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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

> Kinda don't care? Maybe they worked hard for it, even

So you could've just lead with the fact that you don't care about private property and have an anti-social outlook on life. It was spelled out to you why there's value in Reddit. You say the commons are the important thing.

If I go to your living room with 3 friends and we start talking about life and philosophy, you'll ask me to leave or pay rent. But I will tell you no, you just host the place where cultural discussion is happening, I don't care if you worked hard to get your home, I'll just be there and it's not up to you to control that home forever. I could've gone into any home, the value is in my discussion, so you should be happy I'm having it there and allow me to have it for free, since there's no value in your home and you shouldn't even own it for the future.

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And then they'd call the police and get you kicked out.

If instead you'd been invited in - "come along, bring your club members, you don't need to pay for your own hall anymore, use my house, free signup, moderate your own room, use it without paying, bring your friends" and then when your old meeting place had shutdown and been abandoned and all your leaflets and documentation and inertia had settled on the new location, then stavrianos turned on you and said "now you're all used to coming here, I need to pay off my investors who have been funding this all along, that'll be $10Bn valuation please - and don't bring your friends unless they can pay a few million a month. Or you could just leave, after I've borrowed a lot of money and arranged things to make it so you can't easily do that".

Compare to trademark genericization, where a brand name becomes the word for a whole product category, and loses trademark protection because our use of the word is more important than their use of the brand. That's not something that happens instantly, there are thresholds for it. But it's also not something that never happens at all. Maybe you think that's bad, but I certainly don't. There's a whole lot of room between that, and abolishing private property altogether.

Your last example conflates the idea of private property and personal property.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_property

> Private property is foundational to capitalism, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy, with socialist perspectives making a hard distinction between the two. As a legal concept, private property is defined and enforced by a country's political system.

> The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy

That is a political statement, whereas what I described is a practical situation of life. Do you support the viewpoint that I replied to that it doesn't matter if someone owns something, even if they worked hard for it, that you should be able to come in and takeover because of discourse that happens there? If so we can disagree on that, there's no need to make it a wider political statement.

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