I’m in my 40s and have been working in tech for a long time. I remember a time when it genuinely felt like the industry was a force for good in the world, opening doors for people to do things they never used to be able to do. And the companies were so open, e.g. I remember Facebook’s OpenGraph opening up a world of new social apps that were exciting to develop and to use. For sure there was a level of youthful naïveté at work there but it was still an exciting and interesting time to be in the industry.
That positivity still happens today but to a far less degree. Nowadays it feels like every major tech player is all about lockin, about dark patterns that draw users into their services whether they’re happy about it or not.
We used to point and laugh at the cynical, out of touch companies like Oracle. Now it seems everyone aspires to be them. So yeah, I’m often negative on HN.
Apple, Google, or Meta?
Apple obviously. They protect their users and still have a generally positive social vibe.
Meta and Google are largely only spoken of in negative light socially, and constantly castigated for their "user hostile" behavior.
But what is the ultimate irony here?
Apple only exists for people with money. It's a pay-to-play enterprise, and only a small sliver of the global population can afford to be part of it.
Google and Meta welcome everyone, and give everyone access to the same services and features (by and large).
I think there are a lot of people, who if they truly stepped back and understood this whole picture, would be left in a tornado of a soul search. How could the free companies with no bias towards wealth possibly end up as the bad guys?
Is that a serious question? They are ad companies. They don't do charity.
And one company had as a slogan "don't be evil" - they got rid of. And the other one was started with the words about their users
"they trust me. Dumb fucks"
They literally are the bad guys. Google started different, but now I don't see any value they care for except making more money by more web dominance. And with that dominance, spy, sell the data or use it to hijack peoples attention and manipulate it.
As a side note, the "openness" at the times you discussed were still very limited in demography and geography.
Your perspective is common and I see it a lot, but primarily in older and jaded developers.
When I switch cohorts and work with younger people in the real world (not chronically online) it’s a complete 180: Back to being excited about tech and the future, not really dwelling on the things that HNers complain about because they’re too busy looking forward than back at the tech world.
How does this younger cohort feel about locked down devices, App Store distribution and the like? In my experience younger people don’t think about it at all, because they aren’t aware of what the alternative could even be.
Lots of people are using locked down devices, but the higher friction alternatives just lost a lot of their friction.
Combine that with Windows getting noticeably worse and more aggressively annoying, and it might finally be The Year Of The Linux Desktop.
On a side note, so are the bugs.
These excessive daily updates I get on my linux are exhausting. For example, libre office started lagging on a large document I frequent daily and I had to rollback.
I am 110% sure, because the young people I socialize with are operating in a tech environment that is more free and open than what I had as a kid.
The amount of open software and platforms we have right now would be mind blowing to younger me. The fact that I can run high quality LLMs on my laptop and even use them to open up old, closed games I had as a kid is incredible.
> How does this younger cohort feel about locked down devices, App Store distribution and the like?
Honestly? They DGAF. Their phones are communication devices and convenience things in their pocket. They have so many actual computers, SBCs, and microcontrollers to play with and they just want their phones to be phones.
Those who do care about open platforms vote with their wallet and buy one. They’re pragmatic. They don’t buy an iPhone and then whine about it being locked down because they know that the iPhone is not what you buy if that’s your goal.
You also have to remember that they grew up in the age of janky jailbroken phone mods. Jailbreaking your phone wasn’t equivalent to freedom, it was what people did when they wanted crazy fonts and colors and widgets on their phone until it bugged out and broke so bad they had to wipe it and start over. They got their fill of jailbreaking and moved on.
> In my experience younger people don’t think about it at all, because they aren’t aware of what the alternative could even be.
I think this mindset is unfairly smug and dismissive. Like only the old people are capable of understanding technology and the world. In my experience the young people know more about the current open alternatives and their options than I do if for no other reason than they’re more online, have more free time, and have probably watched 80 YouTube videos talking about it this year.
Would you be open to accepting the idea that maybe they do know what’s out there, and they just have different priorities than you?
What tech environments are you using that are more open now than in the past? It certainly seems you're conflating LLMs and their ability to 'create anything (regardless of quality or level of skill of the creator) on demand' rather than the software & services currently provided by Microsoft/Meta/Google/Amazon et al. that have slowly monopolized essentially everything and pushed the smaller players out. I'm referring to the majority of software and services available to the general tech using public.
But then you're talking about highly privileged people being optimistic.
