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People commenting here are negative about the article, saying "yes, the industry has its share of douchebags but...". And that's exactly the point of the artic

by d--b 9y ago

People commenting here are negative about the article, saying "yes, the industry has its share of douchebags but...". And that's exactly the point of the article: we as tech people still think we're doing good things to change the world. But as a whole, the industry has mostly produced tools that have eroded privacy, that have isolated people from one another, that have created the gig economy, and that's about to disrupt a whole bunch of jobs. Of course, some good things came out of it, airbnb has lowered the bar for traveling, transfer wise has made currency exchange fair, coursera brought quality college classes to a large audience, etc. However, it looks like its giant companies can't manage to keep themselves from becoming evil. The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem. The "if it's free, you're the product" meme was the first sign of a broad acceptance that tech wasn't there for the people's good. And now after theranos, Uber, the election's Facebook problem, it's only normal that the general public distrusts big tech companies.

lyndonjohnsonbe 9y ago
> The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem. The way this was phased made me realize that by offering a free service funded by VC money, it squeezes the competition forcing them to reduce quality or go out of business. The monopolistic behavior to eliminate competition then increasing prices is not something that I saw before in many tech companies.
- lafar6502 9y ago
  And in EU we have government grants - free money for all kinds of tech-scams , created just for the purpose of consuming these funds. Of course destroying any legit businesses that suddenly have to compete against these state-funded parasites. Thanks, socialists
  - tnzn 9y ago
    Nice bait and nice misuse of the word "socialist". Capitalists are taking advantage of state funds, duh it's socialism fault.
    - peoplewindow 9y ago
      If they're relying on government handouts, are they really capitalists?
      - jononor 9y ago
        Why would a capitalist care about where the capital comes from? If the terms are favorable, all is good.
        lafar6502 9y ago
        The capitalist has enough to do just taking care of his own business. But now he has to deal with all these who just took government money for nothing and can compete without any costs on their side. Even offer same service for free because govt pays for it - what kind of business could beat that? And what kind of government strangles legit businesses and replaces them with state-funded zombies?
        peoplewindow 9y ago
        Being a capitalist is not defined as a love of obtaining capital. It's more than that: it includes a belief in markets and a dislike of government intervention, which can of course be intervention to prop up his competitors.
        meebs 9y ago
        A capitalist wouldn't not take money because it came from the government -- they'd take it and then vote for the government to remove the grant.
    - lafar6502 9y ago
- stephengillie 9y ago
  > offering a free service funded by VC money, it squeezes the competition forcing them to reduce quality or go out of business. This is very similar to the anti-competitive strategy of "dumping", where you sell something at a loss to undercut a competitor. Again, the primary thing being disrupted here is "laws".
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
to_bpr 9y ago
The public at large have shown themselves to have little qualms about trading their privacy for convenience. Knowing this, is it really so egregious to offer decent tools/platforms to said people, to convenience said people, in return for monetizing their formally private data they willingly hand over? In fact, knowing that people put such a low value on their privacy nowadays, is offering them decent, innovative services in exchange for that data not by definition "doing good things to change the world"? Snowden risked his life to show the world and public at large that they were being spied on by the US government, facilitated by the big tech companies. The response was at best apathy, at worst a thirst for Snowden's blood. It's very hard to come back now, in 2017, with "muh privacy".
- d--b 9y ago
  It's not that people are no longer willing to trade privacy for convenience. It's that people are now more aware that the tech companies are hugely profiting from it. It's like big pharma. You could think of them as the good guys who cure diseases. But the truth is that the big pharma guys are in it for the money and are ready to do anything for it. People are starting to view the GAFA as they see big pharma and big co in general. And that's a shift from the fix-the-world-from-my-moms-garage image they had in the early 2000s.
- eesmith 9y ago
  Your argument seems to be that "a lot of people do X and have no problems with it even though the negatives of X are described in the general media and its been 5 years, so therefore we should continue with X, because it's by definition 'doing a good thing to change the world'". Is that the right pattern? Because it seems that a lot of things don't fit that pattern. A lot of people smoked, and continued to smoke even after the packages all got warning stickers on them. Yet it took decades before general smoking bans went into place. People used pull-tab cans for 20 or more years, because it was much more convenient than remembering to bring a church key to open the can. This despite many warnings about how pull-tab litter caused people to cut their feet, and how children accidentally swallowed pull-tabs inserted into the can itself. (To paraphrase, "The response was at best apathy, at worst a third for injury in others"?) Then there are substances which are now banned for general use: asbestos, DDT, CFCs, lead paint, arsenic as a home rat poison, insecticide, and coloring agent (used in everything from children's toys to wallpaper to candy). All of them had a period where sales were relatively unrestricted, but where people knew, or should have known from its coverage in the general press, about their negatives, before they were banned. That history of protecting citizens has almost certainly lead people to believe that if a company does X or sells X then the government has evaluated it to make sure it's safe, and has good consumer protections in place. This isn't true, and is becoming even less true over time as the cult of "let the market decide" becomes more powerful. Nevertheless, history shows that sometimes it takes more than 5 years (Snowden left the US in 2013) to go from "X is bad, we need to stop doing it" to actually putting laws and regulations in place to restrict X.

