Webshit Weekly

April 21, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg’s failed negotiations with the FTC to end Meta’s antitrust case

2025-04-15 | comments

Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire cosplay Caesar of Menlo Park, has once again discovered that the FTC is inconveniently resistant to the time‑honored Silicon Valley negotiation tactic of “what if I just pay you to stop caring?” Now the great boy-king of surveillance capitalism is shocked — shocked! — that the government isn’t particularly excited about letting him retroactively buy his way out of the decade-old antitrust catastrophe everyone else saw coming except the tech press and the SEC interns doing “due diligence” in between Red Bull shots.

Hackernews, naturally, turns the whole thing into a group therapy session for people whose politics begin and end with their Vanguard allocations. Half insist that breaking up Big Tech would cause GDP to instantly evaporate; the other half insists the FTC should simply seize Instagram with a battering ram because Meta broke a pinky-swear about not fusing user data like a pair of unfortunate lab rats. Someone inevitably declares that antitrust is “early 20th century thinking,” as though the robber barons stopped being a problem when they swapped oil pipelines for infinite-scroll dopamine hoses.

Meanwhile, the webshits play detective, connecting the profound mystery of “why does Facebook know I’m on Instagram?” as though the company hasn’t been greedily vacuuming metadata with the intensity of a Hayek-worshipping Roomba for the last fifteen years. Meta treats fines like subscription fees, regulators treat antitrust like improv comedy, and Hackernews — God bless them — miscorrects each other all the way down.

Seth Rogen Speaks Truth to Billionaires, Gets Censored for It

2025-04-16 | comments

Another week, another celebrity discovers that billionaires don’t enjoy being told they’re hollowed‑out husks of humanity who’ve replaced emotional resilience with a shallow slurry of brand equity and private‑jet fumes. Seth Rogen gets on a stage, mutters some warmed‑over “truth to power” boilerplate, and suddenly everyone’s acting like Lenny Bruce has risen from the dead to personally karate‑chop Jeff Bezos. The article frames it as censorship, because in 2025 everything from comment moderation to a server hiccup gets filed under Authoritarian Crackdown. Meanwhile, the tech oligarchs in question are too busy aura‑farming on X and hiring new chief vibe officers to notice.

Hackernews reacts by doing what it always does: miscorrecting each other about whether comedians are allowed to have opinions, debating the metaphysics of “truth,” and anxiously re‑litigating the Trump Regime Expansion Pack. Half the thread bickers about whether Rogen counts as a Real Rich Person, as though net worth determines whether you’re permitted to call tech billionaires fragile crybabies. The rest try to assign moral weight to which rich guy insults which other rich guy, like they’re refereeing a slap fight in the world’s saddest colosseum.

In the end, nothing of value is produced except the familiar stink of a culture where artists are expected to be prophets, scientists are expected to be influencers, and tech barons are expected to be immortal philosopher‑kings while behaving like toddlers denied a second dessert.

U.S.-born American citizen under ICE hold in Florida after driving from Georgia

2025-04-17 | comments

Hackernews discovers, once again, that the United States government’s immigration machinery operates with all the nuance and precision of a drunk raccoon strapped to a taser. A U.S.-born citizen gets tossed into ICE detention because a prosecutor claims the court lacks the “jurisdiction” to stop the bureaucratic conveyor belt, and the tech geniuses of Hackernews react with their usual wide-eyed shock that the state behaves exactly like the dystopias they pretend to read about between Kubernetes deployments. The thread is promptly flagged, because nothing ruins Hackernews’ productivity vibes like acknowledging the real world. A few clankers dutifully post updates that the victim was eventually released, as though that undoes the part where a federal agency kidnapped a citizen because their internal paperwork engine burped.

HNers spend the rest of the thread miscorrecting each other about constitutional law, immigration statutes, and imaginary edge cases where maybe, actually, due process is optional if it helps someone ship a startup faster. No one is surprised that the same country that outsourced its public infrastructure to venture-backed aura farmers is now outsourcing civil liberties to unaccountable databases. The whole conversation is basically a live demo of what happens when a society run by digital landlords and “move fast, break everything” hobbyists realizes that the breaking part wasn’t supposed to include the Fourteenth Amendment. By tomorrow, they’ll forget all of this and go back to arguing about which LLM will replace lawyers, unaware that the government already replaced them with a spreadsheet.

