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The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by

The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.” As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.” The argument in the OP article stands without this — it is nearly as bad that companies have incentives to misbehave, as if they were legally obligated to — but there is also room for improvement at the margin, if employees and customers understand that corporate actions are management’s choice; their hands are not tied. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... [2] https://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=13-354 https://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&v...

Barrin92 9y ago
It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al. Their business is the elimination of privacy and selling off the data and attention of their users. It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise. Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to. Their entire business model is based on squeezing as much value as possible out of the limited attention span of consumers.
- danbruc 9y ago
  Well, they could just make users pay for the service, there is nothing that forces them to collect money from them via the indirect route of ads.
  - Barrin92 9y ago
    Obviously only my personal intuition but I'd wager there's not much of a business in a pay-to-play social network. My FB account is practically on hiatus already and I'd not pay for it. If there would be so much value in a privacy conscious, paid social network that is mass-consumer facing we'd probably have seen it by now.
    - danbruc 9y ago
      According to Wikipedia [1] Facebook has a revenue of $40 billion with 2.2 billion monthly active users which translates to pretty much exactly $1.50 per month and user. I would be happy to pay this amount of money if it would ensure that Facebook would not try to do an nasty things with my data. But I also think that Facebook is already on its way down, people seem to have moved on. At least according to their numbers they still seem to grow or at least remain stable but I would guess that this is mostly due to expansion into new markets and if people there go through a similar trajectory it is only a question of time until the last new market starts and eventually stops using Facebook. Here in Germany MeinVZ [2] was the dominant social network until people started moving to Facebook and now MeinVZ is just a ghost town. And it pretty much feels the same with Facebook now, actually already for the last five or so years, people come back and engage more and more infrequently until they eventually disappear. It is much slower as compared to MeinVZ but I am pretty sure it is essentially the same thing. I am not sure where they are all going, maybe Instagram for the younger generation, maybe just WhatsApp for friends in my age, so Facebook the company might just be fine for some more time even if Facebook the network dies. But things have certainly changed from this madness of, I don't know, somewhere between five and ten years ago, when Facebook became inevitable, when it was constantly in thew news, when every ad poster featured a Facebook link. I would neither be surprised if it turned out that Facebook was an essentially quite short-lived onetime phenomenon and people were not that interested in a global community as the social media proponents would want you to believe, nor would I be surprised if every generation had its own Facebook even if just to set themselves apart from the older generation. Why would we even assume that social media is more than a fluke and does not die away just like many things before? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeinVZ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeinVZ
- osteele 9y ago
  A company gets to decide what business it's in (Facebook and Google have each explored several), what its ethics are, and how these ethics apply. For example, Google is in a substantially similar business, but it is interesting to contrast Facebook's pattern of behavior with Google's. Google isn't a paragon, and it's alarming (to me) that Google is building a universal panopticon too. But these two companies, despite the similarity in their business models, appear very different with respect not just to how they collect data, what they collect, how much they sell, and what breaches or not-breach breaches have occurred, but also how forthcoming they are about all this, and whether they act like they've got something to hide. Facebook used tricks[1] to run their iPhone app in the background when requested not to, and only backed this out when the new iOS “battery shaming” feature outed them; they uploaded Android call history with text that mislead the user into thinking they were just uploading contacts. Google has made mis-steps and knows a scary amount about us, but I don't recall this kind of systematic boundary-pushing and post-discovery obfuscation and denial. Or contrast Lyft and Uber. These differences in behavior aren't from a difference in business models. They are from differences in “corporate DNA”, or culture. Zuckerberg was a teen when he wrote these messages[2], but most people I know don't speak or act like that even at that age. Some people advance to a different moral stage even at the end of, or after, their teen years; it looks from a longer pattern of evidence, only some of it recent, like Zuckerberg and his company may not have done so. Yes, business incentives are a factor, but explanations don't begin and end with “money made me do it”. [1] http://pxlnv.com/linklog/facebook-background-data/ http://pxlnv.com/linklog/facebook-background-data/ [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-mark-zuckerbergs-secret-ims-from-college-2012-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-mark-zuckerbergs-se...
  - Barrin92 9y ago
    That sounds to me like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. Corporate culture is the direct result of the business model of the company. You won't see facebook promote decentralised privacy, it's not going to happen just like you won't find anti-oil protests within the management of Exxon-Mobile, or a push for rail based public transport within the headquarters of Uber. Corporate culture is a structure build on-top of their business, nobody has ever changed their business to adapt to their culture, they just get a rebranding and hire a PR team if the two happen to run into conflict.
- Lazare 9y ago
  > It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al There's a difference between "we did it because we were legally obligated" and "we did it because Zuckerberg wanted to". The myth of profit maximisation being an absolute legal duty is much too kind to Facebook here; they're not just a victim of our late capitalist system. > It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise. Right. Which is why their largest shareholder and CEO is going to ensure they do it, not because he's being forced by the spectre of shareholder lawsuits. > Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to. Certainly not if we continue to give them a pass when they fail to do so.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    It is not a myth what so ever: the company does whatever those that control the majority of the shares want it to do. Absolutely no one else, unless the company engages in illegal activity has any say. Corporations are democracies with the rules of majority that are spelled out in their documents.
    - d0lph 9y ago
      This line of reasoning seems to forget that the ultimate control belongs to the customer. Thus we see Facebook taking a big hit for collecting personal information people assumed was private.
      - WorldMaker 9y ago
