SOPA and PROTECT-IP

[Loki]

Oh no! How will I ever plagiarize my thesis now?!?

Oh wait. I don't have a thesis to do. Continue.

[deoxys]

Google's in.

Shit just got real.

[DaveTheFishGuy]

Originally Posted by Raptor Jesus

Oh no! How will I ever plagiarize my thesis now?!?

Oh wait. I don't have a thesis to do. Continue.

Plagiarism - getting in trouble for something you didn't do.

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by deoxys

Google's in.

Shit just got real.

Got my hopes up for nothing. Way to over-exaggerate. Google has spoken out against this for months, so what they plan to do tomorrow -- post links explaining their stance on the main Google page -- will accomplish little. As for joining the blackout, unfortunately they're not. Which is what I thought you were implying they were.

Wikipedia's move is still big. Fuck Reddit, though: hardly anyone I know uses that site. But Wikipedia? That one's going to get people's attention. It's just too bad Google isn't also blacking out tomorrow. That would have been to Wikipedia what Wikipedia is to Reddit.

[deoxys]

Originally Posted by Talon87

Got my hopes up for nothing. Way to over-exaggerate. Google has spoken out against this for months, so what they plan to do tomorrow -- post links explaining their stance on the main Google page -- will accomplish little. As for joining the blackout, unfortunately they're not. Which is what I thought you were implying they were.

Wikipedia's move is still big. Fuck Reddit, though: hardly anyone I know uses that site. But Wikipedia? That one's going to get people's attention. It's just too bad Google isn't also blacking out tomorrow. That would have been to Wikipedia what Wikipedia is to Reddit.

Sorry. They're joining the spreading of awareness though. You can't honestly expect Google to go down, that would cost them quite a bit of business.

The fact that they're putting a link on their front page is a big deal and will not accomplish little. Considering it's the second most popular website in the world, depending on whose ranking systems you use.

And maybe you don't know anyone who uses reddit, but I personally know several people who do, and considering it gets on average 100 million pageviews per day and 11 million daily visitors, I think that counts as a big deal. Besides, reddit was the first site to say "We're doing it January 18th", and then other sites follower.

Now if only we could get facebook and tumblr to do something.

Any kind of awareness is good awareness.

[Jerichi]

>Fuck Reddit, though: hardly anyone I know uses that site.

Even if I'm a Redditor who is in support of the blackout (I guess), I still think it's kinda stupid because it is preaching to the choir. Pretty much EVERY Redditor is anti-SOPA since SOPA would pretty much murder Reddit. It's a nice gesture, I guess, but it hardly does anything.

However, it is worth noting that the vehement anti-SOPA movement is largely Reddit-based or at least Reddit-influenced.

Also I don't think Google can black out. I'm pretty sure it'd cause anarchy.

[Talon87]

For the record, I'm not saying "Fuck Reddit" as in "Fuck those guys. Jerks. " I'm saying "Fuck Reddit" as in "No offense, guys , but ... *snicker* ... you're not as important to the Internet as you think you are." I realize a lot of people will disagree with me on that one, particularly the nerd youth (a.k.a. you and 90% of people bound to respond to this post), but the fact of the matter is that Reddit is the flea on the back of the cat (Wikipedia) who's inside the Enterprise-D (Google) soaring through space. They are nothing compared to these larger beings. Hell, even the cat going missing for a day isn't going to have as big of an impact as, say, the entire mothership going missing for a day.

- Enterprise-D disappears from known regions of space: many episodes of Star Trek
- Spot disappears for a day: no episodes of Star Trek, unless you want to be anal retentive and say that "the time Spot turned into an iguana" counts as "The 'Spot disappearing for a day' episode."
- Flea on Spot's back disappears for a day: Huh?

