After rt.com et al were blocked in the EU they also kept working for a few more week/months before I had to use a mirror/VPN to read the new paper of "the enemy".
Side note: I though being able to read the news of the enemy was testimony to the moral high ground of a "modern free and democratic society". No more moral high ground if you are trying to shape the perception of the public with censorship.
I personally don't support blocking Al Jazeera. It's not that I'm a fan of them or any news station operated under a dictatorship without free press. It's clear that Al Jazeera acts as the propaganda wing of the Qatari government, and Qatar, being one of the main sponsors of Hamas, uses it to effectively spread Hamas propaganda. However, the real question is what does blocking them achieve. Does it stop their influence? No. Does it make them harder to watch here? No. Are the people advocating for their blockage even watching it? Likely not. It's mostly done because it's something the government can claim to have achieved for what remains of their base. I'm skeptical that the blocking of the website will actually occur, as it will probably be challenged in court.
Regardless, in a democracy, internet censorship is a slippery slope, and for that reason, I am against it in most cases.
The sponsoring of Hamas by Qatar has happened with approval from Netanyahu. Until October 7th of course.
And the reason that Hamas headquarters are in Doha, is because the US government requested that in 2011.
I'm not going to defend Bibi and his government. They have made and continue to make many decisions I disagree with. Like the vast majority of Israelis, I think we should go to elections sooner rather than later.
However, this does not change the fact that now there is an active war between Hamas and Israel most Israelis dislike Al Jazeera because they perceive to be part of the propaganda wing of Hamas with Qatar's support.
Of course it does? Most people are not going to go out of their way for it unless they have specific reasons to do so. What's on/available by default matters. (Ask any UX specialist.)
I should know better, my wife is a UX specialist!
You make a good point. What I should have said is that it won’t stop people who really want to watch it.
But then that isn't the goal: totally preventing you from ever seeing Al Jazeera or somesuch. As you noted: that'd be curtailment of freedoms only befitting dictatorships. Nobody wants that.
Making it slightly more difficult to consume outright propaganda by not having it front and center; that seems to me to be a very much acceptable move for democratic and free states to make in the context of information warfare.
The Qatari government has been hosting Hamas at the request of the United States and Israel, which want to use Qatar as an intermediary (similarly to how Qatar facilitated talks between the US and the Taliban).
Al Jazeera has more journalists on the ground in Gaza than anyone else. They're some of the only independent media there (because Israel has blocked international media from entering, but Al Jazeera already has people there). If you want to know what's going on in Gaza, you watch Al Jazeera.
The state's enemy isn't my enemy. Consider the case of Edward Snowden. Journalism is still valuable even if you disagree with the person's motives or aims.
No, but Russia is my enemy, and should be the enemy of everyone who cares about a liberal world order based on law, not might.
And in the case of RT, they had left even the pretence of journalism a long time ago. But I agree with those that say we should not have banned them. When we try to defend our liberal world order with censorship, we are certainly throwing out the baby with the bath water.
There has never been a situation where all had more equal access to speech than today. Printing presses were expensive and complicated machines, and distributing handbills was far slower and riskier than tweeting.
Today, anyone can make a website. If they say enough interesting things, they'll get eyeballs. Even if those things are false, and even if the algorithms of the walled gardens want to suppress them, they'll still get out.
I think perhaps you're underappreciating the difficulty of physical distribution. Having one's voice heard has always been the domain of the rich and powerful. Sure, platforms control promotion and discoverability today, but I doubt that gives them more strength to control dissenting views than was available in the days of the printing press.
It's a heck of a lot harder to effectively eradicate physical media than digital.
F.ex. if I shower a town with 250 physical leaflets + I post on all the major platforms, and immediately people of power attempt to suppress them, which do you think results in more people seeing them?
Well I think it depends on the situation. If you're trying to post something they have already built good defenses against (e.g. child porn, or maybe mocking the king of Thailand), you'd probably have better luck with the handbills, but then you'd also have a better chance of getting arrested. If you are posting something that isn't automatically suppressed, I bet social media would still get you more reach.
