site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   26591 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'm curious if you have any thoughts on what Amazon would have based their design on, if not Android? Yes much of it's generally-accepted functionality isn't open source -- I've seen Google claim this makes updates, including security updates, easier without relying on OEMs, which sadly makes sense, but also helps their moat.

Even if you chose something else, I doubt "write an OS from scratch" was in the cards, and I assume you'd end up with Linux or BSD as the base, with a very slight chance of some commercial embedded platform.

I'm far from where those decision-makers worked so take this with the appropriate-sized grain of salt.

Amazon, like most companies, is a profit-maximizing entity. The thing that separates them from most other companies is the types of decisions that people are allowed to make. The leadership principles they have, as much as I made fun of them while I was there, truly are a driving force on the inside.

Here's what I'm figuring happened. I have zero knowledge that it happened this way, but it tracks based on my time there. (seven years)

  • We already have the Kindle line of e-readers and it's driving a lot of purchases of content, except that content is solely limited to books -- purely black & white books.
  • As Amazon, we already have things like Amazon Video, Comixology (the comic book distributor we bought), Amazon Music. All sorts of things.
  • We need to have another platform to make money on that. Let's make something in a similar form factor to an iPad.
  • It needs to run things. We can't just make something that solely consumes only Amazon content because that's not a compelling enough product. The only other viable avenue is Android, which already has some middling adoption for the tablet market.
  • If we ship the Android that people expect, we need to pay Google (realistically a competitor in many ways) money for ever unit sold. Not only that we lose control over the platform since the Google Play Store pushes products that compete with our own. The economics of the razor blade model don't work if you don't lock in your customers to your brand of razor blades.
  • The licensing of Android insists that it's the Google way or the highway. You can't pick and choose what Google things you want -- it's all or nothing.
  • Hey, we're Amazon -- we have an endless supply of really good programmers. We can do this ourselves.

So, to have any hope of getting third-party apps on a startup platform, you only had Android to choose from. The thing is, we were hounding the third-party publishers to even engage with us. Even though we're one of the biggest companies in the world, and we're selling a large fraction of the Android tablets out there, no one even cared. Even if we could get a publisher to put something in our app store, they would ignore it and it would become wildly out of date typically.

And that's with Android. The publishing process was typically upload your APK and press a few buttons. And it was like pulling teeth to get that done.

I think even Amazon realized that, despite their size, asking devs to make new apps was a bridge too far.

Could Amazon have just stuck with a base Linux distribution and built something from that. Yes. Easily. Arguably easier than making an Android clone in many ways. Yes, it's "Android," but from so much of the public Play Store APIs needed to be reverse engineered and reimplemented.

And I'm 100% sure they would have used Linux. The institutional knowledge of Linux in there is astonishing -- especially when you start engaging the AWS folks.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats