[ianstallings]

What blows my mind about this whole mess is how quickly this community has gone off on some witch hunt. Just read the comments. This is apparently what you have to look forward to if your startup is successful and you eventually try to monetize. Good luck everyone.

[forensic]

Boo hoo, the multi-millionaires are getting insulted when they try to fuck their users!

Won't someone please think of the feelings of the millionaires!

I'm pretty sure they can wipe away their tears with $100 bills and their feelings won't suffer permanent damage. Since their feelings are so much more important than all of the people they are trying to fuck over.

[ianstallings]

Are you an adult? These are your peers not billionaire bankers leeching off the backs of the poor. You know, programmers, marketers, entrepreneurs. They made it. And you want to tear them down because they've been successful? Now that they have money they are automagically evil? What planet am I on?

[pfortuny]

Wow, sorry your argument has nothing to do with the ToS. Peers really? And why is it that it is the CEO who answers and not those nice engineers?

Come on, the engineers made the product, the lawyers and the board made the company's legal arrangements. And they are utter bullshit.

[ianstallings]

That CEO is Kevin Systrom, my peer because he is a programmer and entrepreneur. Your whole argument is baseless. He wrote Instagram with his partner Mike Krieger.

[forensic]

Who made the call to fuck the users? Whoever it was, fuck that guy.

Instagram is a company. The leaders are responsible for that unethical behavior and I'm not going to excuse them out of some bullshit appeal to programmer loyalty.

The fact that these are peers is MORE reason for us to be calling them out. Do you really want your profession to be associated with this sleazy behavior? They are poisoning the well for all of us.

Tech people today have the power and money to reshape the entire world. Yet so many of them are focused on extracting a few dollars through grossly unethical behavior. This is not praiseworthy behavior in any sense and you should be ashamed of yourself for defending it.

If my peers are going to be as sleazy and ethically bankrupt as, say, politicians or wall street bankers then I don't want them as peers. I would gladly throw them under the bus to protect the reputation of all tech people.