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Comment by devtul | Hacker News Reader

It's baffling how a group of random people can assert so much pressure. Millions consume Joe's podcast, but somehow a dozen(?) of anonymous people inside Spotify believe they know what is good for everybody.

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This is the same kind of behavior that arises in those who scream "Fascist!", as they put their boot on your face and punish you for not doing exactly what they want you to do. It's all for power.

These aren't just random people, so the number involved is irrelevant. The fact that Spotify has an exclusivity deal with him means that they inherently hold a powerful position over him. And they certainly don't care about what's good for everybody, that's not their prerogative. They care about what's good for Spotify, or moreso, what Spotify thinks is good for Spotify.

This is not the first time nor will it be the last time that a large corporation acquires some degree of power over something and wants to smooth it out for PR reasons. It has been going on since the dawn of corporate media.

Not sure you're correct that these employees have Spotify's best interest in mind. It's just as likely that they have their own political and social agenda which they are able to leverage by working at Spotify.

That's a really strange assertion to make. A corporation the size of Spotify giving that much leeway to individual employees on a major business relationship like this is basically unheard of and fairly implausible, and these sorts of things have been going on in a calculated, intentional manner for over a century in various forms of publishing.

Overall, I'm glad to see this sort of public laundry-airing, even if the anonymous people are wrong. Anything that forces the public to review and consider how these massive content distributors make decisions about how they operate is a small win over the black-box algorithmic attention mining mess we have now.

This relates to the thread about the movie The Social Dilemma.

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