Maybe it’s related to their decision to turn YCombinator into a “safe space” for very specific people; or the way YC takes steps to silence some voices while hiding the fact that they’re silenced. These are deliberate decisions that cause the site to work very differently than naive people envision it from working.
I’m not crazy enough to sue over that shit; but somebody might be.
It's hard to tell what these dark insinuations refer to, but there's nothing (that I'm aware of) that hasn't been fully explained many times—nor are there any questions we don't answer. If you're talking about shadowbanning, for example, there's plenty of explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686672 and the links back from there.
If you're going to make a claim like that, you should supply links so readers can make up their own minds. When people don't do that, it's usually because the real story is rather different than they're making out. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I may be mistaken, but I believe that with your previous accounts that we were aware of, the "real genuine content" was pretty trollish. When users keep creating accounts like that, we stop telling them that we're banning them, because they know perfectly well what they're doing, as do we. This is all explained at the links I mentioned upthread.
We do make mistakes, and when we find out about them, we apologize and try to correct things. But shadowbanning accounts that are innocently posting "real genuine content" isn't anything we normally do.
For sure, the site worked differently prior to 2014. I'm talking about how we've operated since then. 7 years is an internet eternity! Though I suppose I should be thankful that people are still talking about things that happened in 2013 because it means they still care.
HN was moderated differently in the early years because pg was running it in whatever hours he could eke out between running YC and having small children. That was a totally different situation than now. It's a miracle the site stayed up at all.
It's not clear why that account was banned, unless it was related to other accounts that did bad things? (You don't have to answer that.) In any case, I've unbanned it now and restored the affected posts, in case that's helpful.
I always assumed it was because the name looked like spam nonsense, which is why I put the explanation in this one. I got over it pretty quickly, but thank you for the gesture.
I don't think HN ever used to ban accounts for that reason. It must have been something else. We might be able to figure out what from the logs, but that's time-consuming and probably not worth it.
You are, in fact, mistaken. If you go back far enough, you hit a high quality account banned for a stupid reason, without notice, warning, or discussion. After that one you’ll find accounts that shitpost, but before that... good stuff!
But there’s no value in arguing over this. I long ago decided it was more fun to burn the bridge (by rudely stating things that are true) on this set of browser/cookies/account/IPs. I’m not going to dox myself to prove that your second paragraph was wrong. Especially when I concede that _after_ I got banned stupidly and unfairly, I decided to fight back by becoming ban-worthy.
The “optimist” in me thinks your a decent person who happens to have some big blind spots and biases, and you might eventually figure out how to address them if you meet the right set of people and start to learn from folks who don’t look like you. Maybe you’d realize that there are a collection of things that HN encourages, all of which contribute to a “safe space” for certain people, while excluding others.
I hope my optimistic view is eventually right.
Edit: thank you to the peer post to this comment that gives an example of this happening to them a long time ago. I didn’t want to dox myself to show it’s a real thing.
I’m adding this as an ‘edit’ instead of a reply to the peer post because this account is just barely allowed to post at all.
If, like the other commenter, you're talking about something that happened over 7 years ago, the situation back then was different, as I've explained above. When I talk about how we moderate HN, I mean now and in recent years.
7 years is surely long enough to establish a new moderation policy on a website. If that's really the reason why you're still abusing HN after all this time, I think you should reconsider.
Which part specifically is confusing you? Like, it's a long TOU, so I don't think anyone's gonna write down the whole explanation here, but let's pick one paragraph:
> Commercial Use: Unless otherwise expressly authorized herein or in the Site, you agree not to display, distribute, license, perform, publish, reproduce, duplicate, copy, create derivative works from, modify, sell, resell, exploit, transfer or upload for any commercial purposes, any portion of the Site, use of the Site, or access to the Site. The buying, exchanging, selling and/or promotion (commercial or otherwise) of upvotes, comments, submissions, accounts (or any aspect of your account or any other account), karma, and/or content is strictly prohibited, constitutes a material breach of these Terms of Use, and could result in legal liability.
This means: don't use the content of the site to make derivative works to make money, otherwise we might sue you.
It's mostly straightforward stuff like that. If there's a specific part that you're having trouble with, I'm happy to have a crack at explaining it.
