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arfliwon Show HN: Voat programming, development and computing subverses

It's a much bigger idea than this one list, however people don't seem to 'get it' unless I show them an example list on a topic they love. I want to do the same for all of Voat. And then all of reddit. And then...well, I'd better not say lest you think I'm crazy :)

arfliwon Now Worth $10B, Is WeWork a 2000 Redux?

Those places don't have a $10 Billion valuation. That gets articles written, not a novel idea.

arfliwon Amazon interviewed me about my Amazon fake reviews detection app

More accurate title: "Amazon didn't hire me. During my interview, they asked about a Chrome extension I built that detects bad reviews."

arfliwon StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

If you have a solution, this is the best way to do it. You won't get the reputation points for it but when somebody is Googling for that problem, they will be happy you stuck it on your blog. That is the goal, isn't it? To help people?

arfliwon We apologize

With regard to Victoria, she ran the AMA's and was very popular with redditors. Think of it like a sports team cutting a really popular player, without offering an explanation. The fanbase would be really unhappy about that. And this is what reddit does when it's unhappy about something.

The Ellen Pao stuff is complicated, she does have some fault for being the one who made unpopular decisions and the way she managed the process (particularly extremely poor communication) but in general I agree that she gets way too much criticism from the community. She's very unpopular for a bunch of things that are not actually her fault (like people who incorrectly think she censors reddit).

arfliwon We apologize

I would say it's a good start. Where she goes from here will be what matters. If she goes silent in the weeks and months ahead it will be clear this was just damage control. If she regularly engages the community, as she should, then she'll be on the right track.

See Zuck and his regular 'town hall meetings' on his public news feed. She does nothing like that. The only times we hear from her are when she has an announcement or is forced to respond to heavy criticism.

arfliwon The Decentral Authority

Thanks for the link, I didn't see that.

arfliwon The Decentral Authority

Then the question would be, 'why isn't this person investing in Bitcoin if they believe in it so strongly?'

arfliwon The Decentral Authority

Balaji would like a word with you

https://medium.com/@21dotco/a-bitcoin-miner-in-every-device-...

>Conceptually, we believe that embedded mining will ultimately establish bitcoin as a fundamental system resource on par with CPU, bandwidth, hard drive space, and RAM.

arfliwon The Decentral Authority

To be fair, Fred just ripped off somebody else and provided a little of his own analysis:

https://medium.com/@ryanxcharles/fix-reddit-with-bitcoin-7da...

arfliwon Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

>the commonly agreed best subs use extensive vigorous modding

Do you include TIL among those? I do. Best sub there is.

The only they they use 'extensive vigorous modding' for is verifying whether titles follow the rules. And ~100% of that is based on user reports, they just double-check.

Aside from that, there is 0 moderation, other than for sitewide rule violations. You can say anything_you_want in comments and they will take no action.

arfliwon Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

Nailed it. This was all about 2, not 1.

>tension 2 can fester as organizational debt for years before exploding

It has festered for years, we're watching it explode right now.

arfliwon What’s really going on in downtown Vegas?

>Downtown LV is quite far from the strip, so tourists aren't going to stumble on it

Downtown Vegas is a tourist destination on it's own, regardless of the Downtown Project. Fremont East is a popular spot, all of those bars, the Cortez etc. Container Park is in a good location. You want to see isolated, go checkout Switch.

arfliwon Hosteurope.de shut down our servers due to “political incorrectness”

I don't believe his identity is public but unless Atko has been spinning an elaborate lie, plenty is known about him and Voat. He's a Swedish student who went to college in Switzerland and this was a side project that blew up on him, not unlike how Facebook started. He just graduated from college, went on vacation with his family and is now headed back to Switzerland to run this like a real company.

I agree that the best case scenario for Voat is to inevitably do exactly what reddit is doing now, whether he realizes it or not. That's how it works. Right now Voat is amazing. I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

arfliwon GitHub to Seek $2B Valuation in Latest Funding Round

If they started charging a monthly fee to use the app enough people would stick around that they'd be able to buy a sizable % of all the liquor stores in the USA. How many, I don't know. That would make an interesting interview question.

Edit: gonna try it

My city has 500,000 people. I'm going to estimate there are 500 liquor stores here. So that's 1 per 1,000 people. The USA has 330 million people, thus 330,000 liquor stores.

A liquor store is probably worth about $50,000. Thus, they are all worth $16.5 billion.

Whatsapp has 800 million MAU's. If 2% of them convert to $10 a month paying customers, that is $160 million per month.