You're missing the third option however. Start your own blog, then just post links on all of the major social medias, and especially on some of the minor ones. Once your link hits the right Signal groups or Truth Social followers or whatever, it will fly around way faster than any samizdat ever could.
> And in the case of RT, they had left even the pretence of journalism a long time ago.
What is RT doing that is not found in FOX, NBC, CNews.fr, Hayom?
> liberal world order based on law, not might.
This is a facade. The talking point the NATO/US/west uses, while they violate every such rule when they see fit. You may be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer
This is exactly one of the Russian talking points. "You see, we might have invaded a few neighbour countries with the intention of annexing the territories, but look at NATO, they are equally bad because they invaded Iraq." (NATO didn't invade Iraq, the US did with the help of UK, Poland, and Australia)
I can't take someone (like Mearsheimer) who warns that Germany again is likely to try to invade Europe even a little bit serious. He clearly knows nothing about contemporary German politics, culture, or how well they are doing manufacturing and trading.
> This is exactly one of the Russian talking points.
Calling something a "Russian talking point" does not make it less true. Russia would not have invaded if (combination of factors): Ukraine did not have ethnic Russians that were being oppressed (see the Odessa union house massacre), Ukraine did not want to go NATO, Ukraine was not a safe haven of anti-Russia fascists (see the enormous statue for Bandera in Lvov -- bizarre how that's allowed in an "EU ally"). Minks agreements were "just to give Ukraine time to build military" said Merkel (a guarantor of the agreement). Russia was cheated by the west, and behaves accordingly, if you ask me.
> who warns that Germany again is likely to try to invade Europe
> Ukraine did not have ethnic Russians that were being oppressed (see the Odessa union house massacre)
This has ceased being a valid casus belli in the developed world since 1945.
Annexation of a neighboring state's territory isn't justified by purported ethnic persecution.
Not least, because it's historically been the most common manufactured lie to justify war.
> Ukraine did not want to go NATO
Since when does Russia get a say in other sovereign countries' decisions?
Last I checked at the UN, Russia (and China) were big supporters of countries' ability to do whatever they wanted within their own borders (external complaints be damned).
> Ukraine was not a safe haven of anti-Russia fascists
> anti-Russia
Hard to forget the 4 million Ukrainians the USSR purposefully killed during the Holodomor. [0]
When a country does something to an ethnic group that ranks with the Holocaust, it shouldn't be surprised when people are anti-it.
>> fascism: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition [1]
> exalts nation and often race above the individual
How's the glorification of Russkiy Mir going? Or the vilification of non-Russian ethnic minorities?
> stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader
How long has Putin been president or prime minister?
> severe economic and social regimentation
How many state-owned enterprises are there in Russia?
And what inalienable freedom of speech and association rights do Russian citizen have?
> forcible suppression of opposition
How many opposition candidates ran in the last election?
If Russia is looking for fascism, it might want to start with a mirror.
Because it is a pejorative generalization. Some people are susceptible to labels like "the migrants" and short circuit their reasoning when confronted with eg. articles from RT or aljazeera "must be fictious enemy propanda".
because they not my enemy. they dont threaten me. imho NATO threatens them by trying to extend into ukraine/georgia and making color revolutions on their borders.
They are my enemy. I’m living in a country with borders less than 300 km from Russia.
NATO wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for Russia. The only reason Russia’s neighbours strive to join NATO is because Russia’s habit of invading them when they don’t behave exactly as Russia wants them too.
> I though being able to read the news of the enemy was testimony to the moral high ground of a "modern free and democratic society".
Sure, if you believe your own (or more accurately: most liberal democracies') propaganda. But it really depends on how invested that enemy is in convincing your citizens to side with it. It turns out that "freedom of speech" ultimately is a losing strategy against an enemy that's excellent at abusing speech (which is another way of saying they have a good understanding of psychology, rhetorics and deception).
