As it is too late to edit my comment, I wanted to write this here, rather than sending a private email, dang.
I apologize if the questions of myself and other users on this site today has set you on edge - and I am sure that today, in public and in private, you have seen many ugly things that the majority of us do not, and you reasonably draw a trend-line.
I believe that you should extend the same charity of trend-spotting in the other direction.
We live in tumultuous times, and the speed at which the ratchet is moving seems to be ever-increasing. There are significant concerns, as I know you know, about censorship abroad, and also at home in various western countries. I believe the overwhelming outpouring you have seen today has been in response to one undeniable fact -- that even a genuine accident on the part of some engineer somewhere could apply CCP (or any country's ruling party) censorship globally is a line in the sand that many did not realize had been already been crossed.
Whether accidental or intentional, this is a watershed moment in the debate over censorship and freedom. It seems likely there are many more such errors in configuration actively deployed right now. That we have no way of knowing what, or how many such incidents there are is an existential threat to non-authoritarian systems of governance across the globe.
To see something that seemed unthinkable even a few months ago - that Tank Man could be censored in western countries on the anniversary in remembrance of the struggles he literally stood for - crossed a threshold for me in terms of what I believed could be possible more broadly. To see the extremely reasonable discussion around it disappear from hacker news, and stay dead for hours (I note that both the inappropriately-flagged article and the accidentally-marked-as-dupe article both still maintain those statuses at the time of this writing [EDIT: The flagged article's status was changed a few minutes after. Thank you, dang. Doing so does not mean you are re-writing history, and we appreciate it]) made it feel like it had encroached even closer to home than I had suspected.
It made it feel like perhaps I'd been even more naive than I had ever imagined. I'm sure you must feel the same way, after some of the more hateful things I'm sure you heard today.
All of this is to say that I treasure the community that you have played the single largest role in shaping, and your explanations have completely satisfied me.
I apologize for the way your day turned out, and any negative ways in which I have contributed towards that.
I apologize if the questions of myself and other users on this site today has set you on edge - and I am sure that today, in public and in private, you have seen many ugly things that the majority of us do not, and you reasonably draw a trend-line. I believe that you should extend the same charity of trend-spotting in the other direction.
We live in tumultuous times, and the speed at which the ratchet is moving seems to be ever-increasing. There are significant concerns, as I know you know, about censorship abroad, and also at home in various western countries. I believe the overwhelming outpouring you have seen today has been in response to one undeniable fact -- that even a genuine accident on the part of some engineer somewhere could apply CCP (or any country's ruling party) censorship globally is a line in the sand that many did not realize had been already been crossed.
Whether accidental or intentional, this is a watershed moment in the debate over censorship and freedom. It seems likely there are many more such errors in configuration actively deployed right now. That we have no way of knowing what, or how many such incidents there are is an existential threat to non-authoritarian systems of governance across the globe.
To see something that seemed unthinkable even a few months ago - that Tank Man could be censored in western countries on the anniversary in remembrance of the struggles he literally stood for - crossed a threshold for me in terms of what I believed could be possible more broadly. To see the extremely reasonable discussion around it disappear from hacker news, and stay dead for hours (I note that both the inappropriately-flagged article and the accidentally-marked-as-dupe article both still maintain those statuses at the time of this writing [EDIT: The flagged article's status was changed a few minutes after. Thank you, dang. Doing so does not mean you are re-writing history, and we appreciate it]) made it feel like it had encroached even closer to home than I had suspected.
It made it feel like perhaps I'd been even more naive than I had ever imagined. I'm sure you must feel the same way, after some of the more hateful things I'm sure you heard today.
All of this is to say that I treasure the community that you have played the single largest role in shaping, and your explanations have completely satisfied me.
I apologize for the way your day turned out, and any negative ways in which I have contributed towards that.