Posted by Risse 22 hours ago
It's not a gotcha if you're inconsistent from an outsiders perspective, we're all doing the best we can with what little insight we have into reality.
So you're saying the majority of the people here who say they're leaving Mullvad, have:
1. Not heard of Bezos' funding of the Trump family, or don't use Amazon at all 2. Not heard of Zuckerberg/Meta's [insert countless despicable things here], or don't have Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp installed at all 3. Not heard of OpenAIs free pass on the Trump administration using their models for war purposes without limitations, or don't use OpenAI at all 4. And so forth?
Clearly, no. Because it has nothing to do with coming across information without obsessively staying up to date with every entity. The same people have come across much of the above information, yet continue not to act on it, despite most of them being magnitudes worse than this case.
Yes
>or it just a reflexive change of footing whenever you happen upon news like this?
No (only when my personal screening didn't already flag it)
>do you really switch
Yes, where it's feasible
I think that's what a lot of people in this thread are missing. There are alternatives to Mullvad, so it's pretty easy to take your money elsewhere if you're unhappy with where it's being spent right now.
The counter-reaction to the reaction is so dumb. If you think it's silly to boycott a company because of a co-founders political donations, fine. But it's just as silly to try to argue people into not boycotting. Live and let live.
What proves the point is that someone suggested moving to Proton, whose founder (not even co-founder AFAIK) is outwardly pro-MAGA. And comments calling that out are the ones that get downvoted. This shows people are just pretending to care.
It's not silly to boycott companies in general, but this specific case it's silly. Not because of the reason, but because boycotting only makes sense if it's very likely that an alternative is going to be better in the specific factor that instigates the boycott. In this case, it's not likely, you have no clue whether an alternative is going to have more or less $0.0x of your $1 going to people supporting far-right parties.
Especially when VPN companies are known to be some of the dodgiest tech companies in general. Mullvad is one of the most transparent ones.
No.
> is it just a reflexive change of footing whenever you happen upon news like this
Yes.
> do you really switch
Yes.
What is the implication here? That because I did not know that a percentage of the money I give a company went towards supporting a party whose I that I find disgusting, I should keep supporting them now that I do know?
I used to like Musk, now I see Tesla and am disgusted. Maybe he was always like this but the personal line for me was the salutes. I’m sure many others have lines as well.
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on this site. Please do review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, regardless of how divisive a topic may be or how provocative you feel someone else's comments are.
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on this site. Please do review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, regardless of how divisive a topic may be or how provocative you feel someone else's comments are.
Other than fuss about how to define left and right I haven't seen anything that qualifies as misrepresentation.
"Echoing" looks the same as "agreeeing" so that's hardly evidence of people failing to do enough research.
And yes I do actively switch products. I left the Windows ecosystem for Linux and I will leave Mullvad for whatever else pops up. So it goes.
Maybe companies in those kind of markets will simply bite the bullet and start marketing their products as for one side or for the other in politics instead of trying to be for everybody. Then they can lock-in strong goodwill from "their side", and stand on more certain footing. Or maybe most customers do not care as much as online activists.
It's like the meme of nuclear energy help with climate change and the answer is "I don't want to solutions, I want to abolish capitalism!"
As a basic example, youtube started pushing a LOT of anti-immigrant videos. I never watched them since after few minutes it's obvious that it is clear ragebait, but I keep getting them recommended without showing any interest in them and they're all clocking in anywhere from 300k to millions of views.
There is virtually no way to resist the temptation of being anti-immigrant/racist/whatnot when you see abusive behavior exploiting the good will of the european union especially when there is state level abuse to extract additional funding from the shared support pool. This being extremely unpopular gives motivation to keep all of this under wraps as much as possible which only fuels the fire when "information" is made available on social media platforms where you benefit from blowing this out of proportion and then if you try to question it you are labeled which naturally breeds resentment.
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Scrolled for few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6-zhxpNsVQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARKZMX4iGZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmlI4ICp-OI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX-IKLSFH_I