I agree. If alcohol were marketed for heart disease reduction, I'd have no problem with it. But it's marketed as a lifestyle product and a ton of young people with no history of drinking have started as a result.
I'm honestly quite sick of this argument. The issue with the phone company isn't the spam. It's the anonymity. All solutions to the spam issue don't deal with unwanted calls at all.
And be ruined by bad actors destroying the signal-to-noise ratio because--hey, you have to let them stay, even if they're trashing every discussion with nonsense or spam or they're spewing racist sludge you have no interest in endorsing.
Nah. This is just mendacity on behalf of the right wing of American culture that has changed their mind and decided that, yes, facts have to care about their feelings.
>And be ruined by shitty actors destroying the signal-to-noise ratio
Moderation on the client side is a thing. It already is practiced on networks like Twitter and Mastodon. It was the historical model on Usenet too.
At this point you're just posting excuses for prolonging the monopoly of centralized moderation. The bogeyman of "the right wing of American culture" doesn't help, given how international the discourse of the subject is.
Moderation on the client side doesn't work and never has. The Usenet killfile model was awful and was a big part of why huge swaths of it were an unnavigable mess for most users--because unless you wanted to expend the effort to build one you didn't have one and got the whole sewer pipe spraying straight into your face. And, oh boy, client-side moderation happens on Twitter, it works so well? Then why do female friends whose posts get some attention have a bunch of dudes in their mentions saying how they want to have sex with (consensually or not) and/or kill them no matter how many they block? Could it be because it's an abject failure of a model due to the low stakes of spinning up a new account--so low that Twitter stopped using egg avatars because they destroyed interaction rates with new users because most of them were troglodytes?
I do wonder.
I'm trying to assume good faith in your reply so let me point something out to you: the people who are wringing their hands about this used to bleat about shared block lists being used to get some semblance of value out of "client-side moderation" (which is not to say that it is successful at dealing with shitty actors, just that it's less unsuccessful, when you use them), just as they're bleating about this. Because the real beef here is not with Twitter Deciding, it's with Anyone Deciding that they are not entitled to the attention of anyone they demand it from.
But they lost re: shared block lists, and this is a retrenchment to attempt to keep relevance when they can, and should, lose this one too and be shown the door. If they want "unmoderated", there are platforms like Parler and Gab where they can have that. Relatedly, those platforms are full of literal-not-figurative fascists. I wonder why.
Because phone companies and ISPs only facilitate private peer–to–peer connections between a small number of parties, whereas the platforms we’re discussing host often-public interactions involving millions of people.
It’s a fundamentally different problem. If people use my phone company to have racist companies, I don’t have to know or care. Whereas if I had to deal with people saying racist shit every time I went on Twitter, I’d stop using it.
Consider also that most people’s biggest complaint with the phone system is a consequence of them not moderating, i.e. spam calls.
Who said ISPs and the phones are "unmoderated"? Try running a server with significant traffic from your home. Or using blue boxes (? I don't know, whatever Woz used) to get free long-distance calls. They absolutely perform moderation, only at the network layer, so most people never see it.
Firstly, you're wrong about that. This same FCC voted to remove ISPs from common carrier classification.
Also, what do you think common carrier means? It doesn't mean "completely unmoderated" as you appear to believe. As I already demonstrated, even common carriers perform network-layer moderation, since they provide the network layer. Social media provides the application layer, so why shouldn't they be allowed to perform moderation at the application layer?
> Also, what do you think common carrier means? It doesn't mean "completely unmoderated"
Systems such as the phone network are pretty darn unmoderated. It is mostly unmoderated, even if common carriers are allowed to do a small amount, of highly restricted moderation actions.
> as you appear to believe
I have just clarified. It means that there are very strong regulations, that ban many forms of moderation.
> so why shouldn't they be allowed to perform moderation at the application layer?
I am saying that I would be fine if they were banned from doing most moderation actions, as is the case for common carriers.
And I am saying that I would be OK with them engaging in the very small amount of highly regulated moderation, that common carriers are allowed to do.
Common carriers have large restrictions on the amount of moderation that they are allowed to do. I want those same restrictions to apply to other media platforms.
