Typical HN — Anything that goes under the umbrella of big corp gets thrown under the bus, while everyone dreams of selling out one day.
No one is traumatized by this and no one is giving up their profession.
Like read the threads dude, some people are seriously upset to the point of questioning their careers. Believe what you want of course. From the reactions I see on my own corporate slack whenever there are big changes announced, sensitivity and poor coping skills are in abundance.
Is there a logical fallacy for this? I see it a lot online and it drives me nuts. Just because you can point out that the general viewpoint of a group might be hypocritical, that doesn't mean the individuals themselves are necessarily hypocritical.
(personally I have no opinion on figma/adobe, but this class of comment drives me nuts)
I call it the "fallacy of the crowd" and I agree it is very common.
I first noticed it enough to give it a name (and then see it everywhere!) about 12 years ago.
Not just online, and it's not always talking about a negative, i.e. apparent hypocrisy or contradiction. It is also used to talk about apparent consequence or implication.
E.g. political campaign speeches often use it. "They" this so "they" that; "they" this and then "they" that; "they" say this yet "they" do that: Different subsets of people referred to by "they" in the same sentence or train of thought.
It's a great rhetorical trick for persuading large numbers of people of something rousing yet wrong.
The balance seems to be the “government should own/regulate all businesses I need or hate” crowd. Which feels like younger folks that haven’t thought through that endgame.
The reason this anti-corporate stuff appears is because the point of sale is also the best moment Figma competitors who no doubt lurk on here have to throw their name out there and convert users.
Who is HN? Is you HN?
Did you add your thoughts about Avast and the acquisition of the browser extension?
If you found a common opinion on that topic, perhaps it's because data harvesting and selling user data is a common pattern associated with similar acquisitions. It's not like people latch onto gloomy conspiracies pulled from the nearest echo chamber, repeating them in unison, swaying to the beat of an HN drum. Is that what you're suggesting?
At the end of the day, "data harvesting and selling user data" is done by programmers. I find it unacceptable that some do it and then come to HN to complain about other people's work.