We live at a time with high demand for developers. Wouldn't your talents be of better use at some other company - working on something not ultimately hindering your users?
It's OK to quit your job on moral grounds, and now is the best time ever to do so.
Data harvesting, monopolisation of bottlenecks, the whole advertising ecosystem, DRM and systems of IP/copyright domination, etc. These are the unbelievably profitable industries generating the current demand.
Demand is fungible, so this doesn't mean you can't go find a job working on something else. It does however, put some perspective on it. Developers, via the current labour market, are major beneficiaries of said practices.
Again, this does not contradict your comment.
I think it's more because the computer does most of the work, and that just has really good economy of scale.
But to the extent that there seems to be any orthodoxy on HN around what is more and less ethical, there’s a lot of emphasis around the “unbelievably profitable” part.
In my personal experience there is a world of difference between “all your data belong to us” and “pay for content by seeing this ad” which are far from joined at the hip, and to the extent that cryptocurrency has any demonstrated utility it’s pulling in yet a third direction and yet all three are often lumped together into the “trivially unethical” bucket, whereas having deep structural advantages before you’ve written much code via the YC old-boys network is not just “how the game is played”, but maybe even “living the dream”.
I know I’ve personally been guilty of letting my righteous ethical indignation at X or Y get a little blurry with “it’s not right that so many programmers make xMM/year”.
I don’t mean to say that you’re guilty of this (and I know you didn’t mention cryptocurrency or being a YC founder), but it is something I’m still trying to figure out a way to diplomatically add to the discussion and your comment felt like a not-insane place to do so.
People who make DRM are paid by content producers, not content viewers. They're not hindering their users. They're doing what their users ask them to do. It's just that we aren't their users. If you want to influence DRM developers to stop making DRM, refuse to buy/view/stream DRM-protected media. Then they'll have to find new jobs because their customers will stop paying them.
I haven't bought a Sony product since their rootkit fiasco in about 2004. I remove the Widevine library from Chrome when I'm forced to use it, unclick the box that says "Play DRM" in Firefox, and don't really use Safari. At work, I challenge suppliers who use activation to provide us software without it, and I run entirely Linux-boxes.
Yes, I am one of those zealots. Yes, it makes life harder at times. Would I change it? No.
If you don't think doing your job every day is making the world better, please remember that what the parent comment says is true: it's never been a better time to make the switch!
Your work matters, and we can all work to make the world better, or worse, a little bit every day.
Thanks for proofing me wrong :)
> If you don't think doing your job every day is making the world better
Actually, content moderation does make the world better. No one except Nazis will say that the presence of Holocaust denial on the Internet is a good thing. No one except pedophiles wants to see naked genitalia of children.
For what it's worth, even this forum is moderated (pretty strongly, one might add) to keep discussions somewhat relevant and from devolving into endless threads of flame-warring.
It is, but given the scale these tech companies can reach we have seen way too much evidence that moderation is required for a stable society. People have been literally lynched because of viral fake postings [1] on messengers, not to mention the entire clusterfuck that is the coronavirus pandemic and the influence of propaganda peddlers and profiteers.
Censorship is not how you fix a society's bad habits. Correspondingly, censoring social media is not how you fix society's amplified bad habits.
You can actually make a cohesive argument that algorithmic, "if it bleeds, it leads" timelines are in fact censorship (as they push down more recent, but less titillating/outrageous content), and that this algorithmic censorship of less outrageous but more recent/potentially balancing content is the basis for increased social fervor.
Ultimately, the solution to speech you don't like is more speech. When that additional speech is deprioritized to the point where no one sees it in practice, or is hard censored outright, the societal balancing functions can't work.
Social media causes lynchings and worse when it algorithmically amplifies the most outrageous, divisive and controversial content in a bid to maximize "engagement". "Moderation" and "healthy community" policies are the band-aid. There's no such thing as "neutral" social media when these algorithms are used, it's an oxymoron.
No. Social media, particularly ones where algorithms determine which content is shown to users, amplifies the content that is most likely to see more eyeballs or maximize other arbitrary metrics of engagement. And that means content that drives outrage of any form.