The successful way to engage with propaganda is not to let it sit alongside reality[0] but to contextualize it with reality. A widely known example in US news coverage for the former is showing "both sides of the debate" on issues like global warming or evolution: merely giving it an equal weight gives it equal presence in public perception and legitimizes it. Contextualizing means being explicit about which side you agree with and explaining why the given argument by the other side is wrong.
Of course the problem with effective propaganda is that it's not simply misinformation which can be contrasted and dissected easily but disinformation that not only shields itself against analysis but actively disrupts any attempt at analysis. Russian propaganda legitimizing the invasion of Ukraine for example (and this isn't new, this is literally a continuation of Soviet Union psychological warfare) used multiple mutually contradictory conflicting narratives which effectively drown out any other narrative by not only giving a manufactured alternative equal weight but giving equal weight to multiple alternatives, like a DDoS attack on information.
[0]: Of course we can debate what "reality" means but no matter the overarching narrative or the individual justifications, it's nearly impossible to avoid agreeing on things like "Russia sent ground troops in the direction of Kyiv within Ukranian borders" even if you might have different explanations of why that happened or what the intention behind that was or whether it constitutes a military attack.
Of course the irony is that in this case the side most heavily relying on disinformation seems to be Israel given its various contradictory official claims on social media. But arguably their application of it is nowhere near as effective. It's also worth mentioning that not only did the EU kick out Russian state-owned media but Russian television is also heavily censored and legal access to foreign news sources very limited. So the answer to "Who's engaging in censorship?" in this case seems to be "Everyone, to varying degrees". That implies this has never been a meaningful moral distinction, no matter what bleeding heart liberals and free speech libertarians may claim.
You realize the wealthier a society, the fewer kids?
It’s 100% a cultural norm issue. I was raised in Canada but have lived in Israel for the past 20 years. The vast majority of my Canadian friends have no kids, and the ones that do have at most 2. In Israel, all of my friends (secular/non-religious) have kids, usually 3 or more. The idea of whether you can or can’t afford a kid does not cross people’s minds. You get married, and you have a kid. If you don’t get married, and you can, you still have a kid. It’s just what’s expected. I have numerous friends who are single and made the choice to have multiple kids via donors. When it is the norm in society, it’s just something you do. I am sure social pressure has an effect. You see your friends having kids, then you want to have kids too, and then your kids become friends with your friends’ kids, and it expands from there.
Financially, life in Canada is much easier as a parent when compared to here, but socially, life in Canada as a parent is much harder when I compare it to here.
I have 3 kids - for me personally it was the best choice I have ever made, but I accept that I no longer have my own life. I live for my kids and I wouldn’t change it for the world. It probably helps that most of my friends are in the same situation.
I think it is likely the complete opposite of trouble. It helped them write their comment faster and in such a way that it was easy to understand. This is one of the best use cases for chatgpt. Rather than spend minutes trying to get the right wording, tell chatgpt what you want to say in a few short notes and get a well formed coherent text.
Now if this is a good thing, that’s up for debate - although overall I personally would say yes.
I think the point here is that for a group of people (I would argue most) the primary goal of a comment is to broadcast your ideas, with the language being used to convey them of secondary concern, of which this part could be delegated to AI.
This is part of progress (be it good or bad progress).
It used to be that the majority of the US population worked in agriculture and today thanks to automation - it’s around 1% of the population. Same goes for numerous roles (secretaries, switchboard operators etc.)
As far as ChatGPT goes - I have a lot of concerns around it, but I am still not convinced it will replace search. I think it might compliment search. Either way I think it’s a good thing if how we search changes. Search is broken, it no longer brings me the best results, it’s becoming harder and harder to differentiate between ads and legit links (this is of course intentional because of revenue and KPIs) and I know longer trust the results. I am not sure if chatGPT is the answer, but maybe it’s part of the answer.
