According to Brian Krebs: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/114343835430587973

> Hearing a bit more on this. Apparently it's up to the CVE board to decide what to do, but for now no new CVEs will be added after tomorrow. the CVE website will still be up.

Basically when any software/library/whatever has a vulnerability, they have to communicate that out themselves, in some format.

If I'm developing a product built on 20 libraries, it won't just be a matter of scanning CVEs for major vulnerabilities any more, so I'm more likely to miss one.

'always update' doesn't always work, when to manage a product you realistically have to version pin.

NIST NVE relies on the CVE program. (vulnerabilities get reported, MITRE assigns CVEs and publishes them, NIST then copies that list and adds their own scoring etc to it)

Once they fire everyone at NIST, they'll have that in common.

The process seems to be to dismantle anything not nailed down in government.

Now if you want that (even just funding) to be a thing ... you have to go through Trump & Co and pay your bribe to get it back up.

Privatize all teh things?

> I'm trying to steelman

Why? This administration is not acting in good faith, you don't have to act as if they are. People and institutions doing that is part of how we got here in the first place.

I think it's ignorance and arrogance. The US seems to be on a path to lose technological and science leadership. The current leadership doesn't seem to understand things that aren't flashy. I wonder when they'll dial back on food safety. I am sure RFK knows some vitamins that protect against salmonella

We have a 2tn deficit. If Congress wants to fund this, they need to make it mandatory spending and raise taxes.

> I really can't think of a non- nefarious justification for this

Tragedy of the commons - NVD and the CVE project havr been backlogged and facing funding issues for a couple years now, and most security vendors are either cagey about providing vulns in a timely manner (as it can reduce their own comparative advantage), or try upsell their own alternative risk prioritization scores.

Every company will gladly use NVD and CVE data, but no one wants to subsidize it and help a competitor, especially in an industry as competitive as cybersecurity.

It's incredibly foolish. Whatever the justification is, it doesn't matter as much as the horrible outcome.

This is one of those things the government does for the benefit of the whole.

Still shortsighted and stupid, but it's plausible this is intended as leverage to get someone else to pony up.

Reduce government spending; since it's not actually a government organization (as far as I can tell, I never looked into it before), other organizations can fund it. How much goes into this organization a year anyway? I'm seeing a Mitre corporation that does lots of other stuff too that has a revenue of 2.2 billion a year.

Multi-trillion-dollar companies benefit from and contribute to this system, surely they can spare 0.01% of their revenue to this bit of critical infrastruture?

Reduce spending. Steelmanning (not actually believing this): it probably cost a lot for what is essentially a database, and can be done cheaply by private sector (Google, Microsoft).

It's a dying empire, really nothing else to say. The USA led world order is over, we've voted ourselves out of it, and now need to learn how to deal with that.

I'll admit this is a bugbear of mine, but I think this is the reason 'steelmanning' is counterproductive.

Steelmanning is a neologism that serves no purpose other than in-group signaling. There was already a perfectly acceptable term for the same concept, one with more nuance and a rich history: Charitability.

The major difference is that charitability is about treating your interlocutor with respect. Steelmanning is about using one's own intellect to make your interlocutor's argument better than them. Because charitability is based on a concept of mutual respect, if somebody clearly doesn't respect you one iota, then why would you be charitable? Steelmanning tries to divorce the person from the argument, and is ironically both arrogant and naive.

and then a random 9.8 critical comes that affects some software you have in a way that makes it a 0 in your environment but it doesn't matter cause the cve tanks your organizational Security Score (tm) by 10 arbitrary points and management is wondering when you'll secure the company again because the Security Score is their only tangible deliverable to measure success

I don't know of anyone who doesn't quickly become exhausted after running a CVE scanner on their code.

These sound like downstream effects of funding stress to me, no?

The scores were never going to be that accurate across people's environments (IDK how much other places relied on them, places I worked never did that much) and issues with the scores don't seem to be a good justification to torch the whole CVE system anyway.

This is bikeshedding. The point is an authoritative process and an identifier

All this does is help Putin and other rich grifters.

Sure. There's also major problems with the video encoding pipeline at my big tech job. Let's just delete it

> Weren't there major problems with the current CVE implementation

Absolutely. And if the headline was 'DHS proposes improvements and streamlining to the CVE program' we'd all probably be cheering.

Leaping from 'This is Flawed' to 'Let's kill This' is a logical fallacy. A flawed security registry is clearly better than no security registry.

This will get lost in the noise, but i think you mean cvss.

CVE is simply identification of a flaw, not a scoring system.

As an active consumer of CVEs: yea there are major problems. No there's nothing better and no I don't have any better ideas.

The scores are mostly useless, I would not care if they disappeared, I do not look at them. I don't really understand why people get so upset about garbage scores though. If a high CVSS score creates a bunch of work for you then your vuln mag process is broken IMO. (Or alternatively, you are in the business of compliance rather than security. If you don't like working in compliance, CVSS scores aren't the root cause of your misery).

Having a central list of 'here's a bunch of things with stable IDs that you might or might not care about' is very valuable.

Getting a bit tired of posts like this (no offense), something dumb / nefarious happens like funding is cut for <useful thing>, then someone posts an off the cuff comment or question like, 'wasn't this <useful thing> not that useful because <superficial reason>?'.

Why do people do this, to down play all the destruction of the last few months? Seems to be some type of coping mechanism.

Every system has problems. The challenge is to address the problems and fix them. Not just delete the entire system and claim a win.

Yes it earnestly needed new direction and leadership.

Classic 'oh its broken so throw it all away'.

It's the way it is because there isn't a good alternative. They cannot possibly know every environment that we operate in.

To this day we still have large corporations down playing their issues, and it was way worse 20 years ago.

> I wonder what level of compartmentalisation inside DHS means they didn't see this as having sufficient downsides?

This was not a carefully-weighed decision based on a cost-benefit analysis. This was a political order, consistent with the administration's policy of 'cut everything, recklessly, indiscriminately.'

it might be ignorance; it might be malice.

it might also be deliberate: that they actually don't think the government should be involved in this sort of thing. after all, someone could be making a profit on this, and that seems to be their highest value. if gov is involved, that makes it a communal effort, and you know what else starts with 'commun-'?

yes, those reasons are stupid and ignorant AND intentional.

but is there any evidence against that interpretation?

This sort of thing is happening across the federal government. There is no rhyme or reason. DOGE has been given an unrealistic target for cuts and they're desperately cutting whatever they can get their hands on. If you look at the federal budget it's nearly impossible for DOGE to hit their stated goals without touching benefits like medicare and social security (which are off limits so far) so the only option is deep, deep cuts into the narrow slice of the federal budget that excludes those protected categories.

There is no rhyme or reason to what gets cut, other than someone under pressure to hit KPIs (dollars cut) was desperately searching for things that looked easy to cancel.

This is happening everywhere the federal government touches. Most people aren't aware of it until they come around and pull the rug on something that intersects with your own life.

Even my die-hard Republican distant relatives are suddenly shocked because programs they benefited from are being cut. They thought they voted for something different.

No, we're in a middle of a coup. Palantir or some other odious company will get paid 100x more to do something.

Your words don't make any sense in this environment. The idea that any person at an agency could stand up to or convince the DOGE team of anything is preposterous.

Anything that weakens the US or puts our cybersecurity in a place that Russia can exfiltrate data will happen. This is not about the US needing anything and it's silly to think otherwise. See also the NLRB whistleblower and the security backdoors that DOGE demanded to allow data exfiltration and the subsequent death threats to the whistle blower.

You mindset is behind the times and needs to adjust to a, frankly, insane current reality.

If you made this careful analysis, you'd hear 'CRISSAKE WE NEED THIS DONT TOUCH IT' for almost everything (and it likely would be right for a significant portion but not everything).

That's why the current approach seems to be to axe everything, listen to how much screaming there is, then reinstate only the projects where the screaming is really loud.

> 'kill it, we don't need this'

'We are paying MITRE how much? Bigballs and co will write a better ststem in 1 week and have it integrated with xAI. How hard could it be? Send out a first draft of an xAI contract to our DHS contact'

They were at the mercy of 20 year olds from doge. I wonder when doge enters the NSA & NRO WHAT information will they steal & put in their hard drives.

All of this is criminal behavior on the the current regime.

> I wonder what level of compartmentalisation inside DHS means they didn't see this as having sufficient downsides?

The National Vulnerability Database has been unable to keep up with the flow of CVEs for over a year now:

- https://anchore.com/blog/national-vulnerability-database-opa...

- https://www.cyberreport.io/news/cve-backlog-update-the-nvd-s...

- https://www.ibm.com/think/insights/cve-backlog-update-nvd-st...

- and many, many, many others

It has been a complete disaster for months. At this point, perhaps the thinking is to radically change approaches?

> I wonder what level of compartmentalisation inside DHS means they didn't see this as having sufficient downsides?

Come on, are you living under a rock right now? There are massive indiscriminate funding cuts to anything that Elon/Doge deems to be 'fraud', and they explicitly do not care about the collateral damage.

This is not about the DHS or 'compartmentalization'. This is just a politician running amok and having real consequences.

No one analyzed it most likely. It's possible on of the college students working for Doge doesn't understand security because they are a child with no real world experience that Elon brought in to slash costs.

What has been ongoing for more than a year?

The funding appears to have been cut off today, and both of these comments seem to talk about continuing work and how important it is.

Do you mean to say that some form of threat to the NVD has been around for over a year now? Just want to be sure I'm parsing correctly!

I've noticed that there's a post like this in most articles on HN that could be construed as negative for the current administration: some vague false statement followed by either a factually incorrect explanation or some quote that does not support the statement.

I did find this post to be non-helpful and confusing. It would be helpful to edit it (or write differently in the future) to clarify that the sudden defunding event occurring today is separate and not related to the previous funding cuts. If that's the case.

There is nothing in that article mentioning funding reductions.

That article is about how the volume of software vulnerabilities are increasing, resulting in difficulty keeping up by the CVE and NVD projects.

Please stop spamming this thread with political spin.

I'm not sure, but the current article looks to have somewhat more information in it, so I've merged that thread hither instead.

That's exactly what they're saying about the HHS cuts and the measles outbreak.

What I don't get is why people make things up and then get angry at the thing they made up. Is there not enough real things to be angry at?

If you /s/China/Russia/, when asking Trump, it's no longer a rhetorical question.

It seems phrasing it in the form of a joke was too much.

I was trying to convey (with levity/humor) WHY it should continue to be funded as well as the argument that should be made to the one currently in control of the spineless US Congress.

Yes, fixing the vulnerabilities is important. However what the government probably does gain from it is an inside advantage in the lead time for vulnerabilities to protect against, as well as to exploit on adversaries.

I can't believe what a bunch of bollocks this administration is. I couldn't believe it the first time, and this time I thought 'Well at least I'm ready, it will be a lot like last time' and it's so much worse

War with China and doing enough reprehensible acts to stoke protests to declare martial law to stay in power indefinitely.

I find it a little incredible people are still talking about 'four years'.

They tried to reject the election result and do a coup, and were rewarded for it by getting back into power. They are refusing to follow the law or the courts. They are sending people to gulags in foreign countries. All the checks and balances were destroyed last time. The party has been stripped of anyone who would fight the admin or reject this illegality. They have set up a power grab over elections.

There will not be free and fair elections in four years unless they are simply too incompetent to rig it, the rubicon was crossed long ago. Without mass protest that makes it impossible for them to hold power, American democracy is dead.

They have tried to do it, they say they want to do it, they have the ability to do it, they are actively doing it, and no one is stopping them. How are people still acting like in four years they are going to neatly hand over power to be prosecuted for their crimes?

It's a near certitude that Russia and China each have databases of exploitable software errors and prize zero days.

It was to the advantage of the US and allies to coordinate and lead in tracking and fixing such errors.

Multiple countries, companies, and individuals contributed finding and fixing bugs.

The administrative task of keeping track was one part of a greater picture, a part that came with first to be advised and other perks.

It's not that the US had a responsibility to take on the lead admin task, more that in past times the US saw an advantage to being at the centre of global action.

This is just another part of increasing US isolationism.

It's called providing leadership. Worth the money. China will happily fill the void.

The CVE program was started over 25 years ago. It is very reputable (until yesterday) and it was very much in the interest of the US to be seen as the stewards of this.

The funding requirements can't be that high and I'm willing to bet that other countries and entities would have happily stepped up if they had the chance.

Up until recently CVE was very centralized and only in the last few years have there been steps in more decentralization with CNAs taking more responsibility, Red Hat as a CNA of last-resort etc. So, the cost of doing all of this work has already been shifted partially (!) away from the US but I have not seen any movement towards e.g. moving the program to a foundation which could have been done.

Personally I would conclude that it was the responsibility of the US to pay for this because they wanted to and it was in their best interest to control this program.

Because USA was a superpower that can afford it easily. Taking the leadership in everything is quite cheap price to pay when the other end of the bargain is everyone else has to follow you.

Now of course USA is ceasing (voluntarily, by stripping down every international soft power effector in government) to be a superpower, to the great glee of dictators all around the world.

The 'we can't afford being great' is a direct admission that USA is no longer a superpower. And is not going to become great again, just another nation again (at whims of China).

I'm surprised that the world's greatest universities are in the United States. Why weren't other countries providing funds?

The US has made at least hundreds of billions of dollars from it's tech companies and has had a dominance over global tech for a long time. The tech industry has brought a crazy amount of money and power to the US so it makes sense the US puts extra effort to support it.

The US isn't supporting it out of charity, it's good for US businesses to have someone coordinating this for everyone. Why would we want to rely on other countries to be supporting our tech sector? At least now we are subject to only the capricious whims of our own government, as little comfort as that is right now (if another country was funding it we would be relying on the whims of a foreign government, which isn't ideal when tech is the golden goose of your modern economy).

It's a program the US government spun up to serve America's interests. Why would someone else pay for American interests?

Other countries have their own programs, some cooperating with the US, others separate. China has the CNNVD if you're interested in helping Chinese society safe. My government operates https://advisories.ncsc.nl/advisories to serve my country's interests.

Of course, the US is free to abandon their programme and rely on Chinese, Russian, and European vulnerability databases to keep their country safe. It does save them a couple of million after all!

Because, contrary to popular views, there is no 'government of the world'.

So, since the US government needed that (it provides security to US businesses), they organised and funded it (as everything else, with US taxpayers money, and savings from investors in US and abroad.)

Now, the US government decided to commit temporary-seppuku, so a number of things will happen:

* state-level government will use their local-taxpayer money to fund similar efforts (with duplication of effort), or share it with everyone

* another country or block of country will do it, and decide whether they want to 'share'. (I suppose Russia and China have more of an incentive to keep their CVE DB private, given their level of dis-integration with US economy ? EU maybe ?)

* an international, ad-hoc organisation is created to share the funding (something like NATO.) Multi-latteralism is not exactly in fashion this days, but if EU does it, it will be 'international' by design since we're not really a federation ; so, states in 'Southern Canada' are welcome to join.

* or none of that happens, the CVE db rots for a while, until a sufficiently embarrassing cybersecurity problem occurs, and the CVE db is deemed worthy of the '10% you need to bring back' by President Elon.

Pray your company, families and friends are never on the wrong side of the 'reverse-Chersteron's fence'.

The private sector zero day market collapsed last year with Zerodium - corporate bug bounties, nation states in-housing offensive security operations, and the democratization of knowhow destroyed the Zero Day market.

> But maybe this is an opportunity to do CVE better.

Okay, how? This sounds like looking for lemonade in a genocide.

Palantir is about to get a contract.

Why would they spend money to replace it? The idea is to weaken and destroy the US and its institutions. Giving Palantir money might mean that security improves, and that goes against their goals. They have already demanded that Russia stop being treated as a cybersecurity threat in other areas of the government, this is a way to ensure that systems are vulnerable to attack.

It's more likely to boost the zero day black market. I don't know if I want to attribute this to idiocy (indiscriminate cost cutting), greed (contracts for their crony pals) or malice (hoarding and trading 0 days).

Project 2025 literally calls for dismantling the DHS. Seems pretty unsurprising that the CVE database wouldn't be in the list of things they'd care to maintain in that process.

It's astounding that the users here watched all the horrendous things going on and ignored them. But now the CVE numbers are gone it's shocking and too far.

There are going to be all kinds of messed up incentives if this is funded from industry.

No, 'the industry' is all of us alive in the 21st century who depend on software to make material decisions and to be resilient to attacks and tampering. We were all funding it, and now surely we will see some big tech company now assume responsibility from the federal government (please god don't let it be Oracle...)

Because secure systems benefit the public generally, not just the corporations that make a profit operating those systems.

The industry won't want to fund it. It'll want to profit from it.

So you trust industry now?

Don't open source developers and users of their software also benefit from the CVE database?

