agreed, at least jack-booted thugs are visible to those they oppress

If you told Markus Wolf in 1989 that in 2021 most citizens in the world would write each other private and political communicatons via a tracking device that can’t be turned off, and that device has both microphones and cameras, he would raise and eyebrow and ask “How did we win the Cold War?”

Absolutely would, he could not concieve of a spying machine as powerfull and pervasive as we have today

The problem with "Stalin would've loved it" is that it's obviously an unsubstantive flamebait comment, and so was correctly downvoted. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? We're trying for a specific kind of conversation here: thoughtful, curious, respectful. That requires avoiding flamebait.

Re HN: I think you might be falling prey to the notice-dislike bias, which is a variation of sample bias where the comments we dislike or cause us pain start to feel like they're dominating the whole site. They don't dominate the site—HN is divided much as society (all over the world) is divided. But it feels like they do, because painful data points land harder and make deeper impressions than the things one likes or agrees with. The people who have opposite views to yours see HN as dominated by their opposite side (which is to say, your side), because of exactly the same mechanism.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098