TikTok seemed to run off of Alibaba Cloud (from what I read which may be wrong) so it's an interesting move to buy Cloud Services from Google. I probably read this as a way of strengthening the case that they're an "American" software company since they run on the same infrastructure as any SV startup.
This deal was signed in May 2019, before the questions about Chinese control over TikTok had really come to the forefront. There's a decent chance that it's simply about Google giving TikTok a better deal, or other infrastructural features like global availability.
Pretty sure in 2019 if [Chinese company] offered to pay Google a bunch of money for cloud services, Google would take it. Unlike in China, large US corporations don't act as an extension of the government, so China being a rival superpower to the US wouldn't be terribly relevant. Not that the US in general avoids trading with China either.
justicezyx isn't saying Google would turn down a Chinese company's business. justicezyx is saying a Chinese company cannot become popular among US consumers. I don't exactly agree with that argument, but we should at least understand what the argument is.
I agree Chinese companies are basically branches of government if that's what you are saying however I also think the relationship between corporate USA and the federal government is a lot closer than most people realise.
Huawei (a Chinese company) was paying Google a bunch of money in 2019 until they were banned by the government. You may argue that this was justified for national security reasons, but the decision was ultimately up to the whims of the president, and not subject to any sort of actual process or oversight by elected officials.
The US government and corporations are basically one and the same. The USG will extend deals that favor corporations. China is an "enemy" to the extent that it will harm the profitability and flexibility of US corporations or the military empire that supports US market dominance.
To think that a country half a world away would factor into calculations in any other way is a misunderstanding of great power politics. There is no military threat to anything a normal person would consider domestic interests.
> The US government and corporations are basically one and the same.
Not really. Corporations and the government fight about all kinds of stuff, like encryption, and handing over private information about their users. Companies try to buy influence through lobbying, sure, but that's a far cry from 'basically one and the same'.
This is a mere tactical disagreement. The government and the security state are extensively intertwined to an extent that the place where one begins and the other ends is hard to distangle given the revolving door of employees and defense contracts.
The extent to which the buisness community as a whole has the ear of the government vs the people is evident given the extremely large disagreements between public opinion polls and implemented policy. If corporations want something, they don't always get it, but if the people want something and corps disagree the people almost never get it.
Study:
Gilens and Page. "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens". American Political Science Association. 2014. pgs. 564-581.
What's causing it is clear: the community is divided and people have different opinions. This has been the case for a long time, so it's no sudden inrush. There's natural fluctuation, so it sometimes can feel that way.
I posted about this a lot in the last couple of days. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23835613 and the subthread underneath it (which you'll have to uncollapse). You can find other explanations at:
The evidence is extremely clear, by the way. If we'd found any undue influence, we'd say so, but the private data confirms what's already clear from the public record (if you look at other users' commenting histories): people just disagree. The voting patterns don't show anything that the commenting patterns don't.
Hmm interesting. These other people not only seem to disagree but seem to rely on different facts entirely. Perhaps there’s ongoing external disinformation campaigns and many are simply misinformed.
Regardless of whether accusations of spying are true, I think these moves (including pulling out of Hong Kong) will do nothing. The politicians and a large part of the public have already decided Tiktok is guilty, with no way to prove innocence. A ban is just a matter of time.
According to Chinese law, the government can quietly demand any information they want on anyone. A warrant in China? Hah.
All they have to do is say "Give us the data stored on GCP host" and TikTok is legally obligated to comply.
To be fair, it's not much different than in the United States unless the data belongs to a US citizen, which is why many companies are attempting to domicile cloud data in their own country.
The Chinese National Intelligence Law applies to any and every company operating in China right now, including Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, etc., not just TikTok.
Ironically enough, Google is one of the few major tech companies that can't be compelled to hand over information to China.
There is some difference though. You can turn off iCloud and then device lock an Apple phone and make it rather secure. No such option exists for an Android phone. I agree with your general idea though, but I want to nuance. Apple gets too much credit for their privacy efforts, and Google gets too little shit.
Apples efforts only look good compared to Amazon, Google and Microsoft, but that's because they are so bad.
Android does not have an iCloud equivalent, so naturally Android is not going to have a setting to disable sharing cloud data with the Chinese government. Google Drive doesn't work in China because Google isn't kowtowing the way Apple is.
Just a small correction, Facebook is also not in China, IIRC.
It lead to some truly fantastic moments with Zuck grandstanding while every other company was being bashed for bowing down to China last year. Truly bizarro world.
