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Comment by bitpush | Hacker News Reader

Incredible to see the 180 both from EU and also from the HN sentiment. HN was cheering on as EU went after Big Tech companies, especially Meta. Meta is no perfect company, but the amount of 'please stick it to them' was strong (I reckon that is still a bridge too far for a lot of folks here).

Even extreme proponents of big tech villanery in the US (Lina Khan's FTC) is also facing losses (They just lost their monumental case against Meta yesterday).

What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT. People stop using Meta products, and then I want to see it die. But not by forcing the hand - that's bad for everyone, especially the enterpreuer / hacker types on this site

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There has been a change in the community here over the last decade, we've lost a lot of the hacker spirit and have a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick". The legacy of ZIRP combined with The Social Network marketing.

The hackers are still here, lurking in the shadows. Bananas. They are just tired of being berated by fanboys anytime they criticize the will of the tech bros. There is no fun in typing out a well-researched answer only to face a torrent of one-second "nah, you are wrong" replies mixed in with AI slop. Bananas.

Am I the victim of the algorithm? Because all I see on HN these days is people pessimistic about tech and society. The tenor here is overwhelmingly negative.

Where are you seeing anyone defend big tech, tech bros, or any tech in general?

> There is no fun in typing out a well-researched answer only to face a torrent of one-second "nah, you are wrong" replies mixed in with AI slop. Bananas.

That "AI slop replies" excuse you mentioned would only apply to the past 3 years at most (aka ChatGPT 3.5 release on Nov 30th 2022). While the grandparent comment's take felt true to my perception for at least the past 10-15 years, way before "AI slop replies" were even a remote concern.

Hackers should know the government is never on your side.

Growth hackers aim for regulatory capture.

> Hackers should know the government is never on your side

Never is naive. Hackers should understand governments are complex, dynamic and occasionally chaotic systems. Those systems can be influenced and sometimes controlled by various means. And those levers are generally available to anyone with a modicum of intelligence and motivation.

In addition, hackers should know government is inevitable. Even in anarchy, governments spontaneously begin to form.

If I am not mistaken, the anarchist school of thought is okay with governance and even governments, but not with the concept of the state - an entity that exists to enforce governance with violence. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia

I’m not 100% sure though.

edit - a (vs. the) school of thought is more accurate.

That may be one of them, but there isn't a singular anarchist school of thought.

> there isn't a singular anarchist school of thought

Would be oxymoronic if there were one.

Isn’t that like saying there must be as many universes as theoretical physicists can think up? Slight maybe but it could also just be one.

> Isn’t that like saying there must be as many universes as theoretical physicists can think up?

Schools of thought are theories. It’s saying there can be as many theoretical universes as theoretical physicists can think up.

This is true for any social construct, of course. But anarchy’s nature means you get less alignment.

The ideal of self-governance as opposed to alienated state or institutional governance is quite common in anarchist thought. Some would probably consider it foundational for the tendency.

Nozick's libertarianism is not really an anarchist school of thought.

I think of anarchy as a theoretical end state, where power is perfectly distributed among each individual, but that this is less of an actually achievable condition and more of a direction to head in (and away from monarchy, where power is completely centralized).

The thing that anarchists have a problem with is hierarchy, of which states are a manifestation. Most anarchists aren't just "okay" with some kind of government, but believe it to be necessary.

i guess I can see how it might work in a single person's life or small group, but on a large scale doomed to failure because the neighboring country/cit-state/etc will be organized, with and organized army. That group will eventually desire something the anarchist community has and will destroy it.

That is indeed the sticky question, but, again, anarchists aren't opposed to organizing either, even at scale - only that such organizing should be fundamentally egalitarian, not forced.

You can argue that hierarchical organization is fundamentally more efficient, but by the same logic authoritarian governments ought to always outcompete democracies militarily, yet it's clearly not as simple as that.

One could also argue that in a world where anarchist modes of organization are the norm, an attempt by some group to organize for the purpose of conquering neighbors would be treated as a fundamental threat by basically all other groups and treated as an imminent threat that warrants legitimate community self-defense. Of course, then the question is how you get to that state of affairs from the world of nation-states.

I don't have answers to these questions, but it should also be noted that it's not a binary. Look at Rojava for an example of a society that, while not anarchist, is much closer to that, yet has shown itself quite capable of organizing specifically for the purpose of war (they were largely responsible for crushing ISIS, and are still holding against Turkey).

An entity, that invents rules, that are not enforced by anybody is a useless waste of energy.

Yep. The FBI swings from lawful good to lawful evil on a case by case basis. Trusting them is dangerous, but a world where they can be ignored is more dangerous.

No, the naive position is to assume that the state is on your side because you occasionally gain something from it.

The reasonable position is that the state exists to propagate and protect itself, which is made up of it's citizens, you included. This is just like any organism or organization works.