Not to get too reductive or anything, but the reasons are very similar to why people have the authority to compel public expectations based on the arrangement of atoms (e.g. you aren't allowed to stab me, etc.). Namely: those with the power to enforce those rules think it's a good idea to do so, and the public continues to support that configuration of the legal system.
Absolutely. I think that's how we got here. But, the thought regulation regime is pretty new historically. I don't know why we accept it, on the basis.... That thoughts ... Take up space?
I'm afraid I'm a little confused about what your question is. I don't think the notion that thoughts take up space has anything to do with why TOUs are enforceable in the US. It's more because the relevant stakeholders are either largely not very interested in or impacted by TOUs (the public at large) or are interested in and positively impacted by TOUs (the services offered with TOUs).
If the interpretations are accurate and complete, they'll presumably have the same impact as what is being interpreted. If the interpretations are inaccurate, then your reliance on them will not be a defense. For example, suppose TOU;dr got the arbitration requirements wrong. You could not sue ycombinator then argue that you had relied on TOU;dr, thus you were not bound by the arbitration agreement in the ycombinator TOU.
1. Legal contracts are supposed to be as detailed as possible so there's as little room for disagreement as possible when taken to court.
2. It's better for companies if users don't take the time to read and understand their terms, and beyond a certain length and complexity they will just scroll through and click yes.
3. Lawyers are incentivized to write incompehensibly because it helps keep them in business.
4. It's easier to write incompehensible legal text than simple English that a layman can follow, and customers seldomly call lawyers out on it because they've been trained to accept this as the status quo (also see 3).
The "good" answer for why terms of use and contracts are written more complexly is because they encode more complex information, that is less subject to varying interpretations.
Though certainly there is a 'pattern' to these that I think lawyers just fall back into that can be less understandable than needed.
If nothing else, many contracts are written in a somewhat weird frame, where one party is referred to in third person, and the other in second person. And often phrasing is so that the second person needs to recognize a claim of the third person ("you acknowledge etc etc").
In many ways, contracts are like the ultimate reversal of YAGNI. Imagine deploying code that you literally could not fix after release, and you knew that nearly all deviations from intended behavior would just kick you in the butt. Your code (and general product function) would probably get a bit weird too.
Information is not property. That's the postmodern nonsense. Property takes up space. These are mostly thoughts being controlled under the rubric of property
You'll notice though, that the term 'intellectual property' wasn't invented until the (roughly) mid 20th century. After which time, copyright and patent law were affixed to this construction. There was no intellectual property, prior. I would politely suggest that this piece is a post-hoc justification, based on the ignorance of this arrangement. (Because the author, like all humans, is morally ambiguous. Intellectual property was an assumption going into this piece)
Copy rights, are not property. Patents are monopoly licenses.
Again, the patent system is mentioned in the constitution. It's not "postmodern". You may not agree with the system (I certainly don't), but "postmodern" is the not correct movement to associate it with
That’s true, property is exclusive rights. Information is a thing in which property can exist, though.
> That's the postmodern nonsense. Property takes up space.
One might choose to create a property regime in which only tangible items are subjects of property, but neither IP nor intangible property more generally have anything to do with postmodernity; while some forms of intangible property are earlier, the category (including the subcategory now known as “intellectual property”) really flowered as part of the same development of property rights that birthed capitalism.
Zoom out a bit, maybe look at 1602 to the present and ask, "What can and can't be property, who decides what is and isn't property, am I ok with this, and why am I ok with this?" What are the second and third order effects that result from first principles here?
You could though, as long as you're careful with contracts. With backend software that just means a contract that you're not going to give a copy to anyone else. With frontend software that means making people sign contracts that they aren't going to further distribute it, before you distribute it to them.
All copyright really does is make these contracts "automatic". I guess that's important for things like web ui's, but it doesn't really matter for anything with an EULA, e.g. appstores like steam could work exactly the same as they do today.
> With backend software that just means a contract that you're not going to give a copy to anyone else. With frontend software that means making people sign contracts that they aren't going to further distribute it
You are basically describing intellectual property
Well yes, that's my point, you can recreate the parts of copyright that matter with contract law... so wanting to get rid of copyright isn't really a contradiction to our profession.