It's easy to be positive when you grow up with the kind of wealth that gives you access to expensive hardware, as indicated by your statements "LLMs on my laptop" and "They have so many actual computers, SBCs, and microcontrollers to play with".
There's a few ways to go here. 1) (vast majority of people) don't even notice what's going on and generally fine with things. 2) notice, and sink into negativity and helplessness. 3) notice, and actively weed out the garbage.
HN is full of people who want to take other people's money. It should be in the forefront of your mind anytime someone wants to push something here. Nerdy tech discussions are a side effect, and has nothing to do with the motivations of this platform.
Usually it is the titles and posts underneath rather than users who make me less happy
I think the difference I'm seeing, again from the outside, is that (a) people who don't eat, sleep, and breathe tech are entering the field because it pays well, and (b) the people who do finally took notice that their passion is a trap (a well paying trap, but a trap nonetheless).
But isn’t it just shift of the tech in general?
From quirky, optimistic, positive, “don’t be evil”, inclusive ~20 years ago.
To corporate, creepy, fascist, ultra greedy since ~10 years[1] ago and onwards to this day.
I could feel gradual change of comments more into right political spectrum, since 7-8 years.
[1] Personally - Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal is that point for me.
The slice of software development that is purely "finding technical solutions" is shrinking.
You increasingly need to identify with the purpose of the software you are developing.
Spaces of detached "purely technical" software development are shrinking.
So you either say your job is to turn specs into software, then you need to aim at technically demanding tasks. Or you aim at being good at doing this at scale without being particularly involved with the purpose.
The pure "developing an efficient implementation of this clearly defined requirement" part of software engineering is retreating to spaces with really thanklessly complex or tight requirements, and even then, you need to be extraordinaly good.
The gray area between "software where the tiniest bug is a legal liability" and "software that seems cool, fix bugs later" is shrinking.
Somewhat unexpectedly, Twitter/X has been growing as a place for quality discussion for me. That claim will be unbelievable to many here, because the average quality of posts on that site is extremely low. The killer feature is being able to cultivate your follow list and your block list together. If you can stay away from the ragebait, block the anger engagement farmers who worm their way into every discussion (Theo and similar accounts) and follow people when you see high quality posts of theirs shared, you start moving toward a feed with good signal.
Some people can’t help but get pulled into the vortex of ragebait and clickbait on sites like that. Those people should stay away, of course. If you can’t help but click on today’s drama or you get distracted or outraged easily, the Twitter firehose is not a good place to be.
I think you would be hard pressed to find much positive sentiment about a company like Facebook here; eg a post 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215
There are certain threads that always invite a lot of negativity just because of the subject matter. It’s relatively easy to avoid those once you spot the pattern …
Every comment thread got dragged into talking about the same few dozen things (or people) no matter where it started and the same shallow reddit level comments seemed to be all over the place.
Whereas before even on contentious topics there would be viewpoints like X s negative in these ways but if we also consider Y, W and Z these could be confounding factors, people were open to alternative takes and wanted to learn. Even on subjects I disagreed with I came out of it feeling like I better understood things, and other viewpoints. Nowadays though it feels like if the headline read "SpaceX space craft contacted by extra-terrestrials" it'd take 30 minutes to turn into a discussion of Musk.
Problem is I need to stay in the loop on the tech news scene that isn't shallow stories written by "tech journalists" who have a PHB understanding of the issue they're covering, or thinly vieled marketing brochures.
If anyone has any pointers to where I could find that I'd appreciate it. Moreover if anyone knows of some semi-private communities that would take in a poor internet refuge seeking a new tech land to call home I'd appreciate an introduction.
It is semi-private as it is invite-based but still big. Compared to here it has less "industry news" and more "hacker content"
You're fooling yourself if you think your opinions, particularly on matters outside of your direct experience, can exist independent of well funded influence campaigns.
There’s a reason it spawned so many cults historically.
Edit: I wish HN showed some kind of indicator next to usernames, like a small flag for the poster’s country. I’d love to see how reactions to an article vary depending on where people live.
quite like a hostile foreign government
When I was a kid this was not possible / very expensive.
(Of course personally I prefer more privacy focused options like Signal, but still)
For the rest of Meta, just read Careless People and the linked submission is not surprising at all.
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/whatsapp-says...
The sentiment toward Meta is completely different when I talk to friends who are not in tech and who have small, local businesses. Like I’m talking to people who live in two completely different worlds and wouldn’t understand each other’s perspectives.