Like a company, that doesn't mean they will always make decisions that coincide with what you want or what you think is best. But, it DOES mean they have some goal to keep their people, on the whole, happy, because otherwise they no longer exist.

For example, yes the US government sucks in a lot of ways. The US government ALSO wants you to get an education, and they give it away for free. Because more educated people means a stronger economy, which is good for everyone. You might take this for granted, but: there are many countries where the population, as a whole, cannot read or write. Your literacy is the result of hundreds of years of work and has, essentially, been GIVEN to you. That's not something you just have by nature of being human.

> But, it DOES mean they have some goal to keep their people, on the whole, happy, because otherwise they no longer exist.

Not really. The goal is to prevent people from being unhappy enough that they revolt. But so long as that is not a real possibility, the company - or the state - is quite willing to make the population less happy if that means more productivity that can be extracted.

The example you gave - free education - is precisely about that. The point of schools is not to make the people happy, it's to make the people productive. But, also, ideally to brainwash them into being "good citizens" (meaning compliant and not causing problems). It can even mean "happy", but that is not necessarily the desirable state of affairs from the citizens' perspective, either - e.g. in USSR under Stalin, the cult of personality was strong enough that many people were genuinely happy to participate in it, and genuinely sad when the guy finally died; but it wasn't actually good for them!

No, the fundamental problem with state is exactly that: it exists to propagate and protect itself, but you, the citizen, are not included. You are a resource, and your well-being and happiness is only incidental, not the actual goal.

The reasonable position then is to demand governance that is actually in the interests of those governed. And one can reasonably argue that the resulting entity is not a state.

> No, the fundamental problem with state is exactly that: it exists to propagate and protect itself, but you, the citizen, are not included. You are a resource, and your well-being and happiness is only incidental, not the actual goal.

Beliefs like that are self-fulfilling prophecies. People who believe in that often give up trying to influence the state and exclude themselves from its interests. If too many people do that, the state will not care about them.

There is a trade-off based on the size of the state. Small states are easier to influence and more likely care about their citizens. Politicians stay more in touch with other citizens, and the average citizen is more likely to know some politicians in their everyday life. But small states often make amateurish mistakes, because they are governed by amateurs without access to sufficient expertise on various topics.

Large states have an easier time finding the expertise they need. But they tend to develop a political class out of touch with ordinary citizens. Political leaders become powerful and important people who mostly associate with other elites.

I believe the ideal size of a state is in single-digit millions, or maybe up to 10 or 20 million. Like most European countries and US states.

If you were to put a name on your ideological position, what would it be?

It can't be liberalism, since that tradition considers the state separate from society, and the state's purpose to provide liberty to the latter.

Communists of the 'tankie' variety (i.e. 'authoritarian' rather than 'libertarian' or anarchist) believe the state is or ought to be made up of its citizens, but they are aiming for scientific industrial administration and would never describe the state as an organism.

The tendency that does describe the state in that way, is fascism.

If the state inherently wanted all that for its citizens, why have people formed unions and militant organisations and struggled to achieve things like common education and so on?

The state, as like a concept, doesn't 'inherently' want anything, because there's infinite ways to form a state. The organization of human being in which every person has a voice or say, does tend to operate in a certain way.

The main difference between the public sector and the private sector is that the public sector is somewhat of a democracy, and the private sector is much closer to a monarchy. Obviously our democracy is not perfect, but it's a lot better than "the dictator (board and CEO) makes the decisions, you are cog, please comply".

There's market forces to mitigate that, just like we can say there's foreign affairs to mitigate dictatorships in nations, but that doesn't work if you have a lot of power. Exhibit A: Russia. Russia was supposed to be discouraged from invading the Ukraine, but ultimately, there's nothing stopping the King from doing that.

Let's look at Tesla. Elon Musk is supposed to be discouraged from doing a Nazi Salute because free market, but ultimately there's nothing stopping the king from doing that.

For our government, it makes decisions with the coordination of thousands of people, many of them poor and will experience the direct consequences of those decisions. The further we stray away from that core principle, the worse it gets. Just in general, when we talk about human organization.

"Hackers should understand governments are complex, dynamic and occasionally chaotic systems"

No. Hackers should understand that government is force. This is the definition of government.

And force is the antithesis of the hacker ethos.

oh no, the dreaded "it's complicated" counter-argument!

making it complex helps nobody - everyone has to have a default

and default of "do not trust the glowies. EVER" is the better one

Neither are the billionaires and their deputies who both own and run all the megacorps.

99% of the current AI push is entirely anti-hacker ethos. It is a race to consolidate control of the world's computing and its economic surplus to ~5 organizations.

A few people do interesting stuff on the edges of this, but the rest of the work in it is anathema to hacker values.

The client ai push has also enabled people to run local llama models and build products without those companies. Presumably there'll be more of this to come

That's the 1%. It's the hair on the back of the elephant.

Their capabilities will fall further and further behind models that need a billion dollars to train, and a supercomputer to run. You're making a faustian bargain.