If it were privately funded, what incentive would these private companies have to track bugs for these open source projects that don't make money?

The insane number of downvotes you're getting for saying basic common sense stuff, it's why we should push for stricter political rules here in HN.

You didn't say something wrong or controversial, just an opinion. Some ideologies love to pay things with other people's wallets, and they'll do whatever they can to pursue this.

Every now and then the government decides to fund things. Public schools, roads, police, firemen, GPS, NOAA, cybersecurity, government cheese, etc.

'the government' aka 'We the people'. It is in all our interest. This is like asking why the government is responsible for roads.

National (technological) security?

It won't be. Willful ignorance is a cornerstone of the movement. You can't lie about what you don't know. You can't have a bad take if you don't know. Upton Sinclaire said in the 1930's: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.' Now add to 'salary' 'identity', 'relationships', 'sense of belonging to the group'. This is why critical, independent thinking, speaking truth to power, must be separately honored and encouraged by a healthy culture, because these attributes are by default mercilessly punished. (Physical courage and heroism are honored by a healthy culture for similar reasons.)

Because gov infra also relies on CVE?

ENISA in Europe has the mandate of building a EU vulnerability database for the NIS 2 directive anyway and it's coming soon...

And CIRCL in Luxembourg are providing vulnerability-lookup which can also assign IDs but in a more decentralized way: https://www.vulnerability-lookup.org/documentation/

VulnerableCode can help with discovery etc. https://vulnerablecode.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction...

So, parts of this are already in place and I assume this will be a big boost towards a new vulnerability ecosystem.

Us Dutch have https://advisories.ncsc.nl/advisories although a lot of that is just analysing CVEs and their impact on society.

An EU solution would probably be much better. Would suck for Americans, though, they'd need to get up early to meet European office hours.

Consider this part of the attack on the American infrastructure, economy, and society. Attacks do not abide by laws, official procedures, or come with warnings.

CVE-zero: the attack is coming from inside the White House.

Ah! Another one to add to the following list:

- What disease did the CDC ever prevent?

- What improvement did the NHTSA ever bring to full self driving?

- What improvement in airline safety did the FAA bring?

- What good did FEMA do in any disasters?

I don't want to quip about how their achievements are invisible because they prevented the disasters that would have brought the spotlight on them, even when they were too underfunded to properly do their jobs. But I sure would like to see the people making these smart comments to give it a try and see how that goes. Then again, I have no complaints - at this rate, we'll get that chance soon.

Everything is political now by design. It's meant to reach into every facet of society and community and restructure it.

'You can stay out of politics, but politics will always come and find you.'

No, it's just recognising that it is silly to talk about politics, as certain views are just downvoted.

People trying to ignore politics are like fish trying to ignore water.

Yep. It's also true of people who think they can simply move out of the US and that 'solves' the problem too. America's problems are still (almost) everyone's problems too.

The problem is not political topics, it is how people discuss them.

HN and founders will say 'no politics here' on the regulated internet, drinking regulated water, eating regulated food, breathing regulated air.

What people mean when they say this is that they don't want to engage in party political and/or tribal political discussions. They don't want to do this because it just means rehearsing talking points.

People are not dumb. They know that politics is everywhere but they want to live and love and talk about things that are interesting.

I view the archive.org, Wikipedia, CVE program, and Linux Kernel to all have had discussions on HN about how to they should be funded. Is that kind of politics the kind that people wish that HN stayed out from?

This quote is essentially unworkable. Everything you say, or choose not to say, inevitably advances some political perspective over another.

What we should really aim for is thoughtful, civilized, and maybe even aesthetically pleasing discourse. That's what educated people strive for.

Trying to "avoid politics" is like collecting seashells while a tsunami is rolling in.

> The ancient Greek understanding of an "idiot" referred to someone who was a private citizen or a person who did not actively participate in public life or politics.

To play devil's advocate - it's horrible when gaming, programming, business or even porn forums get overrun by politics.

It's not that the political topics are unimportant but all my feeds just end up looking the same as each other and the same as a newspaper app. I hate election nights because of this.

Apolitical person: Ugh politics is so dumb

Same person: Why is the world organized in such a dumb way?

Technology without politics is a pipe dream, even the FOSS licenses depend on politics.

100% agree, staying out of politics has been a luxury not everyone has, it's totally unavoidable now.

There's politics and there are facts.

Trump voters are stupid. This is a fact.

Right or left leaning, that's politics.

The problem with discussing politics is that it gives you the kicks. Its very easy to get into a feedback loop and take things quite far off civility. I am also guilty of it, many times.

IMHO there needs to be a mechanism for breaking the loop and then we can have civil online political discussions. Unfortunately most places just ban it or ban those who got into the loop, either way its ugly.

IRL when discussing politics and things don't go badly its thanks to 3rd party who will moderate or calm down the heated debaters.

Not keeping politics out of our lives is the reason we've ended up with a totalitarian fascist dictatorship. If politics is forbidden, people have to just make up their own minds and vote for what makes sense to them, instead of banding together and slowly intensifying to the most radical extremes in bids to outdo each other.

Everytime you discuss politics on the internet, you entrench the current administration.

> the 'I wish HN would stay out of politics' crew.

Sadly, this crew includes the site's moderation.

ah yes, losing the... CVE database is truly the wake up call to get engaged in politics.

I mean sorry but I'm not sure if you're being ironic. It sounds like something you'd read on ngate

HN can stay out of politics just fine for the most part. If a political topic comes into tech we can talk about it then, and stay out of other crap that insufferable people drag in because 'there's no such thing as being neutral' or whatever.

I can't figure out why the hue and cry wasn't raised until the very last minute. Did they not know a month ago that they were running out of time? Is it standard practice for the government not to say they're going to extend the contract until the day beforehand or something?

So if the govt stops paying them they'll continue to do the work for free?

This kind of a consortium needs to explicitly avoid being captured by both the product vendors (who could be incentivised to manipulate the CVE issuance process to support their own remediation timescales), and by security companies (who could be incentivised to obtain a competitive advantage via preferential access to the CVE database).

It isn't impossible for a commercially-funded organisation to avoid this kind of capture, but it isn't easy either. My mind immediately jumps to the relationship between the Mozilla Foundation and Google.

This smells like a quick attempt to enable phishing for vulnerabilities, and not a legit way to make progress. The comment is from a person that runs a security startup and the site is a google site that people can report to google as a scam. (Edit: downvote as you like it— perhaps my language was too harsh to help make the point clear. It is interesting how easy non-sec people fall for names and quotes and authority.. building trust does not come overnight, in fact it is never fully there, and infosec experts would not fall for such supply chain redirections with questionable future. Hopefully we will not have to test this idea soon, though some level of reliability and long-term automation would be welcome. We need technical, generally agreed upon systems, not a "foundation").

$44M/year?

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_70RCSJ23FR0000015...

This is a chance for the EU to step up and take over. If the US government won't pay for the CVE program, the EU surely could. Many EU countries already run a program like this to server their own interests, and I believe the EU does as well.

If the US is willing to give up influence and control over the cybersecurity sector, we should accept that gift and use it to our advantage.

We will soon find out, probably.

I don't think anyone trusts the NSA to run a program like this.

'National Security' doesn't mean you personally. It's the government only. There's a conflict of interest that immediately arises if a part of the DoD (who owns cyberwarafe, which uses vulns) maintains a public vuln database.

(Edited to be less salty, sorry)

This level of stupidity seems pretty American to me

not just idiots... malicious idiots

My guess is that they'll be phased out next year. The long-term goal seems to be transitioning the CVE program into something more like an industry-led consortium. (If you did not notice they operate zero budgeting approach: cut everything and if something is very important reverse it. But you cut first and then ask questions.)

It's worth noting that MITRE is a DoD contractor (with minor contracts from other agencies like this one). Having the CVE program operated by a company funded by the U.S. military raises valid concerns about conflicts of interest—especially in an ecosystem that depends on neutrality and global trust.

This is good news, but in general. We can not rely on the DoD to make smart decisions.

Ultimately, Pete Hegseth, with a career as a Fox News character, calls the shot.

It doesn't appear to have posted to FPDS yet: https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?q=PIID%3A%2270RCSJ2...

The contract expired today, but had an option period through March of 2026. DHS just needed to exercise the option.

Edit: Note the contract ended today April 16 - so performance would stop midnight tonight if the option wasn't exercised. Government contracts routinely go down to the wire like this, and often are late getting exercised. Why the uproar over this one? Did CISA signal to MITRE that they weren't going to exercise the option?

But the article says, quote:

> It's unclear what led to DHS's decision to end the contract after 25 years

and then suddenly it gets extended. What does it have to do with DOGE?

The cheerleaders don't care. Americans' relative certainty and quality of life is backstopped by institutions they either barely understand or have never heard of. Let them touch the stove, I guess.

> it probably is an anomaly that this was government funded

Companies can definitely fund it. But to be fair the gov, including NIST, also relies on CVE.

ah yes, let private entities pay for it. then when there is a vulnerability with one of those entities' software, they can pay a bit more to bury it!

Ah yes the old "well can't concerned citizens band together, form a committee, collect revenue and fund things that are in the common interest" answer you hear from small government types that makes me think you lot don't really understand what government actually is.

> it probably is an anomaly that this was government funded. All of private tech relies on it, and private tech is big enough to pay for it.

I mean doesn't big tech and the people they give salary money to pay taxes? Ground transportation companies rely on public roads and but we fund it because having the infrastructure is an economic multiplier.

I'm not arguing in favor of funding the CVE program, I just don't think that's a good reason.

The US government itself uses the database, so there is a strong national security interest in it not being in private hands.

Considering the large number of government agencies that have sponsored the program, no, I don't think it was an anomaly: https://www.cve.org/About/History

Oh! It will be even more fun when the entire infotech and infosec industry starts seething soon. Then the rest of the world will just make alternative arrangements and move on, leaving the US behind because they can't be trusted anymore. HN's reaction is just a small taste of things to come.

Maybe something to bring up to one of these e.V.'s if it ends up being difficult to get started: Codeberg.org, nlnet.nl, ccc.de

Try to talk to the people from the Sovereign Tech Fund, they have a history of sponsoring security relevant projects in the EU.

Great idea. I'm interested in helping. I'll dm you.

The EU should just buy MITRE. Move it to the EU and make it a EU based project.

Im also interested in helping

I'm interested to help! I added you on LinkedIn, so will message there after you accept. :)

Try if you can find some help here https://openssf.org/

Depending on deployment strategy I could help with Kubernetes stuff.

The AGPL is a nonfree (and nonsensical) license.

There's nothing wrong with normal GPL.

There are already many security trackers, why writing a new one? The issue is paying people to handle the advisories.

I'm not European but I'd love to help.

The European, GDPR compliant subnet of the Internet Computer could suit your needs. The app would be decentralized out of the box and it can't be shut down by a single entity like a traditional cloud provider or nation state. Hosting 100GB costs about 500$ per year [0]. This is not a traditional hosting provider, it's a decentralized cloud. Reach out on the forum [1] or to me if this sounds like a good fit to you (I think it does, from your list of requirements).

[0] https://internetcomputer.org/docs/building-apps/essentials/c... [1] https://forum.dfinity.org/

(Spain, doing storage and web hosting) What usually worries me the most is the administrative or management part, which I don't know how big would be for this project...

messaged on linkedin fyi

Honest question: Does this not already exist?

- https://vulnerability.circl.lu/

- https://osv.dev/

- https://vuldb.com/

And a few others?

The main costs definitely not hosting and can be quite significant. MITRE had $2.37B revenue in 2023, most if it contributions. I don't know how much of it can be attributed to the CVE, but I assume it's not an insignificant part of it: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/422...

I would email someone like Patch My PC they seem good stewards of stuff open source from my vague looking and they are good people. They may just host a clone of it that's open.

Why EU?

Canada may be another friendly option

Looks like some people are already getting things moving: https://www.thecvefoundation.org/

Some cnas may also submit. Is this something you are open to?

We should host it and collect membership fee from people who need this data. This way we can make it resilient against lack of government support. I would love to pay 5-10EUR/month to use such a service.

And here lies the problem. Even from a libertarian perspective DOGE is counterproductive because maintaining a system is much more cost effective than starting it anew.

Especially when you cut something recklessly, figure out in month that you need back that capability right now and have very little leverage to negotiate with private providers.

When you look at the last cutting effort in the Clinton administration the difference in jarring.

Combine that with the fact that with a few exceptions DOGE has been cutting the most cost effective programs (i can't think of a better bang for buck science program than NOAA) it's saved very little vs the amount of pain it has caused.

Have you seen proof that this is what has been happening? Your explanation is much more convoluted than 'DHS cut funding, like the administration has said it is going to do'.

Just tell the AI: 'Make this code secure' /s

I see this as the perfect moment to get into consulting - either development, or security. People were not sure what jobs AI will create: 'GenAI babysitting' is one of them.

I'm sure that a hundred other countries will step up to fund it. But have you given any thought about why the US was so willing to sponsor it alone in the past?

I thought most people in the US wanted the UN to have less control over this stuff? Remember the talk about moving control of the Internet to the ITU (International Telecommunication Union)?

Sorry, I made the mistake of installing PyPy.

exactly; I hope ycombinator and its proponents can enjoy living in the ancap fantasy land where you have to pay to be alerted for a climate change fueled mega hurricane (also caused by this exact same reckless, unregulated greed) because NOAA was disbanded. Billionaires shouldn't exist, but neither should millionaires.

The missing funding is something like 2 million dollars. Any US company could make this issue go away in an instant.

Or they wanted this, because this could be part of the privatization of many government functions. They, or at least some of them, could see this as controlling this function for money. It's a regular stream too, the valuable subscription model and customers who really need the service (and if they don't, just add a new law in the name of IT security forcing firms to sign up).

There's always a cost even if there doesn't seem to be one, credibility is measurable in markets and when it bite I think we'll all be in rough times.

I guess I'm naive, but given the current situation, wouldn't a smart person resign from DOGE? If I were smart and highly employable, like these guys, I would not want to be associated with all the indiscriminate firings of DOGE.

Yet, he is still praised and cherished. I can't comprehend how.

The bureaucracy of internationalizing it would likely be more expensive than the current cost.

We can afford it.

Any color as long it is black (of course).

With the onslaught of Javascript-parsing bots and crawlers, how useful are A/B testing results any more?

'Engaging experience' being actually a weasel word for 'sucking your brains out to make you watch ads and valueless nonsense'.

My hunch is these algos are also optimized for hiding the long tail of content that's more expensive to serve as it's not edge-cached. And it was the long tail that drew many of us to these services in the first place. At least that's my feeling using Youtube and Netflix these days.

Not just A/B test but all happening while cost optimizations happen.

The key metric seems to be no longer how many users you can make sign up, but how can I keep an subscription running at lowest cost to serve possible.

The UHD price is not worth it for a long term subscription, and the HD quality is subpar.

I think it's very likely this kind of optimization is giving people want they 'will' want, instead of what they 'do' want.

If you ask a heroine user if they want to use, I suspect most will say no.

But if you A/B test their behavior and build a product based on what they actually do, you're going to start selling more heroin and encourage more heroin use.

To everyone's detriment.

>But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests UI optimized for engagement

That really hit the nail. Advertising industry along has ruined web! Everything is for trigger what action we want user to do on the page, how can we see what user is thinking.

Very creepy indeed from a user perspective. Now days I don't care if telementary is aggregated or open or if it helps developer makes better software.

How about NO telementary!!! NO tracking!!!

I fear old reddit is going to be killed off this year. They're getting rid of the red envelope for messages/replies, they've pushed the notification and chat with red icons into old reddit and more and more content seems to 'accidentally' link to new reddit.

They left it alone for years but now they're converging them, looks like it's only a matter of time

I see people riding them around the hood here in Philly. There's also pop up stables here and there.

Have you ... done enterprise sales? The idea that a group of people working for a multi-billion dollar business having no idea what they want and no understanding of capabilities of new technologies is ... standard?

I have seen it personally ... dozens? of times? Its the reasons startups can even succeed at all given the enormous momentum and cash reserves of these bigger companies - their goals, management, approach - it all becomes more diffuse and poorly executed.

What I don't like about the line is it only applies when there is a non-horse option. No amount of effort in 1600 would have resulted in either a bicycle or an automobile - there were too many needed things not available. In 1600 most people wouldn't have wanted a faster horse - sure they knew what a horse was but they couldn't afford to feed it and so they were not interested - a car is cheaper than a horse for nearly all uses.

This is strongly in tin-foil hat territory but: streaming video costs a lot more money than streaming some JSON to populate a UI. Every minute you spent browsing the catalogue over playing a video is probably a significant costs saving for Netflix.

