Discussions about politics regularly seem grounded in conspiracy theories. Discussions about tech company decisions seem to overwhelmingly focus an anti-consumer monopolistic goals, when entirely sensible parallel explanations seem obvious. I'm writing this because the discussion of Android side-loading seems to mostly involve people who think scamware is somehow irrelevant, when it seems to be an ever evolving threat.
This has caused my to engage a lot more recently, but I think it'll ultimately cause me to engage less. I don't think I can handle debating basic economic and political questions, when I'm actually trying to talk about some neat product.
Has HN just grown a lot in the last year or something? Is there a way that we could signal whether commenters have anything worthwhile to say? I'm fine with the way the site is, and I'll keep posting when I have something interesting to share, but it has been weighing on me recently.
bigyabai•1h ago
Is that bad faith? You are arguing over a system of tradeoffs, and by the sound of it most people disagree that your tradeoff is worthwhile. The onus is on you to demonstrate that the threat of sideloading scamware is greater than the threat of losing sideloading.
We saw the same thing happen when Apple proposed Client Side Scanning. Both sides accused the other of being bad-faith when they failed to justify their stance versus the tradeoff.
scoofy•1h ago
I definitely don't want to complain about people just disagreeing with me. My point is that it feels like many of the threads that end up in /active feel like they are in a kind of reality distortion field.
I guess a good parallel to real life is when I get into housing market discussions in SF and people start saying that "we have plenty of housing, it's just that investors are buying up all the units and then not renting them" (not some investors, most investors) which is trivially, demonstrably false, beyond the fact that it makes no sense. That's the kind of "wait what?" feeling I'm getting a lot.