It is impossible to fight apple in the way we fought microsoft years ago - by building out a good opensource ecosystem. The entire reason for the app store is to stop that from happening.
Incidentally, Samsung has actually been caught and taken to court for manipulating social media:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Samsung+paid+students+for+re...
People can defend a company on their own, because they love their products and agree with their policies.
> in the way we fought microsoft years ago
Because Apple helped us fight Microsoft.
People loved Apple almost unanimously on the internet. They were the underdog, the messiah to save us from the bullshit of Big Corp. You won't find much Apple-negging from the era before Samsung started their smear campaign to make themselves relevant by going up against the tall poppy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
Which of course is a chain. It used to be IBM, then Microsoft, now it's Apple (after a long campaign [0] starting with 1984 and continuing with the famous "I'm a Mac"), and so other companies are trying to poise themselves as the underdog to win fans.
And not only these pro-platform votes, look at all the negative discussion that happens here around university. In every single academic thread, where academic principles oppose big tech, the most upvoted threads are those that dismiss CS education, the university research system, the professors and humanities, while upvoting the "I dropped out of college" stories.
Big tech has done a lot of good, in elevating programmer salaries, and some companies contributing to a lot of open source. But walled gardens and subscriptions and censorship are money makers prized by capitalism. So they are always trying to "kill" the web, "boring" standards like email and XMPP, open research, and self-distributed software.
There are tens of thousands of people from FAANG/YC acting as self-interested agents of their organizations without any kind of disclosure or counter-measures. These are, in effect, massive voting rings and propaganda efforts which are supposedly not allowed on HN.
It's obvious how this results in the total dominance of FAANG/YC content, and how it skews the public conversation in Silicon Valley in their favor.
HN could take a variety of counter-measures but they don't. Maybe because users would quickly point out the hypocrisy of ending FAANG voting rings/propaganda while permitting the YC voting rings/propaganda.
HN is now the premier mouthpiece for tech corporate interests.
It would be great for the world if someone were to create a replacement that was designed to prevent this problem, while preserving what is good about HN. Or if HN took action even if it was 5+ years late.
As an example, HN could start requiring users to link their LinkedIn accounts. Every comment could show the user's current employer (if it's a major one) without revealing the user's real name. HN cold also disregard votes for google.com submissions for Google employees, etc. These steps alone would reduce the problem drastically.
No one would like to link their LinkedIn account, of course, but most people in tech have one and could do so in seconds.
That's an obvious solution but there are many other possibilities as well. And it would still be possible to maintain the ability for anonymous throwaway accounts to be used.
I downvoted you. If it makes you happy, know that this downvote is completely organic.
I'm just annoyed by someone suggesting that we remove one of the real advantages of HN: availability of real pseudonymity.
Edit: I also sometimes vote in the same direction as supposed voting rings and I am starting to see Dans frustration with all these accusations.
I have been here for more than 10 years and I have started to get a feeling for some of the weird voting patterns here now. It has even gone so far that I am joking that I want do go to university to hopefully do a study of group dynamics in online communities :-)
And how is:
1 point by starfox9833 (Google) 22 minutes ago
not pseudoanonymous? Google has 100k employees.
HN already has email addresses for many (most?) users and could easily map most of those to LinkedIn accounts one way or another. It also knows the IP addresses of users, which are often coming from FAANG corporate networks (at least pre-Covid).
It might cost some amount of theoretical privacy but gain us a huge amount freedom from the dominance of a few major organizations.
1. LinkedIn is probably easy to game to create fake accounts.
2. HN already has email addresses for many (most?) users and could easily map most of those to LinkedIn accounts one way or another.
One of the really great things about HN is that they've been trustworthy (AFAIK). Unlike a good number of other sites they haven't done all the things they could do.
3. The more you do to identify users the lower concentration of really high quality users one get it seems. As newspapers decided on Facebook comments the only one that would show up to comment were:
- those who didn't realize or didn't care about the privacy implications
- those who just had to anyway because they felt so strongly about the topic
- trolls with faked Facebook accounts
I don't think it would limit the high quality participation, at least not by very much, and that could be mitigated. Maybe users that do not link their accounts could still comment but not vote?
There would definitely be some trade-offs but the current wholesale domination of corporations on HN is a huge trade-off in one direction as well. It seems a very high price to pay IMHO.
What about those of us without a LinkedIn account?