Hacker News Reader

Comment by wamatt | Hacker News Reader

The OP and GP provide an example of the age-old dichotomy between deontological (kyledrake) and consequentialist (cjbprime) viewpoints. Which is more correct, has been debated for centuries and unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, as it's highly subjective.

Should Youtube, have refrained from using copyrighted material that contributed to their popularity, given it greatly increased their chances of success compared to the other nascent video sharing sites at the time?

Was reddit.com, wrong for using sock-puppets accounts to kickstart content when they were starting out?

Some will say it's always wrong to use 'x' in a strategy no matter what. Others would argue that while 'x' might be a bit evil, it's necessary to ensure survival, and will result in a greater good (ie the service being useful to millions vs extinction) in the long run.

View on HN

GP suggested that IPFS might not want to openly circumvent a specific country's censorship system, and blog about it, and you're comparing not doing that to the use of fake accounts by reddit? The issue is not as complicated as you're making it.

Well, yeah. The consequentialist viewpoint is if IPFS fails to succeed because it jumped too early, then ZERO people benefit from it. That's arguably the greater sin.

There's a saying, cutting off the nose to spite the face. That could apply here.

The greater sin is not failing, as failing is expected on the road to success. The greater sin would be to not jump when the opportunity presents itself.

Maybe look at it from a different point of view, if to someone in Turkey trying to access wikipedia it makes a difference then it's already a success.

It's a question of where you want to dray the line, and maybe the consequentialist drawing the line when ipfs takes over the world and gets 3 billions daily users is far fetched.

Youtube is probably not a sound example here as posting a trove of copyrighted content was a deliberate strategy in the larger scheme of having youtube bought by a giant actor for a hefty sum of money by a group of people from the paypal mafia with experience in this shady business.

From the get go the exploitation of illegal content (and other shady tricks) was made for the sole purpose of personal profit and had no intent on making the world a better place.

In other words youtube has been evil from the start, with evil intent, using evil tricks as part of an evil agenda. There was no room for ethics there.

Unless proven otherwise, IPFS seem to not have such a nefarious purpose even to work towards a greater good, due to its nature will hardly ever be made up for sell and has to leverage different mechanisms due to being a protocol and not a website in need of registrations.

Wow, that's ascribing a lot of motivation to things which have multiple interpretations.

Napster was rarely categorised as 'evil' except by 'big content'. In the music industry there was compulsory licencing which enabled it's successor - Spotift. There was nothing similar in video.

This stuff can lead to race-to-the-bottom issues. Consequences are different on a micro or macro scale. The optimal answer is to figure out how to stop others from doing the dishonest approaches. But in a macro context where everyone else is cheating, it's a lot more fuzzy and complex whether it is right or wrong to cheat as well in order to compete…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com