Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

It's not surprising. The biggest danger of having tremendous wealth and/or power seems to be that you can no longer accept and integrate valid criticism from others.

View on HN

There is so much criticism-- especially towards anything/anyone high profile-- including outright invalid criticism that there is potentially a selection effect: Everyone who listens to criticism gives up and we're left with people who are substantially immune to it.

Which seems to apply to some of our politicians too. Like the reply from Elizabeth Warren saying that maybe Amazon should be split up because then maybe they wouldn't have time to criticize elected officials. Or otherwise "stop criticizing me or I'll make you hurt". Not very nice coming from a political figure in a democracy.

I did find Amazon's responses to be tone deaf at best (mostly just disagreeing with them) but her reply to be much worse.

You’re clearly not being charitable to her if you read her tweet and thought she meant Amazon has to be broken up because their tweets are snarky towards her. She’s saying that Big Tech in general is so powerful—they can do whatever they want—and then snap back at politicians in snarky tweets without a care.

But they SHOULD be able to do that. So should small companies without fear of retribution.

The fact that small companies do not, out of fear of retribution by politicians is the actual problem and speaks volumes.

You’re completely missing the point I was making. It’s not about the snarky tweets. It’s about how big and powerful corporations have become.

I don’t know why I’m surprised; HN has shown me more and more that otherwise intelligent people are more than happy to support corporate friendly narratives and anti-progressive ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com