We run our SaaS on Digital Ocean's backend and their TOS says that anything we allow onto their boxes has to comply, so that means our customers have to comply with DO's TOS.
To handle this, we link to theirs in place of a custom one.
2020 (left) v. 2017 (right): Privacy policy was significantly reworked, not the biggest surprise considering CCPA, but n++ is choking on the compare. Some interesting TOU changes though:
According to Article 3 of GDPR, it applies to processing if any of three conditions are met:
1. Processing that takes place in the context of processors and controllers that are in the Union, regardless of whether or not the processing itself takes place in the Union.
2. Processing the data of subjects who are in the Union by controllers or processors who are not in the Union if the processing is related to offering goods or services to such subjects in the Union or the processing is related to monitoring the behavior of such subjects that takes place in the Union.
3. Processing of personal data by a controller not established in the Union, but in a place where Member State law applies by virtue of public international law.
If none of those cover an entity, that entity's processing is not covered by GDPR.
#2 would probably be the only relevant one for HN.
Is HN offering goods or services to subjects in the Union? Sure, people in the Union can access HN and even make accounts. But that might not be enough. One of the recitals for Article 3 elaborates:
> In order to determine whether such a controller or processor is offering goods or services to data subjects who are in the Union, it should be ascertained whether it is apparent that the controller or processor envisages offering services to data subjects in one or more Member States in the Union. Whereas the mere accessibility of the controller’s, processor’s or an intermediary’s website in the Union, of an email address or of other contact details, or the use of a language generally used in the third country where the controller is established, is insufficient to ascertain such intention, factors such as the use of a language or a currency generally used in one or more Member States with the possibility of ordering goods and services in that other language, or the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union, may make it apparent that the controller envisages offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union.
Does HN envisage offering services in the Union, or is it simply a site that happens to work when accessed from the Union but was not envisaged to do so?
Another recital elaborates on the monitoring of behavior of subjects in the Union:
> In order to determine whether a processing activity can be considered to monitor the behaviour of data subjects, it should be ascertained whether natural persons are tracked on the internet including potential subsequent use of personal data processing techniques which consist of profiling a natural person, particularly in order to take decisions concerning her or him or for analysing or predicting her or his personal preferences, behaviours and attitudes.
HN seems to collect minimal data. It might not rise to the level of monitoring that would be needed to count as monitoring behaviour.
Here's what HN admins were responding last yeat to requests to have your account deleted (article 17 of the GDPR):
>Our understanding based on the analysis done by YC's legal team is that Hacker News does not fall under the GDPR, so for the time being we're sticking with the approach of not deleting account histories wholesale but helping with privacy concerns in any other way we can. The problem with deleting entire histories is that it guts the threads the account had participated in, which is unfair to the other users who posted.
> advertise or offer to sell or buy any goods or services for any business purpose that is not specifically authorized;
Heh. I'd say this part is disconnected from reality.
A very significant number of posts and comments recommend aka advertise (in one way or another) various goods or services. Typically third-party goods or services ("I use this"), sometimes first-party ("we made this"). And this is what brings huge value to the website. I get it, ToS are about spam, but it's probably impossible to discern good and bad advertising in legal terms.
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
Emphasis mine.
---
Edit: It gets more interesting with the WhoIsHiring threads. I haven't seen specific authorizations for them, but considering HN staff have commented in said threads in the past (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26306206), this may also be specifically authorized. (I don't know who owns WhoIsHiring)
They allow only California residents to delete their personal information, and they may require proof of residency to initiate a deletion. I am disappointed.
I don't speak legalese, but I can tell you what the actual practice is. For YC data (e.g. applications to YC, participation in Startup School, Work at a Startup, and so on), we delete people's data when they ask us to. For HN data, it's more complicated—we try not to delete posts that got replies, because that's unfair to the commenters who replied, and so on. But we have a lot of tricks to help people in more precise ways than wholesale deletion, and we help people with such requests every day. This is in HN's FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. There's more explanation at these links from yesterday:
80 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadI wonder what changed and made them add the new terms of use.
[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20141020194316/https://www.ycombi...
Probably a lawsuit, mandatory arbitration avoids lawsuits. I’m just guessing, I have no concrete info.
CCPA's April enforcement deadline, most likely.
