Hacker News

points by imagetic 8 hours ago | 0 comments

I'm amazed anyone on HN is willing to run Muse that isn't a FB employee or tech journalist.

I don't trust Facebook or Zuckerberg, but I also don't really care about my own personal privacy from large corporations. I will use whatever is best/cheapest, generally. And I say this as someone who hates advertising and adtech.

[–] cautiouscat 8 hours ago

Or GrokBot that isn’t an Elon employee.

[–] enraged_camel 7 hours ago

I haven't used GrokBot, but I have been sort of amazed by how popular it is. I don't have the numbers but even my friends who otherwise dislike Elon have at least given it a try, and several of them use it daily.

It makes me want to check it out just to see if there's some magic UX juice they put in there. Then again I also don't want to take any risks heh.

[–] joshgachnang 7 hours ago

I've also noticed anything related to GrokBot gets massively boosted on X, which is probably serving as a huge marketing channel. Plus anyone with a Cursor subscription gets access.

[–] skinfaxi 4 hours ago

Cursor started to push it recently, too. They put a popup when I logged in to tell me about it.

[–] mcmcmc 7 hours ago

Most people probably wouldn’t cop to the real reason they use the CSAM and non-consensual nudes generator

[–] nl 7 hours ago

I know someone who isn't an Elon fan at all but has switched completely from Dot to Grokbot. Most of their company has done the same and now they are contemplating cancelling their OpenAI plans (they still use Claude heavily, but Duet isn't available on Teams plans).

[–] lavezzi 4 hours ago

Can you name the company to give the rest of us a heads up?

[–] HDThoreaun 7 hours ago

Ive never had a meta account. Zuckerberg still has all my data and knows everything about me. At some point people decide its not worth hiding from mega corps

[–] ipsum2 8 hours ago

That's because HN is an echo chamber. Plenty of tech people use and enjoy Muse/Instagram/Facebook, but the would be downvoted if they expressed it.

[–] baq 7 hours ago

I disagree. I would gladly hear why they think there are no privacy concerns or why they don’t care about their privacy so much. I find it hard to understand.

[–] nl 6 hours ago

I'm a long time HN user. I work on privacy tech (as in I'm paid to work on it).

I have a Facebook account and use Instagram.

My reasons are many:

I believe it should be my choice what happens to my data, and don't particularly care if Meta has the parts I share with them.

I don't believe advertising is intrinsically evil, and in fact I think it's probably been a net-good for society.

I think Meta is a better steward of my data than ISPs or telecoms.

[–] saikia81 4 hours ago

what about the abuse of advertisements to cause civil unrest, abusing data to control political elections, advertisements that break consumer laws. Facebook has shown it cares more for money than being a steward. Don't see how you can trust them.

[–] nl 54 minutes ago

I'm aware there are downsides.

I'm old enough to have lived without the internet. I'll take this over that anytime.

> Facebook has shown it cares more for money than being a steward. Don't see how you can trust them.

It's precisely this love of money that make me trust them. They value what they get from my data, so they do their best to keep it to themselves.

That's much better than ISP (for example) that sell raw traffic data.

[–] dovin 7 hours ago

I use Muse to read X for me with a burner account, since I want to follow certain topics but don't want to use X. It posts digests a couple times a week to a discord channel I gave it access to. It's fine and I think there are plenty of ways of using it that give essentially nothing to Meta in the way of data. Still I wouldn't recommend it to any of my non-technical friends, since I think the natural progression with these things is to just connect more and more parts of your life to them.

[–] Karrot_Kream 7 hours ago

Almost all of my tech worker friends use Instagram. It's almost universally used. I never talk about it because anything positive about any Meta property on this site gets downvoted. It's been like this for years and only gotten worse over time.

[–] BeetleB 6 hours ago

I said the same for years after smartphones came around.

In my book, if you use a Smartphone that's either Android or iPhone, I can't take seriously the claim that you value your privacy.

Privacy is a continuum.