The subsidiaries of these companies are subject to the intelligence law and whatever data these subsidiaries owns. If apple keeps US data away from the apple subsidiary in China then Apple is physically impossible to hand the data to Chinese government
Apple keeps data in China. [1] They specifically made the move because of China's National Intelligence Law. [2]
>To comply with the law, for instance, Apple announced that it would transfer the operation of iCloud in Mainland China to a government-sponsored data company named Guizhou-Cloud Big Data.
Tiktok' parent is bytedance is incorporated in Cayman islands. It has a US and a Chinese subsidiary. Chinese subsidiary runs douyin is subjected to the intelligence law. The US subsidiary runs tiktok and is managed by US employees and is not subject to the same law. The intelligence law would be problematic if bytedance is incorporated in China but it's not. The data and the code for tiktok is stored in the US and Chinese subsidiary cannot view that data.
>The intelligence law would be problematic if bytedance is incorporated in China but it's not. The data and the code for tiktok is stored in the US and Chinese subsidiary cannot view that data.
But the issue is that bytedance is still physically located in China, and is probably subject to CCP pressure. eg. "it'd be a real shame if your beijing offices were shut down because of fire code violations". Or they go straight to the CEO and demand that they backdoor their US servers or he gets sent to the gulag. According to wikipedia, the CEO of TikTok reports directly to the CEO of Zhang Yiming, so there isn't really separation in terms of control.
>The US subsidiary runs tiktok and is managed by US employees and is not subject to the same law.
Which leaves us with the question as to whether or not the government cares what the law says or whether they would back down if employees in China said they can't easily hand over foreign data.
I was thinking about the volume of the data and the type. But yeah they probably could easily obfuscate it. Wouldn't it just be cheaper to buy it at that rate though? Am I missing something?
Unlike Zoom which is an American company (and everyone feels like they need to pull an Andrew Yang and try extra hard to prove their American-ness for some reason), unless I'm mistaken I don't think TikTok really made any effort to "appear" "American". ByteDance might have downplayed their Chinese-ness and worked more than typical Chinese companies to cater to American audiences (like hiring Disney CEO in the same way Huawei has an America CSO), but I don't think they're making the case that they're an "American" company.
I'm not sure I understand your reference to Andrew Yang. Every presidential candidate I've seen in the late 20th and 21st century has gone overboard in showing their American-ness. What makes Andrew Yang stand out?
In that he specifically called out Asians to out-american others to prove their Americanness. For illustration picture Obama calling on African Americans to do more to prove that they're Americans.
Why would it matter if it's an American or Chinese company? It's a sad world where we need to decide about company, product, person, idea, book or whatever based on their perceived country, colour, race, ideology, ...
For comparison, another reference GCP customer is SnapChat who signed a 5 Year $2 Billion dollar contract with Google Cloud, as they disclosed in their IPO Prospectus. At that time (2017) they were by far the largest single customer on the Google Cloud Platform by spend. They spend the majority of that on App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and bandwidth.
Even after this disclosure of the TikTok $800M Agreement - SnapChat is still a much larger customer in spend per year.
I believe it. 1B daily users globally. Processed events per day probably somewhere in the trillions. In case you missed it, they recently shared some details on their algorithmic curation system ;)
No chance they have 1B DAU. That doesn’t pass the sniff test.
That’s like 1.5B MAU, which is even more ridiculous. But let’s look.. 7 billion people, 4.5B have internet access. So more than over 15% of humans with internet access are using tiktok every day.
3.5B humans have a smart phone, so 1 in 3 are on tiktok every day? Nah.
And honestly, I’m fairly even on china but I don’t really believe numbers the put out for most things.
1.5B MAU is not unreasonable. A majority of Chinese users are using it. It is superfluous when you ride the subway or eat in a restaurant. Everyone. That alone could be .75-1+B.
Then you only need a relatively small percentage of the rest of the world to reach that number.
Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it is not real.
>No one has figured out how to count logged-out mobile users, as I learned at reddit. Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user and inflates company user metrics
How hard is it to generate a uuid on first startup and use that to track logged out app users? Or are they being willfully blind just so they can inflate their metrics?
Yeah, you get this "for free" with Firebase Auth when you enable anonymous authentication. I suspect this is one of those cases where they simply don't want the real number.
This doesn’t surprise me - I discovered my 50 year old mum has TikTok today, and met some undergrads recently who said it was the only app they really used. Seems to have a huge market!