> Censorship is not how you fix a society's bad habits.
If I go on the city plaza and deny the Holocaust, I will probably get Spencer'd in the face and then dragged away by police for causing mischief (or in Europe, for Holocaust denial which is a crime here). Will you call that censorship, too? I guess not.
But on most social media, I can deny the Holocaust, call for the murder of politicians or virologists all day long without moderation or any consequences - and any calls on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram or whatever to put a stop to this hate get decried as "censorship".
> Ultimately, the solution to speech you don't like is more speech.
It should not be the job of unpaid individual citizens to do the job of the government which we pay taxes for. We citizens pay taxes so that police keeps the physical city plaza clean of crime and nutjobs, why should a digital city plaza like Facebook be exempt of the rules?
This divergence between the realities of the digital and the analog worlds is what is the problem.
Yes, that is also absolutely censorship. It's a shame that people don't have free expression in Europe.
I am not a Nazi and I think it is bad when people deny facts (like the holocaust happening, and being a bad thing).
I think it is a good thing that people are able to reliably publish falsehoods freely on the internet, if they so choose. There is at least one other YC company that I know embodies similar philosophical beliefs.
Your claim is false.
You don't need to be a Nazi to support the ability for people to practically exercise their rights to free and unrestricted publishing. It is a good thing to have that in a society, even if some people use it to say false things.
That said, as you accurately noted, this forum is moderated and I don't wish to participate further in what is now an offtopic discussion, so I will not reply further in this thread. Feel free to email me if you'd like to discuss further.
Anything consequential enough to make an impact is a trade off, with winners and losers. If all the employees listened and there was a universal collapse of DRM, I really highly doubt people who make content would be better off. Maybe some of these devs feel good about helping make sure people who make movies get paid. Maybe they feel like they are part of the moviemaking process (which they are!).
It’s not as though it’s difficult for people who want to make their content free to do so. Why should someone who wishes to make content under a DRM model not be free to do so? It’s entertainment, you are not forced to consume it.
We created a system where employees have zero say in what a company does, so the rest of society has not deal with this issue.
Plus, some devs enjoy this kind work and some companies working on DRM are in areas that are not as hot as the Bay Area (small cities in Europe) so they might not have that many lucrative options you assume.
Sure, no consumer enjoys DRM, like how no driver likes police officers issuing speeding fines, but demonizing devs working on such solutions is something I did not expect from the supposedly enlightened HN reader base.
How about you target your disapproval at the Bay Area devs whos' generous compensation packages plastered around here depend on them building nefarious ways of siphoning and data-mining peoples' private data to get them addicted to consuming content and click on ads.
Not exactly NSO level, but this certainly caused issues at the time.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...
Many companies implement DRM in ways that are poor, excessive, overreaching, needlessly restrictive, etc. .. and yes, while poor implementations are frequent, it does not mean that DRM itself is worthless or an enemy of society.
In fact, good implementations of DRM are exactly what is needed in order to prevent hackers from stealing your most valuable digital assets.
The issue is that in conversation DRM is used as a perjorative, whereas terms like data loss prevention are somehow seen as non-malicious, even though it is the same core idea.
People can e-mail the documents or do whatever they want with them, and Microsoft's DRM ensures that only the users that have access are able to view them.
The whole thing is totally seamless and requires no extra effort on the part of the users.
Our corporate documents can't be stolen without comprimising both someone's account and two-factor authentication.
It's a great example of DRM done well.
No DRM is a perfect solution, my only point is that DRM itself isn't inherently evil.
Whataboutism...
It isn't, until it is: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/adobe-spyware-reveals-...
It’s the cigarettes of modern technology.
The OP didn't make any such comparison; yet you make such a comparison, a few sentences later:
> Sure, no consumer enjoys DRM, like how no driver likes police officers issuing speeding fines
DRM props-up uncompetitive business models, to the detriment of customers and society at-large. It is in no way comparable to speed limits, which have literally saved millions of lives over the years (random Google link: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/reducing-s... ).
When will the US join the 2000s and get cameras so police can do actual work?