Ask HN: Why do comment threads suddenly seem overwhelmingly bad faith?

> the discussion of Android side-loading seems to mostly involve people who think scamware is somehow irrelevant

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.

Please email reports of bad faith to the mods. That’s against the guidelines and until we as users have flag reasons it’s the only way to highlight the shift in tone and help halt its popularity. Subject line “Bad faith participation by username” and a link to comment(s) along with your opinion would help them tremendously.

hn@ycombinator.com

Big tech companies have spent this decade being dragged through antitrust and regulatory actions that have put all their dirty laundry on display so of course that is going to influence conversations about things they now do that stack things more in their favour!

It was only a few months ago that Google being forcibly separated from Android was on the table in the DOJ antitrust case in which they were convicted of search and advertising monopoly abuse, and only a few months ago they were convicted of abusing their Android monopoly separately to that in the Epic antitrust case.

I think it is entirely natural their plans to make it harder to use software from outside their app store - at obvious benefit to themselves - is going to be steeped in controversy and skepticism.

Separately to Google, many questionable things about Meta have been revealed too, and Apple's regulatory battles have heated up all over the world, of course these will influence discussions about what else they are doing. Microsoft have also earned a lot of disdain. They choose these courses of action, and conversation about them and their intentions and their motives is rightfully coloured by it.

I expect it has a lot to do with "AI". HN readers are early adopters, so they're probably getting Claude or Claw or some damn LLM to generate their comments in hopes of getting more karma.

I also think that Trump winning in 2024, and subsequently revealing himself as nothing but a grifter with authoritarian impulses has something to do with it.

Anyone with conservative leanings has either been disgusted by Trump and his admin (they've violated almost all previous "movement conservative" doctrines), or got on the metaphorical Trump Train, and are now utterly confused by why The Storm hasn't come, prices aren't lowered, and there's been nobody sent to Gitmo for a tribunal. None of the conservative people can argue that anything is going well, and are also suffering through an epistemological crisis.

The SV tech leaders have turned Libertarianism into a weird combination of an incipient aristocracy and a cult. Obvious legal, personal liberty and freedom violations are ignored in favor of cheering on cryptocurrency and Trump.

Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.