[HN Gopher] When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook
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When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook
Author : input_sh
Score : 291 points
Date : 2020-10-13 08:32 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| ascar wrote:
| > He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The
| company changes his name to 'Hans De Zwart', with a capitalized
| D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something
| bigger: "It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation
| which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of
| Dutch people an edge case."
|
| This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe
| About Names" [1].
|
| As a person with a hyphen in his first name I also get regularly
| mistreated by all kinds of web forms, worst of all flight
| tickets, which is especially ironic as you are usually explicitly
| requested to provide the name as stated in the passport.
|
| [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
| programmers-...
| brnt wrote:
| Another thing is overlooked, which is strange since these
| companies hire so many statisticians and much about their work
| is about understanding populations and individual preferences.
|
| When you have huge populations (2B) you're outliers are going
| to be similarly huge. The meaning and usefulness of means and
| medians over large and/or disparate populations loses its
| meaning. There are tons of distinguishable subpopulations
| (Dutch) which are pointless to lump in with Americans. Etc etc
| etc. You'd think someone would be familiar with subpopulations
| and the limitations of treating 2B users as a normal
| distribution, but yet that seems yet to be discovered.
|
| Ridiculous.
| teekert wrote:
| Yeah, in the Netherlands we also don't use the "de" and "van"
| for sorting so it was confusing to find my badge under the "v"
| at American conferences the first time. Ah well, what can you
| do? A friend of mine had his FB acount blocked for failing to
| provide a real name (his last name is "Fun"), ironically after
| he gave FB a false name they did accept it.
| hnarn wrote:
| > A friend of mine had his FB acount blocked for failing to
| provide a real name (his last name is "Fun")
|
| Don't they have a process where you can submit a government
| ID and have your name accepted? Honestly I don't blame the
| minimum wage person responsible for name screening for
| flagging a name that is both uncommon and one of the most
| common adjectives in the English language, if the policy is
| that fake names aren't allowed.
| dwighttk wrote:
| >minimum wage person
|
| You mean algorithm?
| teekert wrote:
| I don't blame them, but I would prefer to provide an
| accepted fake name myself over sending a document.
| randallsquared wrote:
| > I don't blame the minimum wage person responsible for
| name screening
|
| My expectation is that the person who wrote the code
| responsible for rejecting my name in the mid-to-late 2000s
| was paid somewhat more than minimum wage.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I think OP was talking about the support staff _using_
| the system that the highly paid engineers wrote.
| feoren wrote:
| I think GP was implying there _was_ no support staff
| using that system -- it 's entirely automated. That's why
| the engineer was so highly paid to begin with.
| BuffaloBagel wrote:
| I know a guy from Africa named Test. That's a no-go on
| Facebook's platform so he is known by Tesst there.
| OkGoDoIt wrote:
| They do have a process for providing copies of your
| government ID to have your account unblocked, but I have 2
| friends who did that and neither one ever heard anything
| back or successfully got their accounts unblocked. Normal
| American names, nothing funky. As far as any of us can
| figure out, they hadn't done anything wrong in the first
| place, just randomly unluckily somehow displeased The
| Algorithm.
|
| Facebook is fine until you get caught in the machine at no
| fault and with no recourse. I would have closed my account
| by now but I work in low-budget theater and Facebook events
| and Facebook advertising are unfortunately required to make
| it in the industry.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| That's kind of interesting. I grew up in a heavily dutch town
| (lineage only) in the US and we always organized last names
| with "van" in the V's.
| teekert wrote:
| Yeah Belgians also do that (afaik), so they have big D and
| V categories.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Note that this sentence (and the whole article) contains the
| same mis-capitalization the articles complains Facebook is
| doing. It is most likely an aggressive final pass of spellcheck
| or auto-correct that wasn't re-incorrected before publishing,
| but really ironic all the same.
| superjan wrote:
| No, if you only write the last name in isolation then you
| should capitalize the 'D'. So it's Mr De Zwart, but Hans de
| Zwart.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Honestly, this sounds less like "falsehoods programmers
| believe about names", and more like "natural language
| processing is terrible". A real name policy is
| unconscionable, of course, but "Found 1 sheeps."-isms on
| the display side are only a serious problem (rather than a
| nuisance) to the extent that they trigger (possibly latent)
| serious problems in something else.
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| Hah, I guess that would be falsehood number 7 in the above
| link ("People's names do not change.") Are you a programmer
| by any chance?
|
| In Dutch one capitalizes 'De' if it is the first word of the
| name. So the article is correct (for example in ".. says De
| Zwart."), as is writing "Hans de Zwart" or even "Mr. de
| Zwart".
|
| Bonus points: figure out the correct capitalization (in
| different context) of Nobel prize winning physicist gerard 't
| hooft.
| m4lvin wrote:
| I am still surprised that the two-character icons which Zoom
| uses for accounts without profile pictures become "A" for
| anyone called "Alice Orland" or similar.
|
| It is even more surprising that O, S, etc. become , but Wen Jun
| shows up fine.
| capableweb wrote:
| Not so weird when you consider the context. Zoom is an North
| American company with most (if not all) of it's
| product/engineering development happening in China. Just
| reading public information, it seems they have no development
| teams in the North of Europe nor Eastern Europe, so it's only
| natural that some character sets ends up better supported
| than others.
| _-___________-_ wrote:
| It's likely that all the characters are being transferred
| and stored in the same charset (probably a Unicode one)
| regardless of what character is entered. The replacement
| glyph (the question mark) might be caused by their use of a
| font with incomplete Unicode coverage, or (more likely) by
| a buggy "take the first character of each word in their
| name" algorithm, for example using the first byte and then
| special-casing Chinese under the mistaken impression that
| nothing else needs more than one byte.
| capableweb wrote:
| From someone who doesn't know a lot in that area of
| software, thanks for the (possible) correction, learned
| something new today!
| raverbashing wrote:
| I agree, probably mishandling of combining characters
| Xelbair wrote:
| Yeah, that would work as an excuse back in ANSI days.
|
| we have UTF8 as a standard nowadays.
| jdmichal wrote:
| Unicode doesn't magically make this stuff go away, much
| less any specific encoding of it. A glyph can consist of
| multiple codepoints, and then those can sometimes be
| standardized to other codepoints. For instance, Unicode
| has codepoint U+00C4 for an A with a diaeresis (aka
| umlaut). But it also has codepoints U+0041 U+0308 for an
| A with a combining diaeresis, which should then map to
| the combined U+00C4 for font rendering.
| Xelbair wrote:
| and both cases should be handled properly, as it is in
| Unicode standard.
| microcolonel wrote:
| Specifically for that example, Zoom is written and maintained
| in China, so I would expect the developers made special code
| for segmenting chinese names but not non-English latin ones.
| rusk wrote:
| Are these characters strictly speaking "Latin"? Would they
| be categorised as "Nordic" or "Cyrillic"?
|
| Standard "Latin" characters to me are those that are
| supported on a Latin keyboard, and provided for by the
| latin codepage.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| They are all Latin according to Unicode 1.0
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script_in_Unicode
| Bayart wrote:
| They're Latin characters with diacritics. They're not
| usually treated as separate letters.
| fantod wrote:
| I'm not a web developer but whenever this kind of thing happens
| I just wonder why there isn't a single standard library in
| every common web language to deal with this and if there is,
| why it's not being used more often.
| rusticpenn wrote:
| Why do you need a library. Name is an open input field. As
| long as the inputs are sanitized, you should just accept
| whatever is typed there.
| kace91 wrote:
| Depends on the language and what you'll use the name for.
|
| Some names change capitalisation when the last name is used
| by itself vs full name for example.
|
| In some languages a name affect the words around it in a
| sentence (for a random example, an "o" in Spanish (or)
| becomes "u" when the next word starts by the "o" sound ->
| "Carlos _o_ Maria ", but "Carlos _u_ Oscar ".
|
| In general, for a sufficiently large and well-localised
| application you will need to modify or parse the name at
| some point. Not sure that a library can do that properly
| though.
| rusticpenn wrote:
| I agree with you, however these are small issues compared
| to having arbitrary requirements for names which create
| real life problems.
| enriquto wrote:
| Do you really need a library for that? Why can't you leave
| the name as it was entered by the user, without making
| further assumptions?
| [deleted]
| thelean12 wrote:
| Because people will abuse everything.
|
| Whether it's curse words or porn websites or whatever.
| [deleted]
| hutzlibu wrote:
| There is no need for a libaray, there is just need for a
| consistent standard.
|
| Meaning, if all programms would use UTF-8, fine. But they
| don't. But character -encoding is somewhat complicated,
| because there are a lot of languages out there. Some who even
| need more than 2 bytes per character, so you get special
| cases, which break on another system etc.
| moksly wrote:
| Being in the public sector, doing our 3rd party integration
| and being from Denmark gets me the joy of having to deal
| with a lot of relatively different APIs of very varied
| quality and aeoa in names.