> Common carriers have large restrictions on the amount of moderation that they are allowed to do
Yeah, I don't think you know what common carrier actually means.[1]
The moderation that telecoms and ISPs perform relates to traffic that can negatively affect other users of those systems. Social media platforms can easily argue that their moderation already follows similar principles. It just happens that they deal with content, not raw bits, so they have to moderate content.
You also didn't address my other point, which is that ISPs aren't common carriers at all and this same FCC voted to make it so. So this seems pretty hypocritical behavior on their part.
You're repeating the same things over and over with little logic, and no reference to anything I said. There's little point continuing this conversation.
ISPs aren't a remotely relevant comparison. Neither are point-to-point phone calls, though as an aside the phone system certainly doesn't work. I get elderly-preying spam calls at a rate of eight to twelve a day and the Caller ID gets spoofed so numbers I block are useless. And because I use the phone for my job, I can't go contacts-only.
"Moderation on the client side doesn't work and never has. The Usenet killfile model was awful and was a big part of why huge swaths of it were an unnavigable mess for most users--because unless you wanted to expend the effort to build one you didn't have one and got the whole sewer pipe spraying straight into your face. And, oh boy, client-side moderation happens on Twitter, it works so well? Then why do female friends whose posts get some attention have a bunch of dudes in their mentions saying how they want to have sex with (consensually or not) and/or kill them no matter how many they block? Could it be because it's an abject failure of a model due to the low stakes of spinning up a new account--so low that Twitter stopped using egg avatars because they destroyed interaction rates with new users because most of them were troglodytes?"
Re client side moderation, it's possible that users can be educated about effective approaches. Just like they started warming the non-geeks about email with hollywood films (You've Got Mail, 1998), and I'm sure there must have been similar sort of concerted media efforts for older technology. Automobiles, for example. I -bet- we can dig up content (old films) that basically were teaching the American public how to use cars using movies.
Given the inherently democratic aspect of client-side filterings, and serious inherent political concerns with centralized moderation, it seems wrong to give up on the idea simply because the avant garde generation on internet (using mostly antique kludgy UI/UX, btw) had problems with it.
We can fix client side moderation with education. It is a transitory issue, only.
Centralized moderation is inherently problematic for public platforms. (I have no issues with private, members only, platforms opting for centralized moderation.)
"Just educate users" didn't work when there were a few hundred to a few thousand users. It's one of the reasons, though granted not the only one, why Usenet was a hole and people migrated to saner pastures when they were available. What makes you think it's any more feasible when it's "now you just need to go administer your ration of racism and transphobia and personal threats" on a millions-to-billions scale?
If you're being legit with your post, you're falling for a tremendous okeydoke here on the part of people who wish to do civil society harm. Literally all this approach accomplishes, literally and exclusively and without exception all it does, is cede the public square to people who want to export misery or deal with the exporters of misery--a vanishingly small fraction of the decent people out there. We can and must be better and that means that no, we are under no obligation to waste time or resources on people who were never socially potty-trained.
Re. the scale of the effort required on the client side by the user, I think you missed the "kludgy UI/UX" bit. Obviously, we need to address the kludgy kill-file approach.
> you're falling for ..
You seem to think that you know a lot about me. Let me gently suggest that possibly your technical imagination is failing to show you alternatives that solves all these issues.
So, actually, it is not a case of falling for anything, rather waiting since 1996 for someone else to start discussing having social models for networked virtual spaces.
> If you're being legit with your post
And why would I be otherwise? I found that quite offensive, and entirely un-necessary.
Again, the bad actors in question will scream about tools made to help the general public deal with them, too, because it's not about some ethical thing, it is that they demand to have their sewage spewed at all comers and you are bad if you don't let them. There is a level of malice here that I feel you are definitely dismissing while charging end users with a level of responsibility that it is impractical to handle regardless of what UI/UX affordances you want to put on it.