> More time spent looking for something to watch means less time viewing?

or, if you're presented with more random 'clips' or movie snippets, this turns on your gambling reward center. It's like a slot machine - where you 'win' by finding a good series to watch after searching. And because this is random, you end up getting addicted to looking thru the list/snippet, trying to encounter a perfect series to watch.

Netflix is winning, see net income trends:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-i...

Maybe it is winning despite what Netflix leaders are choosing to do, and maybe their choices will cause them to falter soon. And maybe Netflix could be doing better than they are. But it is always easier to pontificate than execute.

I don't buy Netflix solely because they don't integrate with the search in the iOS/macOS TV app.

Unfortunately, based on media trends before streaming and Netflix was a thing, lots of people like C grade productions. If you recall, "reality" TV shows were taking over in the 2000s. People like the Tiktok-ificiation (or otherwise lowering of quality).

> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain

Because regardless of whether or not the business model depends upon it, investors have been trained that "engagement" is inherently good quality for their investments to have. Increase engagement, stonk price go up.

I guess my thing with LinkedIn is that there's just no reason to use the feed. It's still a place to connect with people I've worked with and keep up with what they've been doing. It's incredibly useful for that. I really don't find the feed to be either a boon or a hindrance in that use case. I know it's there, I know it annoys some people, but it's just irrelevant to me.

You've got it backwards, Netflix doesn't want people to just doom-scroll, the users want to doom-scroll.

Attention destroying apps reduce the long term focus and reward centers such that doom-scrolling through the catalog probably feels better than just watching something. Most of the folks I know who start a movie or show immediately pull out their phones anyway to scroll elsewhere.

As is always the case, they are high on their own supply. Netflix, and a ton of other companies, are terminally ill gambling addicts.

Mostly it's to cover up that the catalogue isn't as great anymore, isn't it? Since almost every big label took back the rights and started their own streaming service, Netflix simply doesn't have as much content (that anyone would want to see) anymore.

I quit all those platforms recently and I'm not missing the frustration of having to 'switch channels' through their incomprehensible categories and views anymore.

I assume it's about papering over the gaps in their content library.

You can't provide a seamless UX for turning on the TV and watching The Office if you don't own the rights to The Office. They want to habituate you to scrolling through content Netflix actually owns and picking something, because it's apocalyptic for them if you ever treat the services as fungible content libraries that you hop between month-to-month.

I think Netflix faces the problem that measuring the causality between a user watching specific content and choosing to stay subscribed is super hard. Therefore, they focus on a metric that is easy to measure, namely time spent in the app. This is likely not the metric they should be optimizing for, but since they _can_ measure it, it becomes the target anyway.

> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain

Entertainment is a zero-sum market. More time spent doom scrolling means less time spent on another service, which probably reduces their churn (also, ads)

Think of it this way, the less time they spend actually WATCHING content, the longer they will pay their monthly service because they have this massive 'watch list' that they never actually get through. They just keep paying month after month never getting through a backlog that they inspire to watch. I don't agree with it, but it makes sense to me. If you can never feel satisfied, you will pay over and over again chasing that satisfaction of watching 'everything.'

Many people will pay Netflix for years hardly watching content for months just because the convenience factor of not having to subscribe/unsubscribe when they know a new season of X will be out in the next year. It's wild to me, but people are lazy. So again, the more you keep them from actually watching the content and realizing they are 'done', the longer they likely just keep their subscription active. Get them to add as much potential content they want to watch to a never ending backlog watch list.

> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain

They want to take the bargaining power from creators (and old IP owners).

They don't want the customers to search for a specific show. They want the customers to watch whatever is shown to them. This way Netflix will have tremendous power over show creators - if our algorithm doesn't favor you, it doesn't matter how good your show is or how much money you spend on marketing outside Netflix.

Netflix's primary goal used to be to attract new subscribers. Now it's a more about maintaining subscribers and finding new ways to monetize the existing subscriber base. That's why you're seeing things like 'sharing' subscriptions, and advertising, and premium plans.

i think people's view of netflix's business model is heavliy biased by what they want netflix to be.

i get it, i hate what they've become too. i'd like to believe there's a world where paying for content is a better model than selling ads. but the reality is that every time netflix makes a decision that the internet gets angry about, their balance sheet looks better.

The thing about the situation is, now that when Tik-tok-ification has grown big enough, it (no-choice interfaces, 'enshitification', etc) becomes the only paradigm UI designers, managers and investors understand. Moreover, it's interface that essentially completely controls the user - all the choices they have are essentially fake and control always appeals to managers and control may not immediately make money but it can make money long term so it can be justified.

You can see how Sonos enshitified their interface and even with a user rebellion wouldn't back down, just as an example.

Part of the problem specifically with Netflix is that they lost the rights to most of the good stuff, or at least the stuff that everyone wants to see, because the Disneys of the world set up their own streaming services and pulled their content from Netflix.

So in a way Netflix had to learn how to push slop. Because they can't make their own Star Wars or MCU or Friends or whatever. It's just not easy to build a catalog of reliably-profitable franchises. Especially when many of those franchises were born decades before Netflix even existed.

Even the good stuff Netflix has (like say Black Mirror) isn't going to be enough to keep customers unless they get people watching some slop.

Maybe it depends on your listening habits, but for me, Spotify and Netflix are very different experiences.

Spotify has almost anything I look for. Netflix I struggle to find anything of interest.

Good luck riding your fast horse through most urban areas (and parking it... er stabling it). All of those things were routine in urban areas before car adoption (I believe Manhattan for instance often had stables in upper floors, leading to some interesting design to get horses up and down).

Yea, iTunes (renamed Apple Music) is getting bad. The only thing I care about is what I've cared about since 2000: Playing a bunch of MP3 files in my collection. That functionality is now relegated to 'third tab from the left,' shoved aside behind a glass case like a relic from a former era.

Its like when I go bird watching and finally see that elusive bird. but if I lose my focus for a split second, its gone, never to be seen again.

Why don't companies have multiple recommendation strategies. One for power-users. One for casual users etc. Have the router infront of these models to intelligent switch between the different styles. In fact, there are times when I want indepth analysis. But after understanding the topic, I need short form content or memes which 'update' or 'entertain' the same topic in ongoing manner.

In those early days the Spotify user experience needed to try and differentiate and put up barriers to being copied. Later it suffered from being purely metric driven and tracking things like user-engagement thinking it's a proxy for happiness with the platform. And then later still they start to mostly care about the cost of delivery.

They don't care. They now make more money selling ads and the user data they've collected.

If you payed for things that are better (like physical media over Netflix etc) the producers would actually respond and there would be more of that.

It's amazing how fast we can eat up new hardware capabilities. The old 6502 1-MHz CPUs were capable of running much more sophisticated software than most people today imagine, with 1/1000 or 1/millionth the hardware. And now we're asking LLMs to answer math questions, using billions of operations to perform something a single CPU instruction can handle.

To be fair even with modern software bloat the overall experience is a lot better now than it was in the XP days. I think it's mainly due to SSDs. They were a huge step change in performance and we fortunately haven't regressed back to the slowness of the HDD era.

At least on most hardware. I have a shitty Dell laptop for work that's basically permanently thermally throttled... :(

I think they were designed at the time of less powerful machines so they had to be designed better. Nowadays there is not as much push to eke out every last bit of performance because there is loads of power at everyone's disposal and developers are pushed to focus on features first without being given time to refine performance because features mean adoption. So the bloat creeps up, and hardware makers keep designing more powerful machines which further enables the bloatiness. It is a vicious cycle.

This is part of why I still have a MacBook2,1 running Snow Leopard. Even with its 4GB of memory and Core2Duo, it's optimized to prioritize my input. It also never changes, which is a form of stability I've come to cherish.

Another point is that you can train a horse, or even eat it if in dire straits. You own that horse. I can't disable things I want to disable, and names, locations, and features change (or are removed) with no notice between minor version updates. I can't tell you the last time I built something for a new Mac, or wanted to.

I don't know MacOS today, and it certainly doesn't make me feel like I own my computer.

I'm less harsh about modern Windows because I view it as amends for Microsoft causing the bot/ransomware crisis of the last 15 years. Still not for me, but at least I neuter it into usefulness.

My setup(FreeBSD+XFCE) hasn't changed at all over the last 20 years and is just as fast as it's always been.

I use virtualisation for the rest.

i'm off grid right now and the only fast websites are hacker news, old reddit, and my app https://bookhead.net that is html + a little bit of htmx + a little vanilla javascript

Hell, my Windows XP system with a nearly 20 year old processor (Q6600, ~17ish years old) still instantly does almost everything.

To me, Spotify's UI is super counterintuitive.

Many channels seem to use Shorts as a vehicle to get you to their long-form content. I don't mind that as a discovery mechanism; it's introduced me to some fun stuff. Other channels make Shorts-specific content, which I really dislike.

> They cannot be disabled.

https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/156lw72/the_be...

> They cannot be disabled

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

I've never thought about it this way, but it's funny to think that horses are largely self driving on roads.

Then, how could a business identify its (or market's) trend-setters, enthusiasts, or whatever we call them, which will push towards something new? I see this as essential for either making the business better, shinier, or to avoid losing users.

> Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches

For street usage, I think those cars are popular because they're beautiful more than because they're fast (or because enthusiasts like them).

My utterly soulless Lexus will drive more than fast enough to get me in serious trouble. No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty, whereas the typical Ferrari or Porsche coupe will look at least appealing to most and beautiful to many, even those who can't tell the three marques apart or even unaided recall the name Lamborghini.

which is also what I feel about the Spotify algorthim at times — no matter what I'm listening to, it invariably brings me back to what it thinks are my 'old reliables' once it gets onto recommending stuff.

I might just listen to it, if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the 'correct choice', but it's a million miles away from, say, listening to a radio DJ where you like their rough output but they're cherry-picking what to play next.

I'm experiencing this in Peloton-land. They have an app that purports to be for home gym enthusiasts but is actually optimized for people who want to take instructor-led classes on their phone. Certain features don't work as advertised and I quickly reasoned that while this is a pain in my side most users don't care. If they did, Peloton would fix it.

> the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family

No it wasn't. It was driven by shady crapware distribution schemes and intentionally subtly broken sites under the big G umbrella.

> However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.

> In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.

I'm confused as to whether your saying change is caused by catering to the median who doesn't care, or the enthusiast who recommends the latest and greatest. You seem to be saying both.

You're giving it way too much of a positive spend. None of the companies are using analytics to increase the desirability for the majority of users.

They are doing it to increase "engagement" and so more people will stay on their site longer.

Why else wouldn't Netflix show the "continue watching" row first instead of forcing you to scroll past algorithmic generated crap?

It is the same reason that Google went from describing success as people getting off their site faster and going to one of the "ten blue links" to the shit show it is today.

Luxury watches are a good analogy too. A $5 watch from the gas station will give you the time just fine but there's a market for watches costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

eh, I feel like this is a nicely typed out comment but it hits some wrong notes.

1. I wouldn't say the car veands you mentioned are popular because they can hit high speeds. In my experience nearly any car can with the right engine and equipment in it (of course due to weight distribution and other details I assume they're not all equally safe but that aside).

Personally when I look at those brands I think they're sleek and pretty and when I feel like wanting one it's because they're expensive cars, driven by the rich. They're not chosen only by the rich cause they have the best taste, they're chosen by the rich because they are the only ones to have the financial means to afford one.

Also I feel like the changes made based on analytics arent made to please (more) users but to make as much money as possible, whether that be pleasing users in the starting phases of your company or in the latter phases when you already dominate the market squeezing money out of your big existing userbase.

Wow - this is great insight. I hadn't thought of it this way. Thank you for sharing.

> But who knows - maybe that really

> is the most profitable way to run a tech business.

Yes, I agree. This does seem to be the most profitable model for running a tech business: maximizing user engagement or increasing the time users spend on the platform. Whether that's achieved through intentionally convoluted UI or by aggressively surfacing certain content, the end goal remains the same.

That said, I don't think there's much room left for significant innovation in video streaming interfaces. The core challenge continues to be content — whoever offers the best or most compelling library wins. UI changes might tweak engagement metrics by a few percentage points, but they're marginal compared to the impact of strong content.

At the end of the day, if there's a great movie or series to watch, people will show up. If the content isn't there, no amount of clever interface design will convince someone to spend 30 minutes on something they're not actually interested in.

This is the cycle I keep seeing:

Most great products start out for enthusiasts and often by enthusiasts. They're opinionated, sharp, sometimes rough, but exciting.

Then VC funding comes in, and the product has to appeal to a broader audience. Things get smoothed out and the metrics rule decisions.

Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The product's no longer for them.

So a new product comes out, started again by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. And the cycle repeats - unless someone chooses to grow slowly and sustainably, without raising, and stays focused on the niche.

> if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants

Except you're making the mistake of thinking these services are optimizing for their userbase. They are not. They are optimizing for revenue and profit growth, a very different target. More ads, cheaper and easier-to-product content, lower opex.

They are converging to churning out the least offensive slop at the cheapest cost with the maximum revenue.

None of the analytics are about what people using the product want, they are about making the most money and growing the fastest. Nothing would look like the services mentioned in the article if they listened to what the users really preferred.

That is exactly what is happening to Reddit. Made famous by its submitters and moderators. Business decision driven by metrics based on view counts because that sells ads. Let this be a lesson: metrics are not the only way to measure success. I worked at a company where metrics were viewed as a way to cut through dissonance and bias. Newflash: leaders should be opinionated and have visions that do not yet exist. They should be investors in their product and its culture. Metrics should play a role in that decision, but perhaps a tiny one. Because what metrics you choose, how you measure it, and most importantly, what is even measurable, have a tremendous impact on the effect of those metrics.

You cannot paint by numbers.

Honestly, I think it's just simple imitation.

Something is popular, folks are envious of it, they end up building something much like it. Doesn't matter if it's houses, logos, or user experiences – seems to be how things work.

The short term data driven optimizations somehow erode the original product architecture and some of its value. I also think treating the consumer as static. Trick me one shame on you, trick me twice (admittedly I get tricked even more often to click on stuff) shame on me but eventually I learn and what worked turn into a constant irritating torn-off. These irritations accumulate. Good product management should strive to minimize such irritations but I guess we lost that with Jobs.

'Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase' maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars. Netflix's financials are a bit more opaque but I think that's the key driver of the carcinisation story here, the thing for which 'what the median user wants' is ultimately a proxy.

Likewise, all social media converges on one model. Strava, which started out a weirder platform for serious athletes, is now is just an infinity scroll with DMs [0]

I do however think that this is an important insight:

> This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.

A lot of these companies probably were founded by people who wanted to cater to connoisseurs, but something about the financials of SaaS companies makes scaling to the ad-maximizing format a kind of destiny.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/style/strava-messaging.ht...

I get your point but I think the browser analogy is wrong.

IE had something like 90% market share back in the day because it was bundled with the OS and cost $0.

Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. They also took out ads, in some countries, on billboards, in newspapers and even in cinemas.

I'm sure technical people talking to their families had a small effect (though wouldn't they recommend firefox, because FOSS?), but I think that pales in comparison to google being able to advertise chrome on their search page.

"Tyranny of the the marginal user"

https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...

What you are describing is explained beautifully in 'The Tyranny of the Marginal User' essay that got a lot of commentary on HN previously, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507.

My favorite quote ('Marl' is the hypothetical name for the marginal user):

> Marl's tolerance for user interface complexity is zero. As far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling motion.

this is such a fantastic comment because it makes a charitable attempt to explain how data driven decisions go off the rails.

and it matters because this seems to be an omnipresent phenomenon.

everything everywhere seems driven by this unless someone with decision making power is executing a specific and conscious strategy that pushes back against it.

Nice example, but not everything is like automobiles where probably not even one in 1000 people has ever been to a track day let alone actually raced a car, but sporty marques are desired.

A very large portion of people actually cares about what they are searching for, and want the ability to ACTUALLY search and find that, with real parameters, not merely get some not-even-close stuff shoved onto their screen instead. That is NOT the serendipity of browsing the stacks in a great library.

A great example of failure is Amazon. I run a small design & manufacturing business, and years ago started getting pestered by Amazon about 'Amazon Business' trying to supply both office staples and parts to businesses. This was an area that had enormous potential. Yet, they have entirely failed. I've never bought a single item, and it has faded.

Their primary competitor is McMaster-Carr [0] who does it right. Well-defined categories of everything, and highly specific search capabilities, at reasonable but not bargain prices. EVERYTHING you might search for is fully parameterized in every dimension and feature. Min/max/exact, width/depth/height/thread/diameter/material/containerType/etc./etc./etc. appropriate for each type of product. The key is McMaster DOES NOT WASTE MY TIME. I can go there, quickly find what I want or determine that they don't have it, and get on with my day.

The smaller company that does it right is still beating the tech giant a decade later. Same for other similar suppliers who actually have a clue about what their customers really want.

