Isn't that what the flagging system is for? Removal of spam and inappropriate comments. With upvotes acting as a counter force to filter good content up...?
...but then, what is the difference between an opinion you disagree with (a "dissenting view") and one that you believe to be factually incorrect? I feel like downvoting the former "factually wrong" comment leads to the behavior that ColinWright is describing: where people downvote anything they disagree with. (One might even argue that this is a fundamental bug in having downvoting as a mechanism.)
People do down-vote anything they disagree with, and there's nothing that can stop that. You can't change people's behavior.
However, removing the ability to down-vote won't really change anything in this regard, except that it will stop people from feeling attacked when they get a down-vote. What would change is that there would be no feedback about genuinely inappropriate comments, and I think that would be bad.
The only thing I can think of is to separate "down-vote" (meaning "of little value") from "inappropriate", label them clearly as such, and have the consequences of a "down-vote" less apparent and less severe. Then you can only trust that the behavior will sort itself as the "community" decides on the meaning of "inappropriate" and "of little value."
"Dissenting view" is "Ruby is badly-engineered", "the poor remain poor chiefly because of a lack of discipline" or "PHP is extremely useful": you may or may not agree, but there are serious arguments to be made for those positions (and there is some degree of truth to each of them), and reasonable people can and do disagree on these issues.
On the other hand, "int i = INT_MAX + 1" is factually wrong, and you could link to the standard to prove it. Similarly, "the Sun orbits the earth" is factually wrong (to the extent that it's meaningful, at least).
Yes, there are edge cases, and yes, people tend to think that what they believe in is "obviously" the only right thing to believe in; but that doesn't mean that there's no difference at all.
Take as an example some comments I made prior to making this post in the climate change thread currently on the frontpage (ice age). Although I have now deleted these, I simply stated that climate change prediction was uncertain due to the number of factors involved. A simple 2 line or so comment in reply to a poster asking why conflicting views existed on the subject. I believe it was of value (it answered his/her question, yet was of course an unpopular opninion to hold. A few minutes later it hit -1.
I won't be repeating the mistake of thinking I can discuss a matter openly here and believe downvoting adds nothing to a discussion (in contrast to upvoting which can be very useful for sorting comments).
That is not a very valuable comment, though. You may have received a better score if you posted a not-so-valuable comment defending a popular position, but that doesn't mean that well-argued defences of unpopular positions receive the same treatment.
Being downvoted has a much higher emotional impact than being upvoted, but it does help with sorting comments, obviously.
It does help in sorting, but i'd suggest it sorts by popularity, not by quality as we tend to assume.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm here to read interesting perspectives on interesting topics. I don't really care to reaffirm a popular opinion, irrespective of quality or substance.
In that case, why do you care about the voting? You will always get the group-think out-voting the carefully reasoned but unpopular. All you need to do is read - perhaps simply skim - all the comments. Find users whose opinion seems to be worth reading, and then seek out their comments.
Removing down-votes won't help the problem you've identified.
That's what I increasingly find myself doing. The downside is that you get less and less exposed to new material; "old" HN would usually surface e.g. tptacek's comments, but there would also be some highly-voted and insightful comments by relative nobodies who were experts in the particular field being discussed. This still happens, but reading the highest-voted comments is becoming less and less worthwhile.
The problem is that down-votes have account consequences. They aren't the mirror opposite of an up-vote. Ten upvotes and a post is just popular, ten downvotes and you might get banned.
If moderation was a flag that some people cared about but that left everything intact then people could ignore it if they wanted.
"Popularity, not quality" is the big problem of any social site. However, removing downvotes doesn't help: "anti-canonical" opinions won't gather many upvotes either. [EDIT: well, hopefully they will. But the trend is that they increasingly don't.]
Look, to be part of a startup you need to be providing value equal to your equity share. Otherwise you're leeching. If you're non-tech you can add value through getting word out, negotiating, and taking care of all non-tech business issues (legal, accounting, marketing, sales), basically things a tech is usually not very good at.
If you are not valuable equal to your equity share, reduce your equity share to a more appropriate value or GTFO.
If anyone wants it I'd be happy to write up a quick how to on how Bitcoin really could be shut down, I have some expertise in the area if that matters and no serious bias either way.
- Bitcoin software: It's open-source. How would anybody compromise it with so many eyes watching?
- Bitcoin trail: Solved using Tor and adding noirc='1' to bitcoin.conf file. Also you need to earn your bitcoins anonymously. Anyway, Bitcoin isn't supposed to be anonymous. It can be anonymous if you do it right, like you can browse the web anonymously if you do it right.
