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Comment by danra | Hacker News Reader

Funny, I don't see similar moral outrage at talented engineers working in Facebook and Google, doing no evil. (I do see such outrage at the companies themselves - but rarely at the developers working for them).

Yes, these companies do make useful products. But they have real negative effects on the world, which would have been better off if all those engineers had made these products for companies other than these lobbyist, competition-stifling, aggressive monopolies.

There's no real moral difference between selling your talents to the highest bidder and this specific case of running a spam service to make money.

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Really? It seems moral outrage against engineers working at Facebook and Google has been pretty popular for the last ten years. First it was because they are displacing long term residents in places like San Francisco, and now it's because they are responsible for building giant surveillance machines.

There’s far more respect among the tech community for the (truly!) talented engineers working in these companies than there is moral outrage.

For one thing, facilitating spam is some distance further down on the benefits to harms scale than facilitating Facebook or Google. Google, especially, has created a enormous amount of value, and continues to do so^; spam, not so much.

^Which isn't to say that it's perfect, of course. Or even necessarily a net good, although my personal belief in the case of Google is that it still is.

> facilitating spam is some distance further down on the benefits to harms scale than facilitating Facebook or Google

So... Facilitating spam is worse than facilitating censorship in China?

Is an arms manufacturer at fault when there's war?

China is always going to censor. Google facilitating it or not make no difference. Might as well make the money, and also hope to influence the system from a position of power rather than a position of weakness (i.e, not involved at all)

Spam is always going to exist. Might as well facilitate, make money, and try to influence the system from a position of power?

That's like saying theft will always exist, so you might as well go steal things. Tools like this actively add to the quantity of spam out there, making it worse for everyone.

the analogy isn't to do stealing, it's to make lockpicks.

Although this spamblaster is terrible, I consider Instagram to be a clear net negative for humanity. It has almost no redeeming traits, it just makes people insecure, envious and wastes their time.

I can tell you it's a net positive in my life. I rarely use facebook proper, but I quite enjoy instagram. I keep it to a small number of actual friends (I think I have about 20 contacts, or whatever they're called on Instagram.) And I enjoy opening it and seeing what they're up to once or twice a day.

I think you and I are the very, VERY small minority. I muted everyone I didn't care about too, and it works for me, but young people especially are very affected by it.

Yes there is. And it's obvious.

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