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Comment by BugsJustFindMe | Hacker News Reader

> Did that guy make a mistake? Obviously. Was it in good faith? It seemed so.

Adding unwitting users' computers to a proxy network by default is so obviously and blatantly unethical, it beggars belief. I'm not angry at the creator, because they seem oblivious. I am, however, extremely saddened and frustrated by their obliviousness. Like in no universe is it ever OK to do this even if nobody responds to your discord poll. It takes a real failure in responsible, ethical upbringing to get here. It takes a lack of consideration and empathy for other people to believe that including this isn't an act of aggression towards everyone who encounters the software.

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I personally have a very hard time believing they are oblivious. It’s a literal caricature of malware. There is no way one could think it wouldn’t cause this kind of reaction. The best one could hope for is that people don’t notice.

I want to be able to agree with you, but too much of the world is poisoned by toxic "me before you" society. There's a high probability that this person just never learned to recognize and challenge behaviors like this. So, maybe, but also maybe not. Either way it's sad.

> Like in no universe is it ever OK to do this even if nobody responds to your discord poll

As far as I can tell, they didn't even really make a Discord poll.

The first mention of "spider" (or "IP" or "proxy" or any related words) is from the release announcement of a version which already contains Spider, which got negative reactions: https://i.imgur.com/gLKce8W.png

It's very deceptive wording since "I made an announcement to poll people's reaction" is technically true, but it wasn't a poll or before the changes were made as is implied. Same with "There were very little comments", which leaves out the fact the comments they did get were negative and the low quantity is just from it being a small unknown Discord server.

Looking at how he named the commit that introduced it.. it just stinks, looks like it's trying to go in unnoticed.

Or sadly, that commit log standards are nonexistent and don't have to describe the changes and be misleading, it's one of those.

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