|
| Sometimes when people think they are using UTF-8, they
| aren't. I'm not sure if that's because they are incompetent
| or if their tooling lies to them, but I've gone through
| soooooo many weird encodings over the years trying to match
| what was specified as standard UTF-8.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Most programs use something that is _compatible_ with
| UTF-8. And UTF-8 is also backwards compatible with ASCII
| which is why A-z usually works. I actually think UTF-16 is
| the most common. The issues start to arise when three or
| more code points /bytes are combined into one
| character/glyph.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Names are too complicated and too personal.
|
| The issue is that many developers have an urge to do some
| 'clever' processing on them when, really, my conclusion is
| that they should be left alone. Just sanitise them for
| security purpose and that's it. This is a typical 'less is
| more' scenario.
|
| The best person to write a specific name as it should be is
| the person the name belongs to, so just let them do it.
| dmurray wrote:
| > The best person to write a specific name as it should be
| is the person the name belongs to, so just let them do it.
|
| It's inconvenient to have the person you are writing about
| copyedit all of your writing. How would that even work?
|
| And if you don't allow them to do that, how do you account
| for the situation here where Mr de Zwart's name is
| capitalized differently depending on context? I'm not even
| sure if I have it right here.
| cryvate1284 wrote:
| In this case, the problem arises, because they are using
| Mr de Zwart [sic], but can this not by avoided by simply
| using the full name? Mr Thomas de Zwart?
|
| Previously I wasn't a big fan of this style, but it has
| grown on me, and I see it now as similar using "they"
| instead of he/she for an unspecified person. Why assume
| anything about the name, when you can reuse it verbatim
| when needed?
| dmurray wrote:
| This seems like a reasonable try but there are some
| problems here too. What if you're quoting someone else
| who called him (in speech) Mr de Zwart? Or when you find
| out that it's correct to use the Emperor of Japan's full
| name in some circumstances, but extremely insulting in
| another?
|
| I think at some point you abandon looking for a general
| solution, and employ an expert editor who can advise you
| on the right style. If you're writing for a small town
| newspaper far away from the Netherlands and get this
| wrong because you don't have that expert editor, that's
| OK, you tried. But if you're Facebook and you have 10
| million Dutch customers and you get this wrong setting
| the policy for the most prominent few words on the whole
| site, you can afford to have better standards than that.
| numpad0 wrote:
| UTF-8 exists, just not recognized its necessity where it's
| needed ?'**`?
| rusticpenn wrote:
| I got this problem with several payment processors as the
| allowed name and name on my credit/debit cards never match.
| After a few years, I changed(modified) my name.
| scott31 wrote:
| People already started having emojis in their name, having
| hyphen is just a minor annoyance, and I'm willing to bet it
| being dropped does not change anything for you
| input_sh wrote:
| One example I remember from high school is a person whose first
| name is Admin. Granted, it's an uncommon name, but he's unable
| to use his real name in many, _many_ online services (Facebook
| being one of them of course).
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| I always worry with plane tickets because I have a middle name
| on my passport but many buying services don't take middle names
| into account.
|
| Also the name of my town has a "A" letter in it, which also is
| problematic in online forms and I often just write A instead
| just to be on the safe side.
| brnt wrote:
| I have three first names, and round these parts they are
| space separated. Turns out that in a neighbouring country I
| should be comma separating them, or they are treated as a
| single first name (that happens to have spaces).
| doikor wrote:
| By definition there is no legal middle names here in Finland
| (all of the 1 to 4 names given to you are called "first name"
| in the law). And thus all of your names will be in the
| passport too.
|
| Filling some foreign (or poorly done/ported local) it system
| forms can be bit of a guess work.
|
| Also as a bonus space " " is a legal character in a name.
| Both "Jukka Pekka" and "Jukka-Pekka" are valid names (also
| you could have 2 names "Jukka" and "Pekka")
| mcv wrote:
| > _" all of the 1 to 4 names given to you are called "first
| name" in the law"_
|
| Is 4 a hard maximum? Because in Dutch it's not unheard of
| to have more. Not common (most people have 1 or 2), but at
| least one famous politician had 5 first names.
| doikor wrote:
| Current law only allows 4 but allows exception for
| foreigners (but then the name has to fulfill that other
| countries naming conventions). Though there is a
| superseding law that roughly says "the name must not
| intentionally bring harm to the child" meaning they can
| block you from giving weird/stupid name to a child (so
| name like Elon Musks youngest "X AE A-12" would never be
| allowed to be given to a baby here)
| PeterisP wrote:
| Ah, it's so interesting to contrast different approaches.
|
| For example, in Latvia, the legal treatment is that if you
| have two first names (two is the legal limit) then they are
| space delimited and if you have two surnames (it's becoming
| popular to join the surnames after marriage instead of
| changing the surname of one spouse) then they are
| hyphenated.
|
| So if you see "Alpha Beta Gamma" then that means Alpha and
| Beta as given names and Gamma as the surname; and "Alpha
| Beta-Gamma" means that Alpha is the given name and Beta-
| Gamma is the surname, so the name in any official documents
| can be unambiguously parsed.
| detaro wrote:
| > _" Jukka Pekka" [...] also you could have 2 names "Jukka"
| and "Pekka"_
|
| How is that distinguished in legal documents/while
| registering the name/...?
| doikor wrote:
| In most important official documents name is not the only
| identifier as you also add the national identification
| number. I guess in most other use cases you just trust
| humans to get it right.
|
| As for how to register such a name correctly for a baby I
| have no clue. Also you don't have to give the baby a name
| at birth (you have 60 days) but the national
| identification number is given to the baby at birth (it
| is just date of birth, sequence number and a checksum
| character). All I know is that I have a colleague which
| such a name and have seen people before with space
| instead of - on a 2 part name
|
| edit: How we usually do forms for this stuff is just 2
| fields. One for all of your first names and the second
| for your family name(s) (you can have multiple for
| example both of your parents or some foreign with
| de/von/etc). Validation is mostly "check that they are
| not empty"
| ClikeX wrote:
| Sites used to refuse the "van der " in my last name all the
| time. Had to remove the whitespaces to get it to work.
|
| Also, sites out my last name under v, which isn't how names are
| sorted here.
|
| "van der Name" is usually written as "Name, van der" in printed
| lists to make checking for names easier.
|
| And many dutch IT systems have a separate field for this. We
| call it a "tussenvoegsel". Which would roughly translate to a
| "middle addition". It's not a middle/second name either. Cause
| those are processed separately here as well.
| dontchooseanick wrote:
| And of course don't forget Pablo Picasso :)
|
| Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de
| los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
| (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso)
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| ...of Ulm ;)
|
| Name forms really should just be:
|
| Your full legal name: [accepts anything, modifies nothing]
|
| Shortened name of your choice for our UI: [can have
| restrictions, esp. length]
| iudqnolq wrote:
| I feel like the pattern of names in the UI comes from
| wanting to justify collecting the name in the first place.
| What is it actually good for?
| will4274 wrote:
| Phone, email, messenger, basically any collaboration
| software? My university assigned email addresses by
| initials - e.g. if you name was John Anderson Smith and
| you were the 167th person with the initials JAS, you'd be
| jas167@example.edu. Which is easier to find, search, and
| read in a contact list - John Smith or jas167?
| tomp wrote:
| Indeed. I consider "gender" even sillier - e.g. Facebook
| adding 100s of different genders to their website - how
| about just _removing_ the field altogether? Same about
| "legal sex" - why would the government care in the first
| place?! ( _Doctors_ might, but the rest of the
| government, not really.)
| wang_li wrote:
| Different sexes have different civic obligations. E.g.
| Selective Service, a.k.a the draft, in the US.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Sounds like it's ripe for a discrimination lawsuit.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Sounds like it's ripe for a discrimination lawsuit.
|
| Such a lawsuit has occurred:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coalition_for_Men_
| v._...
| ponker wrote:
| This is for Facebook's ad targeting. They want
| advertisers to be able to advertise to 21-24 year old
| women in California.
| jfengel wrote:
| They can probably infer it as accurately as asking
| people. The inference isn't always accurate, but people
| don't always tell the truth, either.
| ecnahc515 wrote:
| They can do both. Someone lying or their inference being
| wrong about their gender is yet another new data point.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I can see wanting to know what pronouns someone uses so
| you can autogenerate reasonable sentences about that
| person (i.e. "Tomp marked himself safe from the rabid
| bears in Honolulu")
| ponker wrote:
| When I'm looking at my contacts in Google Docs or Slack
| or whatever it's critical to have the names there. If it
| was bigchungus12@gmail.com and db23423@exxon.com it would
| be very annoying.
| toast0 wrote:
| Hello X near the content you're looking for is a
| confirmation that you're logged in; without having to
| look at the header (which is usually more explicit).
| Having a friendly name there is an attempt to use less
| space.
| thiagocsf wrote:
| It's incredibly ironic that the author also misspelled Hans de
| Zwart's name as De Zwart, just like Facebook did.
| Ballas wrote:
| It is capitalized when used without a first name.
|
| (and the author is Hans de Zwart)
| mcv wrote:
| More precisely: the first letter of a name is always
| capitalised.
|
| So in "Hans de Zwart", the 'H' is the first letter, and
| therefore capitalised. But in "De Zwart", the 'D' is the
| first letter, and therefore capitalised, even if it
| normally wouldn't be.