I’m not crazy enough to sue over that shit; but somebody might be.
Thank you for, once again, proving that you’re a low integrity individual.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that with your previous accounts that we were aware of, the "real genuine content" was pretty trollish. When users keep creating accounts like that, we stop telling them that we're banning them, because they know perfectly well what they're doing, as do we. This is all explained at the links I mentioned upthread.
We do make mistakes, and when we find out about them, we apologize and try to correct things. But shadowbanning accounts that are innocently posting "real genuine content" isn't anything we normally do.
For example my first account, which admittedly didn't have top quality content, hardly did anything worthy of a ban by today's standards.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=d3c0d3dab0d3
HN was moderated differently in the early years because pg was running it in whatever hours he could eke out between running YC and having small children. That was a totally different situation than now. It's a miracle the site stayed up at all.
It's not clear why that account was banned, unless it was related to other accounts that did bad things? (You don't have to answer that.) In any case, I've unbanned it now and restored the affected posts, in case that's helpful.
But there’s no value in arguing over this. I long ago decided it was more fun to burn the bridge (by rudely stating things that are true) on this set of browser/cookies/account/IPs. I’m not going to dox myself to prove that your second paragraph was wrong. Especially when I concede that _after_ I got banned stupidly and unfairly, I decided to fight back by becoming ban-worthy.
The “optimist” in me thinks your a decent person who happens to have some big blind spots and biases, and you might eventually figure out how to address them if you meet the right set of people and start to learn from folks who don’t look like you. Maybe you’d realize that there are a collection of things that HN encourages, all of which contribute to a “safe space” for certain people, while excluding others.
I hope my optimistic view is eventually right.
Edit: thank you to the peer post to this comment that gives an example of this happening to them a long time ago. I didn’t want to dox myself to show it’s a real thing.
I’m adding this as an ‘edit’ instead of a reply to the peer post because this account is just barely allowed to post at all.
7 years is surely long enough to establish a new moderation policy on a website. If that's really the reason why you're still abusing HN after all this time, I think you should reconsider.
> Commercial Use: Unless otherwise expressly authorized herein or in the Site, you agree not to display, distribute, license, perform, publish, reproduce, duplicate, copy, create derivative works from, modify, sell, resell, exploit, transfer or upload for any commercial purposes, any portion of the Site, use of the Site, or access to the Site. The buying, exchanging, selling and/or promotion (commercial or otherwise) of upvotes, comments, submissions, accounts (or any aspect of your account or any other account), karma, and/or content is strictly prohibited, constitutes a material breach of these Terms of Use, and could result in legal liability.
This means: don't use the content of the site to make derivative works to make money, otherwise we might sue you.
It's mostly straightforward stuff like that. If there's a specific part that you're having trouble with, I'm happy to have a crack at explaining it.
I don't know why terms can't be written that simply in the first place.
1. Legal contracts are supposed to be as detailed as possible so there's as little room for disagreement as possible when taken to court.
2. It's better for companies if users don't take the time to read and understand their terms, and beyond a certain length and complexity they will just scroll through and click yes.
4. It's easier to write incompehensible legal text than simple English that a layman can follow, and customers seldomly call lawyers out on it because they've been trained to accept this as the status quo (also see 3).
Though certainly there is a 'pattern' to these that I think lawyers just fall back into that can be less understandable than needed.
If nothing else, many contracts are written in a somewhat weird frame, where one party is referred to in third person, and the other in second person. And often phrasing is so that the second person needs to recognize a claim of the third person ("you acknowledge etc etc").
In many ways, contracts are like the ultimate reversal of YAGNI. Imagine deploying code that you literally could not fix after release, and you knew that nearly all deviations from intended behavior would just kick you in the butt. Your code (and general product function) would probably get a bit weird too.
https://txpatentattorney.com/blog/the-history-of-intellectua...
Copy rights, are not property. Patents are monopoly licenses.
You're incorrect in your use of postmodern in this and the above statement.
That’s true, property is exclusive rights. Information is a thing in which property can exist, though.
> That's the postmodern nonsense. Property takes up space.
One might choose to create a property regime in which only tangible items are subjects of property, but neither IP nor intangible property more generally have anything to do with postmodernity; while some forms of intangible property are earlier, the category (including the subcategory now known as “intellectual property”) really flowered as part of the same development of property rights that birthed capitalism.