Reddit: 100 million pageviews per day, you say?
Wikipedia: 90,000 to 50,000 requests every second. 50,000 is the low point in the 24-hour cycle for Wikipedia. Let's roll with that number just to hurt my argument as badly as possible, showing how robust an argument it is. 50,000 requests/second times 3,600 seconds/hour times 24 hours/day is how many requests per day? 4 billion 320 million page requests each day. And that's hurting the argument, unfairly so, using minimum activity rather than average or peak activity. (The average is closer to 70,000 requests/second, as you can see reported at the bottom of the figure.) To put this into perspective, this means that one Wikipedia is worth 43+ Reddits just by page requests alone. This means that for every one person who clicks somewhere on Reddit, there are 43+ people who click somewhere on Wikipedia. Yes, Reddit has grown quite large, but it's still a featherweight when compared with Wikipedia ... who in turn is a speck of dust compared to the colossus that is Google.

Keep in mind that this argument is just going off of page requests, too. If we were to actually do a head count and compare IP addresses which access Reddit vs. IP addresses which access Wikipedia as a crude indicator of how many unique individuals access those two sites on a daily basis, I think you'd find Reddit becoming even more dwarfed by Wiki in size. Why? Because while your average Wikipedia user may look at 5-10 Wikipedia pages in a given day, your Reddit user is a (pardon my French) a Reddit whore who will go through page after page after page of threads, clicking through each of them one at a time. Even if he doesn't end up liking what he sees nor stay to read it, that's still page accesses each time. I would dare say that your average Reddit user, in a given session (never mind a given day!), probably loads no fewer than 20 Reddit pages. I sorely doubt your average Wikipedia user, in a given session, goes on yet another Wikipedia tangential shopping spree whereby they read 20+ articles in one sitting because one fascinating thing linked to another which linked to another still, etc. I can't prove this, of course ... but only because Wikipedia isn't reporting a head count for me on their statistics page. If they were, then we could actually play this game. And I'm pretty confident I would win it by much more than a factor of 43.

If you put any stock in Alexa rankings -- given the nature of how Alexa works, I'm not sure I would either, but still, it's something to consider -- Wikipedia had an Alexa score of 6 to Reddit's 114. You can see the list I compiled for you below:

Spoiler: show

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Youtube
4. Yahoo
5. Baidu
6. Wikipedia
7. Windows Live
8. Blogspot
9. Amazon
10. Twitter
...
13. Google India
14. Yahoo Japan (will not mention international versions of big names from here on, but suffice to say, they are plentiful)
15. MSN
...
20. eBay
...
26. Bing
...
34. PayPal
...
36. IMDB
...
39. Tumblr
...
44. BBC Online
...
48. Craigslist
...
62. CNN
63. ESPN
64. AOL
65. MediaFire
66. Adobe
67. About.com
68. Megaupload
...
76. Ameblo (popular Japanese weblog service)
...
81. Netflix
...
87. The Huffington Post
...
101. The New York Times
...
104. DailyMotion
...
114. Reddit

This indicates that, at least among those who partake in the Alexa project, Reddit is less likely to be access on any given day than is a Japanese weblog service, an online garage sale, and goddamn America Online. ^^; Of course, like I said: Alexa isn't exactly a random survey of the general populace, so take its rankings with a grain of salt. Still, something to throw out there.

[deoxys]

Ok.

[Loki]

Oh man! No one will notice when 100 million people disappear from the face of the Earth when there's like 7 billion people on the planet. That's only like 1.43%.

[Talon87]

100 million page views =/= 100 million people

[Loki]

50,000 page requests per second =/= 50,000 people per second

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by Raptor Jesus

50,000 page requests per second =/= 50,000 people per second

And I never said it did, smartass! LEARN TO READ! Go back up and look. All I said is that Wikipedia, at a conservative estimate, has 40 times the head count traffic that Reddit does. (Going under the assumption that the page hit : head ratio for Wiki is comparable to that of Reddit.) I then went on to say that not only is this assumption probably wrong but that it's probably wrong in my argument's favor, i.e. that the page access : head ratio for Reddit is probably much higher on average than it is for Wikipedia since, on Reddit, every session is a 20+ pages session whereas on Wikipedia that only happens once in a blue moon when you go on a Wiki tangent spree.

But I think I made it pretty clear, throughout my post, that I was talking about -- and using the term -- "page requests." Because that's exactly what the figure I linked you to charts: page requests.

[deoxys]

Originally Posted by Talon87

Wikipedia: 90,000 to 50,000 requests every second. 50,000 is the low point in the 24-hour cycle for Wikipedia.