I usually hold my tongue on this topic, as I expect many others do, because commenting with anything other than pure anti-Meta sentiment is just asking for downvotes on this website, but since you asked what I presume to be an honest question I think it’s worth an honest answer.
Note that I’m not trying to say that this makes up for that or to cancel out other complaints people might have. I’m only trying to answer the question above.
But that's about it.
I'm not saying social media is ideal, but it has done a lot to democratize the ability of people to share what is happening around them. Now whether that is a good or bad thing has more to do with how you feel about democracy and that's a different discussion. But although it is taking time to adapt I'd say that one now has more opportunities to be informed about the things that are going on them ever before.
Now it may be, some consider those negatives as well.
[0] https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-pr...
They knowingly facilitated genocide and gave zero shits.
They intentionally manipulate elections for the far right.
Seriously - how is my life worse because of them?
Predictably, fewer upvotes. HN users (and probably humans in general) like to vote up stories that reinforce their worldview.
One is about Facebook the product, the other about some technical detail
- Meta Platforms Ireland Limited: €4,514M
- Facebook Ireland Ltd.: €60M
- WhatsApp Ireland Ltd.: €225M
- Meta Platforms, Inc.: €405M
That totals €5.204B. Add in Italy’s €805M and we’re up to €6.009B.
[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/content_files/Earnings...
Two months of income are far from a mere "slap on the wrist".
not saying Meta is in the right (they should have been paying this money in taxes anyway), but they're not going to be hard stopped from handing over money for free either
you know how much governments love pumping their sources... especially once a government start running out of their previous resources... 6B for everyone's pictures suddenly seems like a line item on someones defense budget :/
Why do you think Meta should get away with breaking the law without paying fines?
They're lucky they don't face criminal charges and go to jail for consistently breaking the law.
the people in charge seem to have found just how much of their citizens' data they can sell before anyone votes for the other side; they just have to go through the courts to get the money
if Meta followed the law in the first place, the EU would be down 6 billion
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/why-is-there-no-go...
But Meta is Meta, fr.
This does seem to happen a lot with SpaceX and Tesla since about 4 years. There is no thread on Starship's latest launch yesterday, but the false news claiming that Hawaiian airspace was shutdown due to Starship debris rocketed up to #2 on the front page.
But if you say "We need to access your photos so you can share a few with your friends" and then proceed to upload all the photo's, you are in violation.
Which is similar to what happened here and what the Italian judge ruled to be illegal.
> Which is similar to what happened here
In fact, it has nothing to do with what happened here; why lie? No photos were uploaded by the feature the fine was assessed for.
Facebook requested access to users' photo galleries through a single app-wide authorisation. According to the Italian regulator, a preceding notice did not make clear that this would also allow Facebook to generate suggestions based on photos in their gallery.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwn83gxemk35o
They should have explicitly asked separate consent to generate suggestions based on photos.
They know this. They just made the judgement that they could get away with an 'oopsie' or a fine that is just doing cost of business. These >1B fines are good, make them feel it, so that the next time they won't violate the GDPR.
I mean, this is kind of nuts. Should they ask consent every time you click to navigate to a new page, just in case you didn't want to see it? What level of granularity is acceptable?
I think your comment is obtuse and that you did not actually try to understand what the GDPR is saying but anyway: no, it doesn't concern itself about that dimension at all. There would on the other hand need to be new informed consent from the user before their data can be shared with new parties or used/transmitted/processed/stored for new purposes or extended time/space scopes.
They use dark patterns and deception, and without knowing the details here I suspect Meta is guilty.
Meta’s response even stinks of these dark patterns, glossing over informed consent.
Suffice to say, Nokia is on my blacklist of companies to never patronize again.
TL;DR: they didn't thoroughly explain the users what they were consenting to when giving the app access to the gallery.
* either share from an outside app, e.g. the gallery, choose "share", choose "whatsapp". This gives it access only to the photo you shared from the other app.
* and in Android's settings you can give Whatsapp access to a subset of photos, then it works normally on only that subset. Then you can always add more from outside that set, by pressing the paperclip icon when you write the message, there you see the "gallery option", then you see the limited subset of photos you gave access to, at the bottom right you have a folder picker icon which opens the system's gallery picker view (google photos in my case), where you can see all photos, and it can then access that photo too.
* if you chose no access to media at all, but if whatsapp has camera access, click on the paperclip icon in the message box, then, "camera", then the "gallery" icon, there you get a screen prompting for gallery access, but on the bottom right it has the same folder icon that gives access to the system photo picker, which again will only allow access to the photo you pick there.
