What an embarrassing take. So your retort to people crying foul over privacy is to call them hypocrites?

It's social media dude. We've not talking about access to clean water or some other basic human condition where you are trading your privacy for a basic human right.

Yes, you are damn right I'm calling out some of you as hypocrites, because as some of you around here build and scale your products and begin to build out social components of your businesses, you will absolutely walk right up to the line of regulation when it comes to your user's privacy over making your investors happy.

That may be the way you think. But no everybody here thinks that way. Some of us have no interest in giving away our business to investors so they can then push you over and do all kind of crap. And in addition some of us have no interest in extracting the absolute maximum value per user even if it involves unethical things. Because without doing so you can still live an extremely luxirous life.

I concur.

I run my businesses with this in mind, my user's privacy is at the utmost importance to me, and the way I approach managing my business is to gain the good will of my customers first and provide a quality product. And my business is wildly successful.

But I'm under no illusions to the reality of the situation, and I've been around HN long enough to know that the hypocrisy here can be deafening sometimes with regards to social media. The downvotes on my post prove it.

Edit: just to bolster my point, the vast majority of ANY app developer around here on HN will have been to integrate every ad supported SDK in their apps, which literally invades the privacy of those users probably worse than Facebook does, all for a little bump in revenue.

You might be a great and ethical person whose cynicism about the behavior of others grew from experience, but "the vast majority of ANY app developer around here on HN will have been to integrate every ad supported SDK in their apps" is just making up a statistic and getting angry about it.

> do everything they can to extract as much value out of you as a non-paying customer as possible

And that leads to a worse user experience in many areas. You use it for free but it sucks and you sacrifice your data. I'd honestly rather pay $2-4/month for a social media that doesn't suck and doesn't harvest my data.

Social pressure to make business more respectful of human rights when the business is financially incentivised to ignore them is a force for good. Someone has to clutch the pearls.

Good will has business value too.

I completely agree with this. I have direct experience in good will to my users on my businesses.

I completely removed advertising from one platform, and for my paying customers, I have made the conscious decision to not automatically charge and bill my customers for their subscriptions unless they explicitly opt-in for reoccurring charges. Those two "good will" components have generated enormous good will with my customer base at the expense of significant revenue.

The flip side of that is that unfortunately good will doesn't really have much business value if you are completely revenue and profit driven in a competitive marketplace. And if I'm wrong, and good will eventually does win out over something like Facebook's privacy practices, and the free markets determine the winner, then never forget that the markets can stay irrational longer then you can stay solvent.