alt Hacker NewsThings were build by passionate people, who had the skills and the means to do it.
I feel that modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product, than took away the means by making everything cloud, and now kills the skills by eutrophizing our brains with AI.
There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
Replies
> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
I used to think this, I would repeat that old quote "It's not a conspiracy, the truth is more frightening, nobody is in control"
Then comes stuff like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#:~:text=th...
and
https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who...
and
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-plots...
and
https://cybernews.com/cybercrime/meta-fortune-fraudulent-ads...
and
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+inauguration+zuckerburg+musk+trum...
and
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/dem-orders-congressional-probe-eps...
and I'm left thinking well, if none of that covers the definition of evil cabal, then what does? How far can we move these goal posts?
I agree to some extent; however had I still contribute to Wikipedia and Wikipedia, while it has problems, is still fairly good (quality-wise could be better, a lot of content from discussions should be added to main articles but I usually confine myself to just suggest things on discussions and let others make a decision then).
> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all.
> who had the skills and the means to do it.
emphasis on means. The means to spend ~8 hours a day contributing instead of dedicating that time to a full time job or a second job.
But the gravy train is ending...
I dunno the leadership of at least US tech has been trying to market themselves as a cabal for a bit now and are doing a more convincing job of it than I thought would be possible
There is the incentive too which LLMs destroy:
- If you embrace agentic development and prompt/produce something, a rando with spare money and a better clanker supersedes your efforts.
- If you ignore LLMs and write and design the product yourself, the LLM corpo says "All the better for me! Moar free untainted datasets for me! I'll make you buy tokens from me in the next 6 months anyway..."
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
+1
There's also another aspect - in the early days, and often times that's what's attractive to contributors - the field might be a total niche that appeals to us nerds. But then, slowly but surely, as it gets taken over by commercial interests, that appeal gets totally lost.
Like, it was fun to dabble in HTML and make your own little website in the mid-90s. Now it's a total drag to do "web development" as your full-time job, staring at Claude Code all day long - YMMV.