You also deleted some comments around then, which presumably were even worse.
The main difference between your account and the GP, though, is that you were breaking the site guidelines within a day or two of creating your account. The threshold for banning is lower in that case, since such accounts are far more likely to be trolls (and often serial trolls). That, plus spam, are the cases when we use shadowbanning.
The GP account, by contrast, has been around for over a decade. In such cases, yes, we prefer to give warnings before banning. I think most users would consider that reasonable.
The same deal applies to you as to other banned accounts though: if you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
No that's you curating the platform you own to conform with the terms of service you laid out when users signed up. Which is exactly what happened w/ the alex jones stuff, it was always against youtube's ToS.
People are really confusing a free speech issue with a first amendment issue.
It's not a first amendment issue because the first amendment only forbids the government from censoring speech, and private companies are not the government.
However, it's still a free speech issue, and it's still a censorship issue. Just not a first amendment issue.
Private companies can still censor and can stifle/forbid free speech.
> People are really confusing a free speech issue with a first amendment issue.
No, people disagree on the meaning, scope, nature, and purpose of “free speech”, despite agreeing that “free speech” is a good thing.
It's true that the First Amendment (especially when combined with incorporation under the 14th) directly embodies a reasonably close approximation of one of the viewpoints of what free speech is all about, while simultaneously looking like a narrow special case of one of the other viewpoints.
But the nature of the disagreement here is not confusion between a principle and a legal embodiment of that principle, but a fundamental clash of beliefs about the nature of the named principle.
Let's be clear here, it's not that they don't want content on their platform: it's that content blatantly violates their rules.
Encouraging the harassment of families of school shooting victims is pretty heinous, and not something I'd want affiliated with my brand. I also wouldn't want my brand to become a platform for someone who perpetuates conspiracy theories that cause true believes to pick up weapons and become terrorists, simply because that's how he makes a buck.
After all, both Google and Twitter have spent close to a decade silencing religious extremists on their platforms. Where were the free speech advocates when fundamentalist Muslims were silenced on Twitter and couldn't use the platform to spread their message?
Yeah, I equated the two concepts: they created rules to specify what they do and don't want on their platform. Sorry if it came across as them deciding arbitrarily on the fly.
ProtonVPN is no competitor to Private Internet Access in terms of the size and the number of users. If you were a co-founder of PIA, would you risk your reputation by publicly providing false accusations against a company 1/100 of the size of yours?
That's the problem. I haven't found any of his statements, that would be only half-true. I even discovered a conference held in Lithuania in 2017, where one of the speakers was presented as the head of B2B sales at Tesonet, working on Oxylabs[1]. It is very unlikely, that ProtonMail was not aware of who it was partnering with on a free VPN service.
Furthermore, after it was pointed out by the co-founder of PIA, that the CEO of Tesonet is the director of ProtonVPN UAB, the company was renamed multiple times in two months[1], with its director now hidden from the public view.
Finally, the IP blocks, which belonged to Tesonet and were used by ProtonVPN just a few months ago – despite the co-founders of ProtonMail publicly denying any technical partnership between the two[1] – now belong to ProtonVPN[2].
> These stories were first fabricated by Private Internet Access, a competitor who has been feeling pressure from ProtonVPN lately.
This is a lie. Private Internet Access is probably the largest paid VPN provider in the world, and ProtonVPN (by Tesonet?) belongs to a short list of free VPN providers, such as Onavo VPN by Facebook[1] and Hola VPN by Luminati[2], most of which are subsidized by data mining companies. These are two completely different markets.
> We used the same legal address and nominee directors as our local partners because we still did not have our own office yet. For contractual reasons, these moves took some time. For example, ProtonLabs Skopje, our newest entity, only moved in November 2017.
ProtonVPN UAB has been founded in July 2016, and was still operated from Tesonet HQ in June 2018, when this fact was made public by the co-founder of PIA. The current ProtonVPN legal address in Vilnius, Lithuania can be used by any company, which agrees to pay for 1 work-place without any long-term obligations[3]. This means, that ProtonVPN might as well be still operating from Tesonet HQ.
> ProtonVPN/ProtonMail does not, and has never used any IPs or servers from Tesonet (this can be publicly verified)
This is a lie. ProtonMail admitted to using Tesonet IPs, when presented with Whois results in June 2018[4]. Those IP blocks were later assigned to ProtonVPN.
> Proton does not share any employees (or company directors) with Tesonet. This is also a verifiable fact.
This is a lie. It is no longer possible to verify, who is the director of ProtonVPN, because the company made the public record unavailable after changing its name multiple times in the last two months[5]. The last public record listed the CEO of Tesonet as the director of ProtonVPN[6], which was still true in early June 2018, when the co-founder of PIA made the fact public.
> There is little actual evidence that Tesonet does data-mining (in any case we have never used infrastructure from them).
This is a lie. There is plenty of actual evidence, that Tesonet is running a data mining company, called Oxylabs[7][8], which sells access to "10+ Million Mobile IPs in Every Country and Every City in the World".
How am I stealing the spotlight from them? They are on the front page, whereas mine is just a comment that's relevant to it. They still have the spotlight, the link is still there and my comment only adds to the number of comments on the story.
If anything, the comments saying that they shouldn't be trusted, etc. harm them more than my comment.
Actually my comment should be: I don't think being audited by a third party firm is newsworthy, this is us being audited and we didn't post it.
PR is hard. Replies like the one you got are a hint that you need to learn a lot more than just "This right here that I thought was not really newsworthy is totally newsworthy."
;)
(Chin up and all that. This is not intended to be in any way hostile.)
Those types of comments (yours and the general back-and-forth with ProtonMail) make the VPN industry look like it's full of sharks. It's hurting all of you. It makes you look unprofessional. Before seeing this I had a favourable impression of PIA, but not anymore.
EDIT: I'm sure the competition is intense and I'm not sure I would be able to rise above it myself but I think you need to be aware of what it looks like.
