There are over 80 million US downloads of TikTok as of October 2018, with an active user count of 40 million [1]. This means China's authoritarian regime is influencing the political discussion of 40m+ US citizens.

You say this ban is good, I disagree. In the US, a lack of informed political discussion is one major factor keeping young voters away from the polls. It also prevents global free speech from reaching 400 million Chinese users.

1. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/

That's not true at all, at least not on the surface. Do you have any proof of anyone being banned as a user for posting political content?

From the article: “Any paid ads that come into the community need to fit the standards for our platform, and the nature of paid political ads is not something we believe fits the TikTok platform experience,” says Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s VP of Global Business Solutions, who recently joined the company from Facebook.

“To that end, we will not allow paid ads that promote or oppose a candidate, current leader, political party or group or issue at the federal, state or local level — including election-related ads, advocacy ads or issue ads,” he says.

Our parent wrote that paid political advertising is favoring those with the greatest amount of money to spend and therefore (as far as I understood) reducing the quality of political conversation. (Which sounds plausible to me, since money is a factor largely unrelated to quality.)

You seem to imply that paid political advertising is increasing the quality of the discourse. Is that right? If yes, I'd love to know why!

Was TikTok was an appropriate place for informed political discussion?

I agree.

But the purpose of political advertising is to misinform.

Signal doesn't really care about identity at all, it leaves it up to the users to decide if "Steve" in their contacts is who they thought it should be, if they're happy to accept that without proof or if they've verified it was who they expected in person or out of band.

Modern Signal lets users put together a profile, like a Twitter profile, and like the Twitter profile you might know somebody whose profile name is "Grim Reaper" and whose profile photo is the Discworld Death, without you believing that is their real name or appearance. Maybe you decide that's enough reason not to mark your friend Suzie ("Grim Reaper") as Verified in Signal. Most likely not. Other Signal users aren't informed of this decision and Signal itself doesn't know what you decided.

But it does default bind your contacts to Signal users based on a telephone number they've proved control of at some point. So if you don't verify anything, a message from you to "Steve" could be received by somebody who registered the phone number you've associated with the contact "Steve". Signal's creators rationalise that this is what an ordinary phone user expects to happen.

If it's important to you that "SIM Swap" isn't used to create an imposter Signal account with your phone number - a reasonable concern for some people, you can set a "Registration Lock PIN" for the phone number. Anybody else in the future who wants to use Signal with that telephone number will need the PIN or their registration fails.

Collecting telemetry is a decades-old method of getting real data about the behaviour of a program in real-world environments. This is why web browsers, smartphones, and OSes all have telemetry collection routines.

There's plenty of reason to be upset with Mr. Holt. His own reply elsewhere in this thread reads more like a PR response than a real reply. But keep the contention on-topic and less like a personal hit.

What would you like me to say?

To be clear, I am not a Caddy user and have no horse in this race. I tend to sympathize with the privacy-conscious, however, having been a user who turned off telemetry in Firefox after the Mr. Robot scandal. Let me see if I can explain why your response comes across as tone-deaf:

1) Your first response is "I haven't actually watched the video," which immediately suggests that you're not going to actually engage with the claims so much as tackle a strawman version of the claim. Now perhaps the author is repeating an accusation that he has made in the past, and so you actually are familiar with it already, but that's not how this comes across.

2) Your next response--"Several of us in the research community have agreed that telemetry can be a net good for the Web."--is not really doing anything to assuage the privacy concerns. It's not a technical refutation, and it's not a particularly fleshed-out emotional appeal, either. It's basically, "We disagree."

Put another way, let's imagine for a sec that you were a Tobacco CEO and the following exchange was recorded:

Reporter: Sir, we have a multitude of evidence that smoking is conclusively, irreversibly detrimental to human health.

CEO: Actually, a number of scientists and health officials have agreed that smoking is good.

Do you realize how tone-deaf that non-answer comes across?

3) Your final response is the most "PR" part, as it first advertises the product, then pivots away from the contention at hand in favor of praising how wonderful it is that it's open source and has a vast number of contributors. ---

I've already done the transposition analogy once, so I'm hesitant to do it again lest it look like I'm demonizing you, but I want you to read the below and see how you would perceive this response if it came from the CEO of J.Crew about accusations of child labor in its clothing factories:

  "Hey everyone. James here.

  I haven't actually reviewed the accusations yet because I've been at a conference.

  We believe that allowing underage employees to fill a limited number of positions at 
  are factories allows impoverished families to bring in badly needed revenue, and 
  ultimately serves as a net positive for these needy communities.

  A huge thanks to everyone for shopping at J.Crew and making it the World's Best 
  Clothing Line™ five years and counting!"

Hopefully that makes sense. It may not have been your intent, but perception is critical when you're the public face of the company. You can gain or lose a ton of goodwill among your users depending on whether you attempt to receive their criticisms with an open ear and work towards a solution, or dismiss them and dodge around the question. And even if you're doing the former, the mere perception of the latter can be damaging.

Good luck.

Next time, maybe spend more time on elaborating on the "very real privacy concerns" and less on personalities.

Your video contains little argument that hasn't been already in the discussion, goes in no detail what specifically you object to, personally insults him, and being a video isn't a very good contribution in a text-forum anyways: in sum more then enough reasons for a moderator to remove it, and adding very little to the overall discussion.

Matt has a right, as the creator of that work, to ask for some form of compensation for the portion of his life invested into the project. It's a completely fair and reasonable request. If you're set on avoiding any form of compensation (financial or otherwise), then you don't have any rights to demand anything from him. Just go use nginx and be done with it.

We don't want a) a sole developer making decisions which the community has rejected, and b) software which sends telemetry by default.

Have you run a poll to be sure that >50% of the community rejects the change? Anyway, online polls are not reliable, it's difficult to be avoid sock puppets, people that don't use the software, ensure that people that disagree with your proposal care to vote, ...

Just make a fork and if most of the community agree with you, your fork will be most popular and shadow the original.

I can see that different people would take exception to that which is why there's an off switch for telemetry.

If you're having a difficult time accepting that telemetry exists at all, then I'm almost certain Matt would be happy to create a non-telemetry version for paid subscribers.