Also, WolframAlpha is where I got my info on reddit. Let's see what they say about wikipedia.

860 million pageviews, 220 million visitors

Damn, that sure is a far cry from 4 billion!

[Loki]

Originally Posted by Talon87

Fuck Reddit, though: hardly anyone I know uses that site

Originally Posted by Talon87

(...) one Wikipedia is worth 43+ Reddits (...)

One United States of America is worth 10x Canada in population, but we would notice if Canada fell off the planet right?

Just because Reddit is only a mere 100 million page views, you're on this quest to prove it is somehow insignificant. Is it less than Wikipedia? Yeah. But 100 million is still a noticeable sum of views.

Also, using Wikipedia activity vs. Reddit is a skewed system. Wikipedia is built as a system of articles linking to other articles and links of information to create a broad source of information. Reddit is a series of articles. Where one person might read a single Reddit article and be done, a person might read dozens Wikipedia pages for their information or just out of curiosity.

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by deoxys

Also, WolframAlpha is where I got my info on reddit. Let's see what they say about wikipedia.

Damn, that sure is a far cry from 4 billion!

I got my information from Wikipedia themselves. I had to extrapolate for a daily estimate because they reported in per second increments (for daily), but you can still see for yourself where the 70,000 page requests/s statistic came from, and that isn't my doing, that's theirs. Now that stated, it looks like (according to Wolfram Alpha) January 2012 has been the busiest month for Wikipedia in the past twelve months. So it's possible that the 880 million vs. 4 billion discrepancy of a factor of five ... no, looking at the charts on Wolfram Alpha, that still wouldn't explain it. Not a factor of five discrepancy. Well, I don't know where the math steered us wrong, but in any event ...

How nice of you to not link Reddit's info back around too for our easy perusal. In any event, looking at it, it becomes clear that even by Wolfram Alpha's estimates, Wikipedia accounts for 20 times as many unique human beings as Reddit per day. Now yes: the sudden loss of 11 million lives, to use Loki's analogy from earlier, would certainly be felt. But 220 million? It doesn't even begin to compare. One is like saying "We just had another WW2," the other is like saying "We just had twenty WW2s back-to-back."

Instead of comparing things to Planet Earth's population, though, let's use Google's numbers as a gold standard. Google's daily headcount is apparently 720 million. This means that Google is equivalent to between 3 and 4 Wikipedias (not bad, Wikipedia!) and that it's equivalent to between 65 and 66 Reddits. This further underscores the point that Reddit's absence from the Internet, while it might be felt by a certain segment -- our segment -- is not really an earth-shaking absence. Wikipedia's is, and Google's even more so.

In any event, T-minus 2 hours 11 minutes and counting until Operation: Blackout.

[Jerichi]

Jumping in to say that 4chan, in classic 4chan style, forced spoiler boxes on all the text.

[deoxys]

It's funny because hey look Wikipedia isn't down it just says "Wikipedia is locked for the SOPA PIPA blackout". Sounds like what Google is going to do!

[Talon87]

Weak. And after all that talk, too. Have to say I'm quite disappointed.

[deoxys]

I spoke too soon. It loads the normal page, before the black screen. You can just stop the page loading and use Wikipedia normally. My internet is shit, hence, it didn't happen.

[deoxys]

Wow, look at Google's homepage and Craigslist, too! You're doing it right!

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by deoxys

I spoke too soon. It loads the normal page, before the black screen. You can just stop the page loading and use Wikipedia normally. My internet is shit, hence, it didn't happen.

Apparently. But don't kick yourself: when you wrote what you wrote last night, before I posted my post (via cell phone), I actually went and accessed Wikipedia for myself. Just to see. And I was able to confirm what you had said. The main page loaded, albeit it with a black box on the top of the screen. But who cares? I went ahead and clicked on a front page Recommended Article link and it loaded perfectly fine. I then went ahead and searched for something (I forget what) and was able to load it, too, no problems. This was around 1:30am local, which would have been 12:30am Central Standard Time, thirty minutes past the supposed beginning of the site blackout.