A hacker should probably know that it's usually trade offs and blanket statements are very useless. Certain tools are good for certain tasks and situations, but bad for others. No free lunch and all that.

If you make that blanket statement, you're definitely not a hacker (or just a novice). But you'd make a heck of a politician or tech bro salesman

That is an absolute nonsense.

At minimum, government will be useful as defence against worse government.

I know that some anarchist had dream of a stateless world, but it is not viable.

And while I am not going to say that any government is ideal, many are better than USSR, Third Reich or Cambodia under Pol Pot.

Government != state.

And the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. It can be a temporary ally, but you always have to be wary of it becoming strong enough because you can become its enemy tomorrow.

In a democracy, the government is its citizen. It sucks when you disagree with the majority of the voters, of course. But it's wrong to say that the government is against the majority of the voters: it was elected by them.

A government or president can definitely be against its voters interests.

So the people should talk to their representative. A government becomes authoritarian not only because of an authoritarian leader, but also because of the enablers, people like the spineless Mike Johnson.

This is Mike Johnson's district:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana%27s_4th_congressiona...

The people who voted for him are very happy with what he does and that's why they vote for him again. They voted 75% for trump.

They don't want what you or I want.

Well sculpted district shape.

Then that president should not be re-elected. Or it's the voters' fault.

The truly "eternal" September.

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

I don't know if it's a changing of the audience or a change in how people behave generally, but this place has been insufferable lately whenever anything remotely related to Donald Trump's administration comes up.

One of the things that made this place special relative to other online communities is the ethos to interrogate through a lens of curiosity. Now, there's a lot of vitriol that's indistinguishable from any other comment section.

It’s a difference in values. To some, the ends justify the means and human life has no inherent value and the world is zero sum, and to some, a lying malignant narcissist deciding who lives and who dies is a personification of evil.

To some people, it’s literally a choice between that “lens of curiosity” and their families lives. But people for whom politics has never directly impacted them past a few % up or down in their paychecks can’t understand that, or feel safe in the idea that “they won’t come for me”.

precisely this. cool detachment or disinterested curiosity around political events is the privilege of those comfortable enough to believe current politics won't affect them. These same people are also usually ultimately responsible for the apathy/failure to act and stop meaningful regime change before it's too late.

I'd love to live in a world where one can neatly compartmentalize reality and view life-altering political shifts with "a lens of curiosity", but that isn't how the world works.

Yeah I still remember my first interaction with a supporter back in 2016. It was startling, and the first hint I had that politics was about to shift abruptly.

My rule for a sane HN experience: avoid and flag any articles related to Trump, Elon, <current culture war topic>, American politics, and anything tangential that summons them.

That's getting pretty hard these days. I did a query on Clickhouse and this year a full 1% of all comments on this site mention Trump.

In the last few years I think sentiment on hacker news has shifted from libertarian leaning to much mored left leaning. The same happened on Reddit a few years before. Anyway, just my gut feeling, nothing scientific.

Keen observation both you and OP. We've gone from a sense of techno optimism to tech blaming.

Valid criticism is OK (I stand by crypto being a scam) but bring up any topic that is neutral to popular(VR, Autonomous Driving, LLM) and people are first to be luddites come out.

> We've gone from a sense of techno optimism to tech blaming.

IMO this is simply because the tech industry isn't what it was 20+ years ago. We didn't have the monopolistic mammoths we have today, such ruthless focus on profiteering, or key figures so disconnected from the layperson.

People hated on Microsoft and they were taken to court for practices that nowadays seem to be commonplace with any of the other big tech companies. A future where everyone has a personal computer was exciting and seemed strictly beneficial; but with time these "futures" the tech industry wants us to imagine have just gotten either less credible, or more dystopic.

A future where everyone is on Facebook for example sounds dystopic, knowing the power that lays on personal data collection, the company's track record, or just what the product actually gives us: an endless feed of low-quality content. Even things that don't seem dystopic like VR seem kinda unnecessary when compared to the very tanginble benefit the personal computer or the internet brought about.

There are more tangible reasons to not be optimistic nowadays.

> A future where everyone has a personal computer was exciting and seemed strictly beneficial

I like to frame it in terms of capital goods, even if I didn't think of it at that time: The personal computer's promise was that everyone would own their own digital foundry and factory, creating value for them, controlled by them, and operating according to their own best interests.

Nowadays, you're just renting whatever-it-is from BigCorp, with massive lock-in. A tool for enacting other people's decisions at you.

I find it really hard to classify myself. I've always called myself a "libertarian" - I believe the best strategy to Civilization is to maximise freedom for anyone. As freedom enables enlightenment an enlightenment drives progress. To actually achieve that, in the real world, means that you have to distribute and limit power. That means limiting not only government power but also corporate power. That means regulation, strong regulators (breaking monopolies), policies to keep prices down (including rent/housing!) and to enable free market competition and innovation. And provide an economic system where risks can be taken, enabled by a social let (and social healthcare).

