As of now, it is called whitelist/blacklist in PiHole [0]. Maybe it will change, maybe it will not, but there is already a place to fight that battle [1] and it is not HN.
If the terms whitelist/blacklist are hurtful to some people because of all the racial baggage we've applied to the words white and black, why not switch to allow/deny instead?
Using allow/deny is more explicit and doesn't rely on the benign cultural associations with the colors black and white.
The choice of colors used here is arbitrary. For example, one could just as easily use green/red in reference to traffic signal colors. Ask yourself, would it bother you if we used blue and pink for allow and deny? What if we used blue or white as synonymous with deny?
Two good reasons exist to change our habits, basic manners and clarity.
I'm sure I'll use the terms blacklist and whitelist from time to time out of accumulated habit. But there's no reason for me to cling to those terms. Being gently reminded to use objectively clearer terminology shouldn't engender hostility on my part. I try not to be an unpleasant person, part of that is when someone tells me my behavior has a negative impact on them, I try to listen to what they say and modify my behavior--while actually effecting change can be hard, the underlying concept is pretty simple.
There is a real cost to changing APIs/documentation/UIs. My experience talking to black (one African, one European) coworkers is their reaction is "That's the problem you're going to fix?". When the company does a companywide initative to remove "problematic" terms from APIs/documentation, but doesn't stop funding of politicians who support voter suppression that predominantly affect black people in real practical ways, that bemusement can even turn to offense as they feel placated.
Of course, my coworkers don't represent all black people, and especially wouldn't claim to represent African Americans, but if even black people can hold this opinion, are you surprised others don't see this as worth the effort to change?
> There is a real cost to changing APIs/documentation/UIs.
This is an OSS project. If someone cares enough about it, they should submit a (non-breaking) patch along with a patch for the documentation. There are no costs to people who don't find it a valuable change.
> My experience talking to black (one African, one European) coworkers is their reaction is "That's the problem you're going to fix?".
Obviously this isn't fixing any of the fundamental issues, but it does bother some people. My preference is to respect the people who have problems with it. An easy policy is to simply avoid creating new software which uses that terminology and to accept any patches which fix it. That way the people who feel the change is important bear the burden of the cost (which is likely small some thing like this).
Whitelist/blacklist have their origins in terms from the 1400s and nothing to do with race (they have to do with criminality). Twisting their etymology to fit some kind of racial bias is sort of weird.
And throwing aside 600 years of clarity for "basic manners" also seems rather weird. Sort of like banning the word "engender" because a small minority might find that to be offensive. It isn't clearer to use a different word than has been used for over half a millennium.
For a while, people were getting in trouble for using the word, "niggardly," even though it had nothing to do with the offensive term that it sounds like.
The difference being that the controversy around white/blacklist only appeared after someone said it was a controversy in 2018, which is extremely recent, and the wording doesn't contain any phonetic similarity to a term from slavery. Being able to be misheard is more of a problem when phonetics clash.
Should all terms for the colour-that-is-somewhat-the-absence-of-colour now be banned? Is Vanta Black now racist?
Manufactured controversy leads you down a path of absurdism. It isn't helpful to the people it purports to help, whilst granting the vocal group the ability to say they're being helpful whilst actively ignoring any actual problems.
Blacklist/whitelist are not used consistently, so the clarity is not there. You can't see whitelist and consistently know whether it's going to be an allow list or a deny list
I don't believe I have ever seen a single example of a whitelist not being a list of exemptions. Nor can I seem to find any.
Nor can I find any example where blacklist is not a list of denied subjects. A blacklisted person, website or process is immediately clear within their context.
Where the clarity is lacking is not clear to me. However the mismatch between "allow list" and "whitelist", is. The latter seems to have a different meaning altogether.
Sorry but I find this claim (which I've heard from others too) ridiculous. "Blacklist" is an actual common English word in the dictionary. "Denylist" is an incredibly awkward-sounding neologism without any context or history behind it. There is no way that "denylist" is the "objectively clearer" one here.
