* My liberal relatives won't own guns because they keep hearing stories about how guns are deadly, even though I own guns and nobody's died yet
* My friend's kid won't pet puppies because he heard they bite sometimes
* My aunt in Moscow didn't want to vote for Putin because he's "authoritarian", but my life is going great
How do you distinguish between things that are actually bad vs overreactions? Maybe it's just based on individual risk tolerance? I don't see the need to put my digital life in the hands of some unresponsive corporation, but the risk is worth it to you and we just have to agree to disagree?
Everything has a level of risk and reward associated with it. It's up to everyone to judge the risk versus reward.
The flaw I see a lot in the HN comments trying to get people to abandon Big Tech is that they're coming from people who overestimate the risks while underestimating the benefits to other people.
Abandoning a lot of convenience for fear of some rare outcome might be a perfectly good choice for someone who doesn't use those conveniences (e.g. Linux user who doesn't want cloud storage for photos because they enjoy setting up their own elaborate backup schemes) but it's not a good tradeoff for the average person who just wants their photos backed up and either doesn't want to or doesn't trust themselves to set up a good backup solution.
For example, you can choose not to take the plane because you do not feel it is safe. -> Statistics show that it is safe but there are some rare catastrophic events, and these are really bad -> Though these are NOT supposed to happen (exactly like with Gmail, Apple, etc).
Nobody wants to have such terrible issues, so you take the most reasonable operator and hope that the millions who shaped the path before helped to make the system reliable, but yes, at the end, you are at their mercy and their technology.
Of course, yes, you can go the other route, take the train, the bus, your feet.
Keep in mind, it is more inconvenient, is way slower, and has different type of dangers (losing backups for example, getting attacked on the way: the machine hacked for example if the webmail was running React, arriving too late for a meeting, etc).
Plus all that time you wasted, you will never get it back. Nobody is going to be impressed if you spent 45 hours in a bus versus 5 hours in a plane.
What you (ideally) need is to take the plane, and pack a parachute (the backups); not actually avoid the plane.
This way you get the benefits of both worlds.
Billions of people fly without parachute by the way, and this is perfectly normal and is still a very reasonable choice. What matters the most is the track-record of the operator and the service the offer.
I guess you rolled the dice hoping to post this on a day without a mass shooting, and you failed.
This is how one should make the choices.
You are going to have false positives in fraud detection. You are going to have to investigate those or pay in reputation. Fail to fight fraud may also cost rep.
When you run out of reputation people should take their business elsewhere.
It's how we are suppose to keep people honest.
Well yeah, but there're not the only choices. The full opportunity cost is finding and paying and learning alternatives when you have decades of vendor lock-in to overcome. Maybe "keeping people honest" is a bigger ask than you think while you're busy meeting all kinds of other requirements which take priority.
Currently having to migrate to Win11 and thinking I spent 3k on new hardware just to be able to run some absolute clusterfuck of an OS.
I regret not spending it on overpriced Apple hardware, at least it runs all my Adobe crap which I'm 100% dependent on. But then I read joyous stuff like this.
Oh but you say, ""just"" run it on a VM in Linux, like all us rural folk, because big tech evil. Yeah thanks pointdexter, like I didn't know that. And oh look it's running like a complete slideshow on my 4k color calibrated monitor because now you apparently need two fucking GPUs. One for the host and one for the guest just to have hardware acceleration and CUDA video encoding. And I only have room for one GPU so I sell my current CPU and buy a CPU with iGPU. And now apparently I have to run these 10 ducktaped together shell scripts and there's like three guides to achieving a clean passthrough and they're all 50 pages and each is completely different and omg I have other shit to do please kill me already.
Death by mutually incompatible walled gardens, welcome to our fully automated high tech utopia.
So they constantly congratulate themselves for not going to the nearest city, look down upon people who spend time in cities, warn us that we're at risk of the bad things happening, and never miss an opportunity to talk about how bad cities are in conversations.
Now replace big cities with big tech and that's exactly how a lot of these Hacker News comments read.