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Comment by admax88q | Hacker News Reader

What has become of HN. Why are so many people defending this practice because "You agreed to this when you signed up."

Are so many unscrupulous people now members of HN?

Even if this practice is legal, which is questionable, it's very likely immoral, and very obviously a jerk move.

It's both amazing and alarming to me how the overton window on HN has changed. Obviously unscrupulous and questionable practices are defended on the grounds of "yeah but its not actually _illegal_"

Maybe I'm just out of touch with the state of the industry, might be time to move on from HN in general.

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> What has become of HN. Why are so many people defending this practice […]

I think people on HN increasingly have FAANG (or even more murky) jobs.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

— Upton Sinclair

If these people were to admit to themselves that the place they work is deeply unethical, they would have to either face unpleasant truths about themselves, or face the prospect of abandoning their job. Neither alternative is attractive to say the least, so cognitive dissonance sets in, and an illusion is created is their minds that this behavior is, in fact, ethical.

Prezi is more a startup in "growth hacking" phase than a FAANG

Also, people often have different and mutually exclusive ethical values from each other, there are plenty of defense contractors who believe they are the good guys, privacy activists who think they're doing good, anti abortion activists who believe they are saving lives, pro choice activists who think they're protecting rights, etc. How can we know which is the illusory position?

I can't expect to believe that all of my positions just happen to be right. Everyone on the planet believes they're right--the right values, the right religions... I'm not aware of an objective answer to morality.

>Everyone on the planet believes they're right--the right values, the right religions... I'm not aware of an objective answer to morality.

Moral relativism is the most insidious means to reduce legitimate concerns—whether they be ethical, political, or otherwise—to inconsequential.

It's easy to assuage your own feelings of shame/guilt by pointing out that $repugnant_behaviour occurs else where and that's so much worse.

At some point it's required that people actually take a stand rather than participate in the race to the ethical bottom.

> take a stand

This same thought process works for suicide bombers fighting for a theocracy as much as you or me.

Consider that giving this advice to everyone on earth would just lead to more extremism in all directions. E.g. PETA sees meat consumption as animal genocide, but meat eaters don't see animals as being in the same class as people (they're humanists).

The argument here is that most agree that including fine-print in a contract most people don't read, can't realistically understand, and can't even renegotiate to allow yourself to do awful things is abhorrent.

Well, most do except those who engage in the practice, of course.

I was responding to the Upton Sinclair quote but I seem to have attracted some moral absolutists and now the conversation is steering philosophical.

I agree that corporate lawyers are abhorrent ;)

lol k.

So what's your conclusion then. Morals are relative, therefore there are no morals? Who are we to criticize genocide and terrorism?

No, morals are relative, just that. We probably have similar morals as frequenters of a tech website site in English compared to hunter gatherers, so we can even have this discussion in the first place. I haven't been convinced that there's anything universal about the morals we hold across species let alone sapiens in the past 10,000 years or across cultures.

Unless your definition of moral absolutism only encompasses humans living today (with the implication that technology makes certain things possible), which I might agree with.

> No, morals are relative, just that.

And yet by focusing on and stating "just that," you steer the conversation away from the concrete action that this whole thread was started about.

We're not going to resolve moral relativism vs absolutism in a web form, nor should that be a necessary pre-requisite for condemning the immoral behaviour of a company.

It's one thing to debate if the particular action in question is good or not. It's another to attempt to invalidate the entire debate by stating that "morals are relative."

You may think you're just stating "morals are relative, just that," but in reality, the context within which you state it serves only to move the discussion away from the morals of the act in question into some abstract debate about morals in general. It's a distraction. Sometimes the "root cause" cannot be resolved and we should focus on the symptoms and more surface level issues.

I'm sorry if I gave the impression that I'm using this to defend Prezi or something.

The parent comment I originally responded to was about jobs they found morally objectionable and an Upton Sinclair quote.

My reply was about how some people don't actually find those jobs objectionable.

Then the reply to that was about moral relativity (which okay, now we're getting into philosophy).

And now we're about to discuss the purpose of a web forum, but that seems even more meta than this conversation.

I guess in summary, I agree we have veered off of course (arguably the original comment had very little to do with this Prezi incident), but I also think these side discussions are interesting. If you don't want to chat about philosophy you don't have to and it's okay if some people are wrong on the internet.

>Consider that giving this advice to everyone on earth would just lead to more extremism in all directions. E.g. PETA sees meat consumption as animal genocide, but meat eaters don't see animals as being in the same class as people (they're humanists).

I categorically disagree. Your stance is what seems to me what would increase extremism, because there's always someone else you can point to and go "BUT WHAT ABOUT..." to justify any arbitrary shitty policy.

Hmm maybe. I'm not evaluating my model of the world on its effect on society if made popular, only its proximity to reality and predictive power.

I don't think understanding that beliefs are arbitrary and fighting for your beliefs is mutually exclusive. If anything there's at least the acknowledgement that because many moral arguments work both ways, bringing people who disagree to your position requires other methods.

If you want to get more technical, there are normative and positive statements, the former describing what we are talking about here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics

In that lens, "Your stance is what seems to me what would increase extremism" is probably positive because it could be evaluated experimentally, but "cutting in line is wrong" is a normative statement.

My open question (and I'm very open to being wrong) is if there's a way to convince line cutters from a culture of line cutters of their wrongdoing without resorting to violence or coercion. How would you do it?

HN is associated with a startup incubator, and every startup I've seen has engaged in some measure of shady growth hacking. Once you start blurring the lines, you open yourself to stuff like this.

That said though I can see how this specific case happened just looking at incentives. Startups are strapped for people, and offboarding is sadly one of the first things to get dropped, because it doesn't directly increase revenue (and may even decrease retention).

Even more cynically I wouldn't be surprised if there was a time where this warning wasn't even shown at all and presentations just went back to being public because the has_active_subscription field returned false.

This is more malicious than just not focusing on offboarding. The easiest implementation would be to just delete the user account and abandon the data, slightly more effort would be to delete the data. Making it public with the legal disclaimers and all that takes effort and commitment.

Could very well be, I wasn't there so I can't say.

I have seen good people do bad things out of negligence that later gets attributed to malice on the internet when it gets discussed.

People always drift towards malicious intent but I think it's uniquely terrifying that "good" people can do bad things when the incentives are misaligned, or they aren't thinking end to end, if only because it's an opportunity to admit that we ourselves might make a similar mistake, so we should be vigilant.

> Are so many unscrupulous people now members of HN?

Probably the same people who recently suggested re-colonization of Africa and downvoted my horrified responses to oblivion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893411)

Is this just a recent spike in abject immortality or is this an Eternal September?

Or the same people who defend Holocaust denial.

I don't know what's going on either but there certainly seems to be an uptick in some straight up embarrassing thinking on this site.

Are we seriously comparing people who aren’t upset about some bad software policy to people who want to colonize Africa or deny the Holocaust?

I've noticed the trend on here shift towards the more "libertarian" views. Most Google/Microsoft/Apple/Giant-Corporation threads have a ton of "just stop using their service" replies that ignore the practicality of such a solution.

I did notice that this all reversed when TikTok was going to be banned, and a lot of people were happy that the US government was going through with it.

One thing I do question is if there was an actual shift in the trend and I noticed it or if this libertarian-ism was always present in tech circles and I'm noticing it more now.

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