Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet
6 years ago
> Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform.
We are rapidly heading towards this future and SV devs are decrying it on HN while helping implement it in the background to pad their wallets.
The devs working on this are generally not the devs who are decrying the harmful effects. In reality, when you work on such projects you tend to isolate yourself from criticism.
I know many such developers who work at these companies helping build these products and who hate these policies; they don't work on whatever feels most direct like the evil feature itself, but they don't seem to have an issue working for the company helping build parts of the UI or networking or whatever.
Moreover, even if they were the same devs, they're all working on such small parts of a bigger product that no one person or team is responsible for any of the compounding decisions that lead to this.
Insightful and an important thing to keep in mind.
Or, quite possibly, they have no other choice. Some devs have the freedom to walk away from a job that they find morally detestable. But many can't refuse or leave because they're under contract and can't afford the break-contract fee, or they're visa holders whose visa is tied to their employment, or they have a family to take care of and can't afford the time spent job searching. It's unfortunately not hard these days for any sufficiently funded business to find developers for morally questionable or outright unethical business models
The cases where people actually have no options (H-1B who had no idea what kind of business social media is and thus needs the job to stay in the US) are pretty rare.
Yes there are people who think they need a big house in the bay area or need a Tesla, but that doesn't mean they have no other options but to work at Twitter or Facebook.
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To be clear, I think the FB/Oculus devs are doing impressive work. I get value out of FB (that's why I still have an account) and Oculus is the primary driver of progress in VR today.
However, I don't believe it's a user-friendly product decision to tightly couple FB's VR hardware to its social media platform. It's yet another push towards a walled garden, much like Google's AMP and Apple's app store.
> and Oculus is the primary driver of progress in VR today.
Eh...I'd hand that title to Valve.
It's surely debatable, but Valve's $999 outside-in (lighthouse) wired unit is about two generations behind the Quest 2 (closer to the Rift).
I believe $300 inside-out tracking wireless headsets are much more likely to push VR out of the "trough of disillusionment" and into the mainstream.