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Comment by jdormit | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't understand complaints like this. When you post something on the internet (on a service that has a documented, public API!) anyone can see it, by definition. Twitter isn't your local pub - it's a public forum visited by millions of people daily. If you don't want those people reading and reacting to the things you write, don't write them on Twitter!

And yeah, brands aren't people. But guess what? Brands are made out of people, and those people have just as much a right to be on Twitter as you do!

There are lots of forms of electronic communication that are non-public. If you don't want people reading what you say, use those.

/rant

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Isn't this actually a damning indictment of how normal humans expect social networks to work, versus how they actually do?

You don't expect big corporations to have spies listening to every conversation in a random party in your local park, but you don't mind other people joining in, it's kinda the point.

People think of social media as a big party of real people, not as a massive corporate espionage listening to every conversation for certain trigger words so they can slimely sidle up, butt into the conversation and try and sell you something.

If your feed is public, then it’s less like a party than standing at speaker’s corner in Hyde Park with a megaphone. And yeah, some of the folks in the crowd are corporate shills yelling ads back at you.

You're missing the point, that's not how 99% of normal people think it works, consciously or subconsciously, it's regardless of how it actually does.

People expect Facebook and Twitter to be local, and forget, because that's how human society works, but not computers.

Whether it's a couple of friends joking about defacing Marilyn Monroe's grave (with no real intention) or someone moaning about their internet, they don't expect to be watched by tens of thousands of corporations and hundreds of governments.

Go to a public bulletin board at a university sidewalk and it’s all ads. Why would twitter not become the same?

I don't mind if they read the post. The annoying part is that they send spam.

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