They continue to prevail over tech giants and VC-funded sites BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT STUPID.

It would be nice if the tech/vc crowd would also stop being stupid. They started out not stupid, but they really lose the plot when they think a few extra eyeballs this week will really win in the long run. At least provide two modes, a strict and serious search and their new messy UI. But they are stupid and this will not happen. Enshittification rules the day.

[0] https://www.mcmaster.com/

The irony is that he argued for a faster horse and that's what all his providers are doing. TikTok is the faster horse. What he really is asking for is a step out of the paradigm, although he argues for a romantic conservative product instead of an innovative product like Ford.

You're way overestimating the effect an enthusiast has. Evangelism only goes far enough to introduce people to the thing. How often someone uses the thing depends entirely on its utility (usefulness).

As long as Netflix was successfully reading the author's mind, they were satisfied with the experience. However, Netflix assumed that they want to keep watching the same content, oblivious to the author's desire to discover something entirely new. Netflix failed to meet the expectations of those seeking something entirely different.

I can understand why Netflix made this change. They've replaced many shows with their own in-house productions. By doing so, they prevent users from searching for specific shows and then realizing that Netflix doesn't have them. If this happens frequently, they risk losing customers.

On the other hand, Spotify doesn't face this issue. Therefore, I'm puzzled by why they've made it more challenging to explore content by categories. (Disclaimer: I don't use Spotify, so my experience is based solely on author's observations.)

> This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.

I think this is a great nuance that is often overlooked when discussing this.

> Ferraris, Lamborghini

I think the big difference is that nobody is going to pay $10m for a web service or browser.

Some people have claimed that pure A/B testing is an agent for enshittification, both on a quality and ethical dimension. And I can't see how those people are particularly wrong.

There are systems out there that can do AB/CD testing and those do a better job of finding pairs of changed that have compounding effects.

You cannot A/B test your way from chocolate and peanut butter to cherry and vanilla. So we get to deal with tone deaf companies who feel their analytics are proving that customers either don't know what they want or are lying about what they want. But that's not something A/B testing can prove. It takes more sophisticated experiments than that.

I think when you're a startup, you have to invest in all of these things - you want to hire some experts early on because they'll have insights that help you design a better product, and if your product appeals to experts it will be a PR win. But of course your goal is scale and distribution so you have to respect a certain lowest common denominator as well lest you become too niche.

Once you become a bloated monopolist like the three companies you just mentioned, your distribution strategy is solved in other ways (like, you've done some bundling and some acquisitions, maybe pressured a few companies into exclusivity agreements and are probably breaking some anti-trust law or other but you have lawyers). Then you don't care about the experts, PR or niches anymore, and you serve up slop. When the analytics recommend slop you go with the analytics, when they don't you ignore them.

None of this is to discount your insightful comment, just saying once you're big enough, your strategy is just doing tricky distribution deals, really (a fact no record executive would dispute).

My takeaway:

The Nash Equilibrium of streaming UIs is a TikTok experience.

:-(

>maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.

That's the issue, it seems like it really is the most profitable way to do things. Everything sucks now because shooting brainrot and advertisements at our eyes and ears is more profitable than actually giving us what we want.

yeah except a lot of those companies almost went bankrupt trying to make those cars for enthusiasts and only for them.

porsche and lambo didn't see the outsized success they have now (financially) until they started pumping out SUVs. hell, the purosangue was made precisely to capitalize on that boring market segment.

i feel there's a little suvivorship bias at play here. i think the important thing is to not forget your enthusiasts perhaps, but a lot of these 'successes' wouldn't even be around were it not for appealing to the greater masses. ofc some market segments fare better and you can build a business around enthusiasts.

That's a very keen observation!

It's probably profitable in a lot of cases to follow those metrics, shovelware content is cheaper to produce, and since the median user pays the same subscription fee as the enthusiast, you get better margins producing slop for the uncaring masses.

You need enthusiast businesses owners to produce quality product.

Damn, I never thought of this before, but it explains so much!

Chrome leveraged Google's near monopoly on search to gain users

I think the second paragraph in the parent comment fits really well with mimetic theory and this René Girard quote: 'Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.' This, however, doesn't mean that the current Netflix solution is the only one possible.

> you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.

This is so spot on. I was a long-time serial entrepreneur who spent a couple decades across three successful startups discovering, shipping and growing new categories of tech products primarily for consumer, prosumer and hobbyists. Then I sold my last startup to a very large F500 silicon valley tech leader and ended up a senior product exec there. While there were a lot of positives like more mature engineering processes, testing and devops as a discipline, the exact issue you describe was a nightmare of product-damaging mistakes I called 'analytics abuse.' In my startups I valued having increasingly robust analytics over the years. In part because they helped increase my overall understanding of usage but mostly because they provoked good questions to explore. That exploration happened naturally because as the 'product guy / founder' I never stopped spending a lot of time with our most passionate, opinionated, thought-leading customers. Over years of iteration I'd learned how to engage deeply and listen carefully to input from these customers. This involved interpreting, filtering and curating the mess of divergent personal preferences and pet feature ideas to tease out the more actionable product signals that could increase broad usage, adoption and passion around our products. I'd then bring those curated signals back to the product teams for evaluation and prioritization.

At BigCo they were diligent about meeting with customers, in fact they had entire processes around it, but their rigorous structures and meeting agendas often got in the way of just directly engaging and actively listening. Worse, the customer meetings the more senior product decision makers actually attended in person were mostly with the highest revenue customers. Junior PMs (and sometimes new grads) were delegated to meeting with the broader base of customers and filing reports. Those reports were then aggregated by ever-helpful program managers into tables of data and, eventually, slides - losing all nuance and any ability to spot an emerging outlier signal and tug on that thread to see where it goes.

I tried to convince everyone that we were missing important customer signals, especially from our smartest, most committed users. Being only one level removed from the CEO and quite credible based on prior success, I was definitely heard and most people agreed there was something being lost but no one could suggest a way to modify what we were doing that could scale across dozens of major products and hundreds of product managers, designers, execs and other stakeholders. In my experience, this general problem is why large companies, even the most well-run, successful ones full of smart people trying their best, end up gradually nerfing the deeper appeal in their own products. Frustratingly, almost every small, single step in that long slide pushes some short-term metric upward but the cumulative effect is the product loses another tiny piece of the soul that made our most evangelistic, thought-leading customers love the product and promote it widely. Ultimately, I ended up constantly arguing we should forego the uplift from some small, easy-to-prove, metric-chasing change to preserve some cumulative whole most people in the org weren't fully convinced even existed. It was exhausting. And there's no fighting the tide of people incentivized on narrow KPIs come bonus season.

I'm sorry to report I never found a solution to this problem, despite my best efforts over several years. I think it's just fundamental. Eventually I just told friends, 'It's a genetic problem that's, sadly, endemic to the breed' (the 'breed' being well-run, very large tech companies with the smartest product people HR can hire at sufficient scale). Even if I was anointed CEO, given the size of the product matrix, I could only have personally driven a handful of products. I do think codifying premises and principles from the CEO level can help but it still gets diluted as the number of products, people and processes scales.

> Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars

... primarily for their price tag. There are a lot of enthusiasts for money in the world, much more than for driving at 200 mph.

> the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family

It was never about recommendations. MSIE and Chrome were (and are, but with Edge Browser instead of MSIE) shoved into consumers' throats by ads, marketing, bundled distribution and outrageous lies.

> very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH

I agree with that.

> but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars

I agree with that too.

> because the people who are into cars like those marques.

I think that is not true. I don't care about cars. Never had one. Don't even have a driving licence.

The reason why i think Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are desirable cars is because they look cool, and they sound cool. They were designed to be like that. If i see one on the street i notice it. I couldn't care less about the opinion of gearheads. If a car would come out looking like my grandpa's skoda, but all the car lovers would love it I wouldn't even hear about it.

It is all about flashyness of the industrial design. And rarity of course.

You're talking both about tastemakers and the silent majority vs loud minority.

I promise it is NOT always a good idea to follow the enthusiasts, because they are not at all like everyone else who uses your thing. Following them will skew your decisions—unless they are your entire customer base, so, have at it.

This article imo is complaining about the effect of middle management product owners at large companies. There are two dynamics that both converge on enshittification:

1. These product managers (or product designers) are early in their careers and want to make a splash. They are given lower priority projects but try to break out by making them bigger, better, more non-horse-like. They over-design and over-complicate the solutions as a result, because they don't yet know when the right solution is just a refinement of what's tried and true. They are incentivized to do this because they want to break out of the mold.

2. The managers above them, or a layer or two above depending on company size, are risk AVERSE. They are tasked with delivering results regularly and consistently. If you have the innovation bug or are creative at this layer, you get moved onto projects where this is required, which is not most of them. Overcomplicated is fine sometimes with you but WEIRD is absolutely not okay (the stuff that actually could be innovative), and no one gets fired for following The Metrics.

These two incentives clash to create overcomplicated but functionally poor products that aren't helping anybody out. A healthy skepticism of complication and a healthy skepticism of engagement as the sole metric (or metrics in general) is necessary to make good shit. Sometimes it is actually understanding and using things as an enthusiast would, but you need to bring in an understanding of how the rest of your users are distinctly different from the enthusiasts, too. Using your thing yourself and actually following your own subtler feelings is what produces really useful innovation, slowly and surely over time.

>For any given thing or category of thing, a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing, but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing.

I think that's a self-dellusion many tech enthusiasts have, that they're somehow trend-setters.

And then the same enthusiasts say for the original iPod 'No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame', and see the masses jump to buy it, and themselves only catch up later.

Or they see the masses never caring for their e.g. desktop Linux, whose mass dominance (not mere 'works for me' or 'have set it up for my elderly parents and they don't even know it's not Windows') would come 'any day now' for the last 30 years...

Trend-setters exist, but they're a different group than the 'tiny minority' of enthusiasts. More like some musician paid to spot Beats headphones, or some cool dude sporting some gadget early on.

>For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into cars like those marques.

A hell of a lot of people had a real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, if they could have the chance. And even more admired Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches because of their design and elegance (and price, people aspire to luxury goods, even when they can't afford them), not because some sport-car afficionados said so.

It's the same in other areas: the popular books, or comics, or movies, or music, etc. are rarely if ever what the 'inner' crowd of each niche admires. Most people buy Reacher and such, not Finnegan's Wake.

>So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants.

More likely, if you want to keep and continue increasing your margins, and your stock price, you'll incrementally continue to shit all over your product trying to squeeze ever more money.

Neither the 'enthusiasts'/tech-savvy users NOR the 'median user' wants Netflix to be the shit it has become, or Google search to be so fucked up, or ads and nags on Windows UI, and so on.

They're just given those, and they accept them having no recourse. The moment there's a better recourse, they jump to it (like IE -> Firefox -> Chrome, or BS early search engines -> Altavista -> Google).

this reminds me of american politics

This is exactly the situation unfolding with JetBrains right now. They've lost all touch with their professional enthusiast core and have gone hell-bent on acquiring new users at the cost of alienating a big chunk of their core. I don't think it's going to go well for them, they don't have the chops to compete with Microsoft like they're presently trying to do.

Just for protocol: In your example the peasant rabble recommend Chrome, while the enthusiasts with deep technical knowledge, broad perspective, wisdom, charm and good looks recommended Firefox.

Thank you for that term!

I finally know what to call these idiotic trends that I've learned to recognise but couldn't name.

The one that grind my gears the most has been Microsoft breaking decades-old Windows paradigms to cater for Linux-developers-on-Windows, which is a very marginal, even actively disinterested group. All this at the expense of the 99.9% of their loyal user base.

For example, VS Code had the opposite shortcut (literally with the arrow keys going in opposing directions) for 'go back in search history' to every other editor ever made for Windows... but matching the Linux equivalent.

Similarly, they recently broke 'cls' to match the broken(!) behaviour of 'clear' in Linux because of basically just one or two Linux users complaining in a GitHub Issue ticket. Windows users weren't listened to, because they're already users, not potential new users.

The Tyranny of the Marginal User: why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time

https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...

The implication here is appeal to a wider audience _at the expense_ of the existing customer base, right? Otherwise it wouldn't be a tyranny at all.

What I don't get is at some point the marginal user increase for a change has got to be smaller than the number of customers you tick off and lose by changing things.

Is the idea that all services converge on the same N billion people target audience who wants something almost entirely unlike the initial product? I feel like 'marginal' doesn't really capture this nuance if so.

The problem is with the definition of "sustainable business model."

Could you maintain a profitable business and continue steady growth? Sure. Could you become a unicorn and IPO within the next 5 years? Unlikely.

By 'create new markets' they've always meant 'Become useless middlemen by displacing the existing bridge between makers and consumers'

Usually their new bridge is modestly more convenient in some way, but opens the door to the worst kind of enshittification.

Is this about software or is it about you?

I loved my computer when I was a kid, now I only see flaws. I don't think software was flawless at the time, it's just that I became very keenly aware of its current issues because this is my field.

How much has been lost to the altar of shareholder value? And how much gained?

It will be interesting to see how these first decades of the millennium will be remembered.

Delightful software is still there and still being made. It's the industry that targets average Joe, who doesn't care about technology.

Spotify has a free tier. Apple Music and YouTube Music do not. Young people start on the free tier and don't want ti have to move their libraries/playlists. And young people share Spotify playlists, not Apple or Youtube playlists, because they know their friends have Spotify.

I unfortunately pay for Spotify.

I also pay for Youtube premium, but I can't even switch to that because their music player is even worse than Spotify.

I really miss the good old days of music players that were _packed_ with features. The players of current streaming services are so basic. And as long as I can't find a replacement that fits my needs I don't really want to bother switching.

I have used Tidal, Deezer and Amazon Music in the past, but I've always went back to Spotify. I prefer the UX, but not only that, the recommendations are WAY better for me than other streaming services. However, my music taste is very eclectic, so maybe that helps a lot to recommend something within my taste.

My local music format public radio station provides song links to: Spotify, iTunes, and Amazon.

https://www.kcrw.com/playlists

All the shitty CEOs start doing the same shit at the same time, because most CEOs are not exceptional workers or thinkers or innovators. They are simply the (in)human conduits doing as much as possible to siphon money from their users to the shareholders and Board Member class. They follow the trends that their consulting firms tell them to follow (the same consultants that work at multiple companies within the industry), which is why we get massive hiring at the same time, massive layoffs at the same time, RTO at the same time. The US has allowed collusion and market coordination via 3rd parties (so we have, e.g., landlords sharing rental prices with a 3rd party consultant, who then combines this data and illegally collude to set prices but with a Computer instead of Bob). Modern-day capitalism has said 'monopolies and huge conglomerates are good because they're EfFiCiEnT!!!' (though what kind of efficiency and to whom the efficiency gain are given is entirely ignored -- the efficiency to max profit is the only one that matters).

> It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing about) meetings between CEOs where 'new information from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all onsite are the best way to do things' - and everyone gets the same 'information' at the same time, and thus the entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...

The same thing too when companies hire consultants to look at the 'market wage' and then set salaries based on what the consultant said. Every worker at the same 'market wage' with no incentives to be above that.

> And incentives align really easily.

Today incentives align more easily. All these CEOs are in the same whatsapp group. That's how we got the RTO mandates from all CEOs at the same time. There was story here a year or two ago.

This is a well-know enshittification, which is going on for a long time already: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/

That's because WeChat has really taken off in China. So there are companies in different markets trying to replicate that. And, well, from business perspective it does make sense. If you manage to pull it off, the reward is massive.

I believe the 'Peter principle' [1] also holds for companies. A company grows until it eventually outlives its mission and loses focus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

I have the same with my banking app here in The Netherlands. I don't know if they try to be a super app, but since a year or two they put all kinds of annoying ads inside their app and unnecessary notifications on top of my account overview. Just show me the numbers, I pay for your service.

> I feel like this with my (current) bank of choice here in Brazil. Now they've decided to be what they call a 'SuperApp'.

I'm curious to know the name of that digital bank.

> They are the ones getting faster horses.

To a point, until stage 3 enshittification hits, and the business claws back all the value.

Until I finally get fed up and leave. There is value in my sharing pictures of my kids with distance friends and seeing pictures of their kids - but Facebook has got so bad at that I finally gave up logging in and not I'm not a product that exists for them. And in turn because I'm not there facebook is less valueable for my friends and so they are more likely to leave in the future.

The only question are people like me outliers that can be ignored - there will always be a few people you can't get. However I could be a sign of the end.

I'm surprised that the services don't seem to have updated for that reality yet; it feels like there's only one or two 'hits' on each service per year. They did already adapt a bit by no longer releasing a whole season in one go, so you need at least three months of subscription for a 10 episode weekly series.

But what they need is rolling releases across the whole year, so that once one production is 'done', the next one rolls around.