        The trouble being that customer is 1) an aggregate (there likely is no the customer, just some customers, maybe a lot of them), 2) fuzzy (Facebook's real customers are advertisers, they pay the bills). How do non-ad-buying users matter as customers to Facebook? Only so far as they are aggregate eyeballs to feed to the real customers, advertisers? The sad specter of case law dating at least as far back to Dodge v Ford [1], is that legally the only relationship that has to matter to a (US) business is its relationship with its shareholders. Consumer protections have only ever barely been carved out with regulatory action. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
gukov 9y ago
Let's not forget employee stock options. They're designed to make improving the bottom line everyone's interest.
zaptheimpaler 9y ago
Its not about law, its about investors. Big investors have outsize control of the boards of most companies, and they pretty much only care about profits. The public doesn't blame them either because we don't talk about how decisions made by those on the board shape the entire company. Investors have little to fear from unethical decisions, so they make them.
- dbrgn 9y ago
  The article actually contains a good point regarding investors and external influence: > Companies like Facebook, publicly traded, have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Private companies with investors are similarly obligated. Nowhere in the equation does it say that they’re obligated to do anything for you - the only role you serve is to be a vehicle for exploitation. But I see an exception to this rule: Self-financed companies where the founders are still the shareholders and where the founders are in the company for the long run, and where the company is financed by the users. If your company is financed by the users, then in order to make the business sustainable you need to optimize for the users. If the users demand privacy, then you optimize for privacy. I'm aware that slow, sustainable growth is not popular in silicon valley, but that's probably a question of culture (in many european countries a lot of startups still follow this path).
mesozoic 9y ago
Good point we shouldn't let Zuck et al use fiduciary as a scapegoat.
coldtea 9y ago
>The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.” That's only a myth in that it's not mandated. But it's still very much what almost every company will do, so it's a de facto (if not de jure) thing.
- simplify 9y ago
  > But it's still very much what almost every company will do But it didn't used to be like that – not even that long ago, either. In 1970 Friedman released his essay "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits". Look at the corporate behavior he was criticizing: > The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In other words, companies at that time WERE concerned about social responsibility, and not purely focused on profit. Friedman didn't like this; he called it "pure and unadulterated socialism". Since that time this parasitic mentality was spread to and propagated by top schools like Harvard, dominating the world view of that next generation of businessmen/women. But it was never "a defacto" thing, and many are starting to catch on to the damage it has caused.
daveFNbuck 9y ago
Hobby Lobby is a private company, and this was critical to the ruling. The fiduciary duty myth is about public companies, so Hobby Lobby does not work as a counter-example.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  The same fiduciary duty legal precedents still matter to private companies. Even private companies have shareholders (we don't have a model for companies that do not have shareholders), and the fiduciary duty of a private company is absolutely a factor in any "corporate breakup" when Founders come to disagreements, dissolve companies, et cetera. I agree with your implication in using the word "myth" that fiduciary duty as a concern is overblown in the collective world of public corporations (the decision in Dodge v Ford was hugely problematic and its shadow haunts us all), but it's not a myth in that it doesn't exist.
  - daveFNbuck 9y ago
    Yeah, I was referring specifically to the myth quoted by the parent, "There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice." I don't think that people believe this about private companies.
d0lph 9y ago
Any company that places the wants of the shareholders above the customers risks losing their customer base (see Facebook).
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  So far Facebook's paying customers, the advertisers, seem unworried?
  - d0lph 9y ago
    Either way, customers leave, advertisers leave. Also, while I do like the expression "if you're not a customer, you're a product", it does not change the actual definition of the word customer.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      First definition via Oxford Dictionaries, emphasis mine: > a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business You may be confusing the word "customer" with the word "user"?
      - d0lph 9y ago
        http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/customer.html http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/customer.html > 1. General: A party that receives or consumes products (goods or services) and has the ability to choose between different products and suppliers. See also buyer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer > In sales, commerce and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration I think to me the customer is the one receiving the product, whether or not they have actually spent money. Also for consideration, "paying customer" and "non-paying customer" are common(?) phrases.
woodandsteel 9y ago
>but there is also room for improvement at the margin, if employees and customers understand that corporate actions are management’s choice; their hands are not tied. But will they change? Zuckerberg, as far as I can tell, started Facebook because he wanted to be master of the (internet) universe. And then he hired a lot of really smart people with the same motives. Are you hoping that at some point in time he is going to have a great moral conversion and decide to forego power and wealth and become a sort of saint who will give it all away? Seems to me far more likely Zuckerberg will pretend to reform, but keep pursuing the same goals. What you are saying seems to be that we should not push decentralization and instead just wait around for something good to happen. Which in turn makes me wonder about your motivations.
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  Let me say some more. Maybe you are not trying to undermine decentralization, but if so I am still angry at you. Let me explain why. The article is about why we need to decentralize. This is an important issue, and so we need to have a discussion to decide whether or not this is the right course of action. And we have this great resource, an internet comment section, in which to discuss it. And you are a netizen, so you should think about it and add in any useful comments you might have. Instead you made a comment that derails the conversation off onto a track that it seems to me isn't useful. I see this happen a lot here at HN. There is a lot of useful discussion, but so often there are also people who make comments that derail the discussion, provoke an argument that isn't really relevant. I wish every commenter would first think out what is the basic issue at stake, and avoid making comments that lead to disputes that are off track from what needs to be discussed and decided.
  - daddosi 9y ago
    More exclusive moderation is required to have constructve conversations. With constructive i mean ones that construct things. HN might not be the place. (Its not for me to decide.)

