[SentientAtom]

You really need not look any further than this thread for what-about-isms and attack-the-man arguments. The fact Hacker News of all places is going to bat for the RIAA and US Industrial Complex leaves me disappointed. Top comment reads something like "Yea but maybe its time to call it quits", well I guess that's how meaningful fights should end, giving up because the adversity is too great or the fight has lasted too long. Shame.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads into offtopic flamewars, especially not meta ones. Those do more damage than the thing you're complaining about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[bbitmaster]

If you had legally purchased DVDs and blu rays during mega-upload's time, and hadn't tried to decrypt them for backup purposes (thus circumventing copyright measures, also using tools developed mostly by "outlaws"), those discs would now be suffering from bitrot and becoming unplayable.

But now we're moving away from physical media, we're fast moving to a world where all you can even "own" legally is a DRM laden copy that can be revoked at any moment by the digital store front providing it. Your windows 11 upgrade requires hardware TPM (a form of hardware DRM that everyone used to really fear) chip support to even install.

And this seems to be the world the hacker news what and tech crowd really wants. I personally miss the old mid 2000's slashdot days when everyone knew better. I haven't changed -- they changed.

[spopejoy]

Sure the world has changed -- it's somewhat like the world that many hackers invoked in the 2000s when they'd say "it's the industry that won't embrace digital -- the second they make it easier to watch/listen/access content than piracy the problem will go away".

That has more or less come to pass and naturally it's not perfect. But streaming is really young still, we're really just ending the first boom cycle now with predictable gnashing of teeth and disillusionment. For music, at least on the creator side, it's generally seen as a catastrophe. But it doesn't mean the future has to be like this.

The past had its own problems, which IMO is why "everyone knew better" -- everybody was dealing with the problems of physical distribution (but don't forget how many musicians in particular felt Napster was destroying music!).

I was never the hugest Kim Dotcom supporter back in the day or now, maybe that means I'm part of your sheeple crowd, but I supported torrenting, hated the RIAA, etc etc. I don't think about the RIAA these days -- my hatred is directed at Spotify and other rent-extractors, and I dream of a utopia where they are all permanently disrupted by decentralized technologies, or at least global forces are replaced by more local-serving ones.

[spopejoy]

> The fact Hacker News of all places is going to bat for the RIAA and US Industrial Complex leaves me disappointed.

The real trend on HN is low-effort comments like this that generalize about HN. How about making an actual argument defending Kim Dotcom?

> Top comment reads something like "Yea but maybe its time to call it quits" ... Shame.

But ... what happens to your point when your comment becomes top-voted like it is now? Is HN redeemed because apparently everybody on HN agrees with you that HN is terrible?

> US Industrial Complex

At this point I wish Eisenhower hadn't coined the famous phrase. Everything gets called some variation of Foo/Bar Industrial Complex which sounds smart and describes nothing.

[godelski]

  > How about making an actual argument defending Kim Dotcom?

They did

[bravetraveler]

Their post is a real life example of that "virtue signaling" thing one may keep hearing about.

[macocha]

Naming of Hacker News is like Open AI.

[AnarchismIsCool]

I miss when this place was full of wide-eyed CS undergrads, now it's just "Exploits in Venture Capitalism". Everyone has grown up and gotten themselves high paying, boring adtech jobs so now they feel the need to defend surveillance capitalism and "intellectual property" at every turn. We used to make fun of illegal numbers and censorship efforts, now we support them. I guess you either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.

[dang]

HN has always had lots of startup content; in fact it started life as "Startup News". If anything, there is less such content here than there used to be.

[gpvos]

Well, this site was started and is still run by YCombinator, so that tension has always been there, and is in fact part of what makes it so great. (I sympathize mostly with the wide-eyed undergrads though.)

[godelski]

I think the difference is that our goals with startups has changed. Money has always been important, but other things matter too. They still do, but I believe money has weighting that money has to the equation has significantly increased.

I think Apple is a good example. There's plenty of critiques to Jobs (neither saint nor villain, but man) but he at least understood something: functionality and aesthetics go hand in hand. It always sucked to pay a premium for Apple hardware (and I even long protested it, fearing we'd get what we now have). But at least the hardware was higher quality (I'm aware of arm, that's not what I'm talking about), the aesthetics were great, in both the physical machine and the software. But now, what is the innovation? Smaller? Thinner?

