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Companies should be accountable to their customers, not activists.
by cal5k 6y ago
Companies should be accountable to their customers, not activists.
- Barrin92 6y agodepends on the nature of the problems those companies cause. If they're negative externalities then customer behaviour is of little value, say for example environmental damage caused by meat consumption, pollution and so on. The negative effects of social media tend to be environmental in that sense, threats to national security, destruction of the political climate, negative effects on minorities and so on aren't felt by most customers. The negative behaviour of companies like Facebook affects the commons, not individual customers.
- sharken 6y agoTell that to Microsoft who removed the santa hat from Visual Studio Code due to one user. Ironically the issue currently has 18 down-votes. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268
- grawprog 6y ago>The Santa Hat on vscode insiders and pushing of religion is very offensive to me, additionally xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the centuries, yet even if that was not the case, pushing religious symbols as part of a product update is completely unacceptable. Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika. That comment...it's really hard not to take that as a troll comment...
- sharken 6y agoIndeed, waiting a bit would have been a reasonable thing to do, instead the change was sanctioned on the same day. The Santa Hat change most likely also made it so much easier to move forward with the renaming of the master branch on GitHub. One could also argue that the master branch name should have been changed back in 2014 in connection with the Ferguson unrest and the killing of Michael Brown. Source: https://github.com/github/renaming https://github.com/github/renaming
- glerk 6y agoPoe's Law strikes again. It is scary to see how swiftly Microsoft acted here, it seems like malicious actors could easily weaponize this.
- Izkata 6y ago> it seems like malicious actors could easily weaponize this. This is exactly what happened to the "OK" hand symbol, which people have lost jobs over: It was a 4chan prank. There were alternate suggestions for what a bunch of different common hand symbols could mean, and this was the only one that caught on mainstream.
- thu2111 6y agoThey already did, years ago!
- ballenf 6y agoDo you really think replacing the hat with a snowflake was coincidence?
- enraged_camel 6y agoAt my previous company, one user complained very loudly that our documentation used the word "execute" in the context of executing a program or a script. They sent the CEO a very lengthy email about how it was vile and conjured images of horrible death. A Jira ticket was filed the next morning to change all instances of "execute" to "run".