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Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

Heh. I didn't know what to expect when I came here, but frankly I was a bit surprised to see the ethical implications of this deal weighed so heavily here. Not that I view the HN community as cut throat necessarily, but certainly often business oriented. Granted this was only posted an hour ago, but I will try to less judgementally provoke a discussion regarding ethics and startups...

Is it wrong to even associate with a company like Monsanto? What if they're providing some tangential support infrastructure that doesn't relate to the actual business practices that people are so ethically opposed to?

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Agreed, I don't think I've ever seen so many 'fucks' and similar words used on an HN thread before. For some reason all these new posters are tying every company which they have a grudge against with Monsanto, and by association, with Cloudant. Amusing to read all the pent up angered comments, with any dissenting ones heavily downvoted. Did /r/politics arrive to stay? What happened here?

Cloudant is providing an amazing infrastructure to power a large client, and with that, they grow as a business and innovate in technology. I don't see anything wrong with congratulating them for their securing of this great partnership, and I find the response here from the mainly younger accounts very disappointing.

edit: We've hit Godwin's law pretty quickly already I see.

I've been very curious about the persistence of anti-capitalists attitudes on Hacker News.

For me, one of the things that changed me from a liberal into a libertarian was starting businesses. Getting out there, trying to grow, dealing with government, and recognizing that I needed to learn finance, etc, caused me to get experience with how the business world works, and to also learn economics, and that was pretty much all she wrote.

Maybe Hacker News has a lot of overlap with the /r/politics demographic due to commonality in ages?

I think this is a more recent development actually, that started in the last year particularly. Hacker News had a much more business and startup friendly environment, but the anti-capitalist attitude is a sentiment that was found mostly at the bottom, downvoted for their mostly incoherent rants. It's unfortunate that their numbers have gained.

I think one of the biggest signs to always look for is how many comments a story has. You'll find the older, better commenters tend to be more conservative with their comments and only joining the discussion when they have something worthwhile to contribute.

Hacker News has grown a lot in the last year, and obviously many of the new users are people who don't actually run their own businesses. They view making money as somehow abhorrent. The same kind of mindset you see in these new occupy wall street protests.

But lest I take us off on a too political tangent, I'll end it here. Politics does not belong on Hacker News.

Says the guy whose account is under four months old... while responding to one whose account is slightly over two months old. The ironing is delicious.

This is just a throwaway account and not the one under my real name. I've been reading Hacker News since before it was even called that. My "real name" account is over 4 years old.

I don't see how decrying a partnership with Monsanto equates with anti-capitalism. Monsanto is seen by many as an enterprise with particularly questionable business practices, but more revelatory than that, one with deep ties to our political system, from which they might be said to derive great benefit from our government's support through subsidies, research grants, political pressure on other countries, abuse of the justice system in going after often innocent farmers, and the list goes on. If anything, it is Monsanto which is seen as anti-capitalist, for their reliance on government power in order to succeed in the marketplace, rather than the inherent merits of their products.

Beyond that, the fact that their genetic modifications to our basic food staples are not contained, that they are allowed to contaminate our seed stocks as a whole, with often poorly understood long-term consequences, touches a nerve for a large portion of the population, since we are talking about a consequential and irreversible effect on the basic food upon which we all rely to stay alive and healthy. It is not hard for me to see why this would be controversial.

I love how you just simply stop responding whenever someone makes a valid, well-thought out point against what you were saying.

Respond to wiseweasel and nolabel. They refuted your assertions, the least you should do is own up to it rather than just ignoring them.

> Is it wrong to even associate with a company like Monsanto?

Yes. Associating your name with the likes of Monsanto, especially as an entrant to the market, is PR suicide. You would be hard-pressed to come up with a more universally reviled entity than Monsanto... maybe the Church of Scientology, though even that is probably not enough.

I've got it; Intellectual Ventures!

It is a huge negative publicity, to be associated with a company like Monsanto. Not sure if that would affect Cloudant's future business prospects though. We all know of the sweatshops run by companies like Walmart and Nike, lots of people even complain loudly, but those companies seem to be doing very well, year after year.

On the other hand, given the size of Monsanto, there is no doubt that Cloudant could effectively demonstrate their expertise, and use them as a case study for landing big customers in future. Plus, the money must be pretty good.

I guess it isn't our job to judge Cloudant, they are running a business - their business, their choice (moral or not). HN crowd (me included) just can't digest associating with an entity as Monsanto, hence the extreme reaction.

Nike hasn't been an ethically questioned company since 2000. In fact, they're pretty universally acclaimed as one of the most ethical companies in the world now (google Nike Most Ethical). Most of the Monsanto data in this thread is decades old, as well.

Hmmm. May be I haven't kept up, but I definitely remember reading about the labor practices of Nike (vietnam, I think). May be they changed, if they did, kudos to them.

"Is it wrong to even associate with a company like Monsanto? What if they're providing some tangential support infrastructure that doesn't relate to the actual business practices that people are so ethically opposed to?"

Certainly. Ethics should trump finance in every scenario. There are very few companies as evil as Monsanto, and helping them further their cause is akin to direct involvement.

I see the nazi / ibm situation being tossed out in the thread, but in this case I think it's more like the RIAA.

Would you help the RIAA further their cause?

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