Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The reason you're even making this argument is that the person who submitted this story altered the starting conditions of the thread by substituting an editorialized title for the author's own, and in that sense you're arguing not with Moxie Marlinspike, but with the submitter.

View on HN

The original title was a bland thing conveying naught but the thin idea that the world changes. A better objection is that the submitted title does not accurately reflect what is clearly Marlinspikes thesis statement:

> "I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all"

Personally I think the new titles stays pretty close to the thesis statement, but it might be a bit exaggerated as clearly Marlinspike doesn't mean "technically impossible" but rather something more like "socially unworkable".

The corruption imposed by the false title is clear from the comment I responded to, which is premised on the idea that Moxie Marlinspike opposes all federated protocols (including, as the comment asserts, HTTP), when in fact his concern is with the project of deploying very specifically a secure messenger.

It's not up to the submitter of an article on Hacker News to decide that an article's title "conveys naught", and then make up their own purportedly better title. Threads are sensitive to initial conditions, and submitters don't have a privilege to set those conditions. This is black-letter HN guidelines stuff; the title here is an abuse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com