|
| There might be an exception to that if that letter is not
| part of a whole word. "De" is a word, but I once knew a guy
| whose last name was _' t Zet_. The "'t" is not a word (it's
| short for "het", the neutral version of "the", whereas "de"
| is gendered[0]), so probably wouldn't be capitalised[1].
| Now imagine 200 countries and languages with exceptions
| like that and imagine having to write software to handle
| all of that correctly. This stuff was never a problem
| before the internet, but I expect the next century is going
| to see a lot of simplifications in language.
|
| [0] Yeah, in Dutch, there are two articles: "de" which is
| gendered, and "het" which isn't. Compare to French "le" and
| "la", which are both gendered, one male and one female, and
| there's no neural article. In Dutch there is, but the
| gendered article doesn't care whether it's male or female;
| it works for both and doesn't actually care about gender,
| just that it's there. So it's gendered in a neutral way.
| Wrap your head around that.
|
| [1] This is also true at the start of a sentence: always
| capitalised, except when it's not a complete word. If you
| start a sentence with _' s avonds_ ("in the evening), you
| capitalise the 'A', not the 's', which is actually the last
| letter of the archaic possessive 'des'.
| [deleted]
| kmm wrote:
| > [0] Yeah, in Dutch, there are two articles: "de" which
| is gendered, and "het" which isn't. Compare to French
| "le" and "la", which are both gendered, one male and one
| female, and there's no neural article. In Dutch there is,
| but the gendered article doesn't care whether it's male
| or female; it works for both and doesn't actually care
| about gender, just that it's there. So it's gendered in a
| neutral way. Wrap your head around that.
|
| That's a curious way to present it. "het" is gendered, it
| corresponds to the neuter gender. There is nothing
| neutral about it, that's just a (bad) name. In Russian
| for example, they call it the middle gender. Dutch nouns
| take one of two genders (three in some Belgian dialects),
| just like in French.
|
| Both Latin and Proto-Germanic had three genders, which
| correspond to what we would now call male, female and
| neuter. Over the span of centuries Latin merged male and
| neuter into one, leaving French with male/female, whereas
| in the Germanic languages usually male and female merged
| into a common gender, leaving common/neuter. But apart
| from that, it's _exactly_ the same phenomenon.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Since we're bringing up fun facts about Dutch
| capitalisation, when the first two letters are "IJ",
| which pronounced as a single letter (a vowel) in Dutch,
| then _both_ are capitalised.
| mcv wrote:
| There are (a lot of) people who consider the 'ij' to be a
| single letter. When asked whether that means Dutch has 27
| letters in the alphabet or the 'y' is not a Dutch letter,
| the discussion becomes very confused. Best explanation is
| probably that the 'ij' is a letter that's not in the
| alphabet, or it is, but shares the 25th spot in the
| alphabet with the 'y'. But it is still a different
| letter, because "symbool" and "royaal" are also valid
| Dutch words. The situation isn't helped by the fact that
| some names and words that currently contain an 'ij' used
| to contain an 'y'.
|
| (Personally I think it's two letters, but there are very
| serious sources, including a major encyclopedia as well
| as primary schools, that disagree. In games and puzzles
| it's also usually considered to be a single letter.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29
| robertlagrant wrote:
| According to Medium. At the top of the article another name
| is given.
| barrkel wrote:
| The Dutch language version of the article was written by
| Reinier Kist but the English version was translated by
| Hans de Zwart.
| eythian wrote:
| At the bottom it says:
|
| > This article was written by Reinier Kist and originally
| appeared in Dutch in NRC on August 3rd, 2020. It was
| translated into English by Hans de Zwart.
|
| In the original source: https://archive.is/g6H0F it is
| also "De Zwart" when without the first name, and I would
| reasonably trust NRC to get it right.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| I would hope it would be even more reasonable to expect
| Hans de Zwart to get it right!
| Uberphallus wrote:
| > which is especially ironic as you are usually explicitly
| requested to provide the name as stated in the passport.
|
| Mine either doesn't go through, or goes through and is silently
| trimmed down to whatever amount of chars they support.
| namdnay wrote:
| There are actually a whole series of algorithms used to help
| match the name on your passport with the name in the airline
| reservation system, due to absolute mayhem when dealing with
| asian names for example
| eznit wrote:
| If black people used "de" in their names I'm sure the bug
| would've been fixed in hours.
| dschuetz wrote:
| A brilliant read. Just what I needed today. Thanks for sharing!
| danieldk wrote:
| _The company changes his name to 'Hans De Zwart', with a
| capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies
| something bigger_
|
| Oh yes. At some point this was a very annoying problem on
| Facebook. Our last name has 'de' as well and Facebook refused to
| have 'de' in lowercase in my wife's name unless she sent them a
| photo copy of her ID.
|
| At some point they started permitting lowercase Dutch
| 'tussenvoegsels' again.
|
| But it showed so little appreciation of other languages and
| cultures. (It's like Apple/Siri and others pretending that
| everyone uses a single language in their daily life.)
| raverbashing wrote:
| If there's one thing that's constant amongst American companies
| (through various extents) is their blindness to other cultures
| and conventions (even things like the metric system or DD/MM/AA
| formats) .
| techaddict009 wrote:
| Happened with me many times. I run various amazon affiliate site.
| Some times I get expired brandable domain names which are
| available to buy. When I share any post on fb page from them I
| get same error and there is no way to fix it. I just have to stop
| working on those niche sites on fb promotion.
|
| FB sucks sometimes. I can feel this guys frustration.
| cycomanic wrote:
| He should go to small claims court (or the Dutch equivalent) to
| get his 5 euros back. There was actually a case in Germany where
| the largest ISPs continously ignored a customer whom they charged
| too much at some point (similar order as the 5 euros) . The story
| ended with a court bailiff (?) going into the main ISP office and
| seizing a printer I believe. Big PR disaster and much higher cost
| then the original amount.
|
| These big companies do these things all the time calculating on
| people just giving up. We should take the advantage of the courts
| to teach some lessons as much as possible.
| brisky wrote:
| I also had my website "reported" as suspicious in facebook. There
| is no official way to get more information or unblock your
| website. I see this as a darker pattern where facebook algorithms
| are tuned to block 3rd party external information content. In
| this way facebook is promoting sharing information only created
| within facebook platform.
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| One can only wonder how much the economic damage is from such
| small annoyances.
|
| I always have to check under the D for Dutch, N for Netherlands,
| and T for The when filling in my nationality or my postal address
| on an international form. Its a minor annoyance till you
| encounter very important forms without an easy way to scroll or
| some other broken UI making input hard.
| barkingcat wrote:
| This article screws around with de Zwart's name so much while
| complaining about another organization's screwing around of his
| last name is really something.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| It doesn't, it uses correct contextual capitalisation. "De" is
| the definite article in Dutch, and in a full name the correct
| capitalisation is written using lowercase ("Hans de Zwart").
|
| However, when used in isolation it needs to be capitalised so
| as to differentiate it from "an incorrectly capitalised
| noun/adjective following the definite article".
|
| If English had surnames that started with "the ...", the same
| rule would be applied, where "Jason the Bouvier" would be the
| correct full name spelling, but in isolated context, such as
| "According to The Bouvier, this policy has [...]",
| capitalisation should be used to make it clear that this is
| expressly not the definite article.
| detaro wrote:
| How does it "screw around" with the name?
| tekknolagi wrote:
| de Zwart -> De Zwart
| barkingcat wrote:
| The the name de Zwart appears inconsistently capitalized
| throughout the article.
|
| If you do a matched-case search in the body text, de Zwart
| appears 3 times, while De Zwart occurs 7 times outside of
| quotation marks, and other locations (like at the beginning
| of a sentence) where English rules will capitalize a name.
|
| I believe to follow proper Dutch capitalization, it should be
| similar to, for example:
|
| Being a digital rights activist, de Zwart knows this
| discussion very well, so he starts to meticulously log his
| attempts to get clarity.
|
| However, I can't be sure if in Dutch, a lower case pre-
| surname is capitalized in circumstances when it's used in a
| sentence vs as a full name.
|
| Without the clarification of rules governing the use of such
| lower case surnames, I can't be exactly sure whether the
| capitalization is on purpose or not.
| detaro wrote:
| Luckily a large part of this HN discussion already goes
| into detail about this.
| barkingcat wrote:
| For example
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763789
| lsaferite wrote:
| Considering that the person referred to in the article, Hans de
| Zwart, is the one who translated the Dutch article into
| English, I'd say he knows how to write his own name.
| the-dude wrote:
| Prior restraint!
| sneak wrote:
| uhh, EXCUSE ME MISS
| jaspax wrote:
| Any guesses what tipped the automated system off? Two guesses:
|
| 1. _The Big Lebowski_ uses the word "fuck" many, _many_ times,
| which may start to look abusive to an online system that doesn't
| know any better.
|
| 2. The movie contains references to nihilists and Nazis which an
| irony-unaware system may not be able to distinguish from actual
| endorsement.
| darepublic wrote:
| Someone with access to FB and it's monorepo could likely find
| the entry where biglebow.ski is blocked and perhaps create a PR
| to unblock it
| blunte wrote:
| There are so many ways to have a problem with Facebook and be
| unable to get help. The list of ways grows...