It's not a UI/UX problem. It's a "you are offloading moderation to the end user" problem--it is a fundamental failure of the approach. If you are going to put all of the work of moderation on the end user, regardless of whether you dress it up as "shared moderation" or whatever, the end user is going to leave and cede the floor to those who want to dominate the public discourse with sewage and crud and threats because the end user has a life to live and things to do with their day. There is a fundamental human cost to being exposed to the kind of garbage that Twitter et al filter out on the regular. It takes a toll on the psyche. It will drive people away. And that's not a "but muh engagement" for whoever's metrics and KPIs are involved--it is a realization that this is now the public square and ceding it to actively anti-civil movements is bad for liberalized society in general.
If there's a failing of technical imagination on my part, fine. There strongly seems to be a failing of appreciation of how modern supremacist movements operate on yours. This is not a technical problem, this is a human problem. It's a question of whether the psychic damage inflicted upon bystanders by constant and unending exposure (because that is, genuinely, what the end state here is) is worth whatever hypothetical benefit is realized by giving these parties a place from which to abuse others until they definitely, yessir, are blocked by all of them and never, ever seek to get around it to continue their abuse.
> And why would I be otherwise?
Speaking frankly? Because this discussion is dominated by bad-faith types whose axe to grind is really that there's a movement against their favorite flavors of supremacism and they generally use arguments like the one you're putting forth as retrenchment now that the tide has turned against them. If that isn't your bag, I appreciate that; I think you're incorrect, but that's separate from disingenuous.
The lack of imagination on your part was an allusion to the inability to see a structural solution to the conflated issues of identity; access; location; and social affinity. Believe it or not, it is possible to have a social network where it is impossible to spam.
> There strongly seems to be a failing of appreciation of how modern supremacist movements operate on yours.
Well, the internet gifted to us, with its flat namespace and the inevitable conflation of user identity with device identity, [empowers] bad actors. I alluded to this.
>people who wish to do civil society harm>a vanishingly small fraction>never socially potty-trained
A facade of politeness & shaming, a reality of censorious rules. The encroach was slow, almost imperceptible, but here we are at last. The current state of the Twitter rules is impacting investigative journalism. Internationally recognized journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept explains:
Look carefully at what Twitter is saying to justify censoring the Biden story. If applied consistently, it’d mean that some of history’s most consequential journalism — the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks’ war logs, Snowden docs, Panama Papers, our Brazil Archive — would be banned. [1]
Ceding the full power to the platforms has failed us.
It's possible some people just disagree with you. Implying anyone who thinks you're wrong is "just posting excuses for prolonging the monopoly of centralized moderation" is neither civil nor persuasive.
Anyway, your examples are unconvincing. Twitter is primarily moderated by server-side spam and abuse prevention tools. The other two are both far smaller, and don't exactly do a great job at content moderation.
Disagree. Newspapers and ISP follow under this regulation. Social media networks have been able to skirt the issue. If newspapers can get sued for their content and the phone company can't, it only makes sense that this applies to social media companies are held to the same liabilities or protections.
I don’t understand what outcome you are seeking here. Clearly social media companies can’t prescreen every piece of content so either you want them to all go out of business or you want to forbid them from moderating even to delete spam. There are already forums with “zero” moderation and there’s a reason all discussion hasn’t migrated there.
If such a system is implemented properly, moderation can be done by a third party service on top of the platform. This would be strictly better than the current model, since every specific user could pick a service that best matches their opinion on what does and doesn't constitute spam and other undesirable content.
Better yet, something like Aether, where everybody can moderate for their own feed, and any user can designate any other user or group of users as their moderators to get a curated feed with no effort of their own.
Great, I have issues with big tech and social networks in particular. Let’s outlaw bad behavior or talk about ways to put real oversight on their actions. I’m all for it. I bet a majority of Americans are too.
So let’s not mess with a law bedrock to the participatory part of the internet. Gutting 230 to get Facebook misunderstands the problem and will have horrible unintended consequences.
Some politicians have become fixated on Section 230 as a remedy to what they feel is an injustice centered around these massive platforms, when what 230 mostly does is allow hundreds of thousands of small websites to operate without fear of legal liability for every single user comment, whether or not they do basic spam-filtering.
A solution exactly designed to make Facebook and Twitter less profitable would not touch the hundreds of thousands of other websites that gutting 230 would suddenly expose to liability. It would be much more tailored and specific to its purpose.
