alt Hacker News> What the site was is that, I had scraped data for all students at IIT Delhi, and made a profile for all of them.
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile.
Oh, good, they made a harassment factory.
Replies
It doesn't matter. This is how Facebook started. It's how a lot of things started.
Young people doing (sometimes questionable) experiments.
The fact that the default response to this is "omg" and "this guy deserves to be in prison" is an indication of the dark times we're headed towards. A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm, is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm. And the norms are changing.
I am pretty pro-privacy. And yes, I find it to be fairly thoughtless, but that's no reason for coercive intimidation. The fact that this was the reaction to someone doing an experiment speaks poorly about the society it took place in, and explains why there haven't been any major breakthroughs - in consumer tech, science or the arts – from within that country.
More generally, HN's reaction is disappointing. This is a very hacker thing to do. Hackers have always been people out at the edge doing things that get them into trouble. The fact that most people on HN want to crush that rebelliousness – that hacker spirit – is sad to me.
I think there's a dark undercurrent in global culture, where people would rather live in a world where they're poor but able to control others as opposed to one where they're wealthy but unable to exert control over others.
That's an indictment of humanity not the creator.
So he watched the social network then