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by PragmaticPulp
2089 days ago
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It's not conspiracy theories, it's any story about a big company doing something bad or evil. Or any story that confirms the worldview of the most active HN commenters. Any story about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Uber, or PayPal doing anything negative tends to bring out the most cynical commenters. HN is usually a skeptical crowd, right until a story arrives that fits their worldview. The false story about Apple's refund policy that garnered 2000 upvotes before being retracted is a prime example ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584 ). When it was in the #1 spot, several people tried to correct the story in the comments. They were heavily downvoted. For some reason, the majority wanted to believe a random Twitter comment over actual iOS app developers trying to correct the misinformation. Likewise, stories about psychedelics being miracle cures tend to rocket up the front page despite deeply flawed studies (no control group, usually). Meanwhile any study showing negative effects from psychedelics or cannabis tends to get picked apart for for small sample sizes or the evergreen "correlation is not causation" no matter how good the study was. The real problem is assuming that HN is somehow immune from the same problems as other social media platforms. HN is very much a social media platform. |
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> Any story about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Uber, or PayPal doing anything negative tends to bring out the most cynical commenters. HN is usually a skeptical crowd, right until a story arrives that fits their worldview.
It's these companies that are cynical, not my worldview!
Nearly every single allegation about these companies doing something sneaky, evil, greedy, and underhanded has turned out be completely true.
When Uber was doing grey-balling, it turned out to be true. When Uber had made a secret agreement with Apple to have their app take screenshots in the background, that was true. Just off of the top of my head I can think of so many preposterous sounding incidents that turned out to be 100% true.
I would assert that people were completely correct to just assume that Apple was doing something shady with the app store. I think it is kind of naive to give Apple the benefit of the doubt at this point.