> Outside of the HN crowd, I don't think the average consumer thinks of privacy as a differentiator.
Frankly, I think this community is the exact same. Pretend to care about privacy, but convenience comes first. Like, I think the AI fad here is a perfect demonstration. I dunno.
This is the issue with trying to derive market insights from an upvote based community.
Unfortunately, people do not say what they truly think when internet points (formal sanctions in the sociological sense) are at stake.
They instead bend their commenting to align with the performative moralistic aspirations of the most extreme members of the group. Here it presents as an almost hysterical level of privacy absolutism over even trivial things at the expense of everything else. Reading HN you would think there’s a huge market of people living off the grid in a mosquito coast sense. But it’s a mirage.
You see this in tons of subreddits as well. Humans do weird things when you get us in large groups and gamify the interactions.
I think it's possible to avoid, at least if you have the determination.
For example, I chose a real name account intentionally partly because I was afraid that a pseudonym might encourage me to just go on typing nonsense that most intelligent folks could see through, yet avoid pointing out due to game theoretical reasons.
Sometimes it's extremely advantageous because I occasionally find myself the only HN user actually engaging in a substantive discussion in decently upvoted posts.
Where literally ever other comment or comment chain in the post is either not replied to or consists of just folks writing platitudes one after another, even when the initial comment is substantive.
Sometimes I get extra lucky and some challenger appears trying to knock the arguments down a peg, which provides convenient tests of veracity.
But this does require staking some real world credibility to get that boost in willingness in others to engage substantively.
Frankly, I think this community is the exact same. Pretend to care about privacy, but convenience comes first. Like, I think the AI fad here is a perfect demonstration. I dunno.