|
| My "favorite" is if you once had a spare FB account for playing
| some game, and later FB has blocked that account (for inactivity,
| or being obviously fake _after_ they instituted the real name
| policy)... but you still get occasional emails from FB begging
| you to come back and login - your friends miss you! Of course you
| cannot login, and you cannot stop the fucking emails from FB.
| There's no process for dealing with this, so you ultimately have
| to write a custom filter to process these zombie FB emails.
|
| I urge everyone, no matter what your "need" to have an account on
| FB is, to just stop logging in. Don't delete the account... just
| never login again.
|
| Facebook will continue as a bad and irresponsible actor of global
| proportions until we collectively send it the way of MySpace.
| jdofaz wrote:
| I tried that for a while, I would go months without logging in,
| but for one reason or another I would log in to check
| something.
|
| The last time I did this my news feed left me feeling so
| negative I decided that I was done and I deleted my account.
|
| So far it has been easier to say "I don't have a facebook
| account" than to explain why I never post anything or answer
| did you see what I posted questions.
| marricks wrote:
| I really wonder why anyone advocates "not logging in" and if
| it's ever in good faith? Something always drags you back and
| it's just a quick step to get sucked in again. I tried to use
| it less and it just never worked, FB pays billions to
| optimize sucking you back in.
|
| Deleted my account and it was perfect, no emails, no getting
| drawn if, if someone wants to talk with me there's a dozen
| chat service to choose from besides facebook.
| blunte wrote:
| Perhaps it is my paranoia, but I worry that someone could
| create a lookalike to my account and misrepresent me. So I
| leave my real account there and simply don't mess with it.
| Occasionally I post that people should reach me by email.
| jdofaz wrote:
| For my close contacts, group chats (with notifications
| muted) have replaced social media sharing
| dingaling wrote:
| > Facebook will continue as a bad and irresponsible actor of
| global proportions
|
| I log in, I have a browse at what my acquaintances have posted,
| I close the tab and go on with the day.
|
| Sometimes I flick through the 'People you may know' and smile
| at some old real-world friends.
|
| For the vast majority of people, Facebook is a positive
| experience.
| Miraste wrote:
| That's nice, but has nothing to do with whether they're a bad
| and irresponsible actor.
| jfengel wrote:
| The problem is people having a positive experience by
| becoming angrier and angrier. They're having a great day on
| Facebook. Then they go out and make other people's lives
| worse, because the information they're acting on is faulty.
|
| It's not a majority of Facebook users, but it has an impact
| on a majority of people, or at least a very large minority.
| nyghtly wrote:
| There's an option to "deactivate" your account. It's a soft
| delete. Make sure you check the right boxes so that they don't
| keep sending you emails.
|
| You can also download your data in bulk so that you don't
| "lose" your photos.
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| If you are European you can report them for this as it goes
| against the GDPR[0]. You can also just send an angry email to
| their data officer which they have to reply to by law, and
| enjoy the template reaction of "we are currently too busy"
| followed by dismissal a few months later.
|
| If you are not European you can probably still use their
| mechanisms for complying with the GDPR to fix this as they cant
| really tell who is a European citizen and who is not.
|
| [0] https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/
| elpool2 wrote:
| I read stuff on FB occasionally but almost never post. The last
| time I posted anything I was instantly logged out because
| apparently my single comment was "unusual activity on my
| account."
| jungletime wrote:
| There is an episode on the simpsons, which I think illustrates
| the problem with the modern times. Everyone overreacting to a
| snippet of information, without knowing what came before or
| after. The overreacting to the overreactions. Its two villages
| making up stories about what happens in the other village, and
| each turn, the story gets embellished.
|
| How To Cook For Forty Humans
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxI7B758XBQ
| nerdponx wrote:
| I don't get the relevance. Is this article an overreaction?
| jungletime wrote:
| The movie revolves around misunderstanding and incomplete
| information. There are people on facebook trying to cause
| such misunderstandings using selective clips, and quotes all
| the time. Consider the BLM protests, most of the cases, are
| kind of grey area. People don't have the full information.
| There are much more clear cut cases around BLM could have
| focused on. Yet they chose these ones. Why? They pick the
| controversial ones, over witch people will argue endlessly.
|
| People might be rioting right now over something that is not
| even True.
| osobo wrote:
| Pfff, such fabricated drama. This shit gives real digital rights
| activists a bad name.
| input_sh wrote:
| He was the director of Bits of Freedom, one of the founding
| organisations of EDRi[0] (think: European EFF). That being
| said, he left that spot a few years ago and this is just his
| side project, but saying that he's not a "real digital rights
| activist" is just ridiculous on so many levels.
|
| [0] https://edri.org/
| osobo wrote:
| Whatever he did in the past, this whining about FB not
| linking his database with copyrighted script -interlaced with
| non-issues like how a platform he does not use spells his
| name- doesn't help anyone much now. There are bigger digital
| rights fish to fry.
| LocalH wrote:
| You have a problem with advocating for correct representation
| of people's names?
| louwrentius wrote:
| I think if you work at Facebook, I wonder how you can live with
| yourself, helping to make the world a worse place.
|
| Having worked at Facebook should make you a paria, nobody should
| hire you. Facebook should be a stain on your resume.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Do you hate the people at Facebook who work on improving the
| Linux network stack? Are they making the world a worse place?
|
| Some nuance, please.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| And where do you work?
|
| I can probably (almost certainly) find serious ethical lapses
| in your company, if it's large and/or has been around for a
| long time.
|
| Shaming people based on their perceived associations is just
| wrong, no matter what those associations.
| snakeboy wrote:
| > if it's large and/or has been around for a long time
|
| So why not work for a smaller company with values and a
| history that you can respect?
|
| You make it sound like in a capitalist society we have to
| sell our souls to a big evil company. Software developers
| (especially ones have the skills to work for facebook) can
| work literally anywhere. Lots of them start their own
| companies. There's simply no excuse for contributing to the
| success of companies whose values and actions you can't
| personally endorse and stand behind.
|
| Of course I'm not gonna resent some dude working at McDonalds
| for contributing to the obesity epidemic, but software
| developers just don't have any excuse.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Firstly, I'm arguing the general point. Secondly, I'm not a
| software developer (well maybe I'm slowly becoming one, but
| it's not my job title).
|
| Thirdly, I have looked for ethical companies who'll pay me
| to analyse data, and I am yet to find any industries that
| don't have ethical issues. I'm not sure what makes Facebook
| special in this sense (do you feel the same way about
| Google, Snap, Twitter and TikTok?).
| louwrentius wrote:
| I won't disclose that but rest assured, I don't work at
| Facebook or any other similar style company that is a
| detriment to a stable society.
|
| If you work at Facebook, I despise you. (you in the general
| sense)
|
| The foundation of the company is a guy who thought it was OK
| to create website to rate women. Fucking degenerate people.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Can you explain (with links please) how Facebook is a
| "detriment to a stable society".
|
| > If you work at Facebook, I despise you. (you in the
| general sense)
|
| I think that is massive hyperbole. Do you despise all the
| people who work for oil companies also? What about everyone
| who works for Nestle (all the pushing of formula milk in
| Africa that led to the deaths of babies), I mean where does
| it all stop?
|
| > The foundation of the company is a guy who thought it was
| OK to create website to rate women. Fucking degenerate
| people.
|
| He was a 19 year old man at this point (and I'm not even
| sure that happened anywhere except _The Social Network_ ).
| I'm pretty sure lots of 19 year old males have done things
| similarly except no one cares, because they're not
| billionaires.
| callmeal wrote:
| >Shaming people based on their perceived associations is just
| wrong, no matter what those associations.
|
| Uh, there's a whole group of people at the end of WWII who
| would disagree with you.
| chillacy wrote:
| Unless they were useful, then in that case their
| associations suddenly didn't matter...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
| piokoch wrote:
| I think there is some difference between working as a guard
| in concentration camp and as a toilet cleaner or programmer
| in HSBC, although HSBC bank was laundering money for drug
| cartels that also murder people.
| jiuahweruihawi wrote:
| I've long viewed working for Facebook (or Twitter) as like
| working for a cigarette company. Your product makes the world a
| worse place and everything would be better if your company
| disappeared, but hey, something's gotta pay the rent I guess?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I'm amazed that in a global lockdown, where digital
| communication and connection are more important than ever,
| that you see only negative benefit to users in Facebook.
| jiuahweruihawi wrote:
| Facebook is, by far, the worst communication platform out
| of any that I use. Practically every aspect of the site is
| designed to be as impractical and user-hostile as possible.
| The only reason I use Facebook (which happens increasingly
| less often) is because it's my only way of contacting
| certain people. I'd LOVE to delete my account but I can't
| because I still need it for random little things
| occasionally. I'm not their user - I'm their hostage.
|
| And that's without even getting into any of FB's terrible
| practices around data collection and privacy, none of which
| need to be repeated here.
|
| Facebook is cancer.
| [deleted]
| smolder wrote:
| Yes, because Facebook's actual value is trivial to recreate
| apart from the network effect, and they do their worst to
| make the site inhospitable. It is worse to use Facebook
| than abandon it for almost any alternative.