A huge chunk of Indian people were using it. The app is indeed very addictive. I wonder what % of userbase they must have lost now that India has banned them.
Very interesting that they shared some details on their algorithm. In my opinion as an active TikTok viewer, their curation algorithm is really their competitive advantage versus all other social media platforms. TikTok has BY FAR the best content curation/recommendation algorithm of any social media site I've ever used, and I hope other competitors take notes.
One of my major frustrations with algorithmic content curation is that you can fall into a rut where the algorithm just shows you similar content to what you've liked in the past. TikTok on the other hand is constantly showing me fresh and unexpected content, so that my For You Page never feels stale. For example, I've recently stumbled into "International Logistics TikTok", where I get recommended videos posted by crew on cargo ships, talking about their favorite ports and canals, and showing tours of their cabins on the ship. I never would have sought out these videos on purpose, but TikTok's algorithm is good enough that it figured out that I enjoyed them, and that's a level of curation I haven't seen on any other social media platform before.
The article doesn't really go into concrete details. It's very high level. All I could get from it was that it's an adaptive recommendation engine that does some multi-armed bandit type exploration of "user interest" space. Having more technical details would be really interesting.
> While a video is likely to receive more views if posted by an account that has more followers, by virtue of that account having built up a larger follower base, neither follower count nor whether the account has had previous high-performing videos are direct factors in the recommendation system.
This seems to ring true to my experience, and seems to be very different than other platforms e.g. Youtube. I've seen a lot of videos on TikTok get very popular that never would have taken off on any other platform
It's not hard to imagine them planning ahead. In fact you can argue that the parent company ByteDance has planned for such existential risk by setting up TikTok as a separate entity from Douyin.
Just for reference, GCP earns $10 Billion a year and this deal is $800 Million over three years. Whether this is a big deal is an exercise for the reader.
That comes to 2% of this year’s revenue. I’d say that’s a pretty big deal. I can’t imagine Google has many individual customers representing more than 2% of revenue. Math says that at the least, they are one of the top 50 customers.
There are two types of customers that every B2B company wants - customers that bring in a lot of money and “referenceable” customers that are willing to stand up on stage and have their companies listed in marketing documents.
TikTok being referenceable means a lot more so sales people can go out and tell CxOs “look we are a safe choice because $x company trusts us”.
Disclaimer: Just in case I get called out. I work for AWS consulting but I am so far removed from the sales process it’s not even relevant. All opinions are my own. I’ve been in the room more when “enterprise deals” were being made in smaller B2B companies.
But that's kind of the point. Azure also likely doesn't make up the big chunk of the pie for MSFT Cloud. Many more business need O365. That still counts as cloud. By far the largest pure cloud provider is and will continue being AWS. GOOG and MSFT need to keep pushing their strong enterprise offerings to grow their infrastructure play.
I wonder if there is a salesperson getting an insane commission from this transaction.
More generally/seriously how exactly does this conversation go? I've seen deals at my company which have been in the 7 figure range (involving many, many people) but never anything so large. Is this the kind of thing discussed only at C* level?
I was tangentially involved as a consultant when a major bank bought a few billion USD in GCP services.
Others have mentioned whole 50 person deal teams from both sides, multi year processes, all of Google’s most senior execs pressing the flesh etc.
But to your question this type of deal usually goes beyond even the C Suite, to a companies board and shareholders. The bank I was involved with held an ‘Extraordinary General Meeting’ for reps of major shareholders, to present its case and get sign-off. This part of the process was actually the longest, it took ~6 months.
That was because the shareholders of the bank had interests to be accommodated, for instance one of them was also a major holder of Amazon stock so they had a vested interest in having the bank choose AWS. They needed to be worked around or convinced choosing GCP would create more value for them than portfolio synergies.
> for instance one of them was also a major holder of Amazon stock so they had a vested interest in having the bank choose AWS
Thank you for highlighting this. It is a reminder to engineers that sometimes the best technical solution doesn't win because there are usually many factors at play.
> one of them was also a major holder of Amazon stock so they had a vested interest in having the bank choose AWS. They needed to be worked around or convinced choosing GCP would create more value for them than portfolio synergies.
Did they state that explicitly? Is this legal?
Seems equivalent to asking management to directly transfer money to the pocket of only some of the shareholders stiffing out all others, which I'm pretty sure is generally illegal.
These sorts of deals have whole teams attached to them. If you're buying nearly a billion dollars in Google products, Google has hired people specifically to work the TikTok account.