The major, major issue is not really the hosting, but the amplification mechanism (e.g. "More like X"). The social networks have basically used "algorithms" as an excuse to wash their hands of even basic moderation up until this point, and it's well documented that recommendations lead people into echo chamber rabbitholes.
The solution is very simple. Remove section 230 specifically for recommendations. Which IMO makes sense, people perceive "More like X" or more explicitly "You might also like X" as tacit endorsement.
That is a false dichotomy, they can clearly moderate without a political bias on what they claim to be a public utility. Yes I am claiming a site such as Twitter, that provides a public forum that anyone can join, has a moral duty to act like a public utility.
Courts are well practiced at sorting these kinds of things out. They would review the content, presentation, targeting, etc. of the emails to determine if it is commercial speech or political speech.
This is a nightmare scenario. Take down a platform by flooding it with ambiguously political spam and then bring lawsuits until a judge rules censorship.
Color me unsurprised that the end game of the nominally pro–free speech crowd is letting the government determine what legal speech should be censored.
1. Even if the courts always get it right, small sites are not going to want to want to hire a lawyer and go to court to defend someone else's speech. They will instead err on the side of caution (as many do now for DMCA violations), causing a chilling effect on speech.
2. In a system where whether a platform is liable for its content is ultimately decided by courts we cede a lot of power over speech to the government.
I really don't think the courts are the path we want to take.
If the spam is commercial speech it can be subjected to significant regulation as long as the regulation is viewpoint neutral the same as other commercial speech.
Who decides what is moderating "without political bias"? You? What if I don't like your decision?
Seems like a lot of the people decrying the behavior of the social media sites here are just asking for a censorship regime controlled by them instead of the site itself. Which we already have a mechanism for: go found your own.
The goal would be to put significant, very large restictions on their ability to moderate.
> There are already forums with “zero” moderation
How about we look at other examples of communication platforms, that are working perfectly fine.
Just take a look at the phone network, or ISPs.
ISPs and phone networks, have very little "moderation" from the parent company, and yet seem to work pretty well, IMO.
Why can't we treat other communication platforms, the same way that we are treating the large and successful communication platform, which is the phone network?
Because a discussion forum is not the same as a phone network. It just isn’t. Why would the rules that govern the phone network make sense to apply to Wikipedia?
It’s weird to be having this argument on one of the very forums that benefits from 230. Do you think HN would be a better place if it were forbidden from moderating content? Were you here before dang came along? Can you imagine how much spam gets deleted before we see it and how unusable it would be if it didn’t?
And not for nothing but I wish my phone company would do an better job of moderating the junk calls and spam texts I get.
But set the phone company metaphor aside: I still don’t understand what outcome you want for social media. How do you imagine it will look? Or is this actually intended to put them all out of business? If so, taking down every comment section and discussion board seems like a lot of collateral damage.
I wonder whether it would suffice to just have a link to the NSFW/L "Unmoderated" version and remove only that which has valid legal complaints (e.g. DMCA) or illegal content (which should also be made very clear by the lawmakers, in an easy and feasible way to implement, but that's a tangent).
Since the alternative is leading us toward actual violent war, I say “make HN choose between moderation and immunity too, if we must” without hesitation.
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” - Sam Adams
> Since the alternative is leading us toward actual violent war, I say “make HN choose between moderation and immunity too, if we must” without hesitation.
Just the opposite. Companies unwillingness to intervene did so. Your opinion may be different, but it's nothing more, and suggesting we deny people their civil liberties based on your hunch is a dangerous line of thinking.
> Are you saying that a special immunity from prosecution, granted to particular businesses, is a civil liberty?
I think that moderation is a consequence of the rights to speech and association. The ability to choose what content you host, and whose content you host, is a consequence of those rights.
Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, whomever, cannot violate your civil liberties. Only the government can do that. And when they pass laws that, de facto, restrict the ability of companies to associate and speak freely, they restrict those essential liberties.
Section 230 ensured civil liberties, both Facebook's, and yours, and mine. It means that anyone who wants to can create a website for broadcasting and discussion q-anon conspiracies theories, and they can ban anyone who chooses to disagree. But just the same, I can prevent those people from posting things on my website.