| Yhippa wrote:
| "If it wasn't Facebook it would be another company"
|
| "Facebook isn't the problem, human beings are the problem,
| and they just expose it"
| [deleted]
| Yhippa wrote:
| How is it that fake news, misinformation, and conspiracy theories
| are allowed to run wild on the platform but then VERY SERIOUS
| things like this are taken care of?
| prepend wrote:
| This reminds me of studying ethics from a deontological and
| utilitarian model. The discussion was about whether it's better
| to optimize for the greater good or to have a rules based system
| of right and wrong.
|
| To me, utilitarian seems like the best outcome because the most
| people are improved. But the way to get there, I think, is
| through deontological methods because it's actually unclear what
| actions can be taken to lead to an outcome. So trying to optimize
| in the short term can lead to unexpected side effects.
|
| Having a rules based system and following it even if it costs $1M
| to fix a $1 problem seems better in the long run because it is
| predictable and solves hidden problems.
|
| It seems Facebook is MLing itself into a feedback loop that is
| missing any core value other than "let's make it work for 99% and
| not worry." But I think this piles up little slices of technical
| debt until it eventually breaks.
| instagraham wrote:
| Isn't it a similar situation with Twitter blue ticks now? You
| have to know someone at Twitter to get them?
| _-___________-_ wrote:
| What does that have to do with the article?
| gifnamething wrote:
| The significant section on the author struggling to contact
| Facebook?
| eithed wrote:
| I was awaiting the conclusion that de Zwart started using De
| Zwart surname because of Facebook.
| nanis wrote:
| Looking at
|
| > He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The
| company changes his name to 'Hans De Zwart', with a capitalized
| D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something
| bigger: "It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation
| which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of
| Dutch people an edge case."
|
| I am really confused. I am assuming the correct spelling is "de
| Zwart" ... since a human is writing this article, it shouldn't
| have been too hard for him to use the correct spelling or check
| the work of any computer involved in publishing the piece.
| [deleted]
| onion2k wrote:
| _I am assuming the correct spelling is "de Zwart"_
|
| Are you really willing to assume someone spelled their own name
| wrong _before_ you question your own knowledge about Dutch
| names? That seems a bit unreasonable. It 's much more likely
| that your assumption is incorrect than someone wrote their name
| incorrectly.
|
| This is the premise that should drive software as far as user
| input goes. The rule should simply be "Trust that the user
| entered their data correctly and don't try to 'fix' it
| programmatically." Validate it, sanitize it, but don't change
| it.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Are you chiding someone for knowing and communicating their
| confusion and assumptions? When someone is already
| communicating enough self-awareness to obviate that, either
| contribute clarifying information or say nothing.
| s_fischer wrote:
| I think the problem is that the OP did not stop at "I am
| confused, can someone explain this discrepancy to me?" They
| went on to make seemingly unconfused assumptions that the
| translator must have misspelled his own name in an article
| about misspelling names.
| nanis wrote:
| The reason for my assumption is the explicit statement:
|
| > The company changes his name to 'Hans De Zwart', with a
| capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it
| signifies something bigger ...
|
| which seems to imply pretty unambiguously that using "D"
| is incorrect. Assuming that all the information I have is
| what is contained in the article, this is confusing.
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| Seemingly completely reasonable... but I think your
| assumption can be classified under falsehood number 7
| (People's names do not change) in
| https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
| programmers-... which was linked above.
| _-___________-_ wrote:
| It was actually translated into English by De Zwart himself. I
| _believe_ that proper capitalisation of Dutch names with 'de'
| is to keep the 'd' lowercase if stating the full name (Hans de
| Zwart), but to capitalise the 'd' if stating just the last name
| (De Zwart), which the article seems to do consistently (except
| when quoting Facebook's mangling of the name).
| etripe wrote:
| In this context, _Dutch_ refers to the country The
| Netherlands, not the language.
|
| Based on my non-linguist opinion, I would say you're correct.
| Dutch people tend to not capitalise their Ds in surnames.
| When only mentioning the surname, it is treated as a mini-
| sentence, hence the capitalisaiton.
|
| In northern Belgium (AKA Flanders), Dutch speakers tend to
| capitalise their Ds in surnames, so you would see "De Zwart"
| regardless of where it appears in the sentence. In case
| you're wondering: yes, there are quite a few surnames that
| exist both in The Netherlands with "de" and in Belgium with
| "De". The same goes for "van" (of) and "vander/van der" (of
| the), for instance.
|
| Then again, if they're nobility, they might not capitalise
| the "de" because it might be the French "of" as opposed to
| the Dutch "de", meaning "the". Confusing stuff.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| In Spain we don't have so many surnames prefixed with
| particles, but we do have some (e.g. "Del Rio") and the
| capitalization also works as you describe for Dutch.
|
| It makes sense: when you say Juan del Rio it's obvious that
| it's a surname, but if you just said "del Rio" without
| context, the "del" could be confused with the common word.
| etripe wrote:
| Exactly. In the Dutch example, "de Zwart" in the middle
| of a sentence would be a misspelling of "de Zwarte",
| meaning "the Black".
| bambax wrote:
| Works like that in French -- with subtle caveats depending on
| the length of the name and weather it starts with a vowel:
| "D'Alembert", "De Seze", "De Gaulle"... but "La
| Rochefoucauld".
| butokai wrote:
| I was under the same impression, until I reached the end of the
| article and noticed first the return to "de", and second that
| the author is de Zwart himself
| jwilk wrote:
| > _This article was written by Reinier Kist and originally
| appeared in Dutch in NRC on August 3rd, 2020. It was
| translated into English by Hans de Zwart._
| input_sh wrote:
| If you're referring to him by his last name, it'd be De
| Zwart. If you're referring to him by his full name, it'd be
| Hans de Zwart.
| thiagocsf wrote:
| And I made a presumptuous comment in another thread about
| the irony of the author getting it wrong.
|
| Whether that's you or not, I apologise.
|
| I shall leave my shame there, as a reminder to myself.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| If you write just the last name, it'd be "De Zwart". If you
| write the full name it's "Hans de Zwart".
|
| The first character of the name is capitalized. Just a Dutch
| grammar quirk.
| tdons wrote:
| "Hans de Zwart" would be correct in Dutch yes. In English it'd
| be similar to "Hans the Black"
|
| We also have variants that we insert between first and
| lastname: 'van' (from), 'van de' (from the), and many others.
| [deleted]
| timvdalen wrote:
| The way it's used in the article is correct. His full name is
| "Hans de Zwart", but if you want to refer to him by just his
| last name, you always capitalize the tussenvoegsel: "De Zwart".
|
| I did notice the juxtaposition in the paragraph there, but
| everything is correctly written here.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| A big part of this I think is due to "uncommon" TLDs. I had a
| joke "quiz" .website domain that was insta-blocked by Facebook
| for no reason and was impossible to get revoked. That was a
| complete waste of time when the main way I intended for it to get
| some traction was through Facebook shares.
| keraf wrote:
| I registered a .as domain for my last name (ending in 'as') and
| managed to set it as my primary email on Facebook shorty before
| they decided to block that domain for no apparent reason. For
| years (until I deleted my FB account), I had a message on the
| top of my feed asking me to confirm my email even though it was
| already confirmed but I could never do it because of the block.
| Tried many times to get it resolved but no success. And to this
| day, people cannot send posts or messages that contain my
| domain (website or email) anywhere on Facebook and Instagram.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Consistent, quality
|
| content moderation
|
| at scale
|
| is impossible
| wyldfire wrote:
| Published under de Zwart's medium, but "Written by Reinier Kist."
|
| That's puzzling. Maybe de Zwart just kept pursuing up to the
| point that he paid a ghostwriter to blog something about it?
|
| Frustrating "experience", to be sure.
| input_sh wrote:
| It was published in Dutch by Reiner Kist, and Hans himself
| translated it to English. It says so in the footer.
| numpad0 wrote:
| IMHO: A private company, under a nation, shouldn't be _allowed to
| require PII_ , let alone forcing to publish it, unless it is
| absolutely necessary(not in the way Facebook works) or required
| by law(webshops, banks) to do so.
|
| Facebook as it is isn't compatible with society. It's at least a
| decade past the point it had to be corrected.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| This really isn't the problem at hand.
| tchalla wrote:
| Once, I had a message on WhatsApp not delivered to the recipient.
| I contacted WhatsApp support about this. I haven't received a
| response yet. I sent them the screenshots and all details they
| requested off me.
|
| This was 2 years ago and I still have the request number with me.
| RickJWagner wrote:
| This aggression will not stand, man.
| satyanash wrote:
| OT: Why are medium.com URLs getting special subdirectory handling
| for usernames in the trailing HN title parentheses?
| LeonB wrote:
| It's a new feature. There's some related discussion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24754456
| ebg13 wrote:
| HN has done some variant of this for a long time now with
| subdomains, but often you had to send an email to request sites
| with personal subdomains to be added to the list if they
| weren't already. It's because your rando personal blog is _not_
| medium. It's just _on_ medium. Your rando personal github
| repository is _not_ github. It's just _on_ github.