I suspect it is the perception that it's a bit pedantic to correct an otherwise correct answer. I agree with you, but also don't really think it needs to be corrected every single time someone posts whitelist/blacklist.
EDIT: apparently setting allowlist/denylist won't work so it's not just being pedantic, it's wrong.
You and everyone else who exhibit this are reading into things that don't exist. Language has context, words are part of language and so therefore words have context too.
Exactly. And using white/black as synonyms for good/bad may be creating context (connotations, really) that we don't want. It would be fine if we hadn't already overloaded those words to refer to people... but, here we are. In the context we've created. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The original poster used the terms used by the technology. The best choices for changing this terminology would be to write a treatise for HN consumption (to reach the community at large) or to contact the authors of the technology that use this terminology (to fix the origin in this case). Sniping a 'random internet poster' is just lazy trolling.
A black celebrity (forget who) said that he came to the realization growing up that the only positive connotation he could find for black was "in the black" with regards to finances.
The downside of that is being 'in the red', which is also potentially problematic.
To fix the problem, we either have to stop referring to any metaphor/symbol involving color with negative connotations; or we have to stop using color to identify and refer to people. I think the former is good for precision (allowlist/denylist are great identifiers in that regard), but won't really solve our other problems; while the latter is probably better for human dignity, mutual respect, and combating our propensity for tribalism/racism. (Or, why not, we could do both.)
After a few failed attempts to migrate from Google as my default search engine due to poor results, a couple of months ago, I decided to give DDG another try. Been using daily since, I don't even remember what Google is. Not sure if the service did improve that much or what, but I'm glad I could move on. Youtube, you are next.
I must be in the minority here, but even after trying ddg exclusively, I find myself doing !g all the time, to the point where I just switched back.
I do many technical searches throughout the day, and ddg falls short basically every time. Google is always closer to the mark with my search intent, with for example, deep links to stack overflow answers that ddg misses.
I honestly find it interesting people have trouble with duckduckgo. Although, the one thing I have found lacking is their exact phrase search. For exact queries I end up having to add !g the query. Otherwise, I find myself rarely needing to use google.
I started using DuckDuckGo, and one day I woke up and all of my email was on Fastmail instead of Gmail. No memory of switching, but all of my contacts were moved over. My accounts were using Fastmail aliases.
I called up my siblings and asked, "where did you get this email address, why are you emailing me here?" And they just said, "what are you talking about, you've always been on Fastmail." I have no idea what's going on. Sometimes I'll go to update my system, and I'll be using Pacman instead of the normal Debian package manager. Then the next day it will switch back. Sometimes I'll search for things online, and I won't find the result I'm looking for, but then a day later I'll get a physical letter in my mailbox with the answer to my question written on it.
So anyway, long story short, I decided to switch Bing instead and so far that's had only minor side effects.
As a first step you could try alternative frontends. On the web invidious¹, on Android I suggest NewPipe.
As a next step you could try out entirely different platforms. I personally find Peertube very appealing, because it federates with ActivityPub, which I already use and love. There's also LBRY, but I don't get how it works, so no opinion on that. It seems to have more well known publishers on it though.
Go for it, it's really worth the effort, even if it is a small one, with the bonus of being fun (at least for me it is). I can't imagine setting up my home network without pihole, and I'm considering setting it up at work, I manage a small network with 100 devices connected to the internet.
DNS is a very light protocol. In addition, responses tend to be cached, so it's not like the Pi would be hit with a dozen queries on literally every page load for every client on the network.
As @theandrewbailey mentioned, DNS is light protocol, I guess even older PIs would handle it pretty well. But, as a permanent solution, I would opt to set up on a VM/Docker so that I could have snapshots to quickly recover the service in the event of a problem.