So whether they were just slow to start, or having cold feet, or something, I dunno, but in any event, they definitely did not originally shut the site down to the extent it is currently shut down. So your original post, if premature in hindsight, was quite correct at the time you wrote it.

As for Google ...

Sure, there's a modest blackening out of their logo on the main page, www.google.com, but (a) that's it *yawn* and (b) iGoogle users don't even see any changes. Hardly a protest on the same level as Wikipedia or Reddit have done. +1 Wikipedia, +1 Reddit, +0 Google for this round.

[Tyranidos]

Realize that if Google stopped functioning for a day, everyone would die.

[Talon87]

Quit being overly dramatic, guys. You could go without Google (search engine only) for a day. They could leave their other avenues open (e-mail, weblog, etc) in case people really are depending on it for emergency notifications. The more persuasive argument I've heard -- but I still don't buy it, considering how much money Google stands to lose if SOPA or PIPA pass -- is that Google would lose perfectly good money by shutting down their search engine for a day.

[Jerichi]

I think you're pretty drastically underestimating the power of Google, but I don't really care to get into the details of that at the moment.

I think you're kinda missing the point, though, Talon. Yes, Google isn't doing some big OMG BLACKOUT deal. Yes, Reddit is a small site. But it's really not the volume that counts - it's the ability to generate word of mouth and media coverage. I can pretty much guarantee that one of the top-viewed sites on the Internet going dark for 24 hours is going to incite some major media attention, which will lead to more parties that wouldn't necessarily get involved to get involved.

Even if Reddit won't generate that coverage, the show of pan-Internet solidarity sure will. Not to mention, in these kinds of things, every call to a Congressman and every signature on a petition counts. I still think the Reddit blackout is kinda stupid only because it's 100% preaching to the choir, but it still serves a purpose to show that people are unhappy and oppose the bill.

I really have a hard time understanding your constant Negative Nancy attitude towards this movement. Sure, they're not doing WILD DRASTIC BLACKOUTS but everyone is doing their part to contribute within their means. Wikipedia can do more than Google since Wikipedia won't lose money from a day of blackout where Google would. I really don't think it's that ridiculous, and considering how many page views Google's front page gets per day, I don't think it's such a bad thing that they're only doing the Logo blackout + Link. It's also on -every- Google search page, which makes its visibility even higher (even if it's not all that visible).

EDIT: A list of participating websites. Everything below that first chunk is pretty insignificant, though there are a handful of high-ish traffic blogs and the sort. However, the main group contains a lot of significant sites like Flickr, Tumblr, Mozilla, TwitPic, Internet Archive, icanhazcheezburger, Vimeo, Wired, etc. Obviously, the level of participation varies from a logo blackout and a front-page post to 100% going dark, but it's something.

I think this is a pretty significant thing. Volume is being generated, even if it doesn't seem like it, in a multitude of ways.

[unownmew]

Glad to see Heritage is helping as well. Not by protesting, but it's still getting the word out.

While a total blackout would be quite cool to see on any site, and I'm disappointed the top companies aren't doing so, I'm glad they are still getting the word out. Though, Google's censor image could have been done much better and more pronounced. I do also agree that we all could all go without Google Search for 24 hours, there's plenty of other Search engines to use if one was absolutely needed.

As it stands, I fear some of the "ho-hum, don't care" people who see these not-blacked-out protesting sites, aren't even going to wonder about what it's all about.

A total Blackout/lockout would have serious staying power with everyone.


If I ran a website, I'd do something along these lines:

[serious lockout screen with the US Seal and the words "Anti-piracy Acts of 2012]
[Informative Text underneath:]
This website has been censored for infringement of the SOPA and PIPA Acts of Congress.
Further violation and access by users shall be subject to Criminal Prosecution and sentenced to [*whatever the maximum penalty is according to those laws*]

For further information on infringement, please see: [Link to Petition and informative page describing SOPA and PIPA, the serious problems that will accompany their passage, and a way to contact Congress to tell them "NO!" And then a workaround link to access the website without the lockout]
[Un-locked-out Site:
banner image and all images Black-line censored with the words SOPA and PIPA, linking to the previous page about the Bills]