I felt that that was more common here 15 years ago before Big Tech pivoted into the cynical extractive and, in the case of the socials, net economic drag industry that it is now.

The really weird thing is that my views are considered both very right-wing (free markets, globalisation are great, maximal freedom, maximal responsibility, freedom of religion) and very left wing (strong regulation, policy to minimise rent/house prices, strong social net, progressive taxation and wealth limits, freedom to be LGBTQ+ etc).

This isn't actually unusual in the grand scheme of things, just at the moment. "Libertarian" was originally a word that anarchists came up with to describe themselves for a good reason. Lysander Spooner is famous in right-wing libertarian circles, but the guy also promoted mutualism and was the member of the First International. Today, what you describe goes under the label of "libertarian free-market socialism".

Regarding regulation, I do have to note that in many cases when you try to root-cause corporate power, it turns out that it hinges on active government regulation in practice. For example, consider the fundamentals of capitalism, namely, accumulation of capital. Why do we get those huge monopolies in the first place? Well, because more capital means more way to generate wealth (or, more precisely, to appropriate wealth generated by your workers), which can be invested into more capital etc - there is a natural positive feedback loop here. So at a first glance it feels like you need government to actively do something to prevent companies from becoming too large. But consider: what does it mean for a company to own something? It's not a person, so it can't really have physical possession of things. It's all abstract property rights, and the only reason why that works is because the society as a whole acknowledges those rights and legitimate, and, crucially, because there is a state providing infrastructure (police, courts etc) to enforce them. Now imagine what would happen if, for example, the state simply refused to acknowledge property rights past a certain limit and simply wouldn't enforce them on behalf of the property owners.

This is such a laughable comment. Being in favour of a regulation - any regulation - is not part of the "hacker spirit". A hacker qua a hacker is interested in a regulation insofar as they can work around it, or exploit it to their ends, not to put one in place to directly achieve something. That's not to say all regulations are bad, or even that the GDPR is, just that HN being for or against it isn't proof of some demographic shift.

> we've lost a lot of the hacker spirit and have a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick".

Doesn't that describe SV in general, and big tech in particular?

> Doesn't that describe SV in general, and big tech in particular?

Absolutely! It's just that the hopeful hacker/nerd culture used to be more dominant here (slashdot had the more cynical types).

Now there are a generation who don't know anything but Javascript but think that they're God's gift to programming. I can understand it as ZIRP resulted in the bar being dropped to the floor for jobs which paid SV salaries. Imagine earning that kind of money straight out of school and all you had to be able to do was implement Fizzbuzz.

The hackers ARE still here as are some really amazing people but this always seems to happen with communities. The only constant is change. And without change communities die.

This sounds too much like a 'good old days' argument, which is actually in the HN guidelines (something like, 'don't say HN is becoming Reddit').

No. It's reflecting on an overall culture that embraces taking chances. Even if 50% of those chances lead to failure it still beats the paralyzing fear of moving forward.

As this is the message board of a VC fund it's not that surprising that it doesn't only attract hackers in the original sense?

True that. I went to a building in SF that dedicated floor space to every adjacent field like robotics, AI, crypto, etc. Zero hacking or even cyber related space.

It made me feel kinda sad for a few days.

>a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick"

your complaint was Unassailable Hacker® jwz's complaint about HN more than 10 years ago here's a link (many on HN complain that this is NSFW https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png since there are rarely complaints here that anything else is NSFW, I'd suggest people feel insulted by the message)

the thing that has actually changed since jwz's disgust is the site is now flooded by socialism, the antithesis of get-rich enthusiasm

As a hacker, I don't care about cookies or what the EU thinks about them. Disable them if you really care. Or at least use a browser that blocks 3P cookies (not Chrome).

people still insist on using a browser built by a company that makes money off of ads and act surprised when said company purposefully compromises their privacy and data on said browser.

What about when the lack of cookies makes everything break and you cannot work around it because it's too much JS to reverse-engineer, and/or it's a copyright-felony in your country to develop workarounds?

"I'll use my l33t hacker skillz to avoid it on my own" is a losing strategy in the long run.

A similar thing happens with the proliferation of cameras and license-plate readers.

You can keep them enabled and clear at end of session. I'm not saying this makes you untrackable; that is a losing strategy due to all the non-cookie tracking, but also the cookie popup isn't helping there.

> As a hacker, I don't care about cookies

Well I care about privacy. And so should anybody with an ounce of common sense.

It always had a lot of that, I would say 2-3% of articles were about SEO in the early days of HN. It was never slashdot.

Some of that is attributable to raw inflow/outflow differences, where newer cohorts are bigger and therefore the blend would shifts even if no oldsters ever left.

The "hacker spirit" is dying.

