Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store

Apologies for the extreme swearing that ensues.

Wow, I would have hoped for better support from the HN community. Instead there are apologists after apologists. So what if Epic is big. Really, seriously shouldn't we have had alternative app stores available form the official ones. Why is this even a point of debate? All the time we hear stories of people one of our own getting fucked by these app stores and their lordship and now that we have an opportunity to make some noise, this is the response? Fuck that. Maybe we deserve these lords.

Fuck your security and fuck your walled gardens. Fucking no alternative browser allowed. Fuck that, fuck you apple and fuck you google. Fuck your monopoly and chokehold on the devs.

I truly believe apple pays people to comb through HN and down vote any comment critical of apple. The simple fact is that apple has done more than any other company in the history of computing to quash the freedom to control your own computing devices.

It is impossible to fight apple in the way we fought microsoft years ago - by building out a good opensource ecosystem. The entire reason for the app store is to stop that from happening.

HN's great flaw is that it has been allowed to be overrun by huge numbers of people from large organizations.

There are tens of thousands of people from FAANG/YC acting as self-interested agents of their organizations without any kind of disclosure or counter-measures. These are, in effect, massive voting rings and propaganda efforts which are supposedly not allowed on HN.

It's obvious how this results in the total dominance of FAANG/YC content, and how it skews the public conversation in Silicon Valley in their favor.

HN could take a variety of counter-measures but they don't. Maybe because users would quickly point out the hypocrisy of ending FAANG voting rings/propaganda while permitting the YC voting rings/propaganda.

HN is now the premier mouthpiece for tech corporate interests.

It would be great for the world if someone were to create a replacement that was designed to prevent this problem, while preserving what is good about HN. Or if HN took action even if it was 5+ years late.

Many have tried. There's a simple reason that you glance at but don't directly confront in your post. The "voting rings" you outline are actually a huge constituency, thanks to the outlandish concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of these few companies (I mean FAANG - YC has a huge and unique network but I don't suspsect it's anywhere close to the same scale in dollars or current employees). No site can keep out so many skilled and knowledgeable techies and expect to keep up the level of quality that HN provides. This is one of those cases where culture flows pretty clearly from material reality - you can't have a better site until the titans are dethroned and dismembered. So, if you want a better HN, don't build an HN clone! Build political power that will target monopolies, monopsonies, and anything "too big to fail" for levelling and redistribution.

It is simply not true that many have tried. HN has certainly not tried to solve this problem. They seem to be focused on much smaller problems, like preventing handfuls of friends from upvoting a GitHub project at the same time or Viagra spam.

As an example, HN could start requiring users to link their LinkedIn accounts. Every comment could show the user's current employer (if it's a major one) without revealing the user's real name. HN cold also disregard votes for google.com submissions for Google employees, etc. These steps alone would reduce the problem drastically.

No one would like to link their LinkedIn account, of course, but most people in tech have one and could do so in seconds.

That's an obvious solution but there are many other possibilities as well. And it would still be possible to maintain the ability for anonymous throwaway accounts to be used.