by d--b 9y ago

lyndonjohnsonbe 9y ago

> The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem. The way this was phased made me realize that by offering a free service funded by VC money, it squeezes the competition forcing them to reduce quality or go out of business. The monopolistic behavior to eliminate competition then increasing prices is not something that I saw before in many tech companies.

lafar6502 9y ago
And in EU we have government grants - free money for all kinds of tech-scams , created just for the purpose of consuming these funds. Of course destroying any legit businesses that suddenly have to compete against these state-funded parasites. Thanks, socialists
- tnzn 9y ago
  Nice bait and nice misuse of the word "socialist". Capitalists are taking advantage of state funds, duh it's socialism fault.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    If they're relying on government handouts, are they really capitalists?
    - jononor 9y ago
      Why would a capitalist care about where the capital comes from? If the terms are favorable, all is good.
      - lafar6502 9y ago
        The capitalist has enough to do just taking care of his own business. But now he has to deal with all these who just took government money for nothing and can compete without any costs on their side. Even offer same service for free because govt pays for it - what kind of business could beat that? And what kind of government strangles legit businesses and replaces them with state-funded zombies?
      - peoplewindow 9y ago
        Being a capitalist is not defined as a love of obtaining capital. It's more than that: it includes a belief in markets and a dislike of government intervention, which can of course be intervention to prop up his competitors.
        meebs 9y ago
        A capitalist wouldn't not take money because it came from the government -- they'd take it and then vote for the government to remove the grant.
  - lafar6502 9y ago
stephengillie 9y ago
> offering a free service funded by VC money, it squeezes the competition forcing them to reduce quality or go out of business. This is very similar to the anti-competitive strategy of "dumping", where you sell something at a loss to undercut a competitor. Again, the primary thing being disrupted here is "laws".

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

to_bpr 9y ago

The public at large have shown themselves to have little qualms about trading their privacy for convenience. Knowing this, is it really so egregious to offer decent tools/platforms to said people, to convenience said people, in return for monetizing their formally private data they willingly hand over? In fact, knowing that people put such a low value on their privacy nowadays, is offering them decent, innovative services in exchange for that data not by definition "doing good things to change the world"? Snowden risked his life to show the world and public at large that they were being spied on by the US government, facilitated by the big tech companies. The response was at best apathy, at worst a thirst for Snowden's blood. It's very hard to come back now, in 2017, with "muh privacy".

d--b 9y ago
It's not that people are no longer willing to trade privacy for convenience. It's that people are now more aware that the tech companies are hugely profiting from it. It's like big pharma. You could think of them as the good guys who cure diseases. But the truth is that the big pharma guys are in it for the money and are ready to do anything for it. People are starting to view the GAFA as they see big pharma and big co in general. And that's a shift from the fix-the-world-from-my-moms-garage image they had in the early 2000s.
eesmith 9y ago
Your argument seems to be that "a lot of people do X and have no problems with it even though the negatives of X are described in the general media and its been 5 years, so therefore we should continue with X, because it's by definition 'doing a good thing to change the world'". Is that the right pattern? Because it seems that a lot of things don't fit that pattern. A lot of people smoked, and continued to smoke even after the packages all got warning stickers on them. Yet it took decades before general smoking bans went into place. People used pull-tab cans for 20 or more years, because it was much more convenient than remembering to bring a church key to open the can. This despite many warnings about how pull-tab litter caused people to cut their feet, and how children accidentally swallowed pull-tabs inserted into the can itself. (To paraphrase, "The response was at best apathy, at worst a third for injury in others"?) Then there are substances which are now banned for general use: asbestos, DDT, CFCs, lead paint, arsenic as a home rat poison, insecticide, and coloring agent (used in everything from children's toys to wallpaper to candy). All of them had a period where sales were relatively unrestricted, but where people knew, or should have known from its coverage in the general press, about their negatives, before they were banned. That history of protecting citizens has almost certainly lead people to believe that if a company does X or sells X then the government has evaluated it to make sure it's safe, and has good consumer protections in place. This isn't true, and is becoming even less true over time as the cult of "let the market decide" becomes more powerful. Nevertheless, history shows that sometimes it takes more than 5 years (Snowden left the US in 2013) to go from "X is bad, we need to stop doing it" to actually putting laws and regulations in place to restrict X.