(maybe they already do, I don't know, I'm just thinking of Stranger Things which seems to be Netflix' main seller at the moment)

Earlier people used to spend 2-3 hrs watching and absorbing a single movie. Now people spend 5 hrs scrolling tiktok. So in a sense time spent on content has actually increased. People don't need filler and lengthy buildups. People have been exposed to so much culture they can almost predict the general plotline so no need to spend time on that. Give me the plot twist or the drop (in case of spotify) with short relevant context. I remember Balaji saying something to this effect. He said don't give me filler content, just give me 'fixed point' content which doesn't change after successively summarization and pruning.

Yeah, more like Netflix (and we might as well add Amazon here) became popular because of 'the long tail'. Once, I could easily find 1930's classics like 'Stella Dallas' on Netflix (and early Ultravox! on Amazon when they would have to be ordered from brick and mortar music stores at the time).

For some reason (perhaps because it costs money to keep a large catalog?) Netflix retracted the long tail while Amazon at least kept theirs unfurled.

> no obvious solution: network effects => monopoly => 'optimising' for typical user.

ahem. We have a solution for the monopoly part. We've had it since the 19th century. We just stopped enforcing it in the 70s and 80s when the Chicago School convinced everyone that as long as judge Robert Bork's 'consumer welfare' can be trotted out to prove that the 'free market' is working and prices are low.

There's a lot of money to be made in letting people order takeout from McDonalds while not feeling like the kind of person who orders takeout from McDonald's.

> And most people on this planet are more or less happy with whatever they're presented with because they don't care about technology.

I think this is a debatable statement. It could be true, but I am increasingly convinced that enshittification, TikTokification, AIfication, etc. is proceeding despite what the average person wants. Average does not mean gaping, uninspired idiot. I think people in general do notice that everything is broken, short-lived, watered down and ad-ridden. But what to do? When every company does it, voting with your wallet becomes practically impossible.

Which is a real problem for the rare person (ie me) who doesn't like McDonalds. Go to a new city and I get recommendations of McDonalds, and the dozen 'you won't believe we are not McDonalds' - never mind that I don't like burgers, that is about all I can find when looking for a meal.

Overwhelmingly, products are designed to maximize total recurring user interaction, aka engagement or attention grabbing. This is the proxy for ad revenue, the most popular business model (even if Netflix is different). Look at Quora, LinkedIn and even SO, which essentially degraded into content farms for these reasons, largely downstream of the Google search funnel.

But engagement maximization looks the same everywhere – it's communicating with the amygdala of the user, not their consciousness. And in a way, everyone's amygdala is kind of the same and generic (sugar foods, violence, rage bait, boobs, chock value etc). Products that are largely designed for higher consciousness are more varied, such as most books. But those drive less engagement.

The amygdala wants more of the same, and the prefrontal cortex seems to want variation. My view is that you can't have the chocolate muffins and raw carrots on the same plate, or a bookshelf with both Dostoevsky and Playboy magazines. You have to compartmentalize to protect yourself from your own amygdala. Same goes for media. Even well meaning product managers will be completely fooled if they simply follow the metrics.

> Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average person.

They're generally designed for engagement. Nobody is particularly asking for this type of experience it's just that Tiktok has discovered the most addictive - eh hum, I mean engaging - experience thus far. So they're being copied.

Netflix is a little different though as if people open the app and always see the same top titles listed due to it being an alphabetical index, then they quickly think nothing new is ever there. Or, it's too hard to find. So they're tricking people into thinking there's a bunch of fresh/good content. There's also a cultural phenomenon where everyone discusses 'what shows have you been watching lately?' so the Trending aspects of their recommendations is to help people get on board with the trend; and, to push momentum and create the trend too obviously.

I think I understand the economics here, but it bugs me there aren't more slow-growth self-funded places to fill in these niches.

Oh come on. I have this thing open all day when I'm working, you can't bullshit me like that. It's a not good UI, its serviceable.

It's not good by any conceivable metric other than those they have internally decided represent business goals. If you want to have a tautological argument that makes it good, because those goals are the only goals that matter. That's a boring response to an article about how business incentives have turned the UI into trash.

FFS the Play button frequently breaks requiring a refresh. And as much as I appreciate the inevitable response that I'm holding it wrong, how is that my problem?

Overused and misattributed. What Ford actually said was: "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own"

^ this guy knows Jobs To Be Done theory ;)

For those who don't, reading 'Competing Against Luck' by Clayton Christensen will dramatically improve your ability to create successful products/services.

Where do you buy videos from? Do you mean new films and shows? How, I thought practically all of it is locked down DRM only streaming? Or do you mean DVD/BluRay?

> I still use phones that use SD cards

I can't tell you how much I miss removable storage

This is the way. If I care about watching something in the future, I buy the Blu-ray and rip it. I already have basically all the music I could ever want in mp3 format. Plex (or Jellyfin if you prefer that) provides a pleasant UI, and I don't need those services any more.

This. Masterfully written down, by the way. I subscribed to your blog through RSS, because I also want to do 'the algorithm' myself. Interesting story about the intersection of law and tech you have on your blog!

truly the mcMaster-Carr of video

I think there's psychological research that showing too many options leads to less engagement, supposedly for fear of making the wrong choice. If you give fewer options, people are more confident they picked something good.

> It is therefore in the provider's interest to make you satisfied with less and/or cheaper content.

After getting annoyed by their interface that was showing 80% of content I have already seen, I've come to a realization:

Their incentive is not even to make me watch crap. No! Their best outcome for them is for me to watch nothing and still pay.

Showing me old shows gives me the warm feelings and make me associate them with Netflix, making me keep the subscription even

Hypnodrones are corporate dreams

> It is therefore in the provider's interest to make you satisfied with less and/or cheaper content

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd think that all these 'content companies' are colluding in a mass 'Taste Removal' campaign, deliberately getting users used to bland, vanilla, generic 'content' so they can one day just shove AI slop at us all day and only people who were alive in the 90s would remember when movies and TV were great. The rest happily will watch Ow, My Balls and ads for Carl's Jr.

And the Blurays show ads for the first company's other products.

> Spotify faced a similar crossroads and decided to broaden beyond music once they started losing bidding wars for licensing.

I wasn't aware that Spotify lacked much in the way of mainstream western music.

Are they having licensing issues?

Apple Music still offers library management, with their entire catalog to choose from. They try to play all sides, with algorithmic playback, radio, add to library, and playlists. Adding to library and playlists do seem to be core features, but I'm curious how many people put in the effort when it's not explicitly required.

So glad I collect physical media of all the good stuff.

> They each had to change species or die, and they chose to keep living.

Did they, though? 2025 Netflix is extremely close to having a worse UX than piracy, and it's already far more expensive. Are people going to pay a fortune for Netflix when their handy nephew can hook them up to his far superior Jellyfin instance for a sixpack of beer?

It's a tragedy of the commons, really. The whole value is in having a complete catalogue available for the casual viewer, and making $10-$20 from someone wanting to watch a random decade-old movie twice a month or so. Break up that catalogue into twenty different services each charging $15, and that same casual viewer isn't going to subscribe to a single one of them.

If the streaming industry doesn't get its shit together they are either going to lose viewers to piracy, or to a completely different medium.

I think you're taking things a little too literally.

I wonder if like cars, LLMs will be as equally destructive to our social fabric.

> Who is currently saying they want a 'faster computer'?

well... I definitely want more performance per watt. And I stress 'performance', because more MIPS are useless if wasted.

You should probably read the article... the author did not say that Netflix and TikTok are the faster horse, the opposite actually. You seem really focused on the quote for some reason.

They want you to start a new show so you have something in the queue when you finish the show you turned the tv on to watch.

Weren't the big record labels terrified that streaming would cannibalize CD sales? I think it was a pretty huge thing that Spotify got them onboard at all. I'm not sure how much that matters to your overall point but saying they "didn't value streaming" doesn't seem quite right with how I remember the discussion at the time - they were afraid of it because they could see its value, and how that might disrupt their lucrative plastic disc business.

It feels to me like they poached some high-level product executive from an intrusive ad company, trained in the art of dark patterns, and pointed them at their paying customers. It's a truly offensive way of looking at your user base, as solely engagement metrics to be optimized. It's what happens when an entire business is built around gamifying one KPI.

Same. I gave up on netflix and just use Plex. Usually, I use this app on Android TV to play my plex library https://www.quasitv.app.

Sooo much better.

I spent my last 3 months using Amazon Prime on my smart TV, opening the app, scrolling for 15 minutes through the same stuff as last time, turning off the TV and reading a book. I cancelled and now have 15 extra minutes reading time, though I do miss the cheap delivery it got me.

> The most important thing is 'continue watching', that should be almost the first line, but no it is randomly spread at different levels

This seems to be common among the streaming services. I can't imagine any reason other than they want to force people to see their other content.

I really don't think bad Product Manager's is a good explanation for the UI. Any big company like Netflix is going to heavily A/B test any and every change to the UI. They will only ever add things that boost metrics like engagement. You may not like the UI; it may annoy you, but you should have some appreciation for the fact that they are using sophisticated techniques to optimize for what they care about.

Some people have turned to downloading qBittorrent[0] and use 1337x.to or thepiratebay.org (to start).

At some point these apps are so user hostile that it's simply isn't worth subscribing to. Their margins on content are so low on an individual—effectively zero since a flat fee means ~infinite content—that the effect on their business is incredibly small. Especially for people who have subscribed for months but don't watch consistently.

For movies that are 5+ years old, some would say that the companies have made the vast majority of what they will and copyright is so out of control, bought by those same companies, that it's not bad faith to counter-balance it.

Not sure. These are arguments.

[0]: https://www.qbittorrent.org/

I can't wait for the day my hiking trails aren't festooned with piles of horseshit.

> actual moral fiber.

Maybe? Or maybe they realize that they will lose all future credibility with students, government and NGO's if they bow to the conservative & Christian right?

There are two outcomes for the the current American government situation - a slide in to authoritarianism (it's right there in Project 2025), or these wackjobs get voted out because they are destroying global financial stability.

If it's the former, Harvard eventually has to cave because literal Nazi's.

If it's the latter, Harvard is screwed if they capitulate.

I don't know, is it moral to give legitimacy and a platform to someone like J. Mark Ramseyer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Mark_Ramseyer)? Less clear example would be keeping around Roland Fryer.

> Harvard just earned some reputation with me. It was already a place with great research. But now, it is also in institution with actual moral fiber.

I'm not so sure. The Harvard endowment is huge. I might not be so much 'moral fiber' as having enough fuck you money that risks don't matter as much as they do to others.

While I agree with this, if you read the letter of demands from the administration I don't think Harvard had any choice. I think the letter was much more egregious than what the Columbia demands were (at least from what I read about the Colombia demands). I think if Harvard had acquiesed it wouldn't have much reason to exist anymore, and I say this as a Harvard alum who took plenty of issue with the direction of the university in recent years.

In contrast, most of the demands I read for Columbia, except for the one about putting the Middle Eastern studies department under some sort of 'conservatorship', seemed relatively reasonable to me if they hadn't come from the barrel of a gun and from an administration who has clearly defined any criticism of Israel and any support for Palestinians as anti-Semitism.

The point of no return is Trump getting a third term. The parallels are strong there.

I was just thinking this morning that we very much needed the USA's help fighting Nazi Germany, but who will we turn to when we're fighting fascists coming from the East _and_ West? (Russia and the USA)

$9 billion dollars from the federal government to Harvard equates to nearly $30 per American, that is an ignorant amount of money for a single academic institution, surely the world isn't so black and white that we can have a conversation about how much money is leaking out of our tax dollars without it always coming back to 'fascism'?

Habeas corpus - still in effect unless you're already in El Salvador.

It was very depressing (if financially understandable) to see other institutions immediately caving in.

Did you read the letter sent from the government to Harvard?

these types of moves wouldn't be possible in the first place if these institutions hadn't spent decades burning their own credibility. They even mention Alzheimer's research in this post, something that has literally wasted billions of taxpayer dollars due to an academic cartel shutting down anybody trying to expose the fact that they were completely wrong about amyloid plaques

FYI habeas corpus has been under attack by GOP administrations for nearly a quarter of a century - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus_in_the_United_St...

> the more they will accelerate down a path where there is no coming back from.

Why do you say this? At practically every point in history where a government or dictator goes too far, we've come back from it.

Harvard can do whatever they want. They can also not get taxpayer funding for it.

This isn't close to a monopsony but it's more directionally correct than it is wrong. Keep in mind research institutes can be funded by private foundations, state and local governments, industry (e.g. pharma), venture, or even foreign governments. The federal government is undoubtedly the largest buyer though. I do think there are other motivations to rely primarily on federal grants beyond number of dollars. In particular, funding sources other than federal grant money is often looked down on from an academic prestige perspective. Until now federal money came with very few strings attached compared to the perceived loss of objectivity that could occur when receiving money from other sources. The current situation may alter or relax the prevailing view on which sources of research money are perceived of as potentially compromising.

Universities don't sell or do research. They provide facilities, equipment, services, and sometimes funding for research. The actual research is done by individuals, who are nominally employed by the university but largely independent from it. If a researcher doesn't like a particular university, they can usually take their funding and projects to another university.

When grants are revoked for political reasons, it affects individuals who happen to be affiliated with the university more than the university itself. And it particularly affects people doing STEM research, because humanities and social sciences receive much less external funding. If the decline in public funding is permanent, it makes humanities and social sciences relatively stronger within the university. They are more viable without public subsidies than the more expensive STEM fields.

Anyone whose research is profitable is free to work for a private entity. The government is a 'monopsony' in 'buying' unprofitable research the same way it's a 'monopsony' subsidizing any industry that would otherwise fail in a free market. That is not typically how the concept of monopsony is meant.

It's not a very good analogy because federally-funded research is a public investment, a public good like roads. The research is supported by the public (the government) and becomes available for anyone to use, learn from, and build off of. And in fact most successful U.S. business are built on the backs of technological innovation that was originally funded by the government, or at the very least, innovation from PhD's whose educations were largely federally funded. (Disclaimer: federally funded researcher)

You couldn't replace that with a private company 'buying' research and expect the same societal benefits.

Einstein essentially gave up his professorship at the University of Berlin. How far into the future are you looking?

https://www.nytimes.com/1932/10/18/archives/einstein-would-q...

The current administration have interrupted the pipeline of students to research - current research funded or partially funded by federal government is stopping or will be curtailed and future students will question whether is a rational decision to go into any sort of path that leads to research because it would only be stable for maybe two to three years, assuming a sane, science respecting House, Senate and President were in office and used the regular norms to pass bills and implement programs. I do not see a recovery path from this unless American public gets a similar thrashing like the Great Depression and decides to not elect nut jobs for 50 years. I keep seeing interviews with those who vote for Trump and are hurt by his tariffs or immigration changes and insisting they still support Trump. Those (mostly older) people are going to have to die of natural causes and be replaced by demographic shifts before things change, but the last election showing young men shifting to Trump and this administration trying to suppress the vote of women does not point to this.

'If thing doesn't exist, gets proposed, gets laughed out of the room, good idea' is your framework? It doesn't sound like a good framework.

Wait till you hear of countries where university education is 100% tax funded. And you get money from the government while you're a full-time student.

This article lists out why it's not good of an idea as you think.

>Universities' endowments are not as much help as their billion-dollar valuations would suggest. For a start, much of the money is reserved for a particular purpose, funding a specific professorship or research centre, say. Legal covenants often prevent it from being diverted for other purposes. In any case, the income from an endowment is typically used to fund a big share of a university's operating costs. Eat into the principal and you eat into that revenue stream.

>What is more, eating into the principal is difficult. Many endowments, in search of higher income, have invested heavily in illiquid assets, such as private equity, property and venture capital. That is a reasonable strategy for institutions that plan to be around for centuries, but makes it far harder to sell assets to cover a sudden budgetary shortfall. And with markets in turmoil, prices of liquid assets such as stocks and government bonds have gyrated in recent days. Endowments that "decapitalise" now would risk crystallising big losses.

More worrying is the fact that the federal government can inflict even more harm aside from cutting off federal funding:

>the Trump administration has many other ways to inflict financial pain on universities apart from withholding research funding. It could make it harder for students to tap the government's financial-aid programmes. It could issue fewer visas to foreign students, who tend to pay full tuition. With Congress's help, it could amend tax laws in ways that would hurt universities.

https://archive.is/siUqm

He's not gonna be happy they can operate financially without his assent

They could also possibly fire some administrators. Not every vice-provost out there is strictly necessary.

Just a few years ago, Harvard Crimson carried an op-ed complaining about the bloat:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-burea...

This is about lots more than money. Sure, Harvard can go without federal funds. Then comes federal tax breaks. Then Harvard's ability to recruit foreign students (no visas, no foreign students/professors). After that comes the really draconian stuff like the fed revoking clearances or not hiring/doing business with Harvard grads. Such things were once thought illegal but are now very much on the table. That is why Harvard needs to win the money fight no matter the numbers.

