Hacker News Reader

Borders to slavery in my books. It doesn’t even matter whether these are productive hours, it’s just forced labor using social anxiety peer pressure and FOMO to force people into doing your bidding.

Thought we had labor laws for that...

View on HN

Nobody is forced to do it, you can quit if you don't like it, and you get compensated very well. Please explain how it "borders on slavery" to allow people to work a lot for a lot of money out of their own accord?

Peer pressure / FOMO != "force". Please do not conflate the two.

There’s certainly no physical force applied, but using the right techniques, we can predictively force a large part of the population to work against their own best interests using psychology alone. Obviously, this is an amalgam of social elements, redefined value system, stress response and sunk cost fallacy.

Nobody is conflating them but they are de facto identical in terms of results. The physical forcing has been replaced by social pressure and guilt tripping and they are just as effective into getting you to work more hours as were the physical tortures of the times long past.

The major difference being you can just say "I will not succumb to social pressure", where as you cannot say "I will not be forced physically". That's why it's called "force".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com