What the hell is going on with all the hate towards companies and organizations that are literally doing the most and making the biggest impact when it comes to privacy and security?
Proton, Brave, Mullvad, GrapheneOS, Signal. Everywhere you look on here, it’s hard not to find a comment shitting on or discrediting them.
It’s literally becoming unbearable. It makes me wonder if this has something to do with how popular this forum has become. Because a few years ago, it wasn’t like this, and the quality of the posts and discussions was much higher.
The mood of the internet in general unfortunately. It’s kind of always been a place of constant hostility for as long as I can remember - I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to find places where people are actually pleasant to each other!
Maybe it will have been an exception when it was a less known forum and more just a group of friends
Usually politics is the most hostile subject (I remember in the early days of the internet it was kind of taboo and against “netiquette” to bring it up at all as we just wanted it to be about unity and cooperation) and at least some of those projects are involved in political controversy. There is a tendency for people to dig for ideological impurity and use it to define an entity’s entire existence and then all the tech blogs spring to life turning it into a deal 10x bigger than it was (Proton) but some of them don’t help themselves with how open and unapologetic they are when involved with something massively controversial (Mullvad). So those get people inevitably shitting on them for a start
But trolls and flamebait are a thing too - the internet as a whole seems to have forgotten this despite how there are literally massive troll farms out there in certain places in the world that want to cause division and instability, where it’s people’s full time job to find all the serious discussion forums, politically active subreddits etc and incite as much division as they can.
That probably plays a part if this forum has caught their attention. Whether it’s those paid trolls or just good old fashioned dickheads, you always get those people whose whole reason for posting is to stir the pot and then sit back and watch the fireworks. Sometimes they’re prominent users who’ve been around for years and not kicked out. Back in the day we just called them trolls, quite openly. It used to be that people especially moderators were constantly spotting them to the point of being a bit trigger happy with “false positives” sometimes and then at some point in the last decade or so everyone just started taking every comment at absolute sincere and unquestioning face value. You get massive Reddit threads with thousands of replies where if anyone had checked the OP they’d have found the account was registered a month ago and has been stirring the same pot everywhere (or more likely since the recent-ish change, have a hidden post history) and could draw their own conclusions - but they don’t.
This is nothing new; you can search for these names and you’ll find people complaining about them way back as well. The difference, however, why you find them so incessant now is because back then there were voices on the other side of the spectrum as well, a balancing act if you will.
The fact is, most people who gave a shit to give nuanced enough takes on this forum left a while back, and moderation here just don’t care; a reason why they left in the first place. Look at old threads, all deleted or inactive accounts. Why would you volunteer your time to debate when you’re treated like a second class citizen?
Reddit thread (on the proton sub) of the same topic you linked had somewhat better discussion; so these days with with sophisticated bots taking over and you not knowing if the person you’re debating is even real, your best bet is to choose your battles and let go. Of course, one needs to keep their cognitive balance intact as not to become subject of, for the lack of better term, propaganda of a specific product, but it’s easier said than done.
Old discussion threads are still relevant, so stick to those, and reddit still sometimes have nuanced discussion if you stay away from r/privacy and sift through garbage on product specific subs. You can find genuine gems once in a while. Grapheneos forum I find is a bit better as well, but of course mostly what people talk about is the OS, so not really the same, but better than nothing. There are people like @/any1 here who I’ve find very very insightful, so it’s not all grim, but I don’t have much expectations that things are gonna get better here.
A person I know told me that creating bot accounts for Discourse forums is crazy easy. Creating Reddit accounts for bots is super hard in comparison.
But I think the narcissism of small differences might be the bigger factor (hopefully).
In general I also got the feeling that a few years ago the average person on here was more knowledgeable. Nowadays a lot of people use AI"translation tools" to write their whole posts.
This one one of the reason why the first few pists and comments of new accounts get approved by us first. You wouldn’t know how many spam gets stopped just with this barrier.
Ironically, if you read Yen’s interview, he says that’s exactly the reaction he expects from the community, so it’s not just this forum.
I think 2 things lead to this:
— People switch from free non-private services to private, often paid ones. For a while they enjoy feeling good about the decision, but that feeling fades and nothing new comes along, so disappointment sets in. They start switching between similar apps and shitposting about competitors.
— Privacy-focused companies are themselves responsible for how their communities talk. When you teach people to discuss software in emotional and ideological terms (“big tech steals your data”, etc), you feed the hysteria. One day those same people start shitposting about you.
I think for me, and probably for many other people too, some of the anger comes from the gap between expectations and reality. We understand the potential of these bigger companies with more resources (Proton, Brave, etc.) to do something truly radical and release incredible products that truly center privacy rights and the privacy community. Lots of smaller, less funded groups can release incredible products that have privacy (and security) at the core of their work, why can’t the group’s with more resources do it? We see companies like Brave and Proton often making decisions to appeal to the masses & that water down privacy in order to make a buck.
It irks me too, but the actual issue isn’t these companies themselves, it’s the global system of capitalism we exist under where businesses either grow or die, and most people are not willing or able to work for free. I try to remain grateful for the incredible projects that don’t chase money at all costs. The people who work in those projects are truly a blessing. I also remember that companies like Brave and Proton are big exactly because they chase money. They didn’t get rich by being 100% genuine and honest all the time and only focusing their efforts on people who use Linux and GOS. They would go bankrupt doing that.
Am I still disappointed we don’t have a Proton calendar that works offline or a drive client for Linux? You bet I am. Proton has the resources to do those things if they wanted to slow down their growth. At the end of the day the debate is between broader reach, or deeper quality and functionality. Within capitalism it’s difficult to do both at the same time. Proton is doing the work of getting more people off Google and Microsoft. They happen to have a top two product in mail & password manager, but that is just by luck that others haven’t caught them in those areas. They are not trying to be the best, they are trying to be the easiest for the average person to use.