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Comment by imperfect_blue | Hacker News Reader

You can run people over with cars, electrocute them with electricity. This doesn't mean we should never have built cars or generators.

The more powerful and impactful something is, the greater the potential for abuse. You don't even need that something to be abused - bad people benefited from electricity just as much as good people. This doesn't mean we should stop building powerful and impactful things, or think of ways to restrict them such that only the "good guys" can benefit.

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Both cars and electrical infrastructure have a ton of safety mechanisms built in to them to reduce the potential for harm, many required by law.

For cars we have seatbelts, airbags, traffic lights, speed limits, guard rails on mountain roads, and you have to undergo training or certification before you're allowed to get a license. All cars have numberplates for tracking, and identifying these in CCTV and dashcam footage can be useful in identifying those who have caused accidents or other damage. Vehicle manufactures have a lot of regulations that they have to comply with.

For electrical distribution networks and equipment there are also many safety mechanisms in place, such as insulation, circuit breakers, surge protectors, and lots of regulations covering the installation of electrical wiring in buildings. While growing up, everyone learns of the potential dangers of electricity, e.g. don't stick a fork in a socket and keep that hairdryer away from the bath tub. Similarly everyone knows the damage and trauma that can result from car accidents.

The same is not currently true of social media. I don't know what the right answer is regarding regulation - I'm wary of unforseen negative consequences it may have and the potential for it to be poorly thought out. But I think education on how to use social media responsibly is important. Things like be careful about how much information you share about yourself, don't believe everything you read (check to see if the source of news is reliable), learn how to identify fake news and propaganda, and even how to decide whether to opt out of using certain services altogether.

I agree with your main argument, but it's overly simplistic - we should think about how to achieve the benefits of new technologies while minimising the costs.

All of these safety measures are developed through trials and iterative improvements, not something that was foreseen by the inventors. That's because its difficult if not impossible to accurately predict the impact of a revolutionary product at the onset. Its hard enough predicting whether something will be revolutionary, much less its impact.

This iterative process is working fine for social media. The platforms are changing, how the users use them is changing, it just needs more time to mature.

You absolutely should think about the ways the things you create can be used to harm other people, and take steps to mitigate that.

I agree, the authors of cron and wget/curl should have taken steps to protect people from having their privacy invaded by others who use these tools.

I don't really understand why three separate people have decided to attack the exact same strawman of my argument. Read my response to the other person's?

Attack? I said that I agree.

In guessing this is sarcasm given these tools predate modern social networks and serve such a fundamental feature as "Save Page" within browsers already.

cron doesn't do that. As for curl/wget, both can be used to do all kinds of things other than just "Save Page". Consider combining cron and curl to upload a file to a server every hour, or to download and execute some sort of backdoor script. Whether they predate modern social networks or not is irrelevant.

I would prefer my knives have sharp points on them, despite the fact that they can be used to stab. I do not want general purpose tools "mitigated" because some people could use them to harm other people.

I want my tools to be sharp, pointy, and effective.

Blunt your own tools, but don't tell me what I can do with mine, please.

>You can run people over with cars, electrocute them with electricity. This doesn't mean we should never have built cars or generators.

You should still think about how a car or a generator could hurt someone when you're building one, right? That's how we got crosswalks and fuses.

Electricity is definitely good, but cars certainly have alternatives with various tradeoffs.

Electricity is also especially amusing in the US because we picked the frequency of AC current that requires the least juice to stop your heart. Other countries picked slightly different frequencies....

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