Corporations and governments are locking computers down. Secure boot. Hardware remote attestation. Think you can have control by installing your own software? Your device is now banned from everything. We eill be ostracized from digital society. Marginalized. Reduced to second class citizens, if that.

Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is being destroyed. I predict one day we'll need licenses to program computers.

It's gotten to the point sacrificing ideals for money has started to make sense for me. The future is too bleak. Might as well try to get rich.

I might get worried when mainstream computers won't be able to run Linux. Until then.. I'm not worried.

Seems there are efforts to bring openness to platforms that inherently have an interest to resist it and while the progress is slow.. there is progress

>The "hacker spirit" is dying

This is the number one issue in computing today. Everybodys running around trying to get rich building shitty extensions and frameworks without looking at the bigger picture. We need collective action. Imagine a movement where everybody becomes millitant about adblockers. Like install them on every computer and deflate the advertising industry. Smarter people than me can probably think of better ideas

Right now its death by 1000 cuts. There needs to be a big change or we could lose everything in just 20-30 years in my opinion

Couldn’t agree more.

I’ve said it before, but the cynicism and weirdness that used to exist here has been gobbled up by a new wave of early stage tech evangelists who are just here to complain about ladders and levels.

It’s honestly been depressing to watch lots of good comments and posts go unnoticed, while the bait comments get all the engagement.

There’s also weirdly (ok, maybe not that weird) amount of casual hate on here now. It’s subtle, but I’ve been seeing a lot of negative karma and rhetorics that never used to exist here. I suppose it’s just “the internet” these days, but I’d wager HN has just grown too much outside the bubble it once was, and now we have a wide open door with lights vs the tiny alley way we once had.

> What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT.

That's impossible. The network effects are too strong. Facebook may die, or even Instagram, but WhatsApp is so intermeshed with the majority of the world that it can only be taken out by a government.

I uninstalled WhatsApp last year after I sent a message to my most important contacts that I'm switching to Signal. In the mean time, I convinced a grand total of 2 people to install Signal so we can talk. Also, I realized that actually not being part in some of the WhatsApp groups that I left behind has quite a lot of advantages!

Yes, the network effects are very strong, but each of us has the possibility of making a small sacrifice for this thing to change.

Social connections can be a large sacrifice.

You might have convinced 2 people to install Signal, but the real test is whether they will still be using it a year from now. My own experience from going Signal-first for a while was that it doesn't stick for most.

Facebook is filled with billions of people I have no reason to speak to, ergo its network effects for me are zero, and its value to me is zero. Other services have similar zero or negative value, and hence I don't use them either. As much as some around here would like to believe that network effects are a moat that effectively allow social media to be immortal, experience has shown that not to be the case. Facebook is dying a slow, lingering death. It is not the place you go to find trendsetters and people of import, but, at best, to go check up on grandma. Facebook will die when grandma finally kicks the bucket and there isn't anyone to replace her because they're all on Discord.

Facebook is still running strong on Marketplace and Groups. They have almost no competition on those.

....and I don't care because I don't use either of those. All the network effects in the world mean nothing if that network has no value to me.

Yes, but then it's about you. A significant portion of society is using Facebook marketplace and group so it won't die with "grandma"

What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT. People stop using Meta products, and then I want to see it die.

The problem is that with a nearly infinite amount of money, you are not going to get irrelevant on merit. You just buy up any company/talent that becomes a threat. They have done that with Instagram and WhatsApp (which was and is really huge in Europe etc.).

Didnt the judge rule literally yesterday that this wasnt illegal. This was one of Lina Khan's signature lawsuits, and judge didnt agree even a single one of FTC's arguments.

Where can I read more about this? Quick search turns up nothing for me

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/meta-wins-monopo...

https://www.theverge.com/news/823191/meta-ftc-antitrust-tria...

It is actually a monumental case ruling, and for some reason it wasnt reported or discussed here. Lina Khan's FTC has lost both their marquee cases now (Google, Meta)

> Meta won a landmark antitrust battle with the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday after a federal judge ruled it has not monopolized the social media market at the center of the case.

Wasn't the case here really weak to begin with? I remember reading the FTC's initial filings and they just sounded absurd. The very premise that Meta didn't face meaningful competition from TikTok was a farce.

I'm not very happy with Lina Khan after she killed our only remaining low cost airline carrier. And killed iRobot to let Roborock, a a Chinese company, take over.

She "stood up" to big tech, failed, and her remaining legacy is destroying American businesses that people actually relied on. Literally no value was added, but a bunch was subtracted. I never understood the hype for her.

> The very premise that Meta didn't face meaningful competition from TikTok was a farce.

The original claim was centered around the timeline of purchasing Instagram and Whatsapp. TikTok came much, much later.

If this is true, the case then becomes "Meta was a monopoly from start_date-tiktok_date" which isn't a very meaningful claim since they are not arguing it is a monopoly to be broken up.