> I think that moderation is a consequence of the rights to speech and association. The ability to choose what content you host, and whose content you host, is a consequence of those rights.
The right to speech does not mean that you are also immune from libel laws. That’s the controversial part, Facebook enjoys both the rights (plus consequences), and a special immunity under Section 230 that does not apply to any other kind of speech.
> And when they pass laws that, de facto, restrict the ability of companies to associate and speak freely, they restrict those essential liberties.
Do you think that being banned from Facebook does not also restrict an individual’s ability to associate and speak freely, in 2020?
> Section 230 ensured civil liberties, both Facebook's, and yours, and mine.
I’m sure lawmakers are hearing this exact line from lobbyists, but it rings hollow. One of those is clearly not like the others, and perhaps the law should favor “yours and mine”.
> Do you think that being banned from Facebook does not also restrict an individual’s ability to associate and speak freely, in 2020?
It does not affect their civil liberties, no.
> One of those is clearly not like the others, and perhaps the law should favor “yours and mine”.
Section 230 does. And repealing it would harm them.
> The right to speech does not mean that you are also immune from libel laws.
Correct. And if we were discussing writing section 230, that would be valid. But we aren't. We're discussing changing established law. And if the reason to change the law is to restrict civil liberties that at protected by the first amendment, you encounter a constitutional problem.
Much as some laws are unconstitutional to enforce, I simply argue that some are unconstitutional to ignore.
If you want to imagine the negative impacts of such a change, a forum on baking could no longer remove content that was not related to baking without being liable for content posted by users.
As far as I know, the owner of a physical bulletin board isn't responsible if I post a libelous poster on it. Why should a virtual bulletin board be any different?
There are infinitely more alternatives that aren’t “gut 230” or “do nothing.” Why is this the starting point when it will affect so many sites that we all agree aren’t doing anything wrong.
You want to propose a law that regulates Facebook let’s talk about that directly.
Agreed. But if the alternatives (maybe a size/reach threshold above which the laws change?) were to fail, I would rather see every online community become 4chan, than actual violent war. Hopefully things turn out better than either extreme case.
If HN, or Twitter or FB, selectively apply their 'Terms of Service' in a way that reduces access to pro-conservative positions -- then they are not a neutral platform.
If they are not a neutral platform, they cannot claim shields of section 230.
It is like for a business that hides money in a Organization with a Charity status. We would have that business facing criminal charges in no time.
Why the execs of these platforms demand something different ?
That is not how Section 230 works. It has nothing to do with “neutrality” — it simply shields platforms from liability for legal content created by third parties.
That is neither the letter nor the spirit of the law. Section 230 shields “website operators” (since “platform” seems to be a loaded word) from liability for third-party content, even if they use discretion in moderating that content. There is no requirement of “neutrality”.
Explicit partisan bias is legally protected speech. The conservatives you refer to have no problem with bias when it comes to the mediums they dominate (cable news, talk radio), but when it comes to the wide open internet they now want to bring back the fairness doctrine, as if it's even possible to establish consistent standards for the political composition of a given post on the internet.
So is a 'for-profit business' is a perfectly fine thing.
But having a for-profit business using tax code for a non-profit charity -- would be criminal.
So why does 230 or other shields apply to Twitter or HN or FB?
My point I think more that a social networking company can apply crowdsourced or individual editorialization to political speech. And that application can also be biased, selective and therefore unfair.
It is ok that these companies might do that, but not OK to hide under shields meant for the companies that do not do that (like ISPs)
> Why would the rules that govern the phone network make sense to apply to Wikipedia?
Because it is a platform? I don't see a problem with enforcing neutrality on platforms, in the same way that I don't see a problem with enforcing it on my phone company, or my ISP.
> Do you think HN would be a better place
I think the old school reddit model is a reasonable goal to aim for for these types of platforms.
(yes reddit has taken down some communities as of late, but lets assume that this didn't happen, to clarify the example)
IE, delegating moderation to users, but allowing communities in general to be created, with their own sets of rules, feels pretty fair and neutral.
> I still don’t understand what outcome you want for social media. How do you imagine it will look?
The model would be that any form of "moderation" on non-illegal content would be driven entirely by users, or communities of users.