The biggest thing I wonder when these sorts of "probably C* level" deals is how often they get negotiated for political and/or marketing reasons, and then are just handed down to staff to figure out how to make them work. I've definitely seen major shifts in third party products selected long before anyone on the tech side gets involved to find out what the implementation is going to look like. Sometimes by the time you get IT involved, it's too late and way too high level to put the brakes on something if it isn't as ideal as promised.
Heck I was the dev lead at a medium size non tech company ($1 billion revenue) and I didn’t find out they had to decided to “move to the cloud” until all of the decisions were made.
Of course, the company’s idea of “moving to the cloud” was a “lift and shift” and still having to go through the same procurement process as if we were on prem just to get some EC2 instances provisioned and not taking advantage of any AWS services.
I didn’t realize how dumb that was until it was too late. By the time I learned anything about AWS, the infrastructure gatekeepers had taken over.
Yes, you can be sure the c level suite is at least getting updates and monitoring the deal if not involved in the f2f meetings. These types of massive deals always involve back scratching as well.
Some commission plans have a "windfall" clause where very large deals (anything over x% of your quota) goes to a review process. The sales person then negotiates internally for the most commission possible while the company negotiates to pay an amount acceptable to the sales person while being just large enough to keep them happy but not so large they retire.
I think snapchat have a similar massive deal with Google.
It really does solidify a kind of class structure within these tech giants. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon at the top and everyone else, even massive players like snap and tick tock are completely reliant upon them.
That's an odd way to look at things. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are in turn reliant on Intel for the CPUs that power their cloud services. Does that put Intel in a class above them? No -- it's just companies buying stuff from other companies so they can focus on what they're good at.
* and going one step further, all of these rely on a handful of janitorial companies to operate. so maybe the ABMs of the world are in the top class?
Amazon has AWS instances running their own custom ARM silicon. It's not hard to imagine Microsoft and Google doing the same, which will eventually become dominant for cost reasons alone.
We'll have three platforms that control most non-Chinese computing. It's hard for smaller players to compete with that kind of inertia.
Last year’s Gartner report concluded that less than 10% of cloud computing workloads were running in public clouds. With respect to technology, most of the companies of the world are consistently living 20+ years in the past.
It’s certainly hard to compete at running a public cloud, but it’s hard to compete in any industry that requires $X00B capex to get the ball rolling.
Cloud Computing is the kind of technology that is becomes profitable only at large scale - like telecom and silicon chips. Small players can't really do anything about it.
Unlike Huawei, TikTok doesn't have critical production dependency on the US (specialized semiconductors). Huawei also won't have been too impacted if just their imports were blocked in the US. TikTok will be hurt without US customers, but they are too big in China that they will easily survive. And will easily compete worldwide against any US company.
The reasons I'd seen for considering a US ban on TikTok were all security related (i.e., various claims to the effect of TikTok collecting data on US citizens for usage by the CCP). Those reasons, if valid, would seem to remain valid even in the face of your points here.
Are these valid criticisms? Did everyone forget about the NSA spying scandal a few years back where the US was monitoring huge amounts of internet traffic in Europe on American owned platforms.
I don't know if they're valid. I think my point is structured in such a way that it doesn't matter in this context: those concerns, if they are or were ever valid, are not rendered invalid by the points that the above commenter was making. I don't believe I have the background to comment meaningfully on whether TikTok is an actual security threat to US citizens or whether the US government would be hypocritical in banning TikTok for such a reason. The question of hypocrisy also seems like a separate one to me (i.e., should one not do the correct thing because it would be seen as hypocritical by some?).
True, but if an objective party was reporting on this, I think they would mention that it was in fact a thief taking such precautions, rather than a non-descript local resident.
Would you rather a country that many people around the world wants to migrate to in order to pursue their dreams spying on you (USA), or a country where people are put in concentration camps (China and the Uyghurs) spying on you?
I don't know about you, but I prefer the former as lesser of two evils.
As someone who has family in Syria that was bombed by US and their allies but had never been bombed by China, I'd rather China be spying on me. As far as I know, CCP has never attacked any country out of its borders.
If you are in America from Syria and have a dislike for America because of past bombings I would be more concerned with them over China.
As far as never attacked anyone. Of course they have. China is part of that US allies group fighting terrorism in your families homeland. Here is a list for you of all of the conflicts:
Those are almost all internal conflicts within China. The only major foreign wars China has been involved in since the founding of the PRC are the Korean War, the Sino-Indian border conflict, and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war. It's been more than 40 years since China was involved in a major foreign conflict.
