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>I've heard stories of mid to high level managers crying in bathrooms because of poor reviews from their reports. These factors combine to create an environment where teams are actively working to make engineers happy and content.

Honestly this sounds like a thought experiment.

Do you have any ethical hangups about entering an environment where falling out of your favor can leave someone stress-crying in their place of work and/or about their livelihood.

If so, how much money would it take for you to join the system anyway?

How long would you stay in such a system if you found yourself already in one?

Back in the real world, in a business context, it sounds like an abusive workplace and an untenable system. Like, that obviously can't last forever.

You can't be the "???", italics, and caps guy if you're gonna be the "Woah. Calm down guy." guy.

Either you're the one reacting strongly or you're the one chiding people for doing so. Doing both is poor form, to an extent that it stops mattering what else you type.

The article talks about how chat used to be a protocol, so you could talk between chat clients.

As though you could log into discord and start a conversation with someone who was only using facebook messenger, or snapchat, or twitter, or whatsapp or instagram or any other service where messaging was possible.

Discord in reality represents a different way of doing things. You can chat with other discord users. That's it.

It's a decent system when the userbase is big and the company is benevolent, but it's a different thing than everyone who does "messaging" agreeing to let messages from any service go to any other service.

Ethics is subjective. If ethics could be codified I think we'd have one ruleset everyone agrees on.

The article mentions trying to have a human enforce ethics, but then that person has to be an example of ethical excellence; something you can't test for. And in the end, they say every man has his price, so no. I don't think "ethical AI" is possible. I think "ruthlessly efficient AI" is the goal. Maybe it should only be used in situations where ethics don't matter

A senate race costs a few million. 20 at most.

Netflix revenue for 1 year was 845 million.

Netflix can afford a few senators if they want. Instead they just lobby existing legislators and put bills on their desks.

Corporations are not just "following the law", they're writing it.

>If you don't like the law elect different politicians

How? Government officials are far more beholden to corporations like netflix than they are to people like us. If push comes to shove then corporations can spend a trivial amount of money to crack the consensus among the group of people pushing for change.

You're just using different words to describe socialism, which I frankly don't think needs any further arguments against it besides pointing at it's attempted implementations.

Slightly off topic but I deeply wish I was half the man my library suggested.

Then again I've got no excuse not to be.

"It's ok to be greedy/selfish" is a clickbait title for the statement that you look out for yourself first and foremost whether you admit it or not, and you want things innately.

In a well regulated capitalist environment, those drives are yoked in a way that the paths through which you become rich and powerful and sexy are the same paths through which you improve the lives of others around you.

In a poorly regulated one you get dupont and enron, but show me a silver-bullet government theory and I'll show you an unrealistic fantasy.

>A mindset of "greed is good" and "it's okay to be self" does not even try to understand the difference between "need" and "want"

You're assigning that. Honestly I don't think most of Ayn Rand's critics have read her books.

They also obfuscate the real upvote/downvote numbers, purportedly to stop vote manipulation but I don't really see how it does anything but provide a mask of plausible deniability for editing the up/down figures for advertisements, subversive posts, etc.

>the platform itself hosts tons of alt-right, incel, racist, sexist, and violent content.

This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform.

>lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem.

That's by design. Reddit is just another data mining company. Of course they'd rather have you on the app than the browser. Apps can gather info about you even when you're not using them.

Well the general startup model is to figure out a revenue stream after either an exit or going public, so you're probably onto something.

Yes, I know, you can pay for slack, it's absolutely a viable product for free so most users don't. Does that sound like something a publicly traded company would be happy with?

An important thing to note is that whether facebook has employees doing this or not, there's no shortage of services for hire that will do this for anyone.

Literally any social media site that's popular is guaranteed to have accounts whose influence is for sale.

>minimize screen time while maximizing subscription retention

Gyms essentially do this. The number of people with memberships will be 20x the gym's physical capacity, in part because people get memberships and then never show up. Some gyms target that kind of customer.

The user is losing a fight against the format; this post is an absolute chore to read.

The author account is such a spot-on display of the SJW stereotype that I'm not sure this post isn't a joke.

Yeah like :

clackCLICK..... clack CLICK.. clack CLICK.... clackCLICK... clackCLICK.. clackCLICK... clackCLICK... clack... clack clackclack clack clack "damn I thought I had that one... okay your serve..."

clackCLICK... et fucking cetera

Same way slack and moviepass do: Not really.

Unless you consider taking VC captial "making money"

Okay, so we've gone from "this is a national disgrace" to "everyone's doing it now" real fast.

>I can't help but be jealous of those who function on 6.

Don't be. Hell I can "function" with my shoes tied together.

I can "function" with some marijuana and some whiskey in my system.

I can "function" on 4 hours of sleep. It's an awful day and I'm more rude and impatient, but if I did it for years I'd be telling people I can fully function on 4 hours with no negative side effects.