I think the 9 billion is very misleading. More than half goes to hospitals affiliated with Harvard. I am not sure but I don't think they get anything from the endowment. The impact of loosing this money would be very uneven across different parts of the university and hospitals affiliated with it.

The faculty of arts and science would be fine. Yes, some cuts, a hiring freeze etc. The med school and public health school would feel a big impact. They employ so many people on 'soft money' through grants including many faculty members.

The hospitals are a different story and I am not sure why they are even lumped together.

Harvard is probably thinking they just need to draw the $1 billion extra for another 4 years. Unless, Trump runs for a 3rd time which he has floated. If that happens then I think everyone's just screwed.

Republicans Are Floating Plans To Raise the Endowment Tax. Here's What You Need To Know : https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/2/11/increasing-endo...

Proposed College Endowment Tax Hike: What to Know : https://thecollegeinvestor.com/52851/proposed-college-endowm...

  College endowments are typically tax-exempt, but a 2017 law imposed a 1.4% tax on investment income for a small group of wealthy private universities. A new proposal seeks to increase the endowment tax rate to 14%

  proposing an 8.6 percent tax hike

I agree. Also, the quality and independence of the research will improve when it is funded outside of government influence.

those endowments, especially for the Ivy League schools, aren't liquid at all. They'd take a massive haircut if they had to start pulling funds from it

80% of the endowment funds are heavily restricted as per donor requests and cannot be used unconditionally.

This might be true for Harvard, but I don't think free speech should only be for those who can afford it. I know my school couldn't if the government came knocking.

Harvard affiliated hospitals are dependent on NIH funding for survival. Wonder if they are included in the scope of this.

People here have little idea about how Harvard works. Harvard is financially vulnerable. It is currently running on a deficiency considering the endowment. And Harvard can't freely use most endowment for personnels anyway. If the government takes away funding, Harvard will have a financial crisis. I guess the leadership made the decision in hope someone could stop the government before bad things happen but when bad things do happen, you will probably see mass layoffs of researchers in particular in life sciences and biomedical research.

Much of that federal funding is for research, the same as any other R1 university. We all benefit from research findings. Endowments are used for other purposes.

There are a few colleges that take no federal funding in order to maintain total independence (mostly for religious reasons). But their research output is virtually zero.

The federal funds are for doing research that the government wants to fund, not keeping the university's lights on. This is about terminating a productive partnership, not ending a subsidy handout to schools.

Next step: taxing that endowment (which is a good idea irrespective of the other demands: universities are government-subsidized tax-free hedge funds)

I think that's what they're saying.

I think this is the common-sense response. The push back I've heard is that endowments are apportioned to specific things. That is, it's not an open piggy bank. Nevertheless, $50B is a _lot_ even if the smallest allocation is 1% of the largest that is likely on the order of tens of millions.

Do you have money in the bank? Do you have income? If so, you don't really need any help from the government. If you value your personal independence so much, then cut the cord.

As a university professor, I agree with you. I think universities must cut the cord and be independent. The university faculty gave up the control to administrators and administrators, in turn, gave up the control to politicians.

They don't. This is the federal government threatening to withhold payment for research they commissioned.

> Harvard has a 50 billion endowment, what do they need federal funds for. If they value their intellectual independence so much, then cut the cord.

I agree. Gulf monarchies will probably come in a give even more billions to these institutions anyway to make up for the losses. No strings attached of course...

Harvard probably already secured some more funding from Qatar and what not.

It'd be an interesting strategy if you could split the organization based on departments that depend heavily on federal funds (i.e. perhaps STEM fields such as medicine and physics/hard sciences, etc.) and those that are not (and perhaps simultaneously requiring more freedom of thought).

Perhaps resurrect the Radcliffe College to support the more intellectual, free thought based departments. [1]

[1] https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/about-the-institute/histor...

It's not just about finances. Trump just announced (possibly accidentally) that he's going to start deporting American citizens to El Salvador gulags: https://news.sky.com/story/donald-trump-says-the-us-could-de...

and they've been painting political enemies as criminals. It's pretty much the same situation as Russia/Putin but at an earlier stage of its development, and people want to avoid being the tallest grass that gets mowed.

It's good that some institutions are standing up but I don't expect it to go well for them.

I'm not sure if you wanted it shorter for tonal reasons rather than simply for length of time to read, but I think it was pretty concise.

What does the Federal Gov need Harvard for? Harvard gets 16% of its funding from them - what outweighs that on the aide of the Federal government?

The GOP / Trump administration shows no real focus on employing experts, Trump shows no curiosity about anything. They're slashing research and science across the board department by department. They employ anti science people as heads of departments that require science.

I don't think the GOP & Trump thinks they need anything from Harvard other than agreeing to impose first amendment violations on others on behalf of the GOP and Trump.

The thing to remember is that these grants are their research budget. The endowment is largely earmarked for educational projects. Your average university professor is there because they want to do research, not because they want to teach - so the research budget is critical for educating as well.

I assume Harvard has a plan for dealing with this dynamic. They have some extremely smart people there, so I don't doubt they've found a way.

Genuinely curious: what part of the federal government's letter to Harvard seems fascist to you?

Is the government asking a university to shift their bias away from skin color diversity to viewpoint diversity fascist?

Is there a historical parallel?

Or is it just the fact that the government is asking for reform, and any reform request would be considered fascist? If so, do you also consider the DEI reform requests fascist?

> I'm glad they are standing up to the Fascists

Today I learned that demanding an end to racial discrimination makes you a fascist. I swear this word becomes more meaningless by the day.

In the name of 'fighting antisemitism'?

It's true, though. It's a convenient tool. 'What do you mean you don't want to cede control to us? Don't you want to fight antisemitism?!'

Smells awfully like Putin's trumped up (ayy) play in Ukraine to 'de-nazify'.

The page acknowledges that Harvard lost that case and will comply with the ruling.

These 'values' are not sincerely held, but tactical. Once they got the SCOTUS win and affirmative action was toast, they quickly moved on from fighting anti-Asian hate to a new fig-leaf/tool to useful for fighting the next ideological battle, which was prominent protests against government policy, which happened to be pro-Palestine, so this is the best tool for the job.

The messaging is very similar too, conflating pro-diversity with anti-whiteness, or anti-asian when needed, and now redefining being pro-Palestine as anti-Semitic or pro-Hamas. It's dumb, lacks nuance, but effective when the Fifth estate is pliant, co-opted or otherwise ineffective.

MAGA loves to say how universities screw over poor hard-working Asian students, and then they turn around and defund universities and fire researchers. Their pity on Asians is not sincere, because they detest higher education in the first place.

And I'm saying this as an Asian father whose kid is going to a US college this year.

> MAGA boarded that train too

More like they found some useful idiots

It's my understanding that the issue is not that they're 'espousing the right views' but rather that they have the constitutional right as a private institution to espouse whatever views their students and faculty want under the first amendment.

right, freedom of speech is free as long as it agrees with the viewpoint of who's in power. similar to how history is written by victors but this part is conveniently ignored. it's just facts in the open marketplace of ideas yay!

I mean, while this is the only correct response, it could still cost Harvard around $9 billion, which isn't chump change, even for Harvard.

And while I agree and have been disgusted with Harvard's slow slide to demanding ideological conformity over the past decade plus (e.g. https://www.thefire.org/news/harvard-gets-worst-score-ever-f...), I believe they have made some belated changes in the right direction over the past year.

Another good one, 'Reforming Programs with Egregious Records of Antisemitism or Other Bias .. The programs, schools, and centers of concern include:'

> Harvard Divinity School

> Graduate School of Education

> School of Public Health

> Medical School

> Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School

> Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic

(partial list)

I must have missed the time when the Medical School racked up a record of egregious antisematism.

Some of those international students with their visas revoked apparently only had traffic violations according to what I read in the Texas Tribune. They are going after any level of law breaking in order to match their stated goal of kicking out criminals, since they are having trouble reaching the numbers promised in campaign speeches.

All of the information is saved, it's going to be interesting to study, the first 'class' of people to leave are the ones from tech, you know, the backbone of USA services, it's going to be interesting, it's going to be an economy fall that didn't happen in Nazi Germany

I think you mean jailed, tortured and deported.

If you're seriously ill, you should get treatment, not walk around hoping that a piece of cloth will save others from exposure to whatever it is you're coughing up.

While I am not a friend of a mask ban, universities should absolutely teach their students to stay home when sick. Going to work sick is an abomination that should be rooted out. And it is a nice liberal cause too.

the money is for research not education.

A lot of modern industry started as academic research. Things like semiconductors, EUV lithography, mRNA vaccines, or AI originate in government-funded academic research.

The health effects of smoking and leaded gas were established by academic research, allowing government programs to massively improve our collective health.

Climate change has been recognized, diagnosed, and its solutions invented mostly by academic researchers, an effort that may save all industrial civilization.

Nearly everything you use on a daily basis came from university research. Heck, most of what we know about the universe comes from university research.

Every piece of technology is because of collaboration between taxpayer funding and universities. It is relatively rare nowadays for a private business to create anything truly new without some form of university support. Or it's built on top of university research.

If you like new knowledge you like these types of programs. They make modern life possible.

Universities provide staff, equipment and expertise while the government(and often private enterprise) provide the funding.

> Keep in mind Harvard also runs a medical school!

Aseptic surgical procedures may soon go the way of vaccines.

Harvard Medical School?

Ah yes I've heard of that, it's one of the 'Programs with Egregious Records of Antisemitism or Other Bias' which most fuels antisemitic harassment and reflects ideological capture!

Thank you for that link. I knew about letters to parts of the European industry but not to universities. 7. 12. 14. and 15. are mind blowing.

General strike when >50% of those who voted wanted this? What world are you living in?

Edit: I stand corrected, 49.81%. It doesn't change the point much. Especially when that ~49% includes many 'working class'[1] voters. Who's going to participate in this general strike? A bunch of office workers?

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-return-power-fueled-...

That's right. Infringement of freedom and speech should be left in the hands of government funded institutions like Harvard.

Same, having descended from Holocaust survivors, what is happening in the U.S. and Palestine right now is chilling to me in its similarity.

Which is, of course, deeply antisemitic of the people claiming antisemitism when they are talking about only criticism of Israel, to equate all Jewish people with the Israeli state.

When I was active on the Politics Stack Exchange site years ago I was 'reported to the ADL' for merging the [jews] and [judaism] tags. Right out of the gate after I casually mentioned it in another discussion: not even a big fight about it. But the same person outright ignored the Trump-supporting holocaust denying user who harrassed a Jewish user with antisemitic slurs such (e.g. [1]).

Sadly antisemitism obviously exists, and sadly some pro-Palestinian activists have veered off into antisemitism. But the selective outrage is hard to take serious.

Remember, Caesar subjugated Gaul and killed or enslaved about a quarter of all Gauls in the process, to 'protect' them from invading Germanic tribes. 'Top kek', as I believe the old Latin saying goes.

[1]: https://politics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3596 – I am the author of that, I deleted my account since in large party due to all of this

> all I can think is what a fucking lay-up

I am nervous about the US right now. So many cases are going to end up at the Supreme Court that is controlled by conservatives. It may not be the lay-up you think it is.

Also what happens if Trump just decides to ignore a court loss as he did with the recent deportation of Kilmar Garcia?

Columbia's administration obviously has no issues silencing free speech and dissent based on their actions though.

I prefer these thought police to the thought police we had previously.

The 'diversity' thought police had very strong views about what the only acceptable thoughts were. These people are like, 'if we could get it up to 30% that would be a huge victory'. Actual diversity in thought at top American universities would be a boon.

Between 1935 and today car price inflation is at 2.41% per year while general inflation is 3.56%. You may have not noticed. Since free trade it's been less than 2%.

You may not have noticed but it happened.

Keep in mind labor is something like 10%-15% of the cost of a new car so even if you cut that down by 80%, including transport, and ignored recouping capital cost to actually move the production lines then you'd still need to move the production in less than 2 years to actually see the price decrease rather than 'not move up as fast' at 3% car price inflation of the early 90s. Interestingly there was a dip in the price increase rate of cars at the end of the 90s https://www.in2013dollars.com/New-cars/price-inflation but it's too large to have been reasonably attributable to this trade change.

> Except that I don't recall cars produced in Mexico ever getting more affordable.

According to this site[0], new car prices were about 6% higher at the end of NAFTA in 2020 compared with at the start of NAFTA in 1994. Considering inflation on other things was on average much higher and also that more recent cars are significantly safer, more performant, and fuel-efficient—i.e. more provide more value—it does look like cars did effectively get cheaper.

[0] https://www.in2013dollars.com/New-cars/price-inflation

Much like outbreaks that never turn into pandemics, no one remembers the efficiency measures that prevent price increases.

I think a conversation about what the taxpayer should get back from university research funding is a good question, I personally don't like privatization of medical breakthroughs discovered with public money.

However, I am cautious to extend that argument to this situation. This is an attempt to use federal funding as a backdoor around the 1st amendment (from what I can tell). I'm not going to extend this administration any leeway when their bull in a china shop policies inadvertently break something I don't like. I don't want to improve taxpayer funding of research by losing the 1st amendment.

I don't think your concept her is bad at all.

But I also don't think your concept has anything to do with the situation at Harvard.

Part of nafta was to slow the increasing costs of production, not lower them.

When looking over time it definitely worked in many regards. Things didn't get as expensive as they would have otherwise.

It's a good strategy. Even if Harvard had attempted to satisfy every bullet point, the govt could still retort that their demands were not satisfied.

The demands are simple and not confusing at all.

- Stop promoting Democrats' agendas as the ultimate truth; stop bullying people for non-Democratic views - Allow Republicans' agendas to be equally represented

Is it really so difficult to understand?

Out of many bad things Trump has done, this isn't really bad for anyone except core Democrats voters.

The US academia has become hostile to anyone except one particular culture. This should stop.

The demands of the administration are the demands of a bully who doesn't want your lunch money, he just wants you to know he can take it away at any time.

because they can use as excuse to stop the funding nonetheless, it's impossible to 100% comply with contradictory requests

They go after their enemies (liberals, trans, pro palestinians, brown migrants) and help their friends (right wing white people).

They want to have the old system (deliberate bias and vehement denials of there being any 'bias,') but working for them, and the way to demand that without describing it is to require all of the results and 'forbid,' by name only, the necessary methods.

What the demand is, is institutional fealty to Donald Trump. Trying to interpret it as anything else is going to lead these institutions into poor decision making. Harvard is doing the right thing.

it's pretty clear. it's twitter's policy. neo-Nazi rhetoric must be allowed, empathy must be banned.

It makes sense when you realize that their true position is 'free speech for me but not for thee'. The contradictions are about censoring speech they disagree with and promoting speech they like.

Authoritarian governments are arbitrary governments, all decisions are made arbitrarily. Consistency is unnecessary. That's the trouble with choosing power as a guiding principle over reason or consent.

It all makes sense with a fascist power logic. The goal isn't to implement consistent policy to reach rational targets. The goal is to wield power and slowly errode any opposition with divisive actions that support anybody that is loyal to you. Importantly being loyal doesn't guarantee you will be spared. In these goals consistency is irrelevant, in fact being inconsistent and acting with arbitrary despotism is a feature since it produces more fear.

If you ever find any fascist critique of their enemies you will quickly realize that all of which they accuse their enemies of doing, they will do themselves. Decry freedom of speech as no one is 'allowed' to say sexist/racist things anymore? Be sure they will go in and ban books, political thoughts and literal words. Hillarys emails? We literally operate our foreign policy in signal groups.

Quite frankly I am a bit puzzled by the neutrality with which some Americans try to analyze this absolutely crazy political situation. It is like pondering over the gas mixture in the smoke while your house is on fire, absolutely unhinged.

It makes sense if you understand that they aren't focused on general principles. Diversity is bad when it involves non-whites, women, gay people or research involving these groups. Diversity is good when it involves 'race realists.' Free speech is bad when students are advocating for divestment initiatives. Free speech is good when a professor calls somebody the n-word online.

The goal is white supremacy and antifeminism.

>>- a new diversity initiative for diverse points of view

I'm sure we both know what this one means though. Forcing the university to hire people who think the earth is flat and that climate change isn't real - for the sake of diversity of course.

and the irony at the beginning of the demanding government letter:

'But an investment is not an entitlement.'

Nothing they do makes sense until you accept that hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug, for them and their base. They know that what they're asking for is impossible to meaningfully comply with...

To the fascist regime, 'diversity' means 'hiring black or gay people'. Likewise 'diverse points of view' means 'viewpoints that think it's okay for black and gay people to be hired and for transgender people to pee'. And 'speech control' means 'kicking out people who shout Hitler did nothing wrong in the middle of the library'. And 'inclusion' means 'letting black or gay people study'. It's all newspeak.

