XY chromosomes determining sex. Well, "not all Democrats" and "not all Republicans", obviously.

Yeah that's right, you're correct.

I don't think the issue is a hard fork which would be bad for Chinese miners. It's more about Chinese miners being able to insert transactions. For example, the Chinese government getting all miners to commit to transferring some of the big 'unknown' blocks in the Bitcoin chain into Chinese government control for 'protection'.

That would cause minimal disruption while giving the Chinese government a massive payout. There's a lot of value for China to push that.

EDIT: This would actually cause a hard fork. Any non-Chinese node doing verification would pick up the illegal block and discard it, creating a fork between Chinese and non-Chinese -- with the Chinese fork having the majority of processing power behind it. At that point, you'd just need a Bitcoin client change to exclude the Chinese fork, I'd guess?

This site is hilariously partisan, so while "idiot democrats" certainly does violate the comment guidelines, "idiot republicans" does not. I've seen a few banned comments to that effect.

As someone who isn't American, I find it very disturbing and it makes me doubt both this whole site and YC itself. Has YC become some sort of political activist foundation recently? It was not this way a few years ago.