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That's disappointing to see. I joined HN before that arbitration agreement was instated, and it somehow slipped past me until now that it was added.
If that agreement was present when I first joined, I might not have joined at all. It's blatantly out of step with HN's community in general, and it makes me lose a bit of respect for YCombinator.
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
Not sure this can work, but something similar did work.
Circa 2000 a French guy wrote a web page with some legal text and an e-mail address. The legal text said that writing to the e-mail address implied acceptation of a processing fee (about 10$ IIRC).
It went as intended: spam robots harvested the address, sent spam. The guy picked a spam e-mail that could be traced to a sender he could sue. He did and the judge ruled in his favour.
Can't find a reference now, but I remember seeing a scan of the court ruling.
haha, this reminds me of those posts you'd see on facebook all the time from uninformed users: """I do not give Facebook or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages or posts, both past and future. With this statement, I give notice to Facebook it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents. The content of this profile is private and confidential information. """
It's kind of funny when it's a big corporation doing it.
