alt Hacker NewsRankings not all consistent:
- private military 6 but defense 39;
- surveillance tech 7, data brokers 9, but facial recognition 14, social media 17, advertising 34;
- polluters 3 but coal 26, oil 30, mining 37;
- scam 5 but clickbait 15, MLMs 18;
- influencers 22 but ads 34 (influencers *are* ads);
- lobbying / disinformation are close (1,2);
- escorts, adult platforms, dating, adult content all 47-50 (nice!)
my take on that:
- private military is different from (and not necessary for) defence. A country having an army for defence is bad but kinda necessary. A country hiring mercenaries is not necessary.
- you can have e.g. social media without surveillance tech, and the harm comes mostly from the surveillance tech. Likewise for the others. Facial recognition opens my phone, I'm fine with that. Surveillance tech is always bad.
- same for the resources industry; they could create a mine that doesn't pollute and cleans up after itself when done. Mining itself isn't necessarily harmful (and we need the resources). It's the pollution that does the harm.
- kinda same for scams - the thing we hate is the scam. The others could do this without the scam, but they choose not to which is why we hate them.
- influencers are a particularly annoying form of advertising, so I get why they're ranked differently. It would be interesting if all forms of advertising were ranked so we could really see what annoys people.
totally agree that the sex industry at the bottom is good :)