Anyways, I disagree - this is not the case. If you read the filings and their slides, the FTC argues Meta is a monopoly in the personal networking space.

They essentially carve a market out of thin air to selectively exclude Snapchat, TikTok, and Shorts. The judge has understandably called this for what it is.

It was a phenomenally poorly litigated case, most experts at the time doubted it would succeed, but it did wonders for Lina Khan's popularity. Seems to have served her well with NYC and all.

Just to be clear, when you Khan "killed our remaining low cost airline carrier", are you referring to when the DOJ blocked the JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger? Not arguing, I just want to understand.

Correct, yeah.

Just because something is not illegal does not make it a good thing. Judges have political ties and if the people in power dont want any monopoly laws, then there wont be any monopoly laws.

I think you might have a different definition of "merit" than OP. "Merit" to me means how much value the company brings to society. If I'm reading correctly about your point of it being legal, to you it seems like "merit" means how much value they bring to their investors.

Social media companies becoming more consolidated and influential might be legal and good for their stakeholders but it doesn't mean it's a net positive for the rest of the world. And unfortunately, as much as so many people like to believe otherwise, being a net negative to society absolutely does not lead to a company becoming irrelevant.

It's pretty telling that people here think enforcement of anti-trust laws that are already on the books is "extreme". The implicit goal of half of tech startups is basically becoming the platform for whatever and getting a soft monopoly, so I guess it's not surprising that that people who are temporarily embarrassed monopolists have these views.

Look at what happened to iRobot vs. Roborock though.

can someone explain what happened? how is it relevant to EU laws?

I live in EU. I am totally in support to force Meta down through government's big stick.

While they are at it, I hope they do it to the other big techs too.

Being a "hacker type" (whatever that means) does not equate to being complacent to these companies abusing their economic power.

Yeah, seconded, and I also live in the EU.

Then I propose you should support https://noyb.eu/

Their track record is pretty good.

If you support them (I do, they do great work), please set up a yearly subscription. Predictable revenue is very valuable for organizations.

Do we have anything like this in the U.S.?

I wonder what kind of people downvote you. They must have interesting priorities.

I'm a hacker type and generally extremely (left) libertarian. But when it comes to megacorps, I have basically zero sympathy. When they are big enough to rival nation-states in economic and political power, they can't complain when said nation-states start to notice.

(I would still prefer the world without either, though.)

Yeah, I think states need to release that entities as large as them become their competitors. Now we have entities way larger than them.

This is a proposal from the EC. Whether the EU accept it is not clear.

Yeah I really hope they don't. It's ridiculous to throw out all the great work they've been doing.

Nothing's been official published though, so this is largely a kite-flying exercise.

You don't need a pop-up to use cookies on your site. You (quite rightly) need to get consent in some form if you're to track my (or your) behavior and sell that to rando third-parties.

It is good to stress this, most people don't know how the EU works, Europeans included.

> What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT.

Why? Is META relevant only on merit?

> HN was cheering on as EU went after Big Tech companies

HN is not a hive mind or a monoculture. Every time the EU goes after some company, some people always cheer, some people always boo, and some people will cheer some and boo others based on the impact/nuance of the particular policy or company.

This is accurate, however if you look at any thread you can see an overwhelming consensus of opinion. The diversity of views are not equal - in the sense that there isnt equal number of for and against comments.

In most of the threads I have observed about EU action on Big Tech, the overwhelming majority of thoughts are 'for', with perhaps few dissenting thoughts.

It depends what time of the day you log in too. I'm in the GMT time zone, I can literally see a comment go from +20 upvotes in the morning to negative numbers when Americans start waking up. It really shifts your perspective of the site too, because comments move down or even disappear based on the number of votes.

I would strongly encourage everyone to read HN with `showdead` enabled (it's in your profile page). There aren't actually all that many downvoted comments, and while mosts are low-level trolling, even with `showdead` you see them at the end of the parent thread and they are greyed out, so it's not all that distracting. But being able to see some of the things that get downvoted / killed unjustly (and then vouch & upvote them) is how you get a better HN.

You can upvote dead comments? I can't maybe you need to have some amount of karma.

You can "vouch" for them, which makes them non-dead (and upvotable again). But, yes, it does have some karma limit - I'm not sure if the specifics are documented anywhere, the FAQ just says "small karma threshold".

Yeah, you can sense how strong libertarianism is in the US.

Europeans here steer more in the "we can, but should we?" category, while Americans are in the "move fast and break things" category.

I literally see upvotes during the day (Europe) and then downvotes during the night. Mostly. But the trend is there.

The loudmouths do not necessarily represent a majority of HN users. They're just loud. Some of us find the social-media-bashing threads boring and just go back to our social media.

I think there is plenty of diversity of comments, substantially less diversity in voting and flagging.

You can say lots of things, many that go against the hive mind will just get you more or less instantly grayed or even flagged

> substantially less diversity in voting and flagging

I don't think this is true either. I've seen comments swing wildly from one end to the other and back. It's more that comments show a distribution, while voting squashes that distribution into a single result.