Hi, author of the piece here! You're right that WordPress wouldn't have given you a popup before you could read, for free, the article I spent a couple of months working on. It also wouldn't have provided me with any income to support creating the article in the first place.
Medium, on the other hand, does. I mean, it's not much - I get a slice of the revenue from paying subscribers', based on how much they 'applaud' my piece - but it's higher than zero. Despite this, Medium also makes it available to read free of charge for non-members - up to, I believe, a somewhat miserly three articles a month, though you can bypass this if you really must by using a private browsing window to get another three, and another three, and another three, and another three...
I've got kids to feed and bills to pay. If you really don't want to click an X on the login prompt and read it all for free, I can give you my payment details and sell you a PDF copy...
I wouldn’t know. It’s not like I’ve consumed my “fair free share” of your content, I’ve apparently consumed my fair free share of content across all of medium.
Would you accept to be requested documents when you enter the mall? Would you find normal to be stopped by a security guard that says “sir/madame, you’ve browsed enough stores for free without handing in your id card and personal data, please fill this form or leave” ?
I owe you nothing. If anything, you owe me. It’s my time that builds your audience, not the other way around.
- would you mind sharing how much you actually you expect in revenue from this article?
- Have you considered any other ways of monetizing it? Just an idea: if you had your own blog and registered on Brave as a content creator, you could be getting a few cents from me already.
Massively depends on performance. You get money from a subset of a subset of a subset: there's the set of the audience; there's the subset of the audience that are logged in to Medium at the time; there's the subset of the logged-in subset of the audience that bother to click the 'Applaud' button; there's the subset of the bother-to-click-Applaud subset of the logged-in subset of the audience who actually have a paying membership.
Then how much you actually get is totally up in the air. If mine's the only piece Reader A applauds that month, I get 100% of the revenue (minus Medium's cut, of course - the house always wins); if Reader B has applauded 1,000 pieces this month, I get 0.1 percent of the revenue (as do the other 999 authors.)
It's a model which is inherently insular: of the traffic that has visited the piece so far, 90% is external (and thus earns me nothing other than name-recognition) and 10% is internal to Medium. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of that 10% has applauded, and I won't know what that translates to in terms of Cash Monies until Medium calculates it and tells me. I'd be much better off promoting it to existing Medium members - such as by joining a 'publication' on Medium - and ignoring external traffic sources, but I don't want to do that.
As a ballpark, though, the answer - long in coming - is "not much, but considerably more than I'd get on Brave." The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ benchmarking piece I wrote on Medium has earned about $277 lifetime; if this earns the same, I'll have done very well indeed.
Thankfully, I'm not relying on the Medium income: I've pieces in various websites and magazines based on the same core data, which pay one heck of a lot better!
Thanks for your answer. In all honesty and taking what you said in consideration, I still believe that the Medium model should die in a fire, I won't feel bad for not supporting you through it and I hope you consider other alternatives.
I'm not sure you read what I wrote, but I have considered other alternatives: it's called "writing for magazines." If you'd like to support me without supporting Medium, you'll likely find me inside more than one bound collection of thinly-sliced dead tree at your nearest newsagent, supermarket, or bookseller.
I've even considered Brave. Hell, I've even tried Brave. According to my email archive, I signed up as a publisher in January 2018. Sadly, it's just not a sustainable model yet - which is why my piece is monetised by Medium, not Brave.
I wouldn't be keen on supporting dead tree magazines and its excessive ad-to-information ratio, newspapers that only are tangentially focused on providing good content and more focused on creating constant crisis as well or any kind of publishing industry with so many middleman that need to be eliminated.
Sorry, it is really not my intention to pile on you. I am just really tired of the current state of affairs in regards to the publishing/authoring economy. I know it is easier said than done, but we need to have more content creators that are willing to take a principled stand and stay away from these actors and start creating exclusively on terms that are more ethical.
If you're using Brave, I'm assuming you're using the browser's main claim to fame: the ad-blocking/ad-switching functionality, yes?
