[ethanbond]

No, parent comment said they went down because they ruined people's lives AND broke the law.

Trying to argue whether or not someone's life was actually ruined is irrelevant. That's not for you to decide. It clearly damaged someone enough for them to dump millions of dollars into a totally legal retaliation effort.

Gawker had no right to do what they did, as determined by a court. This is the crucial point. They tried to screw someone by financially strong arming them out of justice, so Thiel did that to them instead.

It's absolutely tone deaf to say that outing someone as gay or posting a sex tape couldn't have devastating effects.

[aetherson]

If it's not relevant whether someone's life was ruined, then perhaps you should be taking it up with the guy who asserted that lives were ruined.

[ethanbond]

What an excellent strategy to move conversation forward. Just take the peripheral argument, attack it, then act like that was the only argument ever presented.

[aetherson]

Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that you had blessed the general concept under discussion as having truthiness, making it inappropriate to discuss the parts of it that weren't true.

Gawker certainly were judged to have broken the law, and certainly did pursue a legal strategy that was at best unwise.

HN regularly anoints as justified activities that break the law if we find the law unjust or unwise, and typically looks pretty badly on legal authorities who impose massive disproportionate penalties on people who disrespect the legal authority.

The person who kicked off this thread asserted that this issue had "absolutely nothing to do with free speech", and that Gawker had ruined lives as a way to argue that this was not appropriate, hacker-like lawbreaking, but inappropriate, opprobrium-worthy lawbreaking.

The idea that this case had "nothing to do with free speech" is farcical in a "black is white" kind of way. It was about whether it was okay for reporters for a news organization to print a story.

The idea that it "ruined lives" runs up pretty hard against the evidence that pretty self-evidently, neither Thiel's nor Hogan's lives were ruined. Now, could we argue that perhaps they did suffer in some way for the story? Sure! Which is why I noted that the "ruined lives" thing was overheated rhetoric, rather than saying that it contains no truth of any kind.