Heck yes, Marvel films, any big Hollywood films, are shady. HN is basically a vanity project so it's less shady. If HN was "optimized for engagement" the way a MrBeast video or Marvel film is, I bet I'm not the only one who would be out of here.

HN puts the most popular submissions on top. Allows commenting and reviews, greys out low voted content.

You don’t think this is optimized for for engagement? Don’t let the beige design fool you.

hn is not optimized (thank good) and didn’t change in forever. There is also no monetizing, it doesn’t have ads nor subscription, and if it were more popular it would be more expensive to host.

Instead look at reddit is desperately trying (inline ads, chat, avatars, forcing app use)

not everyone likes to run a charity, some have a family to feed

HN has ads.

> There is also no monetizing, it doesn’t have ads nor subscription...

This is false. HN is hosted by YC, and as such promotes YC ventures. On the front page right now is the following link (with disallowed comments and upvotes):

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/continue/jobs/smcxRnM-...

HN engagement is really low compared to platforms like reddit

Why is Marvel shady? Because they produce and market films that a lot of people enjoy?

I mean personally I mostly enjoyed Marvel until they started multiverse crap. And they made way too many TV shows that were all terrible. So I stopped watching.

Seems pretty low on the sketch scale to me.

Marvel can produce so much stuff because they overwork and underpay employees like VFX artists and writers. Then those movies/shows don't do so well, so they lower the budget of the next one, and it devolves into what it is now.

I'm not into the Marvel universe (obviously) but it seemed to me they had been doing multiversey stuff for a long time, so I looked it up. They've done it since the 60s. They have also done endless reboots and endless retcons.

In short, they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may have for their characters, I mean their properties, as long as humanly possible and then some.

I don't even have any nostalgia for these characters. They were a really fringe phenomenon in my country. But do you think that means we don't get the 20+ Marvel movies shoved down our throats? Oooh, no. We'll eat what we're served, or not go to the movies at all (that's the option I choose). If you wanted to make a parody of hamfisted, audience-contemptous cultural imperialism, you couldn't do better than Marvelwood.

> been doing multiversey stuff for a long time

Yes, everything in the movies/TV is derived from comic book. Comic books are extremely niche so movie content is new and novel to most movie viewers.

Multiverse / reboots / retcons also helped kill comic book popularity. It was a bad idea there as well! https://youtu.be/0PlwDbSYicM?si=iOlB2xYP8Cm1PwXc

> they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may have for their characters

No, it's not nostalgia. Marvel Film's greatest achievement is they took C and D tier characters and made them A tier. Iron Man was not super popular prior to the films. No one had even heard of Guardians of the Galaxy. Prior to the Marvel Cinematic Universe the most popular Marvel characters were Spider-Man and X-men. The film rights of whom had been previously sold to Sony and Fox.

In any case, I don't see how any of this makes them "shady". Not entertaining? Maybe. Shady? I honestly don't even know what that means in this context. Superhero movies strike me as extremely low on the scale of evil. Making mass market entertainment? Oh no the horror! /s

What's wrong with being shady? Morals are a meme

Marvel films, which (like much of big budget Hollywood at this point sadly) at this point are infamous for their exploitation of cheap unorganized effects artists, are probably a bad example for something being "not shady".

HN actually discourages high engagement by having the front page items change fairly slowly (rather than algorithmically customizing them to each user), not making scrolling beyond that (i.e. pagination and the "latest" feed) any less awkward to navigate than it has been forever and actively preventing you from commenting too much within a given timeframe (which it doesn't actively disclose when you hit the limit). That's probably a bad example for something being "shady".