| qq12as wrote:
| People are commenting that the FB's bureaucratic system is
| idiotic and unsustainable.
|
| I don't understand why: bureaucracies are a brilliant response by
| oversized institutions/businesses to force people to reveal how
| much they care about solving an issue. Don't really need your
| website to be cleared? You won't make a fuss about it.
|
| Is it unjust and inequitable? Yes. Is it unsustainable? Cannot
| see why.
| surajs wrote:
| "duped by facebook" sounds like an oxymoron, idk
| op03 wrote:
| Facebook is trying to administer a 2 billion member virtual city
| with about 20k people.
|
| Most of the fires that start and actual administration details
| are just conveniently left to real world politicians,
| bureaucracies, journos, school boards, parents and police depts
| to work out.
|
| This retarded unsustainable model has been sold as the magic of
| Scale.
|
| Scaling user base = Scaling up issues. No free lunch.
|
| Regulators can be asking a simple question - how many people are
| needed to administrate a 2 billion member city? How many does
| Facebook have to do the job. And if they dont have enough how to
| charge them for all the resource/energy drainage they offload to
| the real world.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| > And if they dont have enough how to charge them for all the
| resource/energy drainage they offload to the real world.
|
| That's the million (billion?) dollar question for me. I observe
| that it will sadly follow the precedent of the oil industry and
| other industries -- a slap on the wrist to the tune of a
| fraction of the true damage, with society left to bear the
| brunt of the externality in perpetuity and prosecutors able to
| say "at least we tried!"
|
| I can't help but wonder if there isn't a better way.
| BTCOG wrote:
| Trillion dollar question, really. When you have a multi-
| billion dollar platform costing magnitudes more in social
| disruption, election and democracy itself being disrupted.
| RIMR wrote:
| This assumes that facebook creates the problems that exist on
| their platform.
|
| All of Facebook's problems exist independent of Facebook.
| Facebook's existence guarantees that those problems will become
| a part of them.
|
| I'm not saying they shouldn't be held responsible for not doing
| their due diligence, but the argument that they ought to be
| charged for "offloading" problems on the "real world" isn't
| great. That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged
| for offloading automotive deaths on society.
| katmannthree wrote:
| >That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for
| offloading automotive deaths on society.
|
| Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? At the end of the
| day _someone_ has to bear that cost, why should we force
| society at large to deal with issues that arise as a result
| of a small group of people finding a new way to enrich
| themselves?
| phobosanomaly wrote:
| On man, if an economist saw this they would be rubbing
| their hands together like Sylvester the Cat finding Tweety
| bound-and-gagged and covered in BBQ sauce. You'd have to
| flee before they locked the door and started pulling out
| chalk and graphs and a STATA license code from their
| economist's trenchcoat.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
|
| "A collective action problem or social dilemma is a
| situation in which all individuals would be better off
| cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting
| interests between individuals that discourage joint action.
| The collective action problem has been addressed in
| political philosophy for centuries, but was most clearly
| established in 1965 in Mancur Olson's The Logic of
| Collective Action.
|
| Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue
| individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than
| behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social
| dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across
| disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political
| science. Examples of phenomena that can be explained using
| social dilemmas include resource depletion, low voter
| turnout, and overpopulation. The collective action problem
| can be understood through the analysis of game theory and
| the free-rider problem, which results from the provision of
| public goods. Additionally, the collective problem can be
| applied to numerous public policy concerns that countries
| across the world currently face."
|
| The part of the wiki that deals with this specific problem
| (vehicles) is unfortunately broken for some reason, but,
| eh, we get the point.
| katmannthree wrote:
| Terrific read, thank you. I'd be interested in seeing an
| economist's take on the viability and effectiveness of
| forcing industries to deal with their own externalities.
| phobosanomaly wrote:
| If you run across anything, I would be super interested
| to take a look as well.
| cgriswald wrote:
| > Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they?
|
| Because they aren't making the choices that result in the
| deaths.
|
| If you force the industry to pay for the negative
| externalities of the industry, the fixes/costs can be baked
| into the product ( _e.g._ , safety equipment, emissions
| standards).
|
| If you force the industry to pay for things that are the
| result of government ( _e.g._ overly-permissive licensing
| standards, building large suburbs that require vehicles) or
| consumer behavior ( _e.g._ , driving drunk, reckless
| driving), you'll either: (1) destroy the industry or (2)
| create strong incentives for the industry to lobby
| government to make such behavior impossible (say by passing
| an amendment to ban the consumption of alcohol).
|
| You also either create a situation where victims can
| double-dip, getting paid both from the industry and from
| the individual consumer--who has already paid in aggregate
| by paying the industry; or a situation where the consumer
| has no direct responsibility, which will likely have the
| effect of riskier behavior; at least until the industry
| successfully lobbies the government.
| katmannthree wrote:
| In practical terms I absolutely do agree with you. People
| collectively respond to whatever incentives they're
| allowed to, you _do_ get riskier behavior when you reduce
| individual responsibility for actions. If you'll forgive
| me for going on a wide ranting tangent though, consider
| the following:
|
| >Because they aren't making the choices that result in
| the deaths.
|
| I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will"
| actually exists, I think it's just a convenient moral
| abstraction we've developed to grease the wheels of the
| world. Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a
| just high-functioning society? One that recognizes my
| hypothesis regarding the illlegitimacy of absolute
| individual responsibility while also resulting in equal
| or better collective behavior?
|
| Going back towards the car example, I don't think hammer
| manufacturers should bear responsibility for the
| apocryphal homicidal misuse of their tools since removing
| a hammer from a toolbox just means the crime would be
| committed with a knife or rocks in a sock. This argument
| gets blurrier when you consider firearms manufacturers
| where the explicit intent of the tool is often to kill.
| You can make a solid argument either way there.
|
| So what about cars? They are involved in roughly 100
| fatalities a day in the united states. Were cars designed
| to kill? No (although we do have the case where a
| manufacturer decided it was cheaper to keep selling
| unsafe cars and just pay out lawsuits rather than fix
| their screwup). Manufacturers generally do what they can
| to make them safer with each passing year. Despite that
| though, society still has to bear the cost of tens of
| thousands of deaths per year and two orders of magnitude
| more injuries. Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would
| _not_ have happened in a world without cars. A portion of
| them would not have happened without car ads and popular
| culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look
| cool. It's convenient, sure, to place absolute blame on
| the people who don't think just watch cool car go zoom in
| tv then buy cool car on credit and go zoom into building.
| Doing what we do now and removing those people from
| society at that point is a viable solution, but what if
| we put more effort into not letting industrial
| psychologists develop good little consumers like that in
| the first place? The US is the "land of the free" with
| high levels of individual responsibility and we've got
| astronomical household debt and the world's highest
| proportion of our population incarcerated to show for it.
| I think we can do better.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just
| high-functioning society
|
| Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we
| can decide to do anything to make things other than they
| are?
| katmannthree wrote:
| >Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think
| we can decide to do anything to make things other than
| they are?
|
| For the exact same reason as people who do believe in
| free will, some combination of our inherent traits and
| environment made us want to change things.
|
| Not having free will doesn't mean people immediately turn
| into dust, it just means the reason you decided to get a
| Big Whopper Breakfast Bucket(tm) from McWendallKingFC(c)
| has more to do with explicit and intentional
| psychological manipulation on their part than it does on
| you as the individual making a totally intentional,
| rational, and well thought out choice that definitely
| doesn't have anything to do with their highly optimized
| (to their benefit of course, not the benefit of your
| health) food and very realistic commercials of smiling
| happy people and great vibes.
|
| There's really no immediate practical application of free
| will (or the lack thereof), human behavior is what it is
| whether we have it or not. If we all believe in it then
| it's very easy to say "the buck stops here at the
| individual" in regards to antisocial behavior. If we
| don't have it then the causal chain is a lot messier and
| one reasonably could assign shared responsibility towards
| institutions that encourage suboptimal behavior (such as
| the advertising industry).
| cgriswald wrote:
| > Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have
| happened in a world without cars.
|
| This isn't true. If you require auto manufacturers to be
| responsible for auto deaths and they decide to get out of
| business, then what? Trains? But won't the train
| manufacturers be held responsible for train-related
| deaths? Then you have the same problem, just with trains
| rather than autos. At that point, you either keep
| whittling things down until some mode of transportation
| is cheap and safe enough (but potentially very sub-
| optimal along other vectors) or everyone walks and goods
| don't get anywhere, which has its own cost in lives.
|
| > A portion of them would not have happened without car
| ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and
| irresponsibly look cool.
|
| I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths
| and a tiny influence. Despite this advertisement and
| culture, the vast majority of people are
| responsible/reasonable (if unskilled and/or ignorant)
| drivers.
|
| I think governments could reduce the number of deaths far
| more greatly by having more stringent licensing
| guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads,
| saner zoning policies, better public transit options,
| etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a
| correlation between speed and fun.
|
| > I think we can do better.
|
| Certainly. However, I'm not convinced removing agency
| from individuals and ascribing fault to entities with no
| direct (and at best marginal indirect) control over
| specific or aggregated situations will get us there.