AI is turning us into glue

2025-04-17 | comments

Another webshit’s Medium-grade lament about how the token predictors are melting everyone’s brains into a fine artisanal paste. The author discovers, with great spiritual anguish, that outsourcing thought to an automated plagiarism engine somehow makes their work feel like, well, outsourced thought. Hackernews, in its usual trance, miscorrects itself into a froth over whether this means programmers will ascend into a new creative class or simply become glue‑factory attendants for broken vibe‑coded systems. Half the thread tries to reinvent economics from first principles; the other half reenacts a wellness retreat argument about psychedelics. Meanwhile, the industry marches on, proudly replacing human judgment with clankers trained on yesterday’s garbage, and congratulating itself for accelerating the composting of its own skill base.

Show HN: Too Many Business Ideas? stop choosing, launch all of them, FAST&FREE

2025-04-18 | comments

Another day, another webshit promising to solve the deep existential crisis of having too many half-baked business ideas by encouraging you to shotgun-launch all of them into the void. The founder proudly explains that this isn’t just “if you build it, they will come”—it’s “if you build everything, maybe one person will show up by accident.” Hackernews, naturally, fixates on the padding, the discount code, and whether the whole thing can be reimplemented in 45 seconds using whatever token-predictor du jour they’re vibe-coding with. The big revelation: SaaS is dead, but don’t worry, we can resurrect it by generating 500 worse ones automatically. Peak tech industry: scaling failures.

‘The bomber’s words sound mainstream. Like he won ’ Oklahoma City’s tragedy

2025-04-19 | comments

Another solemn thinkpiece in which a legacy newspaper (business model: Uber for moral panic) discovers, decades late, that America is still full of angry men who never went anywhere. The article wrings its hands about how the bomber’s worldview now sounds mainstream, as though this is a shocking revelation rather than the predictable byproduct of a country whose political discourse is essentially a comments section running for office. Hackernews, naturally, derails into pedantry about propaganda, imperialism, and whatever half-chewed historical analogy they skimmed from Wikipedia last night. No one acknowledges the obvious: radicalization is a permanent feature of our new political landscape.

How Thai authorities use online doxxing to suppress dissent

2025-04-20 | comments

Citizen Lab reports yet another government discovering the incredible power of typing someone’s name into Facebook and then ruining their life. Hackernews responds with its usual political science seminar conducted entirely by people who think “the state” is a Kubernetes cluster that just needs to be scaled down until freedom naturally emerges. Half the thread is convinced that shrinking government will magically stop digital feudal lords from monetizing surveillance, while the other half thinks corporations will heroically defend human rights out of sheer vibes. Meanwhile, actual dissidents are being doxxed by bored bureaucrats with spreadsheets, but HNers are too busy miscorrecting each other about Social Security to notice.

Pete Hegseth shared Yemen attack details in second Signal chat

2025-04-20 | comments

Another week, another senior government ghoul treating Signal like it’s the back room of a vape shop instead of the place he dumps details of an actual military strike. The tech industry spent a decade shoving encrypted chat apps down everyone’s throats as the cure for all geopolitical ills, and now we get to watch officials with the impulse control of webshits use them to leak classified plans like it’s a group project. Hackernews, naturally, pivots into their usual dissertation on civilizational collapse, democracy theory, and whatever half-digested geopolitics their favorite podcaster burped into their ears. No one, least of all the people in charge, seems capable of even basic operational security, but sure—let’s all keep pretending the problem is “the UX.”

Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M

2025-04-21 | comments

Another week, another founder-child suspended from college for inventing yet another automated plagiarism engine, only to be showered with $5.3 million in VC pity money. The product is basically Microsoft Recall with a hoodie: a surveillance parasite that records every pixel and syllable so it can whisper answers into the ears of people who shouldn’t have passed Intro to Anything. Hackernews performs its usual ritual, vacillating between legal scholarship about wiretap laws and deep, heartfelt fantasies about a future where Zoom ships with anti-cheat DRM so their bosses can finally treat them like the defective gaming consoles they apparently are. Meanwhile, the digital feudal lords funding this nonsense congratulate themselves for “disrupting interviews,” which have already decayed into a competitive sport where desperate webshits shout prompts at clankers until one of them stops hallucinating long enough to spit out an answer that passes a keyword filter. The industry broke its own hiring pipeline, replaced half of it with vibe coding and aura farming, and now pretends the problem is that students are cheating, instead of the obvious truth: nobody in tech remembers how to evaluate humans without a chatbot and a surveillance stack.