They could run that business much cheaper than the current one, so say 50 employees at $10k a month each. $500k a month. Double that for hosting and rent etc. $1 million a month.

Those costs seem way too low in relation to revenue so let's just bump that up to 50% of revenue. $80 million/month.

So $80 million per month profit. Or over 2 liquor stores per hour, 24/7/365. In about 15 years they'd own every liquor store in America.

arfliwon GitHub to Seek $2B Valuation in Latest Funding Round

All they'd have to do is start running ads to show how absurd what you just said is.

I find it laughable that in 2015 people are still claiming companies strategically delaying monetization have worthless businesses. They care about long term growth, not money in the hand. See Facebook and Twitter. And a bunch of other companies.

arfliwon GitHub to Seek $2B Valuation in Latest Funding Round

So first you wanted to know if they had revenue. You got our answer and now you want to know why so many people are paying them money.

You know the answers to all of these things. Just come out and say what you think about Github and their business model instead of wasting our time answering these supposed questions.

arfliwon Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

Right, that's what the conspiracy theorists always say on reddit, too. Ignoring my argument completely and bringing up shadowbanning.

Let's see your proof that people are getting showdowbanned for criticizing Pao. You have no proof. Because shadowbans are about as transparent as mud.

So stop spreading conspiracy theories as fact, please.

arfliwon GitHub to Seek $2B Valuation in Latest Funding Round

I know, right? Also, how is that Whatsapp is worth more than a liquor store, which has actual revenues and profits?

arfliwon Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

He said that they don't touch posts unless they violate the rules. You said that is changing. No, that is not changing. They still don't touch anything unless it violates the rules.

arfliwon Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

> I never understood why reddit was so lenient with its community

> do like me: unsubscribe from most subreddits and suscribe to smaller subreddits with active moderators.

Answered your own question. Because people can do that and not have to deal with that crap. reddit is many things to many people. Some people enjoy that stuff and reddit wants as many people as possible on the platform. The site was also founded with free speech and an open platform as something they believed in. And they've stayed true to that.

arfliwon Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

I don't know if it's reasonable or not but it is not happening. Every time it is subreddit moderators removing stuff that violates their own rules. Then the second it goes down everybody blames Pao automatically. Just like today.

These people somehow seem to miss the dozens of huge threads that aren't removed that she could delete with a couple clicks. She could search her name every night and delete everything in a few minutes. Yet instead she randomly deletes a thread here and there? Makes no logical sense.

arfliwon Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

That explains a lot. I have a few users whose submissions to my sub are always flagged as spam even though they are fine. They must be shadowbanned.

Interestingly, one of them submits awful content. It's not spam but he is absolutely terrible. I wonder if they shadowban because the algo's figured out you suck.

arfliwon Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

That happened to some guy and he kept using reddit as normal for three years until he found out. Took it pretty well. His history is painful to look at. Just talking to himself, nobody ever responds or upvotes him.

Was in /r/TIFU recently, too lazy to get the link.

arfliwon Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

Yes, theoretically they could. And banning users.

If they were abusing that, we'd know about it. There would be a shitstorm just like this. There has not been.

I reported a user harassing me all over reddit, stalking me everywhere I went for weeks. They did not even ban him. Anecdotal but the bar seems to be pretty high.

arfliwon Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

No, that part is not changing. What is changing is more rules getting added. They still don't remove anything that doesn't violate the rules.

The only new rule is no harassment.

arfliwon Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

Finally somebody else except me saying this. I've probably gotten -1000 comment karma saying that over the last couple months.

It's complete fiction that she is censoring anything. Every time it is sub moderators removing stuff that violates the rules of their sub. And there are massively upvoted threads bashing her everywhere with huge comment threads full of vicious attacks on her and nobody is deleting those.

If she is trying to censor criticism of herself on reddit, she is fucking awful at it.

arfliwon Introducing Apple Music

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beats_Electronics#Formation

>The company was formally established in 2006,[1] a time when Iovine perceived two key problems in the music industry...

My understanding is he essentially WAS Beats, with Dre lending his name and like consulting on style and whatnot. Iovine being the brains. That has carried over to Apple where Iovine works full-time and Dre does not. Apple wanted Iovine.

arfliwon Introducing Apple Music

He also cofounded Beats with Dr Dre and sold it to Apple.

Many speculated that was partially a talent acquisition, to get him working on projects exactly like this.

arfliwon Introducing Apple Music

>It's no longer driven by the ivory tower of the music industry.

Jimmy Iovine is running this thing. He is the ivory tower. It appears he is trying to recapture the industry.