antitrust

That's an insightful analysis.

For me, the question is knowing what exactly I'd do differently. On a lot of crucial points, I don't know and don't know how to find out (except experimentation).

The weird thing about online communities is that at some point they transition from being promotional opportunities owned by the promoter to online communities owned by the users and promoters alike.

Part of the role of Reddit, HN and other social media is to motivate you, the collected developers out there, to write your own version and fix all the problems you see in the system (software + admins + "culture") as it is now.

That includes me. Maybe after the wedding, kid's baseball game, co-worker's going away party, and stuff this weekend.

Another option is a middle path:

It will turn out, how it turns out.

Sounds tautological, but it preserves the idea that multiple real world forces determine the outcome, not wishing or feeling. That might save us from paranoia.

I have learned distrust. I distrust anything that makes me feel good without having achieved something that merits that sensation.

Alcohol is like being wrapped in a comforter. You are warm, the world is soft, and like a child, you trust in everything turning out alright.

This has no relationship to the real world.

While I have enjoyed alcohol many times, and both drunk to excess and been a social drinker, I find that it distracts me. It distracts from what I should be paying attention to, while I'm busy feeling good and safe.

Once, deep in a meditative trance, I channeled Perl. My friends took me to the hospital after I refused to stop speaking in regular expressions and hashes of hashes.

Keep pushing, Google. We're all waiting. Is the future of Gmail that it will be manipulative corporate bloatware, or a cool hacker innovation that changed email by streamlining it? Looks more like the former today.

Your second mistake might be assuming that rationality, logicality and common sense are one and the same.

> the structure of a persuasive essay is a non-fancy, workaday model that works just fine.

I agree with this, but would like to point out that grey-area's point was that there are other forms which fit other uses:

> There are various ways of structuring an argument - as a dialogue, as thesis, antithesis then synthesis, or treating it as an oration like Cicero's with 6 parts ending in a peroration.

The five-paragraph comp works very well for a standard argument.

Anything that doesn't fit the thesis requirement, like a list or synthesis, might not do so well with that format.

> the habit people have of making a list (as the OP does) as if this is a substitute for properly structuring their thoughts - to me that's a cop-out and not far above no structure at all.

Speaking as a language professional:

If there's no direct association between the parts, present them as a list.

Otherwise, you're going to impose narrative structure that does not add meaning and thus is extraneous.

> I object to a huge, creepy advertising company having that much access to me and my data, I think it’s unwise to use many proprietary, hard-to-replace services in such important roles, and I think it’s downright foolish to tie that much of your data and functionality into proprietary services run by one company in one account...

He makes a good point.

Absolute power gets abused absolutely.

Unless the person to whom the power is handed is some kind of Zen master, it's likely they'll use that power for personal agenda.

The groups they like will become elites. The ones they don't will get lined up against walls and shot.

That's just how it is.

Even though Google says, "Don't be evil," they aren't Zen masters.