>If this were the case, Weight Watchers (which is at its core a calorie limiting system) should have a near 100% success rate. It doesn't. A casual perusal of Google shows closer to a 50% success rate for a 5% body weight change.

First off - that's an astonishing success rate against a backdrop of an article saying, literally, surgery is the only reliable option.

Second off - You're assuming 100% compliance. I know people with personal trainers who are gaining weight because they don't stick to the program. I halfheartedly went through a weightlifting routine for years and got nowhere because I never really stuck to the program. 100% compliance in the field of weight loss is just not going to happen.

>if you can't tell how many calories are involved on each side of the equation, it's a meaningless measure.

Incorrect. It's an imprecise measure. You said "Some studies show as much as a 20% difference in what was on the label and the actual caloric content". So then the labels are accurate within a 20% margin of error at worst.

Sounds like a pedantic little nag but then again

- "Star Spangled Blizzard - Mini" - 430 calories

- 1 serving of broccoli (1/2 cup, cooked) - 25 calories

A 50% margin of error would be fine given some of the choices out there. With that said, you usually don't pick between a dq blizzard or broccoli. More reasonable comparisons would be a blizzard vs water (0 cal) or broccoli vs french fries (regular size - 290 cal).

In a nutshell: if a thermostat's off by up to 10 degrees it can still ballpark whether the temperature's livable.

https://www.dairyqueen.com/us-en/Company/Nutrition/Treats/

https://www.dairyqueen.com/us-en/Company/Nutrition/Treats/

https://www.livestrong.com/article/402398-what-is-a-serving-...

>do what Europe does and tax middle class people who can't just move to a lower-tax jurisdiction

Well, that's why Europe is blanketed in riots right now.

Disenfranchised people enraged at the governing concept of "taxing middle class people who can't just move to a lower-tax jurisdiction"

Taxing the hell out of foreign goods would just mean the company now plays a two pronged game - manufacturing where the least regulation is present, and selling at the country with the highest price point who doesn't outright refuse to let you extract their nation's wealth.

It's a tricky problem but your answer to it is untenable unless you want people to riot more.

>No shame in putting food on the table for your family.

Balderdash. Don't construct situations where people just shrug their shoulders and go along with morally inequitable because they're getting paid for it.

Besides, no one's throwing up their hands and saying "Gosh, I really messed up this time! I guess the only options left are working at Facebook or sucking dick under a bridge!"

>If it weren't for that, I might have wasted away, disintegrated, completely detached from the normal human world.

Or you might have found a friend and started a social circle based on common interests. Now you never have to, you get various approximations of that. You can hop onto an MMO and have an approximation of a social circle. You can code until a manager says "good job" and have an approximation of social approval. Hell you can watch porn and get an approximation of sex. You can watch ASMR videos and get an approximation of affection (don't tell me a video of a cute girl with audio that sounds like she's whispering in your ear isn't meant to be an approximation of affection).

It's good to have tech and the things it brings us, but on the other hand they're clearly sucking people into a passive life where they interact with the actual world as little as possible. I've looked back on how socially retarded I am because I ran away from the world using these tools, and I don't like it. And it's only a personal failure to a certain extent. We all know, clear as a bright spring day, that a lot of apps and services are build deliberately to keep you there as long as possible as often as possible.

When people say they wouldn't have it any other way, I'm not sure it's for any reason but they either don't know or can't handle any other way.

I'm in my early thirties and feel the same way.

A lot of people do. Looking at something and saying "I don't think I would do that because it would be very embarrassing" is a thing adults can do.

That's why we have the house of representatives.

Not surprised in the slightest.

Political candidates already do this to minimize their weak points and capitalize on their opponents'.

Countries already do this to save face when they're doing something that purchases bad will, like killing folks at a border wall.

There's no way to tell whether a comment on the internet came from a hireling, an outsourced firm, a bot, or a real person who genuinely feels or believes what they're saying.

Honestly it makes sense to not consider these streamers as people, but as businesses.

You shouldn't do inhumane things to them, and harassment of any kind is off the table for decent people acting decently, but you don't know this person and you never will. They don't care about you. They're a creator and you're a consumer.

The waitress is not flirting with you and the stripper doesn't love you. They're both at work.

>Email me at ID @ DOMAIN.TLD for more info.

Generally, if you have to obfuscate the thing you want to post because you need to avoid a filter, it's unlikely that what you're posting is welcome in the place you're trying to post it.

> Are they just getting hate because they lacked foresight in the beginning? Is it because they gambled with investor money on a ridiculous business model?

For me, both.

I want to live in a world where companies succeed by identifying a need and then providing a service/product that fills that need.

Not by taking investor money, using it to subsidize the cost of an existing service (essentially buying users), and then praying that a business model or exit offer appears after the users do but before their weight collapses the company's tenuous structure.