The demands only seem inconsistent if you don't look at the actual principle underlying them. Political discourse tends to present opposing ideologies as being about principles like 'free speech' or 'free markets' - it's really all about power, who has it, and who wants it.

In this case its strengthening particular social and economic hierarchies - america vs the rest of the world, and white christians over non-whites or non-christian.

What's interesting is that this is not necessarily a struggle between the top of a hierarchy vs the bottom of one, but between two different hierarchies. The democrats support cultural non racial and economic hierarchies, while the republicans support racial international and the same economic hierarchies. So while they both support the rich over the working class, there is a struggle over whether to support racial and international hierarchies. Democrats tend to support globalization, i.e unifying of the power of the top of the economic hierarchy across international boundaries, while eliminating racial and sexual hierarchies as they are seen as 'inefficient' from a neoliberal perspective. Republicans are more focused on the 'national elite', the rich people that depend on america being a global hegemon specifically, energy industry, military industira-complex, etc..

It is easier to understand their thinking when you combine each pair of demands: what they want is reversals, they've just split each into two steps because they think that will be more palatable. It makes it easier to sell to their own base certainly, because they can concentrate on whichever half has the most emotive effect in any given speech, and easier for their base to parrot: they just repeat the half they want and don't need to think about the other.

The end to current diversity policies and the start of others combined is a demand for u-turn: stop allowing the things we don't like, start allowing the things you were stopping.

Same for speech: stop auditing the speech we want to say, start auditing the speech you were previously allowing.

And so on.

In the minds of the administration it makes sense, because they think of each item separately where there is conflict and together where there is not. Such cognitive dissonance seems to be their natural state of mind, the seem to seek it.

Much like their cries of "but what about tolerance?!"1 when you mention punching nazis. They want the complete about-turn: LBTQ out, racism/sexism/phobias in. You are supposed to tolerate what they want you to tolerate, and little or nothing else.

--------

[1] My answer there has often become "you didn't want tolerance, you specifically voted against continued tolerance, what you voted for won, intolerance is your democratically chosen desire, who am I to deny the will of your people?".

I don't think it's confusing. It's classic 'my way or the highway' stance. 'Free speech for everyone! (except for things I don't like...)'.

You see the establishment of separate, unwritten classes of things here, right? It will be a case-by-case basis which of these rules is invoked, that way no matter what happens they're 'just following the rules we all agreed to' but they get to hand-select which thoughts are compulsory and which are forbidden.

The governments conditions are not unlimited.

Their proposed 'viewpoint diversity' is absurd at face value.

Do you believe antisemitism is a problem at Harvard? If so, what led you to believe this?

Do we really believe there is a rooted undercurrent of antisemitism at Harvard of all places? Or is this just anti-zionist expansion straw manning? I'm sorry but the continuously faithless positioning of the Trump administration right now makes me believe the antisemitic accusations are a pretext.

The government does not have all that right tho. First amendment and all.

I would invite you to read the government letter if you have not, but look at each demand and put yourself in the position of the recently affected but also try to see if you can hold a 'controversial' view of the world that should be fine but would be put in danger by these demands: https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...

Civil rights, suffrage, they were all the controversial opinion at some point. Some people still argue that they are but anyone against those can go pound sand.

> The government, on the other hand, has every right to put conditions its counterparty should conform to in order to get money from the government.

It really doesn't. There are both normal laws and Constitutional restrictions on how the government can make decisions, and the reasons it can have for making those decisions.

I'm very much not an expert here, but this includes restrictions on viewpoint discrimination in funding.

> antisemitism is barely mentioned as a problem

Because it's very obviously being used as a cover to exert control over universities which are deemed to be too 'woke' (which has nothing to do with anti-semitism).

Yes, antisemitism exists, like many other social ills. But is it a major problem at Harvard and these elite institutions? No, it is not.

Never mistake a man's rhetoric for his principles.

I have never been a 'woke' person, but Trump really makes me doubt the meritocracy argument. If Trump was a black woman he would never get away with half the things he is doing now.

Harvard admitted it needs to '...broaden the intellectual and viewpoint diversity within our community...'

This is a no-brainer considering only 2.3% of their faculty identifies as conservative.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/5/22/faculty-survey-...

It's not cognitive dissonance, or bad faith. Of course.

If you let Harvard do 'merit-based hiring', they'll move a little in the direction of actually complying with employment law, but not much. If you institute a regime such as the one that existed for race and sex for decades (i.e., if you don't have 'enough' black people, you need to show how your recruitment pipeline means that's necessarily the case, like not enough get the required type of degree), you'll get much better compliance.

If you genuinely cannot distinguish the two then that's about equally as bad as cognitive dissonance:

Phenotype diversity != Viewpoint diversity

The former is what current academia and DEI focus on, the latter is what the administration demands.

Does this simple logic need to be expressed in Rust for HN folks to wrap their mind around it?

Unless you're speaking about the high overhead rates, that's really the wrong framing. The public funds at issue are buying things like research, or hospital services.

Awesome response from Alan Garber

They are already are spending billions a year from their endowment, which covers nearly 40% of their operating revenue, which is around the maximum they can sustainably spend.

Sustainable spending is the whole point of an endowment.

Also endowments are created by a vast number of individual donations which often come with restrictions. For example someone leaves a bunch of money to university to support a professorship. That money and its earnings can only be used for that.

Generally the things that are funded by research grants from the government are things that cannot be funded from the endowment.

>It's more like a patchwork of locked treasure chests, each with its own key and its own label: this one funds scholarships, that one supports cancer research, another pays for upkeep on a library.

Explain why direct donations cannot accomplish the same. I suspect that universities want endowment donations because they grow tax free.

If they were concerned with spending, they'd just cut the spending.

They're making the spending conditional on Harvard following their ideological instructions.

Almost every economist believes there is no serious and immediate problem with our current debt level (which is actually increasing under both Trump administrations, despite their fake expressions of concern). Why do you believe you are right and they are all collectively wrong?

Trump is increasing the debt tho and did in his first term.

Republicans only care about debt when it can be used to either bash Democrats or used as a talking point to eliminate something they don't like. Lookup 'Starve The Beast'.

Republicans do not care about the debt. They care that it can be used as a tool. That's it.

They run up the debt when they want and then turn around to blame Democrats for the debt they ran up.

Nobody is really concerned with the US debt outside of silly wanna-be patriots and the politicians who use it to scare them. Now, one way to make the US debt a much bigger deal is to cause a recession...hmm...wonder if anyone is trying to do that...

Do you seriously believe MAGA has any interest in fair access to education? Or are you just saying that as a disingenuous talking point?

because the answer for the racism against admissions from asians is deny admission and deport everyone that isn't us-american

Merit is not easily definable.

Standardized tests are bullshit, IQ tests are phrenology, class rankings are not comparable across school districts. Someone who was president of every club at school may be less able than a kid who had to flip burgers in the evenings to help make rent.

Merit to a university may mean 'someone whose charisma and social connections will bring great repute to the institution' more than 'a child prodigy who will burn out at 27 and end up fixing typewriters in his parent's garage because they actually had an undiagnosed mental illness growing up'.

Merit may mean 'a middling student smart enough to pass who will stick around working as a post-doc temporarily forever because they have no ambition beyond performing slave wage labor in exchange for the cold comfort of the known and familiar'.

Any definition of merit is going to be irredeemably faulty. Like recruiting sporting talent based solely on stats without considering if the talent is an asshole who will destroy the atmosphere in the clubhouse and immediately get arrested for DUI after being signed.

I thought we wanted to let the market decide?

The government funding aspect is irrelevant. Nearly every business in the country receives some form of government funding either direct or indirect and they hire based on a wide variety of criteria. I was once hired to a position I would need time to be a productive in because I am a ham radio guy and my boss wanted someone to talk radios with.

When the 'other side' is pretty much evil, yeah, you are the good guys. Like, by default. I would even go so far to say Harvard could do much, much worse and they would still be the good guys.

On a closely related note, you are legitimately out of touch with reality if you believe any part of this is done with the intention of 'merit'. This is done to strengthen allegiance to MAGA and conservative ideology.

Does that sound a bit scary and fascist-like? You decide. But it's explicitly stated as the goal of this constriction on higher education in Project 2025. So, take it up with them, not me.

Merit as defined by an administration whose cabinet is composed of Fox News personalities, DUI hires, and some of the least qualified people for the jobs they were given.

This administration has ZERO credibility to define what 'merit' is.

It really isn't. Harvard used to be a special cultural institution now it's just another research institute. Whoopee, nothing can be special, everything has to all be the same gray sludge cause otherwise it isn't '''fair'''

If the Trump admin could directly control admission, I truly believe future classes would consist of close to 100% far right leaning ('anti-woke') WASP types.

Or maybe there are better applicants than your highly qualified asian applicants. But sure, an Asian canadian came over here, helped kill AA, and nothing's changed. Well done Asian community. You fucked over a tiny fucking minority for nothing.

Define "terrorism."

The administration, for example, freely uses the word to describe someone with no criminal record and no proven gang affiliations: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lmrwrrkbnf2e

They also use the word to describe Tesla vandals: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/03/25/us/fbi-task-force-tesla-a...

Assumption: everything critical of Israel's actions in Gaza is supporting terrorism. That's quite the take.

'Congress shall make no law' is not unclear, nor is the idea from the declaration that ' all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights'. There is no spot in the founding philosophy of this nation that makes a home for 'rights of citizens' only, and there was copious space to fill that in if they wanted. You made that shit up.

What you're doing is scriptural prestidigitation. It's the equivalent of christians deciding that Satan and the serpent in the garden are the same entity, even though it's very clear that they aren't[1]. You're doing it because it makes your world view seem like less of an incoherent mess, not because it's true.

This is spot on. The US has enjoyed enormous wealth and prosperity, but it's been mostly captured by the top 1% of private individuals. The GOP has done a masterful job redirecting the blame to China, DEI, immigration, etc... when the real problem is that we have not spread around the prosperity through programs like universal healthcare, free college, and heck, even UBI.

They could. Look up Bob Jones College or Hillsdale College, both of which operate without any federal funding. It appears that the elite universities are going to find out the same thing that the small Christian universities found out in the 1970s, which is that the federal government Can control you if they fund you. I believe Bob Jones in particular won a case in front of the Supreme Court giving them the right to racially discriminate in their admissions if they refuse to take any federal funding.

They want freedom for themselves. They're free to impose their will on others without judgement. That's the purpose.

A 'comprehensive mask ban' would presumably include exceptions for people who are immunocompromised, actively sick with an upper-respiratory infection, etc.

Steelman, don't straw man.

The current regime in Washington is clearly fascist, there is nothing democratic at all about them. They want to banish Americans to foreign concentration camps for torture, he said that just before his interview with the El Salvador President who is hosting at least one of said concentration camps. Yet the media says little.

> That's a Christian school

> That is worth federal funding.

... interesting.

> people promoting intersectionality which also promotes systematic discrimination (eg DEI) against specific groups. That's a highly-divisive philosophy with no proven benefits that's similar to Marxism which killed 50 million people and wrecked countries

Just like all people connecting to 'Kevin Bacon', and all Wikipedia pages first links connecting to 'Philosophy', every idea can be connected to mass murder if you're willing to manufacture enough links.

'Intersectionality' is a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, idea. It promotes nothing.

They are deporting permanent residents for op-eds.

One permanent resident was sent to a concentration camp in El Salvator without due process, none over speech yet that I know of but his was for being spuriously labeled a terrorist.

My understanding is that racial discrimination is forbidden under title nine at least.

Why did the response have to include it? It's not tactically useful.

For the people downvoting: can you actually provide arguments for why you think these points are incorrect?

If you are downvoting simply because you disagree politically with what I commented, you are going against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

But they're not standing up for freedom. They are admitting and hiring people based on a monoculture.

I m not sure he ever claimed that

The HRW report[1] goes into details, at least on the 1050 takedowns they documented

> A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report investigating Meta's moderation of pro-Palestine content post-October 7th found that, of 1,050 posts HRW documented as taken-down or suppressed on Facebook or Instagram, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine, while just one post was content in support of Israel.'

[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

The article mentions requests to remove posts quoting Ghassan Kanafani. The article introduces Kanafani as a literary figure, but then discusses his involvement in the PFLP. I don't know if they want the reader to form a particular judgement about this, or if they're just reporting the facts.

It sounds like you're using the fact that the posts aren't available for you to view to evaluate as a weakness of the reporting on this suppression campaign, but of course they're not available because of the suppression campaign.

Surely the burden should be on the censors to establish clearly that something is in fact incitement to violence, rather than on external reporters to magically show that content which has been taken down is not incitement?

I am part of a neighborhood group where I grew up in Bangladesh and lived until 5th grade in the 90s.

The group admin this morning let us know via Facebook post that he has received warnings frm Facebook. The group is 'at a risk of being suspended' because way too many posts relating to 'dangerous organization and individuals' have been removed. He wants everyone to be extra careful when posting about p*l*s*i*e, I*r*e*, g*z*, j*w* etc. He used asterisks himself just to be extra careful himself.

Not to mention my country is dealing with rohingya crisis, which was fueled by Facebook and WhatsApp misinformation campaigns, and Facebook had 2 moderators for the whole country of Myanmar and refused to do anything about said misinformation campaigns. But they sure make exceptions for I*r*e*.

As a recent example, the instagram of guardian journalist Owen jones (well known Israel critic) was suddenly suspended without any explanation today.

It has been since restored, after a predictable twitter storm.

Every pro Palestinian protestor has experienced some form of awareness suppression and content removal. They have known this was a thing long before anyone else did.

Same thing happened during 9/11. Muslims saw suppression, bullying by the police and no one covered it. Then the tables turned on maga republicans after j6.

Since nobody here has actually read the article, it states that the reason the posts were taken down was 'prohibits incitement to terrorism praise for acts of terrorism and identification or support of terror organizations.' This type of speech (incitement) is illegal in the United States and support is very borderline depending on the type and meaning of 'support'. Now, if the reason doesnt match the actual content removed that should definitely be addressed which is your point, but I think that the reason is valid.

The article links to a much longer article from Human Rights Watch with a good number of examples: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

Personal anecdote: whever I log in to the feed, 1/3 of posts are ads, 1/3 are algorithmic recommendations, and 1/3 are pro-Palestine posts by a former partner.

Almost none of my other connections post anything, though there are occasional exceptions.

Groups and Marketplace

They ate still very popular

> Our minds have been so colonized or beaten down by powerful forces that _any_ support of the plight of the Palestine people is seen as pro-Hamas,

What makes you say that? Plenty of people express support for the Palestinian people, including plenty of governments and heads of state, etc.

I personally think that being pro-Palestine means you should be anti-Hamas, since they are a brutal dictatorship that's plundered its people's resources to engage in a war with Israel that has destroyed their lives.

The main worrying thing is when someone is not pro-Palestinian, they're either pro-Hamas or anti-Israel.

That's because the Palestine protests are full of people who actually are pro-Hamas, and not only that but often rabidly antisemite on top of that. Your side linked the two together for whatever reason.

Nothing illeagal. Just dirty.

Having a system of rules does not mean that the system is inherently well-designed or well-intentioned.

Actually it's the other way around. Fascists in Israel and the US worked very hard to make it so that anyone seen to be sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians is seen as pro Hamas, or pro terrorist.

Apparently there are some that even say the Palestinian flag itself is a 'terrorist flag' and anyone flying it is also a terrorist.

Actually the Israeli government (Netenyahu) funded Hamas as a way to destabilise the Palestinian authority and conflate palestinianism with terrorism (EU Policy chief Joesep Borrell has stated this on record https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-funded-hamas-claims-e...)

Just because a bunch of war criminals keep saying it, it doesn't make it true.

Or there truly are conspiracies against our natural destinies, we are merely ignorant and incompetent in identifying what they might be.

Covering own asses is natural enough. War crimes and crimes against humanity are serious concerns with serious considerations, yet what if we cannot ourselves be trusted by the very nature of our self lies?

The difference with Russia is that they are much worse at hiding their corruption and censorship.

It's not a better or worse government (although it may be), it's just different.

You're not arrested for posting this, so that is a pretty big difference to Russia (and other authoritarian nations like China and Turkey), no?

https://rsf.org/en/country/russia

It's still humans being humans, we just have a covert culture while they are more overt. I personally like being tricked/manipulated more than forced. I'd rather get Tom Sawyered into painting a fence than being held at gunpoint.

Indeed. The editorial boards of these newsrooms are often staffed with people who attended the same schools and classes as those running the country. The social circles of the two worlds are extremely closely linked.