IE, we can still allow people to do things like have shared block lists, or even curated communities within that platform, as long as other users are also able to create their own communities on that platform, that ignore those sets of rules.
Users could still make the choice to have certain rules, or moderation, if that is what they want.
Or, in other words, the reddit model, but without reddit removing non-illegal communities (which, to be fair, doesn't happen that often on reddit anyway. Reddit still mostly tries to be neutral, and they do an ok job with it)
EX: if a user doesn't want to see NSFW stuff, or trolling, or "misinformation", or any other offensive content, then there could be general categories, that describe those things, and the user can have that as a setting to not see that stuff.
>EX: if a user doesn't want to see NSFW stuff, or trolling, or "misinformation", or any other offensive content, then there could be general categories, that describe those things, and the user can have that as a setting to not see that stuff.
Let me go out on a limb here and say that no-one is going onto Facebook looking to find misinformation. They may be looking for stories that appeal to their prejudices and be willing to suspend disbelief for those stories.
But no-one is going to tick the box saying "please show me stuff that is actually definitively false, and potentially dangerous to my person".
So the problem will simply move along to how the "misinformation" tag is being applied and the biases at play there.
Completely disagree. I would absolutely tick that box, as would many other people, specifically because we don't necessarily automatically trust whatever authority is "deciding" what is misinformation or not.
Instead, I would prefer to research an issue, by looking at multiple sides, and make a judgement, as opposed to having some minister of truth controlling what I am or am not allowed to read.
> is being applied and the biases at play there.
But the point is, that if you don't trust a certain group or source's opinion on what "misinformation" is, then you could choose a different authority on that.
IE, the tags for what is or is not "misinformation", would be community controlled, and you could pick which community or group to use as the "source" for this tag.
Sure, the issue is that now it is technically possible To do much more.
With the phone company it’s impractical to listen to every conversation and “eliminate the threats”, it is practical with the internet.
EU wants upload filters(stop singing “happy birthday” to your friend, that needs lives), UK want porn and crypto control(no dirty talk on the phone, no secretive talks, must speak load and clear). Turkey wants to control the narrative(An operator jumps in your phone conversation to correct you or stop you talking).
I am sure That US, Canada, Norway , Iran, India etc all have their own agenda too and would loved to control your phone conversations.
As for the liability, it’s already here. A lot of people are serving time or paying damages for the things they did on the internet. The new stuff is to make it controllable at scale.
This is not true. In fact, the document you are thinking of explicitly states that its application shall not lead to any general monitoring obligation.
> Disagree. Newspapers and ISP follow under this regulation. Social media networks have been able to skirt the issue. If newspapers can get sued for their content and the phone company can't, it only makes sense that this applies to social media companies are held to the same liabilities or protections.
Okay, I'll bite. Should newspapers be liable (that is, able to be sued) for a letter to the editor they publish? How about a comment someone leaves on their website?
But is distribution sufficient to trigger liability?
Printing a letter to the editor isn't authoring it, after all. The newspaper is exercising some editorial control in that letters to the editor are not all printed, but it isn't endorsement per-se, just a judgement that there is some public interest in making it available. Any liability for libel should surely lie with the letter's author rather than the newspaper.
I also note that you ignored the latter half of my question.
> I also note that you ignored the latter half of my question.
In case you weren't aware, the answer, currently, to the second half of your question, is that they aren't liable for a website comment, due to section 230.
As for the first half of your question, the newspaper affirmatively chooses to publish the letter. That's where they get the liability. The website does not, it simply fails to censor it.
You are right. We must not have individual-editorial, or crowdsorced-editorial social networks, treated as 'neutral platforms' when it comes to political or legal content -- basically anything that directly affects political candidates in the country(s) where HN has its main offices.
It is like having a for-profit business hiding under a non-profit tax umbrella.
If HN cannot figure out now to avoid editoralization of polical opinions (either by crowdsource or moderators), then do not allow political content. If HN wants to allow political content, and wants to allow the edtorialization function -- then do not hide behind 'neutral platform'.
Companies profit but citizens lose out. Those two entities should not be conflated. This is akin to the outsourcing of many industries such as pharmaceuticals and medical supplies to countries that do not have the same worker or health regulations as the US.
