Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

There are two things that don't sit right with me:

1. "the FOSS community shouldered the burden – both with our labor and our wallets – of a massive exodus onto our volunteer-operated servers" -- this implies that users actually using decentralized services is a burden, a bad thing. Or rather, that a) it would be much better if Twitter was better and people just continued using Twitter rather than FOSS platforms b) that Twitter has some kind of obligation to keep their platform good because not doing so will make people use FOSS services. If the operators don't want their service to be used, they don't have to offer it...

2. "No billionaires" as a motto, implying that having money in itself (and not a specific way of behaving) is wrong, unethical, and worthy of exclusion. That feels like an very common envy-based position, trying to tear people down because they are better off. He does have reasonable points for not wanting that specific billionaire, but the demand for exclusion is "no billionaires". Should e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Acton not be allowed/given a platform at FOSDEM?

1. I agree, and stopped reading at that point. If you don't want users on your site, disable the sign up field. New FOSS tool users are not your enemy, and if you don't want them taking up your resources then you should scope your resources to a limited audience. I have a hard time taking anything Drew is saying seriously here.

> implying that having money in itself (and not a specific way of behaving) is wrong, unethical, and worthy of exclusion.

Having money in the abstract is not. But being a billionaire is.

I think you are (rightly) pointing out that "quantity has its own quality".

As an analogy, this is similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit.

To GP: It's less "no one should have any mass". It's more "Billionaires are like Black Holes, and therefore should be avoided" -- yes, it is a value judgement; no, it's not a blanket statement about money.

> That feels like an very common envy-based position, trying to tear people down because they are better off.

No, it's not because they are better off. It's because (a) to get control of that level of economic resources in this economy, you generally have to do something with many questionable aspects to it, despite its (potential) popularity and (b) you don't need to remain a billionaire or show signs of trying to increase your holdings. Mackenzie Bezos shows the way here - still deliriously rich but giving away money like a bank on fire and having plain her goal to ultimately donate essentially all of it.

The billionaires we don't want at FOSDEM are not just rich, they want to be richer and they are, from our perspective, demonstrably causing harm.

Yes, I happen to think that marginal tax rates above some threshold should probably be on the order of 95%, but I don't begrudge people making a lot of money by doing something good and/or for a lot of people.

Jack has sponsored a lot of FOSS work on nostr, a nice decentralized protocol for open discussion.

That sounds like something a billionaire would say.

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