[sandspar]

What's happened to HackerNews? Look at the vitriol of this comment thread - it looks like a 2 Minutes of Hate thing. Set aside your feelings about the author of the linked article and just look at the HackerNews comment chain. What is going on? Since when do HackerNews users write like this?

[cloverich]

It's the world that has changed. Back in the day that I assume you are remembering, it was easy to look at tech as a force for good. But soon Google and Facebook became ad machines first and foremost, consolidated untold wealth towards the top, and discarded any burned out employees they no longer had a use for, while raking in ever more profits.

Personally, I'm unsure of how to read this post as anything but representative of everything that has gone wrong, comically using charity as an example of a mistaken focal point of one of the worlds most powerful tech companies. On top of charity being obviously not a meaningful distraction anyways (its not in the same ball park as the feature factory + ad machine + poor strategy that has defined facebooks existence the last several years running).