It has border disputes, but it hasn't been involved in any major military conflict since 1979.
Most (probably all) countries in South and East Asia have multiple border disputes. Japan has disputes with China, Russia and South Korea. India has disputes with Pakistan, China and Nepal, and used to have disputes with Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. See a trend? Every major country in the region has or has had disputes with every neighboring country.
I am not in America so your argument is not valid.
As for your link, most of it is about peace keeping missions. The others involve countries that share a border with China. As I said, China has for the most part never attacked countries it didn't share borders with and I don't live in any of these. Even then, they haven't done carpet bombing, used chemical or nuclear weapons against these countries unlike the US.
I think the use of government surveillance is less likely to be used to conduct drone strikes and far more likely to prompt a Tiananmen square esque response to dissent. Thus I would firmly disagree with this sentiment.
I'd very much prefer Chinese spying me over USA, as they have significantly less effect on my life.
For example, if USA found out something about me that they don't like, they might prevent me from visiting USA in the future (which is something I might want to do), or they might force U.S. companies (e.g. PayPal, Google) to close my online accounts. And they might do those things unilaterally as I'm not a U.S. citizen.
On the other hand, I wouldn't care much if China banned me from visiting or from business with their companies.
US has their own camp too, not as bad as Uighur camps perhaps, but on a big scale: the Gaza Strip. It's status has been maintained through US's UN security council veto power for decades.
On a much smaller scale, we're still running Guantanamo.
If you're going to bring up Israel and the area around it, I was just looking at Wikipedia's page on wars involving the PRC, which reminded me (if I ever knew) that Tibet has been annexed to the PRC for just about the same time that modern Israel has been around.
I think it's worth mentioning that the US has not always been the preeminent ally of Israel since its founding. A lot of people seem to just have this vague sense that it's always been the situation. It's something that happened relatively recently.
They don't need anything more than a single Chinese national who they can blackmail to be able to get what they want. A quick meeting to the persons family to make sure they get the message its all it needs.
The CCP has leverage on any Chinese national who still has family in China.
For their handset SoCs, sure. But the real prize appears to be the base station market. As I understand it, Huawei's base stations are critically dependent upon Xilinx FPGAs. With those no longer available to them, Huawei is in a difficult position.
They can make their own FPGAs, true. These FPGAs will not be commercially competitive with Xilinx and Intel, so development costs won't be defrayed by commercial sales. IP laws may effectively prevent their sale in Western markets, anyway. And base stations made with these FPGAs won't be as commercially competitive, either (they'll be larger, more power hungry, produce more heat, etc.).
I don't know enough about 5G or base stations to say with confidence what other alternatives they might have. But I'm sure that they will be sub-optimal, at the very least imposing billions of USD in costs to Huawei/PLA/CPC.
I wouldn't be so sure. 14nm is already competitive with Xilinx FPGAs in terms of efficiency. All Huawei has to do is build ASICs instead, and they should keep or improve their performance. Xilinx is on a mix of 20nm and 16nm, by the way.
The billions of dollars that the Chinese Government will invest in order to compensate for the sanctions might have the unintended side effects of actually making performance of Huawei gear more efficient. The jump from FPGA to ASIC is pretty big as far as efficiency, and being able to have it financed for free to defend against US sanctions is pretty sweet.
They also happen to have stockpiled enough FPGAs to buy time for the transition.
They are not currently using ASICs, so ASICs are presumably not a good fit for the application. Maybe the NRE costs are too excessive given the very small volume, flexibility/updateability is essential, TTM is too long, something else, or some combination of the above. Any way you slice it, being cut off from Xilinx is going to cost Huawei.
Building a competitive ASIC will also be significantly more challenging now that Huawei has been cut off from all the major EDA companies.
Finally, I assume that Xilinx is well into development on future product lines based on newer processes. It would be extremely difficult for Huawei to bootstrap their way to commercially competitive FPGAs.
Any attempt to ban it to the wider public would be immediately be met with a legal battle that the US government would lose as there is no legal way for them to implement such a ban, our constitution would forbid it
At most they could bar employees of the federal government (and its contractors) from using it, which given the federal government is one of the largest would have a large impact. Even that limited action however would be met with a large legal challenge and would have a good chance of failure for anything that is not a Government Computer / Phone / Network
On the contrary, the US constitution specifically permits regulation of international trade as an enumerated power. All the US government needs to do is put ByteDance on the same entity list they put ZTE and Huawei on and Apple and Google would have no choice but to pull TikTok from their app stores.