- Bitcoin public data: Same as with bitcoin trail.
- Bitcoin exchange: Right, but you can buy bitcoins from someone without revealing him/her your name.
It seems your article analyzes if Bitcoin is good for money laundering. It can be used for that, but I don't care. It isn't what makes Bitcoin interesting. Bitcoin is an alternative to payment methods like paypal, to currencies like the dollar or the euro, to payment transfers like ACH or Western Union, and to bank accounts. That is what makes it an awesome currency. That is what makes it disruptive.
It can be used for money laundering just like cash and offshore bank accounts can be used for money laundering. Way more people are using cash than bitcoins for money laundering. And that isn't what makes Bitcoin disruptive, because money laundering already exists.
Open source code tends to give a false sense of security. Many people assume others will check the code, yet few do. In addition, it is possible to spread malicious code throughout a code base to prevent detection. (mentioned in article).
To use TOR you still connect through an ISP. That can be tracked and deep packet analysis can be done. TOR is not a magic bullet.
Exchange - Correct. That was coming in part 2 of the article covering methods around each point, but unlikely to find the time to write it up at this point.
I leave the question: Why else would one use an anonymous currency unless they don't want to be detected? From there, who does not want to be detected? Usually those doing things they shouldn't. Otherwise, you'd just use a credit card or normal payment service as an everyday citizen would.
Open source code tends to give a false sense of security. Many people assume others will check the code, yet few do. In addition, it is possible to spread malicious code throughout a code base to prevent detection.
Those few who do are usually enough. Closed-source code gives a false sense of security. There are way more exploits for closed source code and they tend to take longer to fix.
To use TOR you still connect through an ISP. That can be tracked and deep packet analysis can be done. TOR is not a magic bullet.
Untrue. Deep packet won't see anything besides an encrypted connection. If you use Tor bridges nobody will know you're connecting to Tor.
Why else would one use an anonymous currency unless they don't want to be detected?
It isn't an anonymous currency. That's the main misconception about Bitcoin. Bitcoin can be anonymous using Tor. Just like the web can be anonymous using Tor. But the web isn't anonymous per se, and so isn't Bitcoin.
Again, the main point of Bitcoin is how disruptive it is for the banking industry. It makes micropayments easy, it makes transactions among individuals easy and decentralized, etc. It disrupts their business models based on an oligopoly.
Why would you use Bitcoin? Because you can:
- Be anonymous if you want, but you don't have to.
- Transfer money to someone, overseas, without any fees.
- Charge money for your business without paying horrendous credit card or Paypal fees.
- Stash your money securely in case of Government collapse (think Argentina 10 years ago, Belarus 2 weeks ago, or Greece very soon)
- Make confiscation impossible if you leave in a corrupt country.
- Make micropayments (like tips) without fees.
- Buy stuff online from overseas (people are doing this with a NewEgg proxy that accept bitcoins)
And there are many more use cases that I'm probably forgetting right now.
1. Apologies for the misunderstanding. I didn't mean to say the code will be open to exploits, I meant the code will intentionally contain a backdoor at an agencies behest. Exploits are another matter entirly and open source has its pros and cons for that purpose.
2. Then TOR bridges could be blocked at ISP level or made illegal. We're starting to see censorship arise on the internet and it's possible.
3. Many of these use cases are of course valid, But I will add their exist transaction fees which are paid when bitcoin are transferred, plus exchange fees when bitcoin is exchanged for real currency. It's not a fee free currency as suggested. I would add (and this is of course a guess) that most users will have illegal purposes and intent in mind. If only because they have most to gain from Bitcoin use. Most average folk don't ever see a 2% Visa fee as business absorbs this cost, so for a user purchase fees for everyday goods is not a value driver. I can see it being used for tax avoidance, money laundering and payment for nefarious purposes. Other use cases do not stand up to value analysis.
1. If it had a backdoor, other programmers would see it, because it's open source.
2. Tor bridges can't be blocked because the ISP won't know the IP of them. Please inform yourself about what a Tor bridge is.
3. Have you used Bitcoin? Transaction fees are voluntary. You pay them if you want the transaction to be faster. Compare that with the fees you pay with Paypal even for sending money to a friend. Or compare it with the slowness of an ACH. A Bitcoin transaction without fee still beats an ACH transaction for several days. About money laundering and illegal activities, Bitcoin is as anonymous as having an offshore account in a tax haven: it's usually possible to trace down who the person is. If you dig in the Bitcoin community you'll see one of the most repeated questions in the forums is how to report to the IRS the money earned in Bitcoins. Right now most users of Bitcoin are partly ideological, like GNU/Linux users 10 or 15 years ago. It's about freedom. About having a currency not manipulated (inflated) by Governments.