| katmannthree wrote:
| >This isn't true.
|
| Fair, I'm willing to concede that transportation
| incidents are fungible for the purposes of this
| discussion. That segues right into the question of
| relative safety per unit distance traveled. A quick
| google search brought up this article from the washington
| post [0] which gives the following:
|
| Motorcycle: 212.57 fatalities per billion passenger miles
|
| Car: 7.28
|
| Ferry: 3.17
|
| Train: 0.43
|
| Subway: 0.24
|
| Bus: 0.11
|
| Plane: 0.07
|
| Granted this is skewed by cars being the only viable
| last-mile rural transportation method but we can examine
| that too. According to USDOT, urban motor vehicle crash
| deaths overtook rural crash deaths in 2016 in a reversal
| of the previous longstanding trend of deaths being 60%
| rural and 40% urban [1]. You _do_ still have the problem
| of people dying as a result of private industry, but the
| rate at which people die per mile is an order of
| magnitude lower if you take the bus versus a car. That's
| almost 90 lives saved per day if we all rode the bus. I
| suspect this rate is tied to CDL and bus maintenance
| standards and would remain largely unchanged if buses
| became the transportation method of the majority.
|
| >I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths
| and a tiny influence.
|
| I'd love to see some data but given what I've seen of the
| local street racer scene and how they view certain movie
| franchises that glorify their subculture I think the
| influence is significant. Would society be better if we
| straight up banned everything that shows people doing bad
| stuff? Probably not, but media still has a tremendous
| impact on how people behave. It's again a case where an
| industry offloads negative externalities onto society.
|
| >I think governments could reduce the number of deaths
| far more greatly by having more stringent licensing
| guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads,
| saner zoning policies, better public transit options,
| etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a
| correlation between speed and fun.
|
| Forcing manufacturers to deal with the externalities
| we're discussing would also incentivize them to encourage
| safe driving, no? I used to be a vocal proponent of not
| yielding an inch of freedom as well but I'm less and less
| convinced about that as time goes on. Just because the
| harm isn't as immediate as people getting trampled 30
| seconds after one yells fire in the crowded theater
| doesn't mean it's still not real harm that could've been
| avoided. There's a significant amount of internal
| propaganda here in the US about how amazing freedom is
| but I'm really not sold on the idea that the average
| person's life here is better as a result of it compared
| to a society that recognizes the complexity and
| interconnectedness of the world and responds to it with
| structure rather than "individual freedom" and a literal
| world-leading number of people sitting around making
| license plates in jail.
|
| [0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/
| 14/the-s...
|
| [1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-
| statistics/detail/urban...
| cgriswald wrote:
| > You _do_ still have the problem of people dying as a
| result of private industry, but the rate at which people
| die per mile is an order of magnitude lower if you take
| the bus versus a car.
|
| These numbers don't reflect the absolute difference in
| safety between these modes of transportation. Imagine a
| world in which buses replace cars as the primary mode of
| transportation. You've now got many, many more buses on
| the road. So, if there is a collision, rather than
| probably being car-on-car or car-on-bus, it's most likely
| to be bus-on-bus. That will raise the fatalities per
| billion passenger miles in two ways: (1) The amount of
| energy in a bus-on-bus collision will be quite a bit
| larger than when a car hits a bus or a car hits a car.
| (2) When there is a fatal collision, the number of
| fatalities is likely to be higher. (It takes no stretch
| of the imagination to imagine if one person on a bus dies
| in a collision, his fellow passengers are more likely to
| also die.)
|
| You also have second-order effects, like vastly reduced
| visibility for bus-drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists...
|
| > Forcing manufacturers to deal with the externalities
| we're discussing would also incentivize them to encourage
| safe driving, no?
|
| No. Not if they don't actually have any control or
| responsibility over the externality, like in the case of
| drunk driving, which was my original point. The only
| things a manufacturer could do in that case is fight for
| prohibition or install a breathalyzer in every car. The
| former was tried and turned out to be pretty bad for
| society. The latter probably would destroy the industry
| and/or be trivially worked around by the dedicated drunk.
| jariel wrote:
| There is a better answer and that is to not use Facebook,
| because we don't need it.
|
| Search is altogether another problem, because we really do
| depend on it.
| tinco wrote:
| We not only don't charge them, our governments actually give
| them money to do it. The Netherlands actually gave Microsoft
| 500 million euro in free energy credit (by building them
| subsidized windmills) just so they would build their enormous
| data center here, an enormous datacenter that is going to
| employ only 125 people.
|
| And those windmills, they were pitched to the people as being
| able to power 370.000 households. The kicker of course that
| they won't power even a single one, as 100% of the energy has
| been sold to Microsoft.
| tomglynch wrote:
| While this outcome isn't best for the economy, it is a good
| solution for the environment, and perhaps that was the goal
| of the Netherlands.
| kokey wrote:
| It's the problem anyone who moderates a system faces, when the
| users vastly outnumbers the moderators your moderation has to
| have some level of opaqueness and unpredictability or else you
| have no chance of keeping up with people gaming the system.
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| There's a simple solution: cap the number of users. With a
| closed system you don't have to worry about the registration
| mechanisms being gamed, and moderation of a fixed-size group
| is easy to plan out.
|
| Similarly you could use an invite system with limited
| invites, if you want growth at a constant rate- although this
| could still lead to moderation problems if you don't grow
| your moderation team at the same rate.
| ovi256 wrote:
| If your moderation is the equivalent of a low fence keeping
| people away from the other side, with 2B users the fence will
| always be swamped by people leaning over it and bending it
| while looking you in the eye and going "See ? I'm not passing
| it. This is what you allow."
|
| If you randomly bring the hammer down on a fraction of the
| people who just touch the fence, the fence will be pretty
| clear of people leaning over. But you'll sure gain a
| reputation for opaque capricious moderation.
|
| NB: I am not against this system, and I recognize it's widely
| applied in the world.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > NB: I am not against this system, and I recognize it's
| widely applied in the world.
|
| The problem is that what is "widely applied in the world"
| is using the grey-area of who to bring the hammer down on
| randomly to tip the scales in some way.
| barrkel wrote:
| Or you delegate. Grant trusted individuals power to moderate
| sub-communities.
|
| How do you ensure you select trusted individuals? Create
| institutional mechanisms with accountability and checks and
| balances; e.g. community voting to bestow time-limited power
| on individuals, and appeal boards to as a check on abuses of
| that power, and perhaps recall votes to remove someone.
|
| Opaqueness isn't the answer. Opaqueness leads to injustice.
|
| You certainly don't have a chance of keeping up if you don't
| use the technology we've developed over thousands of years
| specifically to deal with people gaming systems. The
| technology of government.
| DodgyEggplant wrote:
| The dude will abide
| kokey wrote:
| That's certainly a great strategy if you have those options
| available. However, if you can't maintain a certain
| moderator to user ratio then that's going to be impossible.
| wombatpm wrote:
| I want a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of
| Facebook
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Are there sites that have done this at scale? Reddit and
| Wikipedia come to mind as counter examples, where the
| people with the most time and desire for power end up doing
| almost all the moderation.
| the8472 wrote:
| I don't see the issue with reddit. People can vote with
| their feet if they don't like the local lords.
| wvenable wrote:
| Many city, state, and even country subreddits have been
| taken over by right-wing moderators. This has been a
| coordinated process over many years. And while you can
| create new subreddit for your country easily you're still
| can't be /r/canada.
| wolco2 wrote:
| Time to start your own perfect reddit. /r/Canada may be
| currently occupate but wvenable should be available.
| jerf wrote:
| I'd say the issue with Reddit, in the context of this
| discussion, is that it doesn't work. For whatever reason
| you like, Reddit doesn't delegate the community to its
| moderators. It delegates the responsibilities, but not
| the rights. Reddit still has an overarching "community
| standards" and is thus, at that level, still just one big
| community, with the accompanying failure. The attempt to
| solve that with subreddits was a good try, and solved
| some things, but it doesn't get around the sorts of
| problems being discussed in this overall thread.
|
| (I'm only talking about what the case is, in this
| context, not why, nor judging it at the moment.)
| the8472 wrote:
| That may be somewhat due to policy changes. Reddit did
| try to be more hands-off in the past.
|
| But perhaps a better example than reddit is the internet
| as a whole. ISP and hosters are dumb carriers and
| moderation is mostly left to the individual sites.
| Depending on your hoster it may take a court order for
| them to do anything at all.
|
| In other words we need more platforms that put themselves
| front and center, avoiding that also avoids the
| reputation problems with a hands-off approach.
| msla wrote:
| Reddit is an inconsistent mess because it's fundamentally
| reactive at the very top. Someone Who Matters notices
| they host racist communities? They ban the most obvious
| ones, but not communities like /r/Sino which are
| blatantly racist in ways the Western Media finds
| difficult to complain about. Someone Who Matters notices
| they have transphobic communities? Ban the most obvious
| ones, except ones like /r/ShitRedditSays which hide
| behind a twisted interpretation of feminism, as they
| could play a more effective card were they to be banned.