On top of that, one thing that always gets support is complaining about the status quo, and those comments have been the most upvoted, on either side of the debate

Meta's only merit is having a lot of users and keeping them hooked at any cost.

It might surprise you, but success is not always rooted in having done great things for the world

> What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT.

Me too. But losing on merit requires an (at least somewhat) fair marketplace.

> What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT. People stop using Meta products, and then I want to see it die. But not by forcing the hand - that's bad for everyone, especially the enterpreuer / hacker types on this site

I honestly don’t get why so many people jump to the whole "we need the government to save us or we’re doomed" argument. To me, it's simple: put your money where your mouth is. I can’t stand Meta, so I just don’t use their products.

To many (especially younger) people, giving up Meta products would make them a social outcast.

Some industries naturally tend torwards monopolies. In social networks, this effect is very strong.

I believe the FTC had a case years ago. But the market has moved on. YT took off backed by Alphabet capital. Tiktok took off withe Bytedance capital. There was a time when FB/IG/WA commanded most of social media. And Meta did use that clout in some pretty grotesque ways.

Prior to 2020, FTC would have had a much stronger case. But too little too late.

The 180 does not surprise me at all. GDPR and associated laws are a perfect example of the old 'Good intentions, unintended consequences'-pattern we see in laws all the time.

The results of the GDPR (and the unrelated Cookie Directive) on my everyday professional life are what made me - an European - from a flag-waving European-Unity-proponent to a heavy critic that dreams of a Dexit. And I know I am not the only one - public opinion is shifting - some because of cookie banners, some because of driving licenses, some because manufactuers have started to neuter their devices when sold to Europe, taking away features available everywhere else in the world, some because of the ridiculous VAT reporting regime that hits European businesses once they hit a 100k gross income mark, some for yet other reasons. And now they are trying hard to get the de-minimis-rule taken away, increasing trouble and cost for anyone who does cross-eu-border trading.

It's only been a matter of time even Brussles remembered that ultimately, their throne is built on sand, and that Europe has a history of getting rid of unreasonable leadership.

can you please explain the driving licenses part?

I'm not as miffled about that as others, but in Germany, licenses used to be forever (unless you yourself gave it back OR there was a court order, e.g. for a traffic-related crime). Enter the EU, and now licenses come with a renewal date, which is considered mostly a cash grab as you now have to buy a new copy every few years.

A few weeks ago, there even was an attempt to have air-traffic-style medicals beginning at 60, which, in a society that becomes both older AND worse at public transit, was highly unpopular.

You may think that's a little thing. The issue is: these little compound. And every time they come around the corner with a new regulatory clown act, people remember ... when lighting bulbs were a few cents instead of the energy-saving 10-euro new bulbs mandated by brussles ... when we were forbidden to have powerful vacuum cleaners or showerheads (yes, the new ones are not really worse, but they sound worse), ... and a hundred other little annoyances.

Not to mention that national governments like to blame Brussles for stuff they wanted, but which were highly unpopular. "Unfortunately, we cannot do anything, it was an EU decision (which we openly supported)".

And eventually, people become eurocritic. Which is one of the reasons why people start to vote for right-wing, eurocritic to anti-EU parties.

Hah, we already have those medicals in Hungary. Well, it definitely has some cash-grabby aspects, but - at least here - there's some real benefits to having a doctor think at least for 2 seconds about how someone's chronic conditions can and will affect them (and others!) on the roads.

People are getting glasses because the doctor told them that they need them for driving. People are getting regular blood sugar checkups because the doctors told them that driving with prediabetes is dangerous.

And even though I was surprised when they told one of my relatives that he only gets the license renewed for a few years and then he needs to get a checkup again, but he definitely fits the risk indicators. (Recently lost his wife after a very harsh and unfortunately unfair battle with the medical realities and the resource-constrainedness of healthcare, mental health problems, etc.)

...

regarding little things, I completely agree. This trade-off to have some environmental sustainability static look better at the cost of having far worse consumer experience doesn't make a lot of sense when we are not doing the obvious things to sweeten the trade-offs. (Ie. building more walkable cities, better insulation, better public transportation, yadda-yadda. But of course the European auto industries have a lot of influence.)

I think the rise of far-right is very well explained by the salience of immigration problems:

https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-boring-theory-of-the-populist...

Of course the usual consumer annoyances help fuel the populism/propaganda.

Can contract killers become irrelevant on merit, or does it take government intervention?

Well yeah, the GPDR was great in theory and a huge win for privacy advocates until it did jack shit in practice. It turned out to have zero teeth and everyone just found ways to keep business as usual while 'complying' with the law.

I think it's ridiculous to say GDPR did "jack shit". I now have the ability to withdraw consent for tracking/marketing cookies on every major companies website I visit. An option that was near non-existent before GDPR.