Barrin92 9y ago

It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al. Their business is the elimination of privacy and selling off the data and attention of their users. It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise. Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to. Their entire business model is based on squeezing as much value as possible out of the limited attention span of consumers.

danbruc 9y ago
Well, they could just make users pay for the service, there is nothing that forces them to collect money from them via the indirect route of ads.
- Barrin92 9y ago
  Obviously only my personal intuition but I'd wager there's not much of a business in a pay-to-play social network. My FB account is practically on hiatus already and I'd not pay for it. If there would be so much value in a privacy conscious, paid social network that is mass-consumer facing we'd probably have seen it by now.
  - danbruc 9y ago
    According to Wikipedia [1] Facebook has a revenue of $40 billion with 2.2 billion monthly active users which translates to pretty much exactly $1.50 per month and user. I would be happy to pay this amount of money if it would ensure that Facebook would not try to do an nasty things with my data. But I also think that Facebook is already on its way down, people seem to have moved on. At least according to their numbers they still seem to grow or at least remain stable but I would guess that this is mostly due to expansion into new markets and if people there go through a similar trajectory it is only a question of time until the last new market starts and eventually stops using Facebook. Here in Germany MeinVZ [2] was the dominant social network until people started moving to Facebook and now MeinVZ is just a ghost town. And it pretty much feels the same with Facebook now, actually already for the last five or so years, people come back and engage more and more infrequently until they eventually disappear. It is much slower as compared to MeinVZ but I am pretty sure it is essentially the same thing. I am not sure where they are all going, maybe Instagram for the younger generation, maybe just WhatsApp for friends in my age, so Facebook the company might just be fine for some more time even if Facebook the network dies. But things have certainly changed from this madness of, I don't know, somewhere between five and ten years ago, when Facebook became inevitable, when it was constantly in thew news, when every ad poster featured a Facebook link. I would neither be surprised if it turned out that Facebook was an essentially quite short-lived onetime phenomenon and people were not that interested in a global community as the social media proponents would want you to believe, nor would I be surprised if every generation had its own Facebook even if just to set themselves apart from the older generation. Why would we even assume that social media is more than a fluke and does not die away just like many things before? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeinVZ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeinVZ
osteele 9y ago
A company gets to decide what business it's in (Facebook and Google have each explored several), what its ethics are, and how these ethics apply. For example, Google is in a substantially similar business, but it is interesting to contrast Facebook's pattern of behavior with Google's. Google isn't a paragon, and it's alarming (to me) that Google is building a universal panopticon too. But these two companies, despite the similarity in their business models, appear very different with respect not just to how they collect data, what they collect, how much they sell, and what breaches or not-breach breaches have occurred, but also how forthcoming they are about all this, and whether they act like they've got something to hide. Facebook used tricks[1] to run their iPhone app in the background when requested not to, and only backed this out when the new iOS “battery shaming” feature outed them; they uploaded Android call history with text that mislead the user into thinking they were just uploading contacts. Google has made mis-steps and knows a scary amount about us, but I don't recall this kind of systematic boundary-pushing and post-discovery obfuscation and denial. Or contrast Lyft and Uber. These differences in behavior aren't from a difference in business models. They are from differences in “corporate DNA”, or culture. Zuckerberg was a teen when he wrote these messages[2], but most people I know don't speak or act like that even at that age. Some people advance to a different moral stage even at the end of, or after, their teen years; it looks from a longer pattern of evidence, only some of it recent, like Zuckerberg and his company may not have done so. Yes, business incentives are a factor, but explanations don't begin and end with “money made me do it”. [1] http://pxlnv.com/linklog/facebook-background-data/ http://pxlnv.com/linklog/facebook-background-data/ [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-mark-zuckerbergs-secret-ims-from-college-2012-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-mark-zuckerbergs-se...
