Hacker News Reader

Comment by o10449366 | Hacker News Reader

It's honestly hilarious and sad to see so many commenters here defending and excusing Google because the services they provide are "free." Somehow Hacker News thinks this argument isn't applicable to Facebook. The truth of the matter is that both companies are committing huge privacy violations, but Google has managed to convince Hacker News and the US media (NYT in particular) that they aren't evil still. Good riddance to all of these companies.

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You should probably refrain from using blanket statements like "Hacker News thinks that or does this".

I've see comments on HN by users from incredibly diverse fields, expertise, ages, countries, etc.

If you think a specific comment in this thread reflects your blanket statement then address it directly, but overall it makes me dismiss anything you've written.

And it doesn't contribute much to the discussion

You see plenty people defending Facebook too. Trying to assign a single opinion to a large group of people doesn't work.

I see this argument a lot of Hacker News and Reddit. While it's true that both websites are comprised of a large and diverse body of individuals who share differing opinions and various subjects, that doesn't mean you can't discern real trends and biases within them. I think it's quite clear from reading any of the past month's discussions on Facebook:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook&sort=byPopularity&pre...

Yeah this is exactly it. And like I stated in sibling comment. People like me who don’t attack FB don’t defend it either. We are more interested in what we perceive as over the top hatred of FB that doesn’t make sense. Like you said, other companies get passes, but FB doesn’t.

There was a recent thread with more than one person comparing cigarettes with FB. Possibly even FB being worse than cigarettes. Something that has killed millions of people. But even in that no one defended FB. They just said FB isn’t as bad as people are making it seem.

That isn’t true. Straight Facebook defense is pretty rare on HN. Most non-FB attacks are people like me amused that people are so upset over FB. That’s not really a defense of FB. More a statement on HN culture. But by and large there is little FB defense on HN. Rare enough to not matter much. Definitely not plenty of people. Look at any front page FB story comments.

Like the OP responded, even if 100% of people aren’t the same, you can discern clear trends, behaviors, and feelings of the general commenting populace. Like we can for HN being abnormally anti-FB.

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