I think you're believing the FUD spread by some people about Bitcoin.
It's not really $500,000 though is it? As soon as you exchange a small amount of that into dollars you crash the exchange and the value drops significantly. I'd estimate it at about $30,000 worth.
On June 12th, $3,5M were exchanged on MtGox. For 8 of the last 10 days, the daily volume has been above $1M. I think that you could get these $500K in small chunks in a few days, provided you do it full time.
Without an unbiased third party auditing of their accounts I would be loath to place too much trust in data they themselves produce to say how awesome they are. Especially with such a significant amount of capital allegedly at stake and nothing to lose for bending the truth.
Granted the market is easy to manipulate with small transactions that can start large swings; as well it would be difficult to find a buyer if you wanted to liquidate a lump sum of this size without a solid discount.
That said, I think you're overstating the impact this would have. The recent downswing from ~$30 to ~$10 in a period of a couple days was speculated to be due to MtGox consolidating 20 times this amount.
Without knowing how much real backing the exchanges have it's hard to get a figure on what effect a large dump would have on the market. Additionally, you'll get shock dumpers who do a run on the exchange once they see value erosion. $30,000, although fabricated, feels right. Although i'd add that's probably an upper bound rather than expected value.
I would suspect that it's because the primary mission of the NHS is to provide jobs for bureaucrats, any healthcare we happen to get is just a side effect. Same with the MoD and submarines.
Even the most incompetent bureaucrat doesn't actively want to do a bad job. And I'm pretty sure that it doesn't say "we exist to provide jobs, with healthcare as a side effect" anywhere in the NHS charter.
Gov't IT projects suck because the RFP process is the most waterfall thing in existence, meaning the project is doomed from the start. And it goes downhill from there, with absurd amounts of politics and turf-protecting on all sides.
Well you could never say it outright, could you? But consider that the last government increased the number of nurses by 10% yet doubled the number of managers. Other than shuffling paper back and forth amongst each other, what do they do?
It's a truism that a bureaucracy always seeks to expand itself. They could all be brilliant at it, but the problem is a) it takes time and b) isn't actually necessary oh and c) they are all paid a fortune to do it, including their gold-plated pensions.
Well, it's not hard to convince me that large bureaucratic organizations turn into a mess.
But the same thing happens in private industry, too. Constantly. And nobody would ever label a private bureaucratic mess as "there to provide jobs first and turn a profit second". That was my bone of contention with your post, you're mistaking generic incompetence for something more perverse.
"primary mission of the NHS is to provide jobs for bureaucrats"
That might be the case for the bureaucrats in the NHS (of which there are too many) but I'm pretty sure that most of the actual front line staff are there to help patients.
I am not sure that I can fully answer what the root cause is, but most of the delays are due to the various levels of approval that take forever. In addition, they are very concerned with patient information security, and have various process to work through in regards to that.
What about a donation system? Like some channels here in the US have. That way, those who do like the service can pay and those who don't are free of the tax. Do you see that system working as an alternative to the BBC License fee?
I didn't realize it was that bad over there! Got a link for those suicides? I'd say, if UK citizens really do support it as they seem to do, then at least a proportional tax would be better. Having read into it a little though, the fact that it's technically a tax on information doesn't sit well with me (meaning if you didn't have a TV 20 years ago you were basically in the dark as far as video footage of world events were concerned).
Can't find any links to the suicides, I may be conflating the string of female prison suicides at Corton Vale in the 1990s (story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/1852047.stm) with the more general pressure from MP's to reduce the number of women (primarily young, poor, single and with dependent children) jailed for licence fee non-payment that occurred at the same time (it dropped as a result from 250 to 50 a year in the middle of the decade, still far too many and possibly still the leading cause of female imprisonment in the UK).
Having worked with them for a few years now, can I just say I hate the term Monte Carlo Method. Although I can understand that calling them "random number simulations" is not nearly as cool.
In Australia, Monte Carlo is a kind of biscuit. If you tell most people you do Monte Carlo simulations, they will think you design biscuits. Which actually sounds cooler than "insurance", "safety systems", or "math".
In the US a biscuit is a "cookie" and if you tell people that you do Monte Carlo simulations but not the kind related to biscuits they will smile politely and slowly back away from you...
