Hacker News Reader

Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

Archived version, since access is blocked for european readers: http://archive.is/Sy521

The original article is not available to me because "European Union visitors are important" to them, the archive version, miraculously now compatible with my dns service, features a Google captcha which is unsolvable due to being half off the page.

Where did it all go wrong?

There wasn't a singular moment when it went wrong. It's been a long, steady decline. Hackers have gradually been marginalized and replaced by bureaucrats.

I've been reading Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution [1] by Steven Levy. It's fascinating, but also heartbreaking, to see how things have gone, given that the hackers of the 60's and 70's were fighting against it even back then.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers%3A_Heroes_of_the_Compu...

Well, to be fair, the transition between the hackers and the bureaucrats was greased by abusive MBAs.

EU data privacy legislation wouldn't have been seen as necessary if companies weren't exploiting their user base unethically. The fight to keep the Internet open to everyone should have been an easy one for the "hackers" to win... but the other side had help.

Yup, all those FAANGS were founded and are currently run by evil MBAs. In reality of course, even Cook started out with a STEM degree.

Indeed, it's sad to behold. That looks a good book mind, thanks.

Anyway, as this isn't Bureaucrat News, I think it would be good if we all started to clamp down on links to articles on the quasi-web.

We know, don't we? In the past, people always knew there was a value exchange occurring when you got info. Now, everyone wants the info for free and complains when people don't want to give it to you. Well, that's the nature of systems with this kind of incentive flow.

Really, targeted ads were a low-cost way of providing value to content producers which enabled a low-cost way for them to provide to consumers.

Fixed cost barriers increase the cost of doing business with these predictable results. It's like creating a slope and then complaining when the ball you placed on it rolls down. That's just the nature of balls and slopes.

"Your privacy is real important to us and we would like your consent to rape it and share its remains with our partners."

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