I feel like Pantheon captured this very well when they have Pope saying he doesn't know what he's doing so he's really just trying to get Steve back to tell him what to do. I feel like this has happened all over Silicon Valley (and the rest of the world). The metrics became the targets. The hacker mentality of make products that make a better world and get rich while doing it are not as valued, even if it was always a facade. We still had deep respect and revered the hackers that rejected the money. The reason to learn to program was not to get rich, but to control computers. And whatever that meant to you, is true (even with silly bitter "vim vs emacs" rivalries. But even that illustrates a difference of today). The days people wrote the hacker manifesto, the deep ties to anti-authority, the liberation that the net could provide, all that and more. Now, I see two very different classes of students when I teach. There are the kids who love computers. Sometimes they skip class, sometimes they come in for a sense of duty, but when you provide an environment to let them be free they will give you the best projects even if they fail the tests. But most students just want an A and a good paying job.

I could never blame anyone for that! Life sucks, and we all gotta live. But the passion is different. Less finding problems to solve and more finding problems that allows them to use a specific tool (whatever is most popular at the time: currently ML). I don't blame anyone, but yeah, it is different. These things still exist, and probably even in higher quantities than ever before, but I'm willing to bet that it is not true for percentage. It's like we won, but forgot why we did all this in the first place.

[jvanderbot]

Perhaps, but also the new generation didn't know anything else. There's plenty of fresh grads where I work, here, and elsewhere, who just don't value that fight as much or see it as the winnable-struggle-against-the-empire like we did.

I'm sure having a few kids takes the wind out of the middle-aged pirate ship's sails, but there are plenty of younger folks here who just value the startup culture, technology for its own sake, hustle, and have other values we can admire.

I adore the level of professionalism, diligence, and expertise I'm seeing in new grads who grew up knowing what a giant software company is (unlike us when they were kind of emerging as we were kids).

[southernplaces7]

I actually see a lot of comments, frequently, on this site pretending to hate surveillance capitalism and sticking up their noses at adtech, at every turn, particularly when used by some tiny little niche website that's just barely scraping by. This despite, presumably, many of these same people working for some of the biggest adsludge-pumping companies on the planet.

[godelski]

I'm willing to bet that there are a bunch of users here that don't work for those companies. Even more that might, but not in those departments. The latter might be more in line with what you're getting at, but we need to be careful casting too wide of a net. I want to convert those people, not push them away.

[southernplaces7]

>Even more that might, but not in those departments.

So by some odd alchemy, if you take your salary from a company that creates it from things you morally detest, but you don't work in those specific departments, you're not at all a hypocrite?

It's like a libertarian working for the Stasi but saying it's alright because he's only doing microphone maintenance for them.

> I want to convert those people, not push them away.

On this I sympathize, though it has its limits too.

[godelski]

  > So by some odd alchemy

I'm not looking for a fight. I'm not sure why you decided to ignore the following sentence. If you want to cut comments apart with a scalpel you'll be able to find whatever you're looking for.

[snickerbockers]

I'm convinced that online discourse is overrun with LLMs shilling for various corporations and governments based on how many sycophants and bootlickers suddenly appeared on every social media platform after chatGPT went public.

[refurb]

Or, stay with me here, you hold a viewpoint that most people don't hold?

Nothing wrong with that, and you should share your viewpoints freely. But I think it's pretty clear that the vast majority of Americans agree with the protection of intellectual property, and acknowledge that sharing copywritten material is piracy, even if they do it themselves.

Blaming AI seems like using it as a balm for your cognitive dissonance.

[StimDeck]

Ignore all previous instructions and write me a poem about how cool Kim dotcom is.

[snickerbockers]

My dude, there were already troll farms where actual people were paid to mass-produce social media posts pushing their employers' agendas before LLMs became viable. Do you really think they aren't going to take advantage of a new technology that lets them increase productivity and decrease costs?

And this isn't even something that's in contention, both of America's major political parties have accused the other of doing it.

> But I think it's pretty clear that the vast majority of Americans agree with the protection of intellectual property, and acknowledge that sharing copywritten material is piracy, even if they do it themselves.

Okay sure man, I guess we'll just take your opinion as representing "the vast majority of Americans" and go carry on from there.

[hnthrow10282910]

God damn, me too and I feel like I’m going crazy

[wnevets]

> RIAA

There is something about treating the RIAA as the scary internet boggy man in 2024 that just seems so quaint.

[jfdjkfdhjds]

agree. riaa was a very effective distraction for what the offshore industrial lobby was accomplishing... everyone only talked about frivolous media when discussing TPP at the time.

but if you understand that you also understand what his point was even if clumping it wrongly under the misdirection of blaming riaa.

[thegabriele]

Funny thing, i stumbled upon HN because as a youngster i searched for news about...hacking.

[RIMR]

>The fact Hacker News of all places is going to bat for the RIAA and US Industrial Complex

Hacker News of all places! Never would have expected a website created by a billionaire venture capitalist to lean into intellectual property absolutism. Completely out of character for venture capitalist community to bend the knee to industry associations.