I'd call it just another vendor lock-in. Frankly I'm sick of the AWS clone army constantly preaching that spinning up an ECx instance is a better answer than learning "hard stuff" or looking at me like I have a dick growing out of my forehead for not using AWS. Generally it seems to make people lazy and dependent. I don't use it, and will not recommend it because I care about my customers' businesses. Every other 'benevolent' service I can think of which scaled up like that has become a malignant tumor I wish I had never had dealings with. I guess I just won't trust Napoleonic companies again, no matter how nice they may seem. Market share discrimination? lol maybe, but still less fascist than how we rate e-commerce risks, no?
Maybe not many products that end up on your doorstep, but they dominate in supply chain management. It's a very high and expensive barrier for any startup who would want to compete with Amazon.
I think some of the fundamental shortcomings could and will be replaced/fixed by decentralization/distribution which is actively being worked on with projects like ipfs and ethereum.
Yes besides I would drop all of them. I've been mulling over lately how tired I am of dealing with their behavior: Spying on me, Removing features I need, Dropping support for hardware I use, Anti-user defaults, User lock-in schemes, Intentionally converting users into addicts, turning products into services, restricting my use of my software and media.
Weird, I don't really use any of those companies. I switched away from Google (although I guess I still use Android and Maps, so not entirely), I don't own anything Apple makes, I don't buy things or rent services from Amazon, and I haven't used anything Microsoft in years.
I sometimes use Facebook to talk to non-close friends, although I do use Whatsapp daily, so I guess that counts too.
All in all, I don't think it's impossible to escape at least one of them.
I actually finally managed to divorce most of my data (apart from search) from google. I'm running LineageOS without gapps, using microG for the play services. Geolocalisation is done with a service provided by mozilla (which I trust a lot more), and it's been working great for now. For the maps app, I use OSMand, and eventually, I hope to use my own backend for GCM (though that will require some changes to microG).
My contacts and calendar are synchronized with a webdav server called radicale that I self-host. I also self-host my own mail with a postfix+dovecot setup.
Really, the last remaining google service I use is google search. And I've hit a brick wall there. The alternatives just suck too much. DDG's search result has been consistently terrible, and while I still hope qwant will one day turn into a great product, right now the search result are still significantly poorer than google's.
Android doesn't count with a setup similar to mine, because it's all open source and doesn't communicate with google outside of expectations :).
Except apparently, Google, Facebook and Microsoft [1]. If you have any apps installed then probably AWS also indirectly or maybe even fulfillment that you don't know is coming from one of their FCs
That's not even mentioning that you're tracked across the world by them even if you don't go there directly.
I think the only person that doesn't use any of those and is still on the internet directly is RMS [2]
The idea that you can actually live in modern society and not touch one of the big 5 is misguided.
Yeah, article is interesting if you only look at end user products and services, but there's practically no internet without the server infrastructures provided by Amazon, Google and MS.
I tried to achieve the same. But still need to use Skype for some work contacts. And for first time in many years I felt in love with a MS product: VSCode (well it is coded by a very talented sub branch from MS in Switzerland).
So nowadays I'm coding Linux production software on a Mac with a Microsoft editor ;)
I hadn't either but this year signed up for Office 365. Outlook is fantastic on iOS/OSX, OneDrive is much better implemented than Google Drive/Dropbox and OneNote is much more useful to me than Evernote.
Microsoft's release cadence is also fantastic. They are constantly releasing updates all of which contain features/bug fixes that are voted on by users. You can't ask for anything more than that.
I got Win 10 and I quite like it. Apart from the start menu. And the adverts on the start menu. And how slow cortana is. And how slow search is. And adverts in explorer. And adverts for Edge. And how one drive crashes every 5 minutes. And how it won't log me on 50% of the time. And how control panel is somehow split into seven or eight different apps. And the random HD thrashing.
Definitely Amazon. As a customer from New Zealand, their online shopping site is almost impossible to purchase from (any item I look at does not ship here), and some of their practices are so misleading as to be illegal in my country ('one click' buy X at price $Y, which when billed then includes another $Z for freight).
Why blame a shop which is not really operating in or near your country? It's also not NZ law they need to follow. But I would also stay away from one buy IMHO... you can cancel always (if no digital goods) and you are fast enough.
Because all of my other favourite shopping sites (specifically AliExpress) that don't operate in or near my country are able to communicate what I can and can't buy, and clearly show me the shipping price on the product page (i.e. no other click through, or worse, not telling me I can't buy it till the bloody checkout screen) just fine.
Actually whilst I'm having a bitch about the abysmal user experience on Amazon, here's another: Don't let me fill my cart with things I can't buy (after I already selected my shipping address before even started to add items), and then tell me hey this item can't be shipped to your location, which I then remove, only to be told hey this item also can't be shipped to your location. Repeat for all the items. Just tell me all the god damn items that can't be shipped at once, or shit how about this for a trip... maybe don't let me add them in the first place. /rant
Well I agree that the Amazon shipping information for international orders is not very clear. At least you can ship some things internationally... many other shops refuse to ship internationally altogether
I'm surprised that only 10% of people would drop Apple first. I would have guessed that way more than 10% of people don't own a single Apple product. I wonder if maybe the NYT's readership is biased toward Apple owners?
(My ranking: I'd drop Apple and MSFT easily since I don't use anything by either company. FB would be easy to drop but I do use it and would miss it a little. Amazon and Google would be significantly more work to let go of.)
Again. You're continuing to draw conclusions from poor source data.
A New York Times poll that possibly has only been posted here is always going to skew more towards Apple users who are typically more affluent and higher educated.
lots of tech readers are Mac Fanboys, personally I can't stand mac, or windows. I'd get rid of FB first though, it's less valuable to society as a whole, then Apple, then MS, then Amazon, then Google.
I don't own an Apple product, and have never owned an Apple product. My work is 100% Apple and issued me a MBP, or else I could have said I've never even used an Apple product in the last ~15 years.
The same could be said of Microsoft. They could completely disappear and I wouldn't even have to shift to less desirable alternatives.
I don't actually think anything in my life would directly change. I don't run windows, use azure, own an Xbox, etc... but do use a computer heavily, deploy to cloud infrastructure often, and own a modern game console.
I think mostly service providers would be affected.
I don't want to 'drop' Google, but I distrust them enough to want a escape plan, should things get bad. Thing is, they provide so much stuff, I don't know how I could possible ever migrate away.
I don't use any Apple stuff, except vary rarely iTunes for music purchases, because I've still got credit there from ~5yrs ago.
Amazon have little to no presence in Australia currently, but that could change.
I'd love to get away from Facebook, but as previously discussed[1], my nooby friends are the main thing holding me back.
Microsoft seem to have mostly picked up their game in recent years, so I have no problem with sticking with them. That said, I refused to fully integrate like I have with Google (mail, calendar, etc.), because their products just don't seem to work as well.
