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Comment by capote | Hacker News Reader

This does give it a kind of bearded-conspiracy-theorist-ish vibe that puts me off too. But the underlying point in using the word makes sense and hey, maybe it'll deter some people from using Facebook without knowing exactly what they're subjecting themselves to. I can see such a thing sticking in people's minds.

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As is often the case with his writing I find his language and style (conspiracy theorist vibe works just as well) so grating that I couldn't complete the piece. He ends up, as in other pieces, sounding pompous purely for the sake of it.

So I'll never know what the underlying point was if it wasn't entirely in the first subsection.

I think it's going to take someone with greater...ahem...social intelligence than rms to convey the dire reality of facebook's omniscience.

So you're understanding the grave seriousness of the considerations, but still waiting for somebody different to convey that to you?

No. The point is well understood and so poorly expressed that is actually repellent. It's not the "somebody" so much as the way "somebody" insists on using transparently manipulative rhetoric. It's very off-putting even to those of us who agree.

Except that when it's in-your-face transparent, it cannot really be manipulative.

What actually is manipulative is how the common use of words is being influenced by think tanks, marketing companies and the like so that you actually feel repelled when RMS uses language in a way that is in fact more objectively descriptive of reality because it deviates from the norm that has been established.

This reminds me of how "propaganda" was euphemised as "public relations".

Sometimes off-putting is what your need.

They don't put unicorns kindly asking you to quit on cigarette packs. There they put lung cancer pics.

Stallman's points are digital equivalent of cancer pics. "Quit or you'll see more, every day".

And no, I'm not 100% sure that works. Regulations surely do, tho.

To use your analogy, it's not the lung cancer pictures that are putting people off, it's the fact that in this case someone put a exaggerated cartoon picture of lung cancer, and while they know that the cancer is a real thing they can't take seriously the exaggerated imagery. It's not the message, it's the way the message is conveyed

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