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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure Acton and Koum told themselves they were also keeping the power to be in control. I'm sure they went into it thinking they could avoid this end. The brain is a powerful rationalizer when it sees generational wealth within reach.

The indignant tone of the comments here make me laugh. There are very few things I can imagine readers of HN not doing for a billion dollars. People may say otherwise, but until they've been tested I choose not to believe them.

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Yeah seriously. I'd love for a trained philosopher to analyze this scenario. Surely letting WhatsApp become crappy would be worth a nice 9- or 8-figure donation to charity. I would feel like a selfish jerk for rejecting that kind of money so that, what, people see fewer ads? Talk about what a zeroth world problem ads are, good lord.

At the very least, the $50 million dollars he gave to Signal could go a long way.

> The indignant tone of the comments here make me laugh.

Yeah, the level of indignation and self-righteousness in the comments on HN (and not just in this thread) seems to have gotten worse lately. Maybe time for me to take a break from HN for a bit...

I think it is good that this community praises founders who do the right thing and condemns those who do the wrong thing, even though most of us will never play for such high stakes.

"Wrong" as defined by the hivemind pitchmob.

There is no such thing as a hivemind here, just the consensus that it is wrong to sell your company to an entity that puts profit above people's privacy and wellbeing.

It would appear that the hivemind disagrees

I've been seeing the same thing...not just in HN, but across tech.

My theory is there's a lot of resentment of the successful. We're seeing a new generation of engineers enter the workforce that never got to participate in the previous booms, and it's not as easy to make it big as it used to be.

> it's not as easy to make it big as it used to be

What? It's so much easier than it used to be. Between low interest rates, QE policies and the latest corporate tax cuts, equity markets are booming and it's easier than ever to get bought. And the actual process of building a company is also easier. Between accelerators like YC and Cloud providers, the path from idea to getting acquired is shorter than it's ever been. You just have to adjust the goal posts a bit. It's may be harder now to IPO and become and independent company with the outsized influence of one of the FANGs, but achieving generational wealth by being acquired by one of those companies is routinely done in just a few years.

Not saying you're not mostly right, but there is the case of Jean-Baptiste Kempf, maintainer of VLC, who apparently turned down tens of millions to put ads into VLC. (I suppose that is two orders of magnitude smaller than a billion.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048

And if he chose to criticize the WhatsApp founders, it would carry a lot of weight with me. I didn't say altruism doesn't exist...I just don't believe it's in this comment thread. :)

I don't know the details, but he could've turned down monetization of his work for purely selfish reasons as well.

He is an exception. I guess 99% (or maybe more) of the people in his situation would've taken the money, and they'd probably be doing right for themselves and their families. Ethics is always a nuanced topic.

I donated money to VLC the day I learned about this. I had no idea this software I use and love every day was maintained by a single guy.

Props to him. I don't think I would have been able to resist an 8 figure offer

I am not fully familiar with the whole story, but given the different paths Acton and Koum have taken (activism vs collecting cars and chilling on a boat) i wouldn't be surprised that they had a disagreement about whether to sell and one of them prefer to back down. who knows, maybe he even preferred to keep Koum's friendship. Their very different backgrounds also point towards different motivations in a situation like this. I don't know if I'm being silly cos I don't know how these things work, but I'm also surprised nobody has talked about this possibility

Cognitive dissonance explains it. I don't have a billion dollars. Is there something wrong with me? No, the billionaire is evil.

It’s pretty likely that Acton weighed what he could do with the money when it came to pursuing his values post-Facebook. His role in co-founding the Signal foundation and substantial donation to its existence is good evidence of this. A small portion of his fortune could pay for Signal to be free and continue to improve for decades if managed well.

How secure is Signal considered?

It is a walled garden network that demands you tie your phone number to your account making anonymity very hard. Moxie also has an obsession with keeping the network centralized, going so far as to threaten to campaign against attempts to release independently verified and signed clients via projects like F-Droid.

There is not even a path for users that opt out of Google Play Services on Android to install official builds without turning on "enable untrusted sources" and thus opening yourself up to Man In The Disk style attacks.

Signal is modeled very similar to whatsapp where you have to trust a central company to not sell your metadata, and central employees to not backdoor you under coercion.

I don't know what their real agenda is but it is not anonymous encrypted and decentralized communication.

Instead I would suggest looking at Matrix.org/Riot.im which are building anonymous, federated, end to end encrypted messaging where you can use any client that adheres to their published specifications.

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