Comment by kuschku
9 years ago
And yet, everyone trying to work against this gets immediately downvoted on HN, because everyone considers the work of these companies just so convenient.
It’s classical short-term vs. long-term thinking, and it’s damaging not just to privacy, but also to the startup economy as a whole.
To me it seems like decentralization is actually very popular on HN.
As long as it's written in Go, Rust or formerly Haskell
Dude, you're forgoting HN's biggest jerk: the lispjerk
In fairness your particular example isn't necessarily a good one. Snapchat is a trivial idea and it's frankly amazing it got as far as it did.
Imho his example illustrates his well. Snapchat was fairly disruptive and lost a lot of value when facebook just ripped it off. If we allow giant companies to engage in anti-competitive practices it will hurt us in the long run as people won't even try to innovate. The snapchat story is pretty demotivating. Why bother when one of the largest 5-6 companies in your space will just shut you down or steal your ideas?
My point is that Snapchat isn't a good example of a company pushed out by anti-competitive practices. Their core product is technically trivial and uninteresting. The fact that there is a market demand for it and being first to do it at large scale doesn't in my mind meet any minimal standard for protection from anti-competitive practices as you imply.
If you had something that would disrupt it would :)