Comment by pocksuppet
1 day ago
W Social felt extremely shady since their first advertisement on HN.
Also, for all their talk about human verification, I have 6 accounts under different names :)
1 day ago
W Social felt extremely shady since their first advertisement on HN.
Also, for all their talk about human verification, I have 6 accounts under different names :)
Super shady.
The german public broadcaster gave them a 5 minute feature on yesterdays evening news, that felt more like a paid ad than journalism. The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network? I guess the folks behind it are just well connected in Brussels.
Thank you but no thank you.
The company is "W Social AB", meaning "aktiebolag" which in Swedish is what you in the USA would call an LLC or "joint stock company.
So they are 100% looking to monetize and turn a profit.
I wouldn't call it shady, but closed source, for-profit sounds accurate.
> what you in the USA would call an LLC
"Inc" is probably closer than "LLC". While an LLC is a type of joint stock company, it is a specific form with a pass-through tax structure and restrictions on foreign ownership. "Inc" signifies the more general form of corporation in the US.
Aktiebolag is the overwhelmingly most common company form in Sweden and similar to common corporation forms in many other countries. It's not the same thing as a US LLC, which is a strange entity that has pass-through taxation.
Which is to say, there's nothing particularly remarkable about it being an Aktiebolag. It would be more remarkable if it wasn't.
You can have an "open" non profit, that is actually closed and is working to turn into a for profit...
so those distinctions dont seem to count much nowadays
2 replies →
Saw that interview, too. Biggest red flag to me was the claim, that they would use the mandatory id-document only to initially verify your'e not a bot - then discard it and they would "not store anything". Very hard to believe.
Why is that hard to believe? Plenty of systems work that way today. Holding on to that kind of information is a liability.
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> The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network?
This is so stupid. It’s really like truth social. Having a private company with closed source pretending to be open and sovereign (whatever that means), adding ID verification by scanning your passport, it’s like.. gasoline for conspiracy theories. They’re so incredibly tone deaf. It’s like being back in the early 2000s when the older generation didn’t understand the internet. But it’s 2026…
Just skip the extra steps of putting social media makeup on a centralized mouthpiece, and make it an official EU site with broadcast only comms. Like public announcements and the like. That would at least serve some value. You can’t have both the social part and the control of the narrative.
> They’re so incredibly tone deaf.
What more do you expect from German and EU leadership?
>Just skip the extra steps of putting social media makeup on a centralized mouthpiece, and make it an official EU site with broadcast only comms. Like public announcements and the like.
Yeah but then nobody would ever read it. Which is why EU leaders want to coerce private platforms that are already highly successful with the public be their mouthpieces.
Germany's own government had dozens of meetings in secret with Google in order to discuss censorship. https://dailysceptic.org/2026/06/08/google-met-top-german-go...
Indeed a very odd sight between WC matches. I don't normally watch much TV, but I think this warrants further investigation and inquiry.
No mention of long-term stake of EU in ActivityPub platforms either, as if W would be our savior.
Public broadcasters in .de and .at have generally become very shady. To me it seems they dont have to pretend to do good journalism anymore, because they are financed by a mandatory fee per household anyway. It started to be very visible during COVID times. Unfortunately, since then, it only got worse.
>they are financed by a mandatory fee per household anyway
That pisses me the fuck off as well. Not only is it forced coercion to pay for state propaganda, not only are their fees higher than what the brits pay for the BBC, they also don't produce any valuable IP for all that money, like the BBC does (Dr. WHo, Top Gear, etc).
Nobody managed to convince me that it's not a scam and jobs program for the politically connected people to hire themselves, their friends and their family.
And probably stuffed with tax money. As usual.
The name is terrible too.
Are you alluding to the association of "W" with George W Bush?
Not sure that's really a thing outside the USA. And as far as I heard that reference, it was always pronunced "Dubya" not "Double-You"
this is sarcasm, right?
Yeah, based on the people and organizations moving there, RedSky would be more appropriate.
it's actually a double-v as in "the vvitch"
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