The first two cases are pretty low-friction.
Works for me on an alternate Android OS without photos permission, but it's buggy (possibly on purpose) and often requires doing the sharing intent action twice.
WhatsApp only has "Network", "Notifications" and "Sensors" permission on my phone
https://www.politico.eu/article/italy-hits-meta-with-e805m-f...
Yes? Just because I want to share some pictures through an app doesn't mean I want it to go and do anything it wants with any picture on the device.
> Users must grant permission on their device before the feature can operate, and they can change that permission at any time in their settings.
> The fine is equivalent to about 0.47% of the group's global revenue.
What is Italy protecting Italians from here? I think it's clear consent was given at some point. So the objection is what? They need to ask consent again periodically? Or on a feature-by-feature basis? Who was conceivably harmed, and how?
How does Meta accept user content in the future without running afoul of the exact same rule again?
> I think it's clear consent was given at some point
That's not what was found. I don't know the facts of the case, but it's possible that "consent" mechanisms were found to be insufficient. As an example, if you ask for permission for one purpose, then use it for another, that would probably not meet the "inform users" bar.
Giving access to photos so that the user can upload a photo is not giving consent to analyze all the photos of the user on a phone.
The main principle of the GDPR is to store and use as little private data as possible and only get/store data when the user explicitly asks for it/consents to it.
(IANAL of course.)
What they were found guilty of doing is suggesting to the user they might want to upload a photo. All on-device, not uploading anything.
Edit: I see another commenter linked https://enforcementtracker.com/. Very useful resource
https://www.theweek.in/news/biz-tech/2026/08/27/meta-settlem...
Or leave the market altogether. Society here would be better off without Meta, for sure.
cant think of any other pool shared by walks of life as diverse as us, North Korean hackers, grandmas, school children, actual criminals, actual activists, mom n pops, mega corp businesses, big banks, small credit unions, governments / spies...
The vast majority of regulations are poorly enforced in most countries because they require extensive administrative efforts and legal costs, while politics push them to focus on the new boogieman. But if a government wants to find something against you they can. There's a large short term financial incentive with these ones.
By the time the public hears about it like this it means attempts to avert it by the army of corporate lawyers & compliance experts have already failed
>I would just ignore 'em
That goes about as well as you refusing to pay your taxes. Pointless because while governments are slow they do eventually come for their pound of flesh
It is well known, and discussed, that young kids are particularly weak in relation to social media. Meta probably represents the strongest, "evilest" company in that regard.
What will we do, as a society, to make our lives better? Possibly without pitch forks.
Coincidentally, in both cases of surveillance, GrapheneOS or iPhones would have prevented it.
Italy has some critical issues, but it's still a rule of law state.
I think that in the past, the situation was a lot more worrying than now. Think about Ustica, Bologna station bombing, etc.
Isn't the EU making more money from fining US tech companies than their own tech companies are paying in taxes at this point?
No, this is a common piece of Trump era propaganda. The EU does not levy such a general corporate tax, fines are not recurring as taxes are, fines like this one are done by a single member state (Italy in this case) and do nothing for the EU's budget, and the big tech companies within the EU are private companies whereas this misleading stat picks the rare public ones for its comparison
"Your honour, I did not break into this man's house. Last week he gave me his key ring so I could copy his car keys, so I took the liberty to write down all his bitting codes and made a copy of his keyring later. Since he gave me his key, I was authorised to be there and did not break in."
... is literally the excuse Meta is trying to use, except it's about photos.
Just because you have the physical ability to upload some data doesn't mean it's legal to.
You can't raise VAT as that would be massively unpopular, so this is the next best option.
1: Fine tech bros for $reason and $amount must be in the billions
2: $business raises costs to cover the fine, now their AI is 50 cents more expensive per $x thousands of tokens
3: EU collects sweet money under the guise that tech bros are bad, and who would disagree?
4: go to step 1.
There are no other legitimate reasons to fine such an absurd amount and since the EU needs to find a way to stealth tax the population this is a great way to do it. You're not going to ban Facebook, and you're able to create endless reasons to fine them billions.
Don't believe me? Save this comment, check back in 2028, 2029 and 2030. I predict at least 10-15€ billion in fines for various reasons, which will obviously include privacy. You could probably even guess the date, amount and reason of fine it's become so predictable from the EU.
How many tens of billions do you need to fine a company before just banning it. Politicians will wax lyrical about big bad tech companies but judge them by what they do, not what they say.
(Not to be read as a defence of big tech)