WRT Uber, their business model is shady to begin with, and that's not the only shady thing about them. Yet, the post is anonymous, and sincere though it sounds, nobody can be sure that the allegations are true. If cost of a lawsuit is the concern, I believe there are many organisations out there who'd help with the case.
Aside: great insights into the victimhood mentality of the free speech zealots.
https://psmag.com/on-the-milo-bus-with-the-lost-boys-of-amer...
(WRT same-sex marriage issue, I believe that civil unions should replace all kinds of marriage we've today and it should be left to the individuals to decide what their partnership(s) mean to them, wrt their philosophical/religious stances.)
- OKCupid blocking a certain browser to access their website means that who uses Firefox to use their service has to either agree the company and boycott Firefox themselves too or not use the service. That is, they forced those users to participate in the boycott.
- OKCupid is a company, so all of its actions are not only in the name of their executives, but also in the name of the users.
- What they did boiled down to a public shaming campaign, hurting, unjustly, not only a person who used their freedom to support a given political quest, but also a huge community around Firefox and Mozilla that had nothing to do with Eich's political tendencies. Free speech is not useful at all if we let the loudest to win.
What OKCupid did is probably defendable in front of law, but is completely unethical and exploitative. They tried to start a lynch to silence someone. It's no different to shaming someone for being homosexual or calling someone with the N word and excluding them. And it was an attempt to suppress freespeech, not an act thereof.
EDIT: Let me also say it like this: who decides which speech is ethical or honest enough to be protected as free speech? You don't have to agree with what OKC did, like them, or even want to do business with them ever again. But you can't deny they're exercising their free speech and free association rights.
Agreed. When I said their actions have nothing to do with free speech, I meant that they weren't confronting a free speech issue. They have the right to do what they did (IANAL, competition laws may apply, though I don't know much about American law).
> Let me also say it like this: who decides which speech is ethical or honest enough to be protected as free speech?
The only one who gets to moderate is the speaker themselves, and the listener. And my view is that OKCupid boggled here.
> You don't have to agree with what OKC did, like them, or even want to do business with them ever again. But you can't deny they're exercising their free speech and free association rights.
Ditto. But I also think that the companies should stay neutral, especially those who serve registered users, for they represent them in that using their service continuously may (and do) cause people to get labeled with the company's tendencies.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.
Thanks as always for the excellent moderation.
[1] despite gay and lesbian developers coming out and saying that Eich's personal opinions on the issue didn't translate to company culture and they felt a positive atmosphere working there.
When a company is too big to fail it means that if it fails there's a systemic risk for an entire economy. Banks (and it's mostly banks), which are too big to fail are so interewoven with other banks, multinational companies and the economy as a whole that a failure can bring other institutions to the brink of exctinction and by extension wreck havoc on the entire economy.
Thousands of people out of a job does not mean too big to fail. No more being able to hail an Uber may be inconvenient, but it's no systemic risk to the economy.
Look at Enron. They had north of 20'000 employees when they imploded. And they where in a far more critical sector of the economy than Uber can ever dream to be. While it was brutal for the employees (who partially lost their life savings) and while I think there should be a special place in hell for the responsible executives Enron's demise had hardly any effects on the economy as a whole.
I'm not jumping on you personally. It's just that this too-big-to-fail nonsense in combination with Uber is thrown around an awful lot recently.
And it's utter bullshit.