Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

You appear to be arguing that it's better to betray your customers' intimate confidences, than to find a market you can address without doing that.

I'm sure that can't be what you are trying to say - although, if it is, I can certainly understand why you made a throwaway to say it.

View on HN

I'm pretty sure it's just an observation about the situation that any player in that market would find itself in, so therefore when you look at apps in that market they're shitty about privacy.

It's a comment about dating apps, not about people who decided not to go into dating apps i.e. found "a market you can address without doing that."

I'm not saying it's better, but that it is unavoidable given current market conditions.

We all want our data to be handled securely, and we should try to understand why that does not happen.

There's a difference between understanding why people behave dishonestly, and making excuses for dishonest behavior. You're doing the second one under the color of the first.

No one has to make a dating app. I don't see how "no one else could do it without betraying their users either!" as you argue - and, again, even granting this is true, which you've done nothing thus far to show - excuses the actual betrayal that actually has occurred. If you'd like to make an argument that it does, I'd be interested to hear that.

I think you're shooting the messenger here. OP was explaining the incentives for the behavior we're seeing, not excusing it.

Maybe so. It's easy to get your blood up when you're addressing flagrantly careless behavior that substantially helps make possible the systematization of the same kind of targeted, but back then still by necessity only interpersonal and mostly opportunistic, violence that was a daily feature of your life throughout most of its first couple decades.

So, sure, the one comment to which you've directly responded here, I'll call that out of line on my part. Everything else I've said throughout these comments stands.

He's saying that in the end, all that will be available to customers will be the unscrupulous ones - because if someone tries the other approach, they'll fail.

And there always will be someone trying the unscrupulous approach, no matter how many people decide not to.

I think he’s saying don’t even try, because some other company won’t bother and it’ll crush you.

Fine! Don't try, then. "Someone is going to do this shameful thing, therefore there is no reason why I should not do this shameful thing" isn't quite the logic of a sociopath, but only because a sociopath sees no need in the first place to excuse to himself his own immoral behavior.

If your attitude is "if you can't do it right, don't do it at all", that's fine. But a predictable consequence of that attitude is that, when the cost of "doing it right" is high enough, the only people who do it at all are the people who don't do it right.

The incentives are broken, and telling the people who point out that the incentives are broken that they're just making excuses for bad behavior doesn't actually fix the incentives.

I’m pretty sure no one in this thread is saying that but you?

It’s an observation that market conditions seem to disadvantage anyone who DOESN’T do that, so unless you like spending a bunch of effort and time (and being less competitive overall because of it, and likely go nowhere), maybe spend your effort somewhere else if you don’t like to be that way.

There are a ton of markets like this. If you wanted to open a ‘good’ check cashing place for instance, go right ahead. Just don’t be surprised if you lose your shirt trying it by not being like the other, less scrupulous players.

You appear to be taking a very uncharitable interpretation.

This thread reads to me as there may be perverse incentives due to nature of dating and capital markets that make it nearly impossible to compete while valuing security.

Exactly. If “do think X” is my goal, and there are zero successful moral paths to doing thing X, then the only option is to not do it.

u/firephonestival is stating the obvious and much repeated: any conscientious effort will be buried by the horde of amoral and immoral players. They are not defending, excusing, or in any way minimizing the excreble outcomes of our winner-takes-all economic regime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com