So, you won't support content creators who publish on a website which uses advertising.
You won't support content creators who publish on a website which allows non-members and free-tier members access to a limited number of articles a month and charges a fee, distributed to the content creators, for unlimited access.
You won't support content creators who publish in print, in magazines or newspapers.
I'm sensing a theme, here: you won't support content creators.
I would love to host my own website (actually, I host several) and write the same kind of content I do now, but how exactly am I going to feed the bills and pay my children? This is literally my job - I'm not just dashing out a quick blog post as I Segway to the London office of my cryptocurrency startup for a day of find-and-replace in the whitepaper. If I'm not getting paid for my words I'm not getting paid at all.
Brave is not the answer, I'm sorry to say. Something like Brave may be - I used to play around with Flattr, which was the same kind of micropayments model as Medium but applicable to any third-party web content, and doesn't have the ethical issue of blocking everybody's adverts but its own - but Brave ain't it, at least as it stands.
You don't want to support content creators, you want to support Brave. That's fine, but don't frame it as wanting to support content creators but only in one very specific and questionably-ethical way.
Otherwise, put your money where your mouth is: pop me a payment across, in the currency or cryptocurrency of your choosing, and I'll publish the same piece on my main website. No adverts, unless you count the cover shots of the books I've published (hey, there's another way you could support me - and if you're worried about ethics, some of them are available for free download under a Creative Commons licence!) down the side.
I used to have about ~$15/month deposited on flattr* for quite some time, and the main reason that I've been using brave is not because of its anti-ad stance but rather their anti-tracking + the possibility of a way to fund content creators.
I am also contributing about ~10€/month on patreon for different software projects and writers. I've written to more than one youtube channel producers asking them to look into alternatives so that they could take my money. The Quilette model is also something that I do appreciate.
Believe me when I say that I am more than willing to support people that create content. And depending how much you are asking for me to send you, I'd gladly take on your offer.
* story time: I got a call from an Eyeo recruiter some months ago, who was looking for people in their ad-block/acceptable ads team. It turned into a most-of-the-time-friendly discussion about how acceptable ads does nothing about the tracking of the users, so I wouldn't be interested in joining their team and me asking him to call me back only if he had some position on flattr.
The problem with Patreon - and thus Quilette, which is 95 percent funded by Patreon - is that there's a massive gulf you can't cross. Popular Content Creator who has a hojillion Patreon backers and gets $10,000 a month from 'em has no worries; person who plays about with it in their spare time and gets $5 a month can buy a beer. Job's a good 'un.
But what about the person who wants to write full time, but hasn't built the audience yet? How do they go from $5 a month to paying the bills? In my case, I didn't have to: by the time I switched careers I had enough regular clients to cover all my outgoings, albeit only just. Quit the day job, picked up some more clients, and here I am doing it full-time to this day.
If I were relying wholly on Patreon - or Brave, or Flattr, or even Medium - I couldn't have done that. Patreon isn't going to give me $300 on spec to write an article that might not do well; Medium won't front me a few grand against royalties so I can take time to write a book.
D'you know who will? The traditional publishers.
I appreciate you have a personal stance on this, but so do I - and mine comes not from the perspective of "I'd like to read this but it's on a website I don't like" but from the perspective of "if I don't get paid for this I'm literally homeless."
Actually, I have a Patreon account - https://www.patreon.com/ghalfacree - I signed up just before the new fee scheme came in to lock in the old rates, but never launched it (hence the zero backers.) Don't really have time to give it the love it would need to gain traction, either - again, we're back to the problem of not having the cash to go from zero Patrons to I-can-feed-my-children Patrons.
I am sorry but this is the point where we disagree. "I still need to make a living" is not that I would accept as an argument to justify all of the unethical issues that arise from the attention economy industry.
Yes, this means that I will actively find ways to accelerate the demise of these business. No matter how much I want to support content creators, it does not make me responsible in guaranteeing their job.
