[zerobees]

The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.

We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms would have been built without an army of willing, enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical compromises" every day.

And now that there's money made in something else, many of us would accept a seven-digit offer from OpenAI in a heartbeat, leaving the task of figuring out the downstream effects to other people.

[swed420]

> The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.

Only a subset. HN is not a monolith.

[not_a_bot_4sho]

This is uncomfortably true.

[trumpdong]

The most powerful force in the universe is not gravity, or the strong nuclear force - it's the prisoner's dilemma.

Don't fool yourself into thinking you could have avoided this. If you didn't, any one of the other ten million people would. You didn't choose for it to happen, you chose to be the one who got the money from it happening.

[switchbak]

They're also the ones that won't let their kids anywhere near the things.

That really is a strong statement of the ethics here - they're happy to let "those" kids get addicted to it, have it help ruin their mental health and generally create an unhappy generation of narcissists. All sold under the tagline of "Connecting the world". But when it comes to their kids? No way.

I wonder if we'll treat the folks that worked on these things the way we treat the folks that worked at Phillip Morris?