That wasn't even the GPDR and it did even less for user privacy.

what was it then? why it did less for user privacy?

It was the 2002 ePrivacy Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Directive

What the law wanted: putting regulatory friction on tracking cookies by requiring collecting consent will make sites do less tracking.

What the law did: endless cookie banners.

What the law wanted: ending the torrent of people's inboxes filling with ads.

What the law did: nothing because they caved to the industry and let people send ads anyway. actual spammers never followed the law anyway and real companies who ship ads weren't at all burdened by an existing customer relationship requirement.

What the law wanted: companies will stop keeping your personal information on their servers forever.

What the law did: nothing because they again caved to the industry and it just got added to the cookie banner consent screen or the company just said they kept the data for "value add" services like personalization.

I'm shrugging a bit, because we have very different experience regarding what the law did, as I worked on projects and privacy and handling of personal data was taken pretty seriously. (Sure, my sample size is small.)

Separating good traffic (and emails and sites) from bad is an inherently hard problem. I'm not surprised that a big generic supranational regulatory body did not solve it. But I think they found and okay balance between regulatory burden and efficacy.

(And even though I understand that the enforcement had to be left to various agencies of the member states, the absolute sluggishness and total lack of proactivity was bad for morale. Even though I'm aware it had to go through the courts too. But that's a communication problem and I expect the fucking supranational regulator to be able to articulate what the realistic expectations are and where are we compared to them, and what's keeping us from getting there, and so on. Post-legislation monitoring and follow up is very important, and all regulatory bodies are atrociously unaware of the harm their skill deficiency causes in today's complaint-driven cumulative resentment-based populist politics/propaganda.)

The thing is that it didn't work for that objective. It didn't seem to have any meaningful impact on all on the Metas and Googles out there. They control the user base and people depend on their products, it was trivial for them to get full consent like they've always done with their Terms & Conditions.

At the same time, it was a heavy burden for data-oriented EU startups like mine. I've spent a few hundred hours dealing with GDPR, it felt like it was designed to stick it to the big companies without any thought on how it would affect the rest.

And it's been a low-level but ever present friction for users.

> What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT.

That happened a decade ago. Users dropped from Facebook like flies and moved to Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg's response was to buy Instagram. The Obama DOJ waved through what was obviously a blatantly illegal merger.

Likewise, Google's only ever made two successful products: Search and e-mail. Everything else was an acquisition. In fact, Google controlled so much of the M&A market that YCombinator (the company that runs this forum) complained in an amicus brief that they were basically being turned into Google's farm league.

So long as companies can be bought and sold to larger competitors, no tech company will ever become irrelevant. They'll just acquire and rebrand. The only way to stop this is with the appropriate application of legal force.

What about hp, dell, ibm, compaq, sun? Companies are temporary.

> The Obama DOJ waved through what was obviously a blatantly illegal merger.

Speaking of buying Instagram[1], it's plain to see that the horrible judges that Obama appointed simply don't believe that antitrust should exist.

Exactly what you would expect from the guy who let Citigroup appoint his cabinet[2]. The powers that be at the Democratic party thought that Hillary Clinton was too independent for corporate elites, and she makes a fairly good case that they fixed the primary because they thought he was their best chance to "save capitalism" after the crash. They were right. She even sabotaged her next campaign with her desperate need to show bankers that she was a safe choice (e.g. the secret speech.)

> Google's only ever made two successful products: Search and e-mail. Everything else was an acquisition.

And search was only successful for 5 minutes, until SEO broke PageRank. Since that one fragile (but smart) algorithm, and the innovation of buying Doubleclick, everything else has been taking advantage of the fact that we don't have a government that functions when it comes to preserving competition in the market. The West loves corporate concentration; it's better when your bribes come from fewer sources, and those sources aren't opposed to each other.

[1] James Boasberg; "Meta prevails in historic FTC antitrust case, won’t have to break off WhatsApp, Instagram" https://apnews.com/article/meta-antitrust-ftc-instagram-what...

[2] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/8190

I like what Kagi does which is just using the nuclear option of "Look - if you fill your website with crap we're not going to index you"

That said, Google stripped away +must +include +terms from their searches so I do blame them some and not just SEO

?? He bought instagram in 2012 when it was tiny. They all moved in 2016.

His response was 4 years back in time because he can see the future?

They moved from meta to meta.

> sers dropped from Facebook like flies and moved to Instagram.

Even worse, bought Whattsapp.

so what it like working at meta?

Hackernews has always been a venture capitalist forum and has always had a significant minority that generally sides with money. I don't think that is substantially different today.

Most European regulations seemed to be less about helping regular people and more about protecting European ad firms, many of which are even shadier than big tech.

> ...more about protecting European ad firms, many of which are even shadier than big tech.

Where can I read more about that phenomenon?

There are lots of companies like this:

https://zeotap.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Zeotap_-Time-t...

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