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Thanks for your kind words and support. the shame and guilt associated with this makes it very traumatic for some people.

throwawayswede 5y ago
> the shame and guilt associated with this makes it very traumatic for some people. It's laughable that you think the solution to a problem like this is to share one's own vulnerabilities with a faceless private company.
- zero_billion 5y ago
  support groups do help. it's proven to be effective with substance abuse addictions. we are helping people with a support group where users can share and help each other.
  - throwawayswede 5y ago
    They're sharing on your "platform". The only reason for you to do this is because it's profitable to you for some reason, hence, you're capitalizing on people's pains. Support groups help in real life, not over some app where a faceless entity's purpose of existence is to extract your money.
    - lolc 5y ago
      Eh, that's a low bar. By that metric therapists also capitalize on other people's pain.
      - edgyquant 5y ago
        They do but there’s nothing wrong with that. Everything in life is an economic transaction if it involves more than one person. The other poster is just being pedantic and a bit mean.
        lolc 5y ago
        The therapists (and the app) are supposed to capitalize on improvement. Saying that they capitalize on pain takes a dystopic perspective that I find unjustified. Until they are shown to employ dark patterns, we shouldn't dismiss them like that.
        edgyquant 5y ago
        That’s fair but I think the difference is arbitrary. They exist because people are in pain or suffering so their market is people who are suffering. Again I do not think it’s a bad thing that people capitalize on their suffering as long as they are providing a (mutually) beneficial service.
        lolc 5y ago
        I see what you mean. And I still find "capitalize on pain" too broad a framing for what the app. Characterizing it that way does not inform and draws parallels to other, less ethical players that "capitalize on pain". Such as Purdue Pharma for example.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- dang 5y ago
  You shouldn't be posting mean and snarky one-liners to HN, let alone shallow dismissals of someone's work. All that is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Even so I have some sympathy with the point behind your point and it makes me want to write something. It's true that our society has commodified and mechanized a lot of what used to be, and arguably should still be, human relations. But we shouldn't let the good be the enemy of the better. Your comment reminds me of a Launch HN from last week of a startup that provides advances to blue-collar workers on their wages (in a better way than payday loans). They had a story of some guy who ran out of gas, signed up for their app from the side of a highway, and got enough money to get gas and keep going. My first thought was: people shouldn't be paid so little that that can happen to them in the first place. On the other hand, those economics aren't going away soon, and it was much better for that man that the app existed, instead of staying stranded on the side of the road. In that case the active ingredient (the drug, one might say) was money and in this case it's sex, but either way, the startup is (presumably) doing some good, even if the broader context isn't changing much. I'm sure a lot of us feel queasy about the mixture of for-profit companies and helping people—but this is the nature of the web of economic and social relations in which we're all embedded. Non-profits have their own problems and it's certainly not the case that they are somehow immune from that web or pure of it. Quite the opposite. One other thing: to say we're all embedded means we're all embedded. That includes you; I mean, you're expressing your desire for supportive relations to be free of profit motives on a forum operated by a company with profit motives—not only that, the very company that funded just the startup you're dissing, and why? Profit motive. I think it's important for people who care about human relations not to take the stone-casting attitude of pretending to be pure and denouncing others, as if they/we weren't also implicated in the system that has these properties. To pretend otherwise is self-deceptive and for my money that can only add problem, not solution. If we can't allow profit motives to be mixed with nobler motives and call that a relatively good thing, the endgame of that stance is to leave nothing but profit motives. Of the available options, I think we should take the impure mixed bag.
  - csande17 5y ago
    Sure, all of humanity is inherently tainted by profit motives or whatever. That doesn't change the fact that trusting a Y Combinator startup with this kind of sensitive private medical information is a uniquely terrible idea. That information is going to leak, whether intentionally (maybe they'll "pivot" to selling it) or unintentionally via security issues like poor internal access control. Doctors also earn money, but they're human beings with actual identities, not legal entities that don't even list contact information on their website, and they're at least sort of bound by professional oaths and privacy laws.