All copyright really does is make these contracts "automatic". I guess that's important for things like web ui's, but it doesn't really matter for anything with an EULA, e.g. appstores like steam could work exactly the same as they do today.
You are basically describing intellectual property
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To handle this, we link to theirs in place of a custom one.
Pre-2017: http://web.archive.org/web/20161229045611/http://www.ycombin...
2017: http://web.archive.org/web/20170303015020/http://www.ycombin...
2020: http://web.archive.org/web/20200130013739/https://www.ycombi...
2021: http://web.archive.org/web/20210301143626/http://www.ycombin... (current linked)
I'm still doing diffs.
Edit:
2021 (left) v. 2020 (right) diff:
https://imgur.com/a/8LKXKNs
2020 (left) v. 2017 (right): Privacy policy was significantly reworked, not the biggest surprise considering CCPA, but n++ is choking on the compare. Some interesting TOU changes though:
https://imgur.com/a/q4zzm8G
> h. Future Changes to Arbitration Agreemen
Someone forgot to dot their Is and cross their Ts :)
Unless you are prepared to completely sever business ties with Europe.
1. Processing that takes place in the context of processors and controllers that are in the Union, regardless of whether or not the processing itself takes place in the Union.
2. Processing the data of subjects who are in the Union by controllers or processors who are not in the Union if the processing is related to offering goods or services to such subjects in the Union or the processing is related to monitoring the behavior of such subjects that takes place in the Union.
3. Processing of personal data by a controller not established in the Union, but in a place where Member State law applies by virtue of public international law.
If none of those cover an entity, that entity's processing is not covered by GDPR.
#2 would probably be the only relevant one for HN.
Is HN offering goods or services to subjects in the Union? Sure, people in the Union can access HN and even make accounts. But that might not be enough. One of the recitals for Article 3 elaborates:
> In order to determine whether such a controller or processor is offering goods or services to data subjects who are in the Union, it should be ascertained whether it is apparent that the controller or processor envisages offering services to data subjects in one or more Member States in the Union. Whereas the mere accessibility of the controller’s, processor’s or an intermediary’s website in the Union, of an email address or of other contact details, or the use of a language generally used in the third country where the controller is established, is insufficient to ascertain such intention, factors such as the use of a language or a currency generally used in one or more Member States with the possibility of ordering goods and services in that other language, or the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union, may make it apparent that the controller envisages offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union.
Does HN envisage offering services in the Union, or is it simply a site that happens to work when accessed from the Union but was not envisaged to do so?
Another recital elaborates on the monitoring of behavior of subjects in the Union:
> In order to determine whether a processing activity can be considered to monitor the behaviour of data subjects, it should be ascertained whether natural persons are tracked on the internet including potential subsequent use of personal data processing techniques which consist of profiling a natural person, particularly in order to take decisions concerning her or him or for analysing or predicting her or his personal preferences, behaviours and attitudes.
HN seems to collect minimal data. It might not rise to the level of monitoring that would be needed to count as monitoring behaviour.
Here's what HN admins were responding last yeat to requests to have your account deleted (article 17 of the GDPR):
>Our understanding based on the analysis done by YC's legal team is that Hacker News does not fall under the GDPR, so for the time being we're sticking with the approach of not deleting account histories wholesale but helping with privacy concerns in any other way we can. The problem with deleting entire histories is that it guts the threads the account had participated in, which is unfair to the other users who posted.
> advertise or offer to sell or buy any goods or services for any business purpose that is not specifically authorized;
Heh. I'd say this part is disconnected from reality.
A very significant number of posts and comments recommend aka advertise (in one way or another) various goods or services. Typically third-party goods or services ("I use this"), sometimes first-party ("we made this"). And this is what brings huge value to the website. I get it, ToS are about spam, but it's probably impossible to discern good and bad advertising in legal terms.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
Emphasis mine.
---
Edit: It gets more interesting with the WhoIsHiring threads. I haven't seen specific authorizations for them, but considering HN staff have commented in said threads in the past (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26306206), this may also be specifically authorized. (I don't know who owns WhoIsHiring)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26962860
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959559
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959675