- Barrin92 9y ago
  That sounds to me like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. Corporate culture is the direct result of the business model of the company. You won't see facebook promote decentralised privacy, it's not going to happen just like you won't find anti-oil protests within the management of Exxon-Mobile, or a push for rail based public transport within the headquarters of Uber. Corporate culture is a structure build on-top of their business, nobody has ever changed their business to adapt to their culture, they just get a rebranding and hire a PR team if the two happen to run into conflict.
Lazare 9y ago
> It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al There's a difference between "we did it because we were legally obligated" and "we did it because Zuckerberg wanted to". The myth of profit maximisation being an absolute legal duty is much too kind to Facebook here; they're not just a victim of our late capitalist system. > It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise. Right. Which is why their largest shareholder and CEO is going to ensure they do it, not because he's being forced by the spectre of shareholder lawsuits. > Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to. Certainly not if we continue to give them a pass when they fail to do so.
- notyourday 9y ago
  It is not a myth what so ever: the company does whatever those that control the majority of the shares want it to do. Absolutely no one else, unless the company engages in illegal activity has any say. Corporations are democracies with the rules of majority that are spelled out in their documents.
  - d0lph 9y ago
    This line of reasoning seems to forget that the ultimate control belongs to the customer. Thus we see Facebook taking a big hit for collecting personal information people assumed was private.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      The trouble being that customer is 1) an aggregate (there likely is no the customer, just some customers, maybe a lot of them), 2) fuzzy (Facebook's real customers are advertisers, they pay the bills). How do non-ad-buying users matter as customers to Facebook? Only so far as they are aggregate eyeballs to feed to the real customers, advertisers? The sad specter of case law dating at least as far back to Dodge v Ford [1], is that legally the only relationship that has to matter to a (US) business is its relationship with its shareholders. Consumer protections have only ever barely been carved out with regulatory action. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

gukov 9y ago

Let's not forget employee stock options. They're designed to make improving the bottom line everyone's interest.

zaptheimpaler 9y ago

Its not about law, its about investors. Big investors have outsize control of the boards of most companies, and they pretty much only care about profits. The public doesn't blame them either because we don't talk about how decisions made by those on the board shape the entire company. Investors have little to fear from unethical decisions, so they make them.

dbrgn 9y ago
The article actually contains a good point regarding investors and external influence: > Companies like Facebook, publicly traded, have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Private companies with investors are similarly obligated. Nowhere in the equation does it say that they’re obligated to do anything for you - the only role you serve is to be a vehicle for exploitation. But I see an exception to this rule: Self-financed companies where the founders are still the shareholders and where the founders are in the company for the long run, and where the company is financed by the users. If your company is financed by the users, then in order to make the business sustainable you need to optimize for the users. If the users demand privacy, then you optimize for privacy. I'm aware that slow, sustainable growth is not popular in silicon valley, but that's probably a question of culture (in many european countries a lot of startups still follow this path).

