To me the two poles here are the naturalistic fallacy and the moralistic fallacy. The former is basically "what is natural is right", and the latter is "what is right is true". Both of them for me are Mencken's "clear, simple, and wrong".
"Natural" is basically a billion years of historical accidents, so there's no reason to expect it to be optimal from our perspective. We need to think about what we truly want the world to be. But we can't assume that the world is just going to be like we want. As when building anything, we must look closely at the characteristics of the raw materials and work with them to achieve our goals.
I've put this idea forward a number of times here on HN in regards to other big tech companies.
Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed.
The Ombudsman must not be part of the technology companies ordinary support processes, it must be entirely separate, and have highest level authority to demand action within the company.
To avoid the Ombudsman being overused, you could give it a price of say $20, which is always refunded when the case is resolved.
HN constantly has front page posts from people for whom big tech companies have support processes have failed but there is simply no other recourse unless you have "a friend in the business".
It just doesn't work to have some random Cloudflare person offer their email address as some post disaster issue resolution process on social media. Formalise it with an official Ombudsman and maybe then companies like Cloudflare might avoid HN front page bad publicity.
I had an issue at "one of the biggest tech companies" that went on for days and days in which tech support kept telling me I had set up something wrong, until eventually I emailed one of the top managers who I happen to "know" at that company - it was fixed within hours. That "contact a friend in the business who can actually get things done" is a necessary part of a large support organisation and it simply does not exist yet in any tech company that I know of.
FWIW I recently evaluated a few DNS companies after Namecheap ballsed up our MX records in a similar way.
I actively looked for someone we could pay money to, so we are their customer (as opposed to being a free tier user, effectively a cost)
The winner was DNSimple[1], who do exactly 1 thing, and they do it extremely well. And they are small enough to not take themselves too seriously[2], which I really appreciate.
Oh and their normal support channel is email, and everyone in the company takes a turn. I tested out their support before signing up and quickly heard back from a competent engineer, so they passed that test too.
Re 1: what can we do to make this happen? Both as developers and as users of social media?
Re 2: I used to co-organize "privacy café" workshops. I was surprised by how many people showed up and how grateful they were to learn about really basic tools -- like ad blockers or just browser cookie delete functionality. Everyone knows how to brush their teeth, and everyone had to learn how at one point. Digital hygiene is no different.
> it is click-bait in it's dark patterns of pretending the page is an open page/free page so it can compete in the search engines but in reality it presents a paid-gate that only appears after leading content
This is the most important point here. If your content is not actually public, you really shouldn't get the benefits of search engine exposure, HN exposure, or even the distribution from sharing what appears to be a URL to a hypertext document.
This is an extremely important effort. The LibGen archive contains around 32 TBs of books (by far the most common being scientific books and textbooks, with a healthy dose of non-STEM). The SciMag archive, backing up Sci-Hub, clocks in at around 67 TBs [0]. This is invaluable data that should not be lost. If you want to contribute, here's a few ways to do so.
If you wish to donate bandwidth or storage, I personally know of at least a few mirroring efforts. Please get in touch with me over at legatusR(at)protonmail(dot)com and I can help direct you towards those behind this effort.
If you don't have storage or bandwidth available, you can still help. Bookwarrior has requested help [1] in developing an HTTP-based decentralizing mechanism for LibGen's various forks. Those with experience in software may help make sure those invaluable archives are never lost.
Another way of contributing is by donating bitcoin, as both LibGen [2] and The-Eye [3] accept donations.
Lastly, you can always contribute books. If you buy a textbook or book, consider uploading it (and scanning it, should it be a physical book) in case it isn't already present in the database.
In any case, this effort has a noble goal, and I believe people of this community can contribute.
P.S. The "Pirate Bay of Science" is actually LibGen, and I favor a title change (I posted it this way as to comply with HN guidelines).
What you are looking for are called "Commercial Displays" or "Digital Signage"
Expect to pay a premium, but they are generally simple panels built to endure a very heavy duty cycle and harsher-than-a-living-room environment
If money is you main motivation for doing what you do, you’re way more likely ending up making these kind of bad decisions.
Money and greed goes hand in hand and it deludes your moral compass.
If you instead are driven by true happiness which can come in many forms such as doing good, impacting people in a positive way or just improving the world in general, money becomes less important.
I do understand this way of thinking is a luxury and I myself had been in situations where I just needed money to buy food, but the people sitting in these positions, making these decisions usually have no issue with money, they just want more.
To me the two poles here are the naturalistic fallacy and the moralistic fallacy. The former is basically "what is natural is right", and the latter is "what is right is true". Both of them for me are Mencken's "clear, simple, and wrong".
"Natural" is basically a billion years of historical accidents, so there's no reason to expect it to be optimal from our perspective. We need to think about what we truly want the world to be. But we can't assume that the world is just going to be like we want. As when building anything, we must look closely at the characteristics of the raw materials and work with them to achieve our goals.