The visa workers are second-class citizens and exploited by companies to keep cost low. It undermines all workers and in the long run undermines all nations involved. Take the US's relationship with China manufacturing where China has some of the worst pollution and is one of the largest world polluters as they do not adhere to any of the same regulations that nations of the west adhere to.
Currently there is the narrative that the US has a shortage of talented STEM. This is untrue. The shortage is due to a skewed labor market that suppresses opportunity for US citizens in the same way that a US manufacturer wouldn't be able to compete against a Chinese manufacturer not because we don't have the technology, demand, or resources, but that the difference in regulations makes it more costly.
The shortage is false, a form of gaslighting, artificially created so that corporations and academic institutions can keep costs low and suppress wages by flooding the US market with cheap labor that also bypasses usual employment standards available to US citizens. Eric Weinstein has done some really good research into this.
'How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers'
Are you talking dev or academia? I read the paper and I'll give you my dev focused response. The paper is focused on phd supply in academia and the most recent dates referenced are the last 1990s. It has brief discussion of knowledge workers but not really devs. It's not relevant for devs in the us at least since the dot com boom until now.
There's a giant shortage of capable devs. i'm from the us in case it matters to you but in my 25+ years as a professional engineer across a few fangs, midsize and several startups all those companies wanted to hire every capable dev they could find. Microsoft used to have 5k plus openings when I was there and the other fang had similar. We hired all over the world and the us. We never hired as many as we wanted. New college students grads could make over 100k and we still couldn't hire all we wanted.
I worked on creative, original software. I think there is a hiring area that could be impacted by large number of immigrants in tech and that is more IT like positions. There's an oversupply in my experience of people that put software packages together, keep the it infrastructure of a company running - those are crucial jobs too, just like devs writing original software, but there's a lot fewer people in it support and maybe that's part of the issue.
I read the paper but I did not see any indication of wage depression.
Here are the trends I am observing from the comments of this thread:
* Immigrants in the US on visas earn less than US citizens. I have seen no data on this. How much less do immigrant software engineers earn as a percentage?
* Any evidence discrediting knowledge worker shortage is centered on academics. I am a senior software developer with 20 years experience at one of the largest and wealthiest employers in the US. Despite that I have no formal education in the subject matter. I am either entirely self taught or in some other disciplines trained by the military. So it seems, from my perspective, centering the discussion to academics is just a distraction.
Racket will never be a practical language, but not because it is a lisp. Clojure is a lisp and is plenty practical.
Racket was designed to teach programming to young students, which unfortunately isn't a killer app for a language even though I learned a great deal from HTDP and Racket/PLTScheme.
There have been other languages that were not lisps like Dart that utterly failed or like Coffeescript, which faded away because the space that they were trying to overtake (Javascript) was already deeply entrenched.
If you can't appreciate Racket beyond it's syntax, it's unlikely that you'd appreciate it with a new syntax. Racket is academic niche in the same ways Haskell is.
If parentheses and lack of infix symbols are sufficient to keep you away from Racket and you want much of the same level of metaprogramming and macros I suggest trying out Julia, which is considerably more practical where infix expressions and operators make sense within the numerical context: Every infix operator is a function call and has a dual syntax.
But don't please don't lie to yourself that you'd ever adopt Racket if it had infix expressions. I love Racket and I still don't use it for many practical projects because the demands of work are different than academia, which I believe are the true barriers to adoption.
> Racket was designed to teach programming to young students,
I'd say that the "teaching languages" were designed for teaching students, and Racket was designed as the practical tool for implementing those languages and a cross-platform IDE to support them. As a result of this, and various subsequent community work, Racket is now practical for many purposes.
Thanks for all the great effort and progress. Better error messages would be awesome, but this composable multi-thread support makes Julia even more absurdly powerful and versatile! The priority makes complete sense.
The Julia team and community are constantly advancing the frontiers of language design while grounding it in real number crunching applications. I wouldn't be too concerned about trying to have the same documentation and content approach as the Rust community as their goals were to usurp the mindshare of systems programmers (C/C++) with a novel ownership paradigm.
Looking forward to the progress on error messages.
