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by nfbdhdfbf3 hours ago |
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upvoteby qphe953 hours ago|
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Well banning it pushed it to Radicle and now people are moving to GitHub alternatives so I think the Streisand effect worked.
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upvoteby mastax3 hours ago|
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Did banning it cause it to get adopted even faster in India than it otherwise would have? That seems like the salient point to me for the Indian government’s calculus. I don’t have a particularly good feel for Indian society but my prior is that this kind of official friction puts a pretty low hard cap on how popular an app can get. If the realistic ambition was only ever to reach a small circle of activists and nerds then sure, this event probably helped the app reach those people faster.
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upvoteby miki12321130 minutes ago|
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People can be surprisingly resourceful when they feel like they have a need to do so.

In tech circles, we talk a lot about friction and user experience, and those matter enormously, but they're not the be-all-end-all. We have OSS developers underestimating friction on one hand, and tech companies overestimating it on the other.

Even if something requires you to be tech-savvy to set up, people will still do it if the need is dire enough, because everybody "knows a guy". Console modchips in the 2000s are my go-to example. They were devilishly complex to set up, often requiring proficiency with a soldering iron, with stakes for failure being very high (breaking the console you just spend all your savings buying), yet everybody and their mom had one. All you needed was a friend with such a chip, who could tell you who the "guy" in your town is.

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upvoteby freehorse2 hours ago|
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I dont have data for any country, but if anything banning it from github gave it visibility (I personally learnt of it because of that). I don't think that banning it from github hurts its distribution really because I do not expect github to be the channel it gets popularised through as opposed to social media, in which case where the source code is hosted does not really matter. If it gets banned from the app stores, though, it will be a different issue that will definitely hurt.
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upvoteby qphe952 hours ago|
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We both know systems are more complex than # of downloads. In this case, the ban was a sign of weakness the establishment of the government and Github and definitely their control was weakened, which is the opposite of their goal of maintaining control, so it did not have the desired effect.
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upvoteby culi3 hours ago|
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Likely faster than it would've otherwise but not likely as fast as it needs to to succeed. Similar to when Twitter got bought out and then Musk banned people who linked their Mastodon. It certainly helped Mastodon in the short term but likely hurt it in the long term
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upvoteby wat100003 hours ago|
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The Streisand effect only works for things people are interested in to begin with. People love embarrassing photos about celebrities so it works great on those. "A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app with dual transport architecture." Oops, you've already lost everyone.
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upvoteby freehorse2 hours ago|
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Also it works if you can still actually install it. If they ban it from the app store in ios, there is no practical way people can install it on iphones. But if it is just github, it does not really create much of an issue (people found another hosting platform).
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upvoteby miohtama2 hours ago|
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That's exactly why we fight back harder and do not bury our heads in the sand or anywhere else.

This website is called Hacker News. It's not called Authoritarian Cuck News.

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upvoteby inigyou1 hours ago|
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It's also called news dot hypercapitalist VC fund dot com
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upvoteby stackghost2 hours ago|
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It's genuinely hard to tell if this comment is satire or not.

HN is widely known for being the home of the technocrat corporate bootlicker. Very little of the hacker ethos ever gets espoused here.

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upvoteby trollbridge44 minutes ago|
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Yeah. I got a lecture here about the ethics of bypassing a past employer’s MDM.

Nevermind the fact it was possible to bypass it, or that they didn’t detect that I did so… nope, just a scolding of “You shouldn’t do such things.”

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upvoteby ranger_danger3 hours ago|
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When people talk about the Streisand Effect, they usually refer to content that someone wants to disappear entirely, not merely lower its usage.

In that regard the effect is effective in making sure bitchat cannot vanish from the internet.

We can argue that overall usage of it might still go down, but I don't think anyone was arguing that.

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