| ▲ | nfbdhdfbf 3 hours ago |
| It definitely won’t. People love pointing out the Streisand effect as though we’re still in the same social media dynamic that we were 30 or 15 years ago. Wake the fuck up. Banning the app is 100% certainly going to reduce it all’s usage. The fact that you somehow think you could have the opposite effect is a sign that your head is buried so deep in the sand and you have no idea what the current state of the world is. The authoritarians are winning and their censorship and propaganda has been exceptionally effective. Clinging to idealistic slogans and denying reality is a great way to accomplish nothing |
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| ▲ | qphe95 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | mastax 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | freehorse 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | qphe95 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | culi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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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| ▲ | wat10000 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | freehorse 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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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| ▲ | miohtama 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | inigyou 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It's also called news dot hypercapitalist VC fund dot com | |
| ▲ | stackghost an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | trollbridge 5 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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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| ▲ | ranger_danger 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