Important lesson - teach your kids to have a self development mindset. They need to be prepared to have multiple career changes and that their current skill set might be made obsolete at any moment. It sucks, but it’s reality and when things change, they change fast.
I love hackathons and before having kids I use to do them quite often. I usually placed in the top three and from my experience at least you are a 100% right!
Personally I love building things and seeing people use them, but then I get bored really quickly and tend to let them die out.
It’s something I am actively working on because I do want to do another startup at some point in my career.
I am not sure where I read this or who told this to me, but my favorite piece of advice (prior to having kids) was "don't waste your time with people that don't give you positive energy". It's really easy to get brought down by other people's negativity, be at work or in your personal life. Staying away from people that bring you down is key to being happy and successful.
The most important piece of advice I can give to any new parent is
"You have between 6 to 10 years where your kid(s) actually wants to hang out with you - take advantage of it, you'll never get another chance"
I think some people are being a bit too harsh about how the author goes about explaining how you can't prevent all fraud without hurting good users - or in other words, some fraud is just the cost of doing business. Overall it is a good article (that could have probably been a bit shorter) that talks about a topic that is rarely talked about - risk tolerance.
As someone who has worked in the industry for the past 15 years, I can see a few things that I believe are causing risk tolerance levels to increase across the industry.
1. Startups/new businesses that are in growth stage have a large appetite for risk which is pushing the more traditional/legacy companies to also take more risk.
2. High friction experiences that are designed to stop fraudsters require you to provide timely support to any good users that might be blocked by mistake. We all know the trend for most companies has been to move away from providing timely support to their customers as it is extremely expensive. This is another cost (on top of potential lost sales) of creating a high friction experience.
I say this a lot and I will keep saying it. Conversion != customer obsession.
There is a place for A/B testing. It is necessary and can be extremely beneficial in helping your customers enjoy and use your product more successfully.
The main issue is that people mix conversion with customer obsession!
Whenever you work on a product or feature you should be asking yourself "Is this really good for my customer" - if the answer is no, then no matter what the A/B tests/conversion rates show you don't do it.
Unfortunately we mostly hire the wrong people as PMs, who then hire clones of themselves. They are not truly customer obsessed and use A/B tests incorrectly which results in products that trick or force customers to do things they don't understand/want to do. Long term this is bad for the product and company
My 'favorite' silly thing PMs do is UX research studies (typically on 5-10 people) and essentially ask completely untrained people if we should go with X/Y or Z. It's a super-effective way of avoiding responsibility for product decisions ("the data suggest we should go with Y"). If only building good products were as easy as asking what customers think they want.
Either they're doing the UX research wrong or (more likely) you're misunderstanding the process. You don't ask them if you should do X/Y/Z. You ask them to do X in the program, and see that none of them can find widget Y which controls it because they keep clicking on widget Z.
It's about observing the users fumble through your UX when you know their motivation.
> It's about observing the users fumble through your UX when you know their motivation.
Some time ago we did such a test. We called 10 customers to our offices and had them do some flows in the application. They didn't fumble. They pretty much did what they had to do and left positive reviews.
That whole thing got scrapped because consultants convinced our CEO that qualitative data is not good for global scoped startups, and that we should be building based on quantitative data.
Honestly, in less than a year, our customer experience was already taking a dive because all the extra little features we would add and strange UI elements, it became a confusing mess and our tracked NPS (Net Promoter Score) showed that. I've since left the company, but I check on them from time to time and they never really recovered and continue doing A | B in the hopes of hitting that sweet spot. It's just an unrecognizable monster at this point in my opinion.
Data analysis is the lowest common denominator of business thinking: the simplest, easiest thing that feels meaningful and objective. Anybody can sum up two lists of numbers in Excel and see which one is bigger.
I wish the problem were my misunderstanding the process, because then I could fix it easily by learning more about the process. I do get where you're coming from though.