mesozoic 9y ago

Good point we shouldn't let Zuck et al use fiduciary as a scapegoat.

coldtea 9y ago

>The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.” That's only a myth in that it's not mandated. But it's still very much what almost every company will do, so it's a de facto (if not de jure) thing.

simplify 9y ago
> But it's still very much what almost every company will do But it didn't used to be like that – not even that long ago, either. In 1970 Friedman released his essay "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits". Look at the corporate behavior he was criticizing: > The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In other words, companies at that time WERE concerned about social responsibility, and not purely focused on profit. Friedman didn't like this; he called it "pure and unadulterated socialism". Since that time this parasitic mentality was spread to and propagated by top schools like Harvard, dominating the world view of that next generation of businessmen/women. But it was never "a defacto" thing, and many are starting to catch on to the damage it has caused.

daveFNbuck 9y ago

Hobby Lobby is a private company, and this was critical to the ruling. The fiduciary duty myth is about public companies, so Hobby Lobby does not work as a counter-example.

WorldMaker 9y ago
The same fiduciary duty legal precedents still matter to private companies. Even private companies have shareholders (we don't have a model for companies that do not have shareholders), and the fiduciary duty of a private company is absolutely a factor in any "corporate breakup" when Founders come to disagreements, dissolve companies, et cetera. I agree with your implication in using the word "myth" that fiduciary duty as a concern is overblown in the collective world of public corporations (the decision in Dodge v Ford was hugely problematic and its shadow haunts us all), but it's not a myth in that it doesn't exist.
- daveFNbuck 9y ago
  Yeah, I was referring specifically to the myth quoted by the parent, "There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice." I don't think that people believe this about private companies.

d0lph 9y ago

Any company that places the wants of the shareholders above the customers risks losing their customer base (see Facebook).

WorldMaker 9y ago
So far Facebook's paying customers, the advertisers, seem unworried?
- d0lph 9y ago
  Either way, customers leave, advertisers leave. Also, while I do like the expression "if you're not a customer, you're a product", it does not change the actual definition of the word customer.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    First definition via Oxford Dictionaries, emphasis mine: > a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business You may be confusing the word "customer" with the word "user"?
    - d0lph 9y ago
      http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/customer.html http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/customer.html > 1. General: A party that receives or consumes products (goods or services) and has the ability to choose between different products and suppliers. See also buyer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer > In sales, commerce and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration I think to me the customer is the one receiving the product, whether or not they have actually spent money. Also for consideration, "paying customer" and "non-paying customer" are common(?) phrases.

woodandsteel 9y ago

>but there is also room for improvement at the margin, if employees and customers understand that corporate actions are management’s choice; their hands are not tied. But will they change? Zuckerberg, as far as I can tell, started Facebook because he wanted to be master of the (internet) universe. And then he hired a lot of really smart people with the same motives. Are you hoping that at some point in time he is going to have a great moral conversion and decide to forego power and wealth and become a sort of saint who will give it all away? Seems to me far more likely Zuckerberg will pretend to reform, but keep pursuing the same goals. What you are saying seems to be that we should not push decentralization and instead just wait around for something good to happen. Which in turn makes me wonder about your motivations.

woodandsteel 9y ago
Let me say some more. Maybe you are not trying to undermine decentralization, but if so I am still angry at you. Let me explain why. The article is about why we need to decentralize. This is an important issue, and so we need to have a discussion to decide whether or not this is the right course of action. And we have this great resource, an internet comment section, in which to discuss it. And you are a netizen, so you should think about it and add in any useful comments you might have. Instead you made a comment that derails the conversation off onto a track that it seems to me isn't useful. I see this happen a lot here at HN. There is a lot of useful discussion, but so often there are also people who make comments that derail the discussion, provoke an argument that isn't really relevant. I wish every commenter would first think out what is the basic issue at stake, and avoid making comments that lead to disputes that are off track from what needs to be discussed and decided.
- daddosi 9y ago
  More exclusive moderation is required to have constructve conversations. With constructive i mean ones that construct things. HN might not be the place. (Its not for me to decide.)