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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

And yet, everyone trying to work against this gets immediately downvoted on HN, because everyone considers the work of these companies just so convenient.

It’s classical short-term vs. long-term thinking, and it’s damaging not just to privacy, but also to the startup economy as a whole.

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To me it seems like decentralization is actually very popular on HN.

As long as it's written in Go, Rust or formerly Haskell

In fairness your particular example isn't necessarily a good one. Snapchat is a trivial idea and it's frankly amazing it got as far as it did.

Imho his example illustrates his well. Snapchat was fairly disruptive and lost a lot of value when facebook just ripped it off. If we allow giant companies to engage in anti-competitive practices it will hurt us in the long run as people won't even try to innovate. The snapchat story is pretty demotivating. Why bother when one of the largest 5-6 companies in your space will just shut you down or steal your ideas?

My point is that Snapchat isn't a good example of a company pushed out by anti-competitive practices. Their core product is technically trivial and uninteresting. The fact that there is a market demand for it and being first to do it at large scale doesn't in my mind meet any minimal standard for protection from anti-competitive practices as you imply.

If you had something that would disrupt it would :)

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