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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

The fact we have had less than benevolent wizards and shamans, why would we expect to have modern day equivalent of only benevolent coders? It's such a fairy tale level of expectation that it seems childish. Spending any energy in trying to make real world a fairy tale is just wasted.

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We wouldn't. You might expect that on an indivudual level. But at a society level, I would expect any company that's doing things that are specifically allowed by our goverment (who did approve the Ticketmaster Live Nation Merger) to get their jobs filled just like any other. I think Ticketmaster is evil, another developer might not. That's fine, they're not killing people or dumping toxic chemicals into reservoirs, we can agree to disagree.

My outrage is directed entirely at the government agencies whose job it was to stop this, not the developers making a ticketing app.

Ultimately developers type the code in and hit "deploy." They have to share at least a fraction of the blame and accept at least a fraction of the outrage. Without them, the product wouldn't exist.

There's a lot of blame to be spread around though. The developers themselves, their management chain all the way up to the decision makers, shareholders that demand ever increasing profits, governments who provide the legal framework and allow these huge, destructive companies. Everyone should get their share of the blame.

It's nice to think that might be true, but there are always plenty more devs willing to work on anything for a paycheck than there are devs with strict morals. There's a lot of egos, but at the end of the day, no matter who you are, you are not irreplaceable.

It's okay to shame bad actors.

In fact, society would likely be better off if e brought back more public shaming

I think that this is predicated upon a reasonably well informed and educated public. And my estimation is that the general populous is not informed enough on cryptography to be in a position to shame Ticketmaster engineers.

Also, my impression is that there is already copious amounts of public shaming. Some social media sites seem largely devoted to that. And unfortunately, I don't think most people fully deserve the verdict that they get in the court of public opinion.

This is certainly not true. Can you name an existing or historical shame-based society that you would actually want to live in?

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