I know a couple of guys like you in my local activist community, who take a very hostile "I know the truth and you're all fools!" attitude, despite the fact that their audience is mostly very sympathetic to most of their assertions. We know spying on the Internet takes place; HN is full of cantankerous old Internet geeks who've seen, first-hand, plenty of examples of the state (whatever state you may choose, as it happens all over the world) behaving unethically on the Internet, spying on people and punishing people for things that shouldn't be crimes.
But, your paranoid approach is counter-productive. You might as well be working for the people you claim to be afraid of, for all the good you do (negative good; you're convincing people that the folks who believe the government is spying are all paranoid nutjobs who scream at anyone who has the gall to mention other possible explanations).
So, let's review:
1. Just because spying has taken place, and is currently taking place, and may even have the complicity of facebook in that spying, it does not mean that facebook is running a botnet to steal advertiser dollars. The simplest explanation is that facebook looks the other way while others run the botnets. facebook wins (a lot, as long as most advertisers don't know it's happening), botnet owner wins (a little), and the advertiser loses. But, there are other plausible explanations, including incompetence.
2. When you paint things in a "Either you accept my theory in its entirety, or you're all idiots", you force people to choose a side. Nobody wants to be on the same side as an asshole, so you force them to choose the other side. You make people who may even agree with you (to a greater or lesser degree) to begin to formulate plausible reasons for why you're wrong about the crazier stuff you're spouting...further convincing themselves that you're entirely wrong. The best you can hope for is people ignore you and don't have the chance to be inoculated against your ideas; having you as their first exposure to these concepts guarantees they will be less likely to believe them in the future, even if they come from a more credible source. Humans are funny creatures.
Thus, I would point out that there are some really naive and stupid people on HN that have zero grasp of effective argument, persuasion, and even basic logic.
You're right. It was an unproductive method of describing the behavior I was seeing (and was too easy to interpret as saying the person is schizophrenic rather than exhibiting behavior I associate with schizophrenia). It was also insensitive to schizophrenics.
In my defense, schizophrenia runs in my family, and I'm very familiar with it...I don't think of it as an insult. But that's a local custom in my family that I shouldn't think follows in the rest of the world.
>But, your paranoid schizophrenic approach is counter-productive.
Really, now I am a paranoid schizophrenic?
Just because I make claims which are readily confirmed and were completely available in the media - even the EFF filed suit on the AT&T events...
Yet, for some reason, it is my responsibility to educate everyone every single time someone new comes along who hasn't been following these things closely.
Now I am a paranoid schizophrenic?
Also, its a strawman to focus on my tone, rather than content. You're trying really hard to be overly pedantic and, frankly, an asshole.
What I am witnessing is someone trying to inform people, while effectively censoring himself by delivering in such a way as impedes its delivery.
You obviously have a vested interest in seeing your "message" be received, so stop ignoring what people are telling you about your tone and change it. Figure out what it is that people do listen to, or else you have no one but yourself to blame when they take issue with your tone.
To wit: Your tone is defensive. Pejoratives and cursing undermine your expression. What you are effectively telling people is that your thoughts are not important enough to merit self-restraint. Detailed explanations following assertions are also helpful.
FWIW, I work in the performance marketing industry and, IMO, the most complicity facebook could be said to have in this issue is in not placing a sufficiently high priority on preventing bots from clicking on their ads. Even if it is a sizable project there, they represent such a large target that the difficulty of the job becomes much greater. I see no salacious story here, other than a company found itself unable to optimize a campaign into profitability, which I think says more about them than facebook. Ho hum, find a different traffic source and move on.
Thanks - Ill take the constructive criticism on my tone.
However, I will point out that with respect to your comment on FB's complicit actions due to the daunting nature of the problem, this does not take into account their other actions of a 24K ransom on the domain.
Everyone can argue in any direction they want - but neither me nor anyone else is really going to know until we get further down this path...
He's not arguing with you, he can't be using a strawman. He's just pointing out that other people will be distracted by your tone, making them ignore your (mostly correct) message.
And there are some that actually know what they're talking about in terms if intelligence agencies but choose not to indulge in idle conspiracy hypothesizing. The real operations aren't something that the people with actual knowledge would ever discuss. Those that do claim conspiracies are often ill informed or just have read too many spy novels.