> Any attempt to ban it to the wider public would be immediately be met with a legal battle that the US government would lose as there is no legal way for them to implement such a ban, our constitution would forbid it
All they need to do is poke the Play Store / App Store the right way and, poof, it's gone. They don't need to legally ban it, just send a strongly worded letter.
TikTok/Bytedance seems to be growing like crazy, I had three different recruiters from that company reach out to me in the past month. I declined for many various reasons, but mainly what would happen if they were banned in the US which seems like it could happen( I would prb be without a job in short order!). Would all US operations cease and a contract like this be voided and refunded?
If tiktok had was under the influence with Chinese government why wouldn't think do this to keep things on the up and up. Look at us guys - we put data in US. All good nothing to see here. (as china still can request whatever it wants). I dont see the point in this.
I really think this is just a company that went to get the best deal because the homegrown offering wasn't as competitive. I still think having TikTok isn't in the best interest of the democratic west, but you're right. There is not sinister play here.
Man my iphone really butchers my messaging with weird auto correct now and days. Anyways I think you got the gist. Makes sense about best deal, thought didnt cross my mind.
Alibaba has a whole 2 regions in the US, and they’re much smaller than AWS/GCP regions. They are not a significant infrastructure player outside of China, and an app like TikTok is high bandwidth and latency sensitive. It’s not feasible to host something like that entirely out of datacenters in China.
Wasn't one of the promises of cloud - "it will save us money ?" It's hard to visualise the end result of "savings exercise" for ppl to put funny video's on the internet is 800M /s :)
Yea I know they big and there is a lot I don't graps/knows about their system
Google Cloud sales are very aggressive with discounts and offers. They offered my company great prices vs AWS and they even offered to pay for local contractors to do some of the migration work from AWS for us.
We took the deal and it's worked out well in both price and performance.
Interesting, I wonder what discount rate they are getting, or if 'buy' actually just means 'use'. GCP was throwing discounts and credits at companies not too long ago, if you were willing to publicly announce your move from a competitor to GCP.
ByteDance runs two video services.
One is TikTok, which runs on non-China servers. The other is Douyin, a regular Chinese app. Of course TikTok is still subject to Chinese law governing Internet services provided to foreigners, which is cause for concern.
I might have missed the train somehow. First time I heard about TikTok was about half an year ago and now it's already buying services for 800M. How did it get so big so fast or was it already huge deal in China before it reached us?
This might be a bit off-topic, but why is the US worried about Tiktok? They only show short funny/interesting videos that have almost no political content.
If anything, apps like these bring people around the world together.
Not just believed but actually proved with reverse engineering. They even have the app download remote files and executing them which no app should ever do. (Only on Android since iOS does not allow that!)
Money can buy you everything. The country is so poor that what is left is money. Done. No; when is infrastructure is just a hardware where you run your software. When is the software hack that push a button send info back to China or analysing in American soil using American expert but helping communist to slightly bias and ... Is an American firm can be trusted even. And a Chinese controlled one?
OT: Can we stop sharing The Information links on HN? They seem to have the strictest paywall of anyone. I doubt many commenters here actually subscribe which means we're just discussing the headline.
I'm not sure if it's a specific policy for HN, but often for popular articles they aren't too upset if a subscriber shares the full article. (Which we can do.)
I think it's worth noting that The Information is an incredible journalism outfit that does incredible work. I subscribe not for access to the content (which other sites reblog within hours), but to support legit journalists doing real, original research.
Complaining that something is generally behind a paywall is different from complaining that a site centered around widespread discussion of content frequently promotes content behind a paywall.
I'm fine paying for content, but the content rarely belongs on HN, because it is insane to say to the general HN reader "Hey, here's an interesting article. Pay to read it before you have any idea of what it is about beyond the title".
What happens when you have pay-to-read content on HN is that no one actually discusses the content of the article, and only discusses general topics relating to the topic of the article - making for lower quality discussions.
I didn't know it was paywalled before I clicked the link. I came into the comments to see if someone posted an alternate non-paywalled source. My "long comment" was a meta comment about paywalled articles on HN, not about the article itself. Me paying for access to an article will not generate a good discussion by itself, because discussions almost necessarily involve multiple parties. I never claimed that HN banned paywall content.
I don't want to be mean but literally every sentence in your post is off base or just wrong in some manner.
Good move. Google will think twice if it is a good move to remove clients from their platform. I think TikTok has to show they cannot go around banning apps left and right without financial repercussions.
