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Comment by blumkvist | Hacker News Reader

I've tried to explain this line of logic previously on HN and my experience is that the majority of the people here live in their own world. Much like people who enjoy reality TV, just more technically savvy.

They babble about how FB decreases audience reach or how they hide their ad targeting instead of realizing the massive opportunity that is presented to the people who are willing to put the work.

They besmirch google for giving rapgenius preferential treatment instead of taking notes and using the precedent.

They revile linkedin for marketing tactics that serve them very well.

In short, the crowd here is mostly nerds with a misunderstood nobility sense, refusing the see the world they are living in for what it is.

Alternative in short - people here are workers, not businessmen.

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They babble about how FB decreases audience reach or how they hide their ad targeting instead of realizing the massive opportunity that is presented to the people who are willing to put the work.

You criticize that response like it's a bad thing.

They besmirch google for giving rapgenius preferential treatment instead of taking notes and using the precedent.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

They revile linkedin for marketing tactics that serve them very well.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

In short, the crowd here is mostly nerds with a misunderstood nobility sense, refusing the see the world they are living in for what it is.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Alternative in short - people here are workers, not businessmen/marketers.

You say that like it's a bad thing... oh hold on. You're wrong.

Fair enough... I do think it is a bad thing... for me.

Not everyone is me though, not everyone has the same goals and line of thinking like me. And neither should everyone think like me. I was just pointing out to the "parent" why his resistence is futile.

Well, it's the 'don't be evil' thing. It seems to me that it's perfectly possible to not be evil - until you go from being a nimble startup to a billion dollar business with serious shareholders to impress, rather than a couple of VCs who more or less expect you to fail.

The bigger you get, the closer your girth gets to the legal line. Then - as happened with large parts of the financial system - you have to cross the line just to compete.

'Don't be evil' falls away a long time before that.

So, despite our little contretemps over Paris Hilton, I think I'm with you on this one; it's naive to expect an NYSE listed company with a market cap of $23bn not to screw every last drop of leverage out of its data, whatever the ethics of the matter.

That's because people usually put "morality" over "success of a business, even mine", and that's the world I want to live in. Your world has slaves (they're good business, after all).

No people put morality over "success of other". Most of the time when talking about something convenient, or you own business, people manage to bend their own morality with "rationalisation" or "carefully avoiding looking at the fact".

Our world has slaves.

> No people put morality over "success of other".

I disagree. When was the last time you took some money you saw lying around on someone's table?

Ultimately you can also generalize this. Specifically, there is a tug of war between the company and its users. By and large, the company interests may be served by exploiting as much user data as possible. The user usually sees this a bad. They want the company to be useful but without having to give up and privacy (or other negatives.) The user perspective only impacts the companies interests when enough negatives accumulate to create a negative reputation that stifles growth, but almost all users, ceteris paribus, would prefer the company to be less invasive. So these outrage-fests directed at LinkedIn, Facebook, Path, etc. serve to push back against companies and create the demarcation line between acceptable and unacceptable tactics.

Bullshit. Nerds might grudgingly admire LinkedIn for their clever use of dark patterns. Your average business person gets suckered into the dark pattern and then wonders how they've accidentally pissed off their ex, sales prospect's CEO or rival's legal counsel by trying to "connect" with them. And they're not really any more impressed by growth generated through more-or-less inadvertent signups than they were by Enron's accounting practices.

It's not like ad-targeting, which normal people generally don't care about too much unless the retargeting gets really creepy.

Is there a company for which you're not willing to be apologetic?

Who invited all these wanna be "businessmen" to our site?

The people who built it. The "employee" demographic trickled in later, though it now seems to dominate.

blumkvist's businessman/worker point is something worth keeping in mind when you see people behaving badly here. Back when this was a small group of entrepreneurs, it was all about building each other up and helping. Now that it's mostly people with no skin in the game, it's more about tearing ideas down.

(Note that in both cases, it's an attempt to pull people towards your own camp.)

Alternative in short - some people here are actually hackers

There is the world we live in and the world we help build. They shouldn't be one and the same.

All I see here is a couple of people arguing that playing dirty should be compatible with being prestigious, and to that end suggesting that pushing ethical boundaries is literally synonymous with success. And since 'we' subscribe to a certain lifestyle, 'we' need a different morality from the nearest norm. Well, playing dirty is already prestigious in a lot of circles. What more do you want?

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