|
| And so on and so forth. It's administration by reacting
| to bad press.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Moderation is labor, and you get what you pay for. Given
| how notoriously mental health threatening Facebook
| moderation has turned out to be, adding unpaid moderators
| with no health care benefits and especially no mental
| health protections seems the exact wrong direction for
| Facebook.
|
| That said, I absolutely agree that the answer is likely one
| of checks/balances/as much transparency to the adjudication
| process as possible, and yes Facebook has a lot to learn
| there from existing governmental technology.
| duxup wrote:
| >The website has all this time been incorrectly labelled "by our
| automated tools" as spam, according to the spokesperson. "Our
| apologies for the inconvenience."
|
| It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate
| as much as possible and if it impacts some folks unfairly, that's
| just how it works and they've no interest in dealing with it
| unless it gets PR. Otherwise screw those little people.
|
| I had a domain through blogger that I registered ages ago on the
| blogger site. Google started emailing me that it was expiring and
| directed me to Gsuite.... but I don't have a Gsuite account and
| google didn't make one for me...
|
| The domain didn't appear in my Google domains account.
|
| Google had just pointed blogger domain users to Gsuite and called
| it a day.
|
| Google was no help, I never got a response from the handful of
| ways (none of them good) trying to reach out to them.
|
| Finally I found the old registrar google used behind the scenes
| and they let me renew the domain.
|
| I never heard back from google other than all the spam about my
| domain expiring and asking me to login to Gsuite... repeatedly..
| sent to an email without a Gusite account.. someone just flipped
| a switch and screw everyone I guess.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to
| automate as much as possible
|
| Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated
| or human-controlled. Having actual humans do the work is hardly
| a magic bullet, because people make mistakes frequently as
| well. Worse yet, humans are more prone to being compromised or
| acting maliciously, such as in recent attacks on prominent
| companies.
|
| It's not so much as a policy as a necessity. Facebook's number
| of users is counted in the billions. They have about 50,000
| users for each Facebook employee.
|
| Most importantly: People aren't paying Facebook. It's just not
| realistic to expect a free platform serving billions of users
| to have 100% perfect execution.
| Retric wrote:
| Having only 50k employees is something they control. Their
| Net income is ~20B/year at that's enough to pay for about 1
| million low level customer service agents.
|
| I am not saying they need to do so, but the solution is to
| make it unnecessary to call not simply to have nobody to
| reach.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Why would they pay out all their net income, provide better
| customer contact/service, and go from being massively
| profitable to break-even?
|
| What's in it for them to do that?
|
| Even if they went 25% of the way there, does it make them a
| stronger company in the long-term? That they don't do it
| suggests they don't think it would.
| Retric wrote:
| 25% would probably be vast overkill. The point is they
| could have say 100,000 people doing customer support
| without a massive hit to their profitability, especially
| if that support ended up increasing revenue.
|
| In other words the real limitation isn't their current
| number of employees or really their business model. They
| are simply acting like a monopoly which lacks
| competition. I am sure they think simply buying any
| social network that starts to get traction is cheaper
| than providing a better product.
| recursive wrote:
| Employees cost more than their wage/salary. The numbers you
| provide accommodate poverty-level compensation. I don't
| think that would be better.
| Retric wrote:
| As a global company Facebook is not bound to pay US
| workers US wages. Around 300$/month is the Median wage
| for a call center job in India. They could pay ~3x as
| much and sill have plenty left over for the overhead
| involved.
|
| Even just assigning call centers based on the callers
| country of origin would be dramatically cheaper than US
| wages for everyone.
| thayne wrote:
| > Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's
| automated or human-controlled.
|
| I think the problem here isn't that there was a mistake, but
| that de Zwart had no reocurse when it happened.
|
| > It's not so much as a policy as a necessity. Facebook's
| number of users is counted in the billions. They have about
| 50,000 users for each Facebook employee.
|
| So what? How often do things like this happen? If it happens
| enough that Facebook's customer support can't keep up, that
| suggests their automation needs some serious work.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I hear this argument all the time, but Facebook is one of the
| richest companies in the world so they could definitely
| afford to hire some more people that could look at
| complaints. They just choose not to because they don't care.
| If it suddenly would affect their bottom line I bet you they
| would hire people very quickly.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| A few years ago I bought a laundry washer and dryer set. They
| were nice, mid-range units and I was pretty happy with them.
| About a year after purchase, the plastic clips that held the
| handle on the dryer broke off. I called the phone number on
| my warranty papers and spoke to a human being in Tennessee. I
| told her what happened, and she asked me for the model number
| and my address. They shipped a replacement that arrived at my
| house two days later.
|
| A mistake happened, the plastic was too weak (Or maybe I
| pulled too hard, I don't know!) but I was able to contact the
| company and get it fixed.
|
| It doesn't matter what mistakes are made if there is a way to
| fix it. If these systems are automated, fine. But if a
| mistake is made, why isn't there a way to get it fixed?
| That's where humans come in.
|
| btw, Alphabet's income is about 42 times that of the company
| that made my washer/dryer. How is it that they can afford
| phone reps when Alphabet can't?
| stickfigure wrote:
| How many of those washer/dryer units do you think they
| sold? Hundreds of thousands? If it's a super common model,
| maybe millions?
|
| Google and Facebook each have 3-4 orders of magnitude more
| customers. I'm not sure manning phones is realistic.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| If the problem is too big for Google and Facebook to
| handle, maybe Google and Facebook shouldn't exist
| jrumbut wrote:
| Every problem looks daunting until you have the right
| incentives to solve it.
| nine_k wrote:
| Making things right 100% of the time costs a ton. Sometimes the
| business is willing to pay: something related to money or legal
| compliance, the serious stuff.
|
| Sometimes it's cheaper to have things work, say, 90% of time,
| and maybe manually fix some stuff when badly needed, on a best-
| effort basis. Often it's the only viable way. Usually, if
| there's no written contract, best-effort is the only treatment
| you can expect. (Even Google's support is said to be much
| better for paid users.)
| ethanwillis wrote:
| I wouldn't categorize this as best-effort. This is why we
| need more consumer protections because I think any reasonable
| person can agree that this is not how consumers should be
| treated and we shouldn't normalize it by providing a flawed
| rationalization of "Google needs to make more money"
| nine_k wrote:
| If you are not paying for a service, should you expect the
| same protections?
|
| If you do but implicitly (by sharing info good for ad
| targeting, etc), should it not be made explicit then? It
| should stop being "free" and legally become "free*
| (conditions apply)".
| msla wrote:
| > If you are not paying for a service, should you expect
| the same protections?
|
| Precisely the problem: People who _are_ paying for
| services do not receive protection!
| ethanwillis wrote:
| The grandparent comment that we're talking in the context
| of said that they registered a domain through Google's
| blogger service. I assume they paid for that domain.
|
| And I've used paid Google services, support really isn't
| any better.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Back when I got my driver's license in the late 90s, Pennsylvania
| couldn't handle Scottish surnames, so my last name ended up "MC
| BETH" after I wrote it on the form as "McBeth" (which is
| ludicrous, there have been Scots people in Pennsylvania far
| longer than there have been licenses). When I moved to Virginia 7
| years ago, Virginia _could_ handle it, but my PA license showed a
| "MC BETH", so my VA license shows "MC BETH".
|
| Before they issue the license, they give you a form to review.
| They warn you to check the form for errors, because errors are
| "serious business" with "serious consequences". So I point out
| the space on the form, that it is not the correct spelling of my
| name.
|
| The clerk got quite surly with me. It didn't matter that all the
| other documentation I had to submit--including my birth
| certificate--along with my change of residency showed "McBeth".
| Apparently, the PA DMV of 1998 was infallible and I'm now trying
| to pull some sort of fraud fastball in VA in getting that space
| removed.
| nicbou wrote:
| I have experienced this many times. It's unfortunately a sign of
| the times.
|
| One morning, my bank account was frozen by the tax office. It
| took me two days and many calls to even understand what was going
| on. There was no warning, no apparent reason why direct debit
| would fail that one time, but it took me 7 days to get access to
| my account again. Meanwhile, I couldn't buy groceries. I got a
| few late payment fees and a mark on my credit score. No one
| apologised. No one even noticed.
|
| This is not a tech problem. It's a scaling problem. An
| increasingly large part of your life is at the mercy of automated
| systems. If you don't fit on a flowchart designed by a white
| collar guy in California, you don't exist.
|
| If one in a billion users has an issue, they must be really loud
| for one in twenty thousand employees to pay attention.
| input_sh wrote:
| I was a Mozilla Open Web Fellow a few years back at Bits of
| Freedom, and as one of the goodbye gifts Hans of course gave me
| the DVD of The Big Lebowski:
| https://twitter.com/input_sh/status/1315926558134210560
|
| Still unopened because I haven't owned a DVD player since.
| [deleted]
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| Could it be related to Zwarte Piet? Perhaps Facebook is just
| banning everything containing "Zwart" in its content, just to be
| on the safe side.
| eythian wrote:
| I'd hope not, that would be a completely wrong-headed decision
| by them as "Zwarte" isn't an uncommon surname/surname part,
| just like "Black" isn't uncommon in English-speaking countries.
|
| Which of course doesn't preclude Facebook from making a
| completely wrong-headed decision.
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