The term "customer obsession" has become a red flag for me when interviewing because I've never worked at or chatted with a company that had "customer obsession" as value that wasn't aggressively working to squeeze every dime from their users with zero interest in whether or not this squeezing was harmful to the customer.
An actual, sincere customer obsession (and btw I think we both completely agree here) means that you are willing to lose out on some conversion and revenue in order to make sure your customers are top priority.
Real customer obsession isn't just an ethical principle either, it makes business sense. The problem is that the value of customer obsession is realized over the span of years or decades. Companies that have a sincere customer obsession are the kinds of places that survive economic ups and downs, where people's children grow up and are loyal to the product because they remember the time their parents were treated well by the company.
If your only company focus is Q4 KPIs then you really can't have "customer obsession".
> The main issue is that people mix conversion with customer obsession!
The logic is: If they hate your app, they won't spend money. If they love your app, they will. Which is what would make you think A/B testing and UX work are the same thing.
There's really nothing new about this issue at all. Playing towards the average creates a lot of shitty stuff, in apps/websites as well as politics and wherever else there are metrics to track.
The genius of a good product is that it will make a stand and not give in to the whims of over-optimization in order to maintain its original intent. This is what made Apple unique.
It requires leadership with guts who aren't chasing the latest shiny object.
I don’t think this necessarily means anything. App download count will always favor newer apps that are still in their growth stage (TikTok is a good example of this).
Facebook is post growth stage and is probably at the point where it’s already hit, or close to hitting its peak market share. Most Facebook users have already installed the app and only ever need to reinstall it if they switch phones. Those that haven’t installed it/don’t use Facebook are unlikely to convert to new users at this point
I don’t know—I still have a Facebook account, grudgingly, but I long ago removed the app from my phone. And I hear more and more people say that they’ve done the same. Facebook has a deeper problem than slowing user base growth. A lot of existing users view the service as a necessary evil at best, to be kept in a kind of containment.
It does mean exactly what you laid out here and took as obvious —- many investors and shareholders did not —- that this is an indicator that Facebook is in post-growth. This is news because as little as 12 months ago people would’ve had spirited disagreements about this, but as more evidence emerges we see more and more nails in the coffin.
Stock prices are based on future performance. A large part of the multiple is the RATE of growth. When rate of growth slows down the stock price will be down accordingly. So for all shareholders and employees things like this do matter.
Facebook in particular however is beyond the user growth phase. Everyone knows that, including investors.
Nobody expects FB to add billions of additional users, because that is close to impossible. Investors expect FB to instead defend its user base against new competitors, and to increase revenue per active user.
The p/e ratio of Meta reflects this expectation: it is conservatively low right now. If you use the distorted tech-company standards, it is even ridiculously low.
I’d be more interested to see the Messenger stats. The FB site fulfils most if not all use cases of the app, other than notifications, so it’s entirely unnecessary for an occasional user to keep it rather than just using a browser.
However, they’ve made some annoying changes to Messenger that force you to download the app for basic things like checking your marketplace messages, even if you have no desire to interact via that app.
I maybe in the minority here, but I believe that this is not good for the average European and definitely not good for the European tech scene. Europe is already a more complicated place to launch a new company as you have to support multiple languages, countries etc. just to get to the potential market size you have in the US. Strict regulations are that are complicated to implement means that more new companies will choose to launch and build themselves up in the US first. By the time they come to Europe they will already be big and established and can afford to implement the complicated infrastructure that is necessary to support cross continent data storage (or ignore the regulation and pay the fines) while eating up all the small startups that were trying to capture the EU market while dealing with masses amounts of regulation and red tape.
Now to be very clear! I am not against most of GDPR. But some of the interpretations of it have gone too far and it will hurt Europeans in the long run.
This is actually one of the best things that can happen to companies like google and Microsoft as they can afford to develop the infrastructure to support easy geo based cross continent data storage - and they can then sell it as part of their cloud offerings.
Geo-based cross continent data storage isn't enough. The fact that the parent company is a US entity still makes it illegal, no matter where the data is stored.