Of course, this means that the reporting isn't very good at addressing its blind spots–i.e., most of the news in the country, let alone the world, that isn't relevant to the ivy league coastal elites. And I say this as a member of that same class. Most of the political perspectives in my life are completely unrepresented in the opinion columns, which generally tend to pander upwards rather than downwards.

I don't tend to put much weight in freedom of the press so long as that press is floating on the cream of society and asking the government permission to report on what they're doing.

Is Meta really considered "mainstream media"? I always took that phrase to refer to NBC, CBS, NY Post, etc - the big legacy news organizations (print and TV).

Anna Politkovskaya – Investigative journalist and critic of the Chechen war, shot in Moscow (2006). Alexander Litvinenko – Ex-FSB officer poisoned with polonium in London (2006).

Stanislav Markelov & Anastasia Baburova – Human rights lawyer and journalist, shot in Moscow (2009).

Boris Nemtsov – Opposition leader, shot near the Kremlin (2015).

Denis Voronenkov – Former Russian MP, shot in Kyiv (2017).

Nikolai Andrushchenko – Journalist, beaten to death in St. Petersburg (2017).

Alexei Navalny – Opposition leader, died in prison after previous poisoning (2024).

---

The difference is that they murder their political opponents for show to make their people be afraid of dissent.

You comparing it with some (disgusting, vile) social media company (which would improve the world immensely if it disappeared) is completely inappropriate.

I don't think this is necessarily an issue of censorship so much as it is highlighting that Facebook is clearly a fucking news publisher and should be treated as such under the law.

It's time to revoke section 230 for any social media network that amplifies or buries content with a non-transparent process.

In this case it isn't even merely an algorithm designed by humans. They have LITERAL human editors choosing which stories to put on the front page, just like the NYT, and they should be held liable for the content on their platforms just like legacy media is.

Russia doesn't just put people in jail for speaking against the government. They weaponise the generational fear of being disappeared by the government. This is not close to what happens in America where you can post anything anywhere and if Facebook deletes it you can always make your own website about it. If you did this in Russia you go to jail. Even if you say things like "it is sad Ukrainian children die in children's day in Russia" you go to jail. I don't think you can compare modern USA with modern Russia in this way. USA does plenty of other things that are bad like jailing so many people for petty crimes without pushing much on speech. USA has its own problems and all these comparisons only hide them.

>Another difference would be that you are allowed to express your opinion, whereas in russia you would be put to jail, that's true but only in a very limited way.

Although not even close in number and punishment the US government is deporting people for speaking against Israel.

I think we do have a much better system because we are aware of these cases, you can speak out about the issue, and our court system can rule against the current admin.

What makes this possible to either the level of Russia or the US is how much the supporters of the regime want it. This is regardless of morality, legality, or the precedent it sets.

This post is oddly nonsensical ...

> mainstream media, like facebook

Facebook is in the 'mainstream media'? That's a first in my experience. 'Mainstream media' usually describes established journalism organizations such as CNN, Fox, the NY Times, the WSJ. Facebook is universally grouped with 'social media' in my experience.

> Most of the people in the 'free world' goes on mainstream media

In fact, most people go on social media. The 'mainstream media' is losing audience rapidly.

> you end up with most media complying with the official story pushed by government and friends

I'm a bit confused here. Facebook complying with ... which government? The Israeli government has very little power over Facebook - Israel is a tiny market.

Meanwhile, Trump has been calling the 'mainstream media', the 'enemy of the people' - because they constantly report what he doesn't like.

Since the November election, many have shockingly capitulated but many remain. The NYT, for example, publishes negative news and criticisms of Trump and Israel daily.

> The more i think about it, the less difference i see.

You haven't established much of anything. Much of the comment doesn't make sense. Where is the Russian NYT? Which American journalists are in jail?

> Another difference would be that you are allowed to express your opinion, whereas in russia you would be put to jail, that's true but only in a very limited way.

This is more subtle. I have a lot to say about Israel, and I do post occasionally on Facebook, but I tone it down a lot because I have a few high profile people in the industry and academia among my Facebook friends (not actual friends). If I were to post what I really think, this would have serious career repercussions for me. People would brand me as an antisemite (they don't know that my grandfather is Jewish and he practically raised me).

Can you compare this to Russia? Well, I am Russian and I live in the West, so my choice of living here gives an answer to this question. I'd be in jail in Russia if they read my Facebook posts about the war in Ukraine. Yet, I'm now disillusioned about the Western liberalism, all thanks to Gaza war.

The college deportations are the government, but I would guess that the Meta compliance has more to do with the fact that Cheryl Sandberg is a politically-connected turbo-Zionist.

I wish we were neutral on this issue. As an American, it is not my business. I am in no position to justly arbitrate between them. But our politicians are whores, our Zionists have deep pockets, and they're not afraid to empty them out for the cause, so it looks like America's taxpayers are all on Team Zionist, whether we like it or not.

Technically, they are the same. As in: people with power want to control the narrative.

This was so, is so and will always be so, everywhere.

But but but... details matter. A lot.

The west has traditions how and when to apply power, which is distinctly different from Russia.

I hand-pick two illustrations of Russia:

1. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/09/27/moscow-police-accu...

> Officers "beat up Kamardin very badly and stuck a dumbbell in his anus," according to Novaya Gazeta Europe.

2. Bald man claim to power was accompanies with mysterious explosions of apartment buildings after which Chechens were declared enemies and war started.

Some interesting bits from wikipedia:

> Three Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents who had planted the devices at Ryazan were arrested by the local police.[6] The next day, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev announced that the incident in Ryazan had been an anti-terror drill and the device found there contained only sugar, and freed the FSB agents involved.[7]

And

> 13 September 1999: Russian Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov makes an announcement about the bombing of an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk that only takes place three days later

> 16 September 1999: Bombing in Volgodonsk, 17 are killed, 69 injured

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombi...

Corruption of power is an inherent property of power. It is expected that people in power will get corrupted. The methods of power grabs are also fairly universal.

The difference between a corrupt shithole and free world is not in what the government tries to do, but in how the governed respond.

It is not so bad in Russia. Not so many sites are blocked. You can easily read foreign news if you want to. Hacker news is not blocked for example :).

Well, there is a difference with Russia, actually. One of Palestinian professors, who studied freedom of speech, shaped it this way: The difference is that people from Russia, Arab countries etc DO know that their media is lying - but also they know the Western media is lying, because they read all that nonsense the westerners write about their countries.

Good for you that you started to realize how corrupt the Western media is.

> The more i think about it, the less difference i see.

You might consider trying not to view the world entirely in black and white then.

This sort of sentiment is not particularly productive especially in times like this..

The difference is not in the ability to be heard. The difference is in the consequences: jail or even death vs. merely not being heard.

Sadly, that situation is also contorted to legitimize the spread verifiably false information by certain current political cults, led by a Turnip, that claim it is another party controlling media because they believe that they have the secret access to the "truth" that is being "blocked" on all other sources of media, and point to other suppressed stories (even if completely unrelated or blocked due to being outright lies) as proof. Look at attempts to curtail the spread of completely false vaccine information that is now being used as proof of something nefarious (even while more nefarious activity is being perpetrated). Some people took notes from other Dictators' control of media long ago and have been working toward it for many years via press-related misinformation to cause a loss of confidence. You would think the press would fight back harder against being de-legitimized, using stronger wording and calling lying what it is, but when your purse strings are being controlled by the same businesses that see opportunities to advantage themselves, it's not surprising.

The US isn't just trying to save the Jews... it's trying to leverage them to crush the Muslims for Christian domination.

you might enjoy reading, 'Manufacturing Consent'

Another often overlooked difference is that non US/UK citizens are typically bilingual, so by definition can access more news sources

There is no difference between US and Russia in terms of free speech. Russia doesn't have promote a narrative of free speech while banning it. US suppresses it, punishes it and effectively deports anyone who criticizes Israel.

Holy cows are holy everywhere, its just that different cows are holy everywhere.

Another reason why TikTok has to come under US ownership. How else are we going to censor things when they are under China's (lack of) control?

Yes. This was clearly the reason for the ban in the first place.

While this may be part of the story, it's certainly not the full picture. We know that the CCP is actively manipulating the algorithm on Tiktok to further their agenda on multiple other geopolitical issues—something we have ample evidence for. I don't know if there is a smoking gun on this one topic in particular, but the CCP's goal has always been to divide the American audience; and we know that older Americans skew pro-Israel whilst younger Americans are more oriented towards being pro-Palestinian. If someone looked in the right places, they would more likely than not find evidence of algorithm manipulation to favor a Palestinian bend.

Most americans support Israel in this conflict. Maybe the samples are just biased?

Meta could start by being transparent when they are asked to take down a post and could be transparent when they comply.

One defense against it might just be to actively crawl Facebook and externally record the contents of posts as soon as they're posted. Then you have a record of everything that got deleted.

I don't know how you scale that up to make it easy for everyone to find 'disappeared' content on any platform. Maybe some kind of peer-to-peer system where everyone's browser cache basically acts as a searchable archive, with a browser plugin that inserts a button into web pages to show disappeared content.

(It's also worth noting that probably a lot of content that was removed by moderators was removed for a legitimate reason. So, ideally you'd have some sort of crowd moderation to get rid of the stuff that really is spam or hate speech or whatever.)

Edit: ok you guys, all your responses have convinced me that I misread the room, and I'm going to reverse the title edit now.

-- original reply: --

I did those title edits to (marginally) reduce the flamebait effect of the title, in keeping with standard moderation practice (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Titles have by far the biggest impact on discussion quality, so this is a big deal. Especially when the topic is divisive.

The current title (11:36 AM PST) is:

'Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram'

@dang IDK if this matters, nor when the title was changed (from submission, to now). Just an FYI.

The problematic point here is that Facebook is more than willing to obliterate certain topics and political views when requested, not which ones or by whom orders in particular.

No, what it proves is that users will flag unsubstantive flamewar posts on Hacker News, regardless of the topic or the commenter's position on the topic.

This is a good thing. Posts like your comment here break the site guidelines badly*, and the users who flagged it were quite correct to do so, regardless of your (or their) political opinion.

* for example, this one: 'Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.', and this one: 'Don't be snarky.'. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop doing those things? We'd appreciate it.

I think he has a majority of the voting shares, so nobody can get rid of him unfortunately. Meta is too big to fail and Zuck is set to be dictator for life if he wants to be.

This is in the FAQ: see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#whyrank ('Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?'). But here's a longer answer.

In the case of a story like this, which has significant new information (SNI) [1] on a major ongoing topic (MOT) [2], and at least some hope of a substantive discussion, moderators sometimes turn off the user flags on the story [3] so that it can spend time on HN's front page.

In such cases, we usually adjust the degree to which we turn off the flags so that the tug-of-war between upvotes and flags isn't affected too dramatically. Usually the best way to support a substantive discussion is for the story to remain on HN's front page, but not in the highest few slots, where it would burn much hotter.

Since upvotes and submission time are public data but flags aren't, it can appear like a story is being downweighted when in fact the opposite is the case, as with this thread. That's not a rule, though—we do also downweight stories sometimes. That's why the FAQ explains that you can't derive rank from votes and time alone.

The reason moderation works this way, btw, is that HN is a curated site [4] (and always has been—here's me explaining this when I took over HN 11 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621).

Moderators' job is to jiggle the system out of the failure modes [5] it would otherwise end up in if the software were running unattended. Turning off flags on certain stories, and adding downweight to other stories, are two examples. The goal is the same: to support substantive discussion on interesting stories, and (as a necessary condition for that) prevent the site from burning too hot if we can.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

It's all skewed, obviously. It's all about alignment.

I just don't see a way that a two-state solution works. A three-state solution might be feasible (Gaza and West Bank governed separately), but then you have to deal with internal Israeli politics, and I really don't know enough about them to make even an educated guess about how hard it would be to get that through (I would imagine very, but like I said, I know very little about their politics).

this is grossly misunderstanding the situation in Gaza, a two state solution was never acceptable to Israel, Hamas as it exists today is a result of Netanyahu policy. Israel created the monster to justify their genocide.

'The civilians should be evacuated.' They don't want to leave and Israel uses these 'evacuations' to make sure Palestinians never return, as they did in 1948, 1967, etc[1][2]. This is whitewashing genocide and is an extremely violent view, packaged in reasonable sounding words. Israel has a long documented history of using terrorism to build its state. If you truly oppose terrorism I recommend starting with the books I've sourced.

[1] The ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

[2] The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Kahlidi

A two state solution is never possible when one state keeps expanding with impunity, and every time the second state resists it is called a terrorist state. My country resisted colonization in the mid 20th century and the resistance efforts were called terrorism by everyone, nobody calls them terrorists now.

And I assume after this evacuation, purging, and installment of a new government Israel will magically change its ways? You need to address both sides to find a solution.

Hey this Chomsky guy seems pretty smart! Would be great to get him on mainstream media sometime.. hah

> It's never as simple as the White House calling up Mark Zuckerberg and saying 'hey, silence X'.

The government got so comfy it really got to be that easy:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh... (Aug 27, 2024)

> White House, "repeatedly pressured" Facebook for months to take down "certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire."

> The officials "expressed a lot of frustration" when the company didn't agree, he said in the letter.

It's not only about suppression; it's about cultivating fear around expressing your opinions. There are groups actively working to have individuals fired for voicing support for Palestine.

For instance, a woman wrote "Freedom for Palestine" in Gaelic on LinkedIn, prompting a group of Israelis in a WhatsApp chat to actively coordinate efforts to get her fired.

The General Manager of Wix, Batsheva (Levine) Moshe, responded in a WhatsApp chat saying:

"Hi yes we know. Being taken care of since it was published. I believe there will be an announcement soon regarding our reaction."

Wix were orderd to pay €35K for unfair dismissal.

ref(s):

https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-inf...

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/israeli-tech-firm-ordere...

do you feel like it is "Israel's war on Gaza"? Does that represent reality fully? Is that what children should be taught, that there is a demonic people that kills children? You don't see any problem with omitting the massacre of israeli civilians, the captured hostages and many thousands of rocket launches towards densely populated civilian communities? is that how we achieve peace in your view?

Similarly, pro-Palestine content on HN is highly suppressed.

I was there during the onavo scandal. It was straight up spyware. They would regularly show graphs of snapchat usage vs messenger vs whatsapp and the snapchat data was explicitly attributed to onovo logs.

It's a conspiracy theory. Plenty of Israeli citizens support Palestinian rights and are opposed to what their government is doing. The guilt by association leads to things like antisemitism and anti-Palestinian hate and all the rest.

If you have valid rules but in practice only enforce them against a single group, then in some sense you are asking the wrong question.

In other words, for people who assume rule enforcement is supposed to be fair, they see unfair enforcement as hypocrisy. However, if you just see enforcement as another tool to wield against enemies, hypocrisy is irrelevant. What matters is power. It's my basketball, I make the rules.

What would you define as "valid"

The article does mention it, but I agree that the story is incomplete without a clearer idea (including examples) of what is being censored.

> 'A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report investigating Meta's moderation of pro-Palestine content post-October 7th found that, of 1,050 posts HRW documented as taken-down or suppressed on Facebook or Instagram, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine, while just one post was content in support of Israel.'

> The missing part of this article: are the requests valid?

They are enforced with neither human nor AI review, so the reality is that we don't know. They are enforced by virtue of who submits them, with no question on whether they are valid or not.

Having heard from friends the kind of censorship they face on the topic on Facebook and Instagram when discussing the topics at hand, I know of plenty of situations where people were censored without breaking any rules. They're a small sample of course.

Defending yourself from genocide is not terrorism

Israel is comitting mass murder and genocide. Meta is helping to cover it up.

Depends what you consider 'incitement'. The IL government seems to go by 'whoever is not for us is against us' logic:

> A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report investigating Meta's moderation of pro-Palestine content post-October 7th found that, of 1,050 posts HRW documented as taken-down or suppressed on Facebook or Instagram, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine, while just one post was content in support of Israel.

> Like there is a war going on, a pretty nasty one at that.

Sorry, but this is already part if the narrative. (Or rather the implication is that this would justify everything because wars seemingly have different rules. But if course only for one side) It's a 'war' were one side inflicts 100 times as many casualties on one side than the other and still has no intention of stopping.

From the lost of countries and knowing how rampant antisemitism is in these countries I suspect majority of the request are valid and express support and urge for terrorism.

Ask anyone who works at Meta if they are valid, and they themselves will tell you, they don't really know. That should let you know how easy it would be for Israel to wield this tool in their favor. If they actually are doing it unfairly or not, we can never know since these posts are automatically taken down without human review.

It would be interesting to see a random sample of these posts. I know any sample they released would be groomed to make them look good, but it would be interesting if it were possible.

Fair enough, but the social media companies should be honest about it. Instead they brag hypocritically about free speech.

I disagree with you though. These global social media platforms have an incredible amount of sway over our society. As long as they have that reach, they should not be allowed to distort and silence.