throwawayswede 5y ago

> the shame and guilt associated with this makes it very traumatic for some people. It's laughable that you think the solution to a problem like this is to share one's own vulnerabilities with a faceless private company.

zero_billion 5y ago
support groups do help. it's proven to be effective with substance abuse addictions. we are helping people with a support group where users can share and help each other.
- throwawayswede 5y ago
  They're sharing on your "platform". The only reason for you to do this is because it's profitable to you for some reason, hence, you're capitalizing on people's pains. Support groups help in real life, not over some app where a faceless entity's purpose of existence is to extract your money.
  - lolc 5y ago
    Eh, that's a low bar. By that metric therapists also capitalize on other people's pain.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      They do but there’s nothing wrong with that. Everything in life is an economic transaction if it involves more than one person. The other poster is just being pedantic and a bit mean.
      - lolc 5y ago
        The therapists (and the app) are supposed to capitalize on improvement. Saying that they capitalize on pain takes a dystopic perspective that I find unjustified. Until they are shown to employ dark patterns, we shouldn't dismiss them like that.
        edgyquant 5y ago
        That’s fair but I think the difference is arbitrary. They exist because people are in pain or suffering so their market is people who are suffering. Again I do not think it’s a bad thing that people capitalize on their suffering as long as they are providing a (mutually) beneficial service.
        lolc 5y ago
        I see what you mean. And I still find "capitalize on pain" too broad a framing for what the app. Characterizing it that way does not inform and draws parallels to other, less ethical players that "capitalize on pain". Such as Purdue Pharma for example.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
dang 5y ago
You shouldn't be posting mean and snarky one-liners to HN, let alone shallow dismissals of someone's work. All that is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Even so I have some sympathy with the point behind your point and it makes me want to write something. It's true that our society has commodified and mechanized a lot of what used to be, and arguably should still be, human relations. But we shouldn't let the good be the enemy of the better. Your comment reminds me of a Launch HN from last week of a startup that provides advances to blue-collar workers on their wages (in a better way than payday loans). They had a story of some guy who ran out of gas, signed up for their app from the side of a highway, and got enough money to get gas and keep going. My first thought was: people shouldn't be paid so little that that can happen to them in the first place. On the other hand, those economics aren't going away soon, and it was much better for that man that the app existed, instead of staying stranded on the side of the road. In that case the active ingredient (the drug, one might say) was money and in this case it's sex, but either way, the startup is (presumably) doing some good, even if the broader context isn't changing much. I'm sure a lot of us feel queasy about the mixture of for-profit companies and helping people—but this is the nature of the web of economic and social relations in which we're all embedded. Non-profits have their own problems and it's certainly not the case that they are somehow immune from that web or pure of it. Quite the opposite. One other thing: to say we're all embedded means we're all embedded. That includes you; I mean, you're expressing your desire for supportive relations to be free of profit motives on a forum operated by a company with profit motives—not only that, the very company that funded just the startup you're dissing, and why? Profit motive. I think it's important for people who care about human relations not to take the stone-casting attitude of pretending to be pure and denouncing others, as if they/we weren't also implicated in the system that has these properties. To pretend otherwise is self-deceptive and for my money that can only add problem, not solution. If we can't allow profit motives to be mixed with nobler motives and call that a relatively good thing, the endgame of that stance is to leave nothing but profit motives. Of the available options, I think we should take the impure mixed bag.
- csande17 5y ago
  Sure, all of humanity is inherently tainted by profit motives or whatever. That doesn't change the fact that trusting a Y Combinator startup with this kind of sensitive private medical information is a uniquely terrible idea. That information is going to leak, whether intentionally (maybe they'll "pivot" to selling it) or unintentionally via security issues like poor internal access control. Doctors also earn money, but they're human beings with actual identities, not legal entities that don't even list contact information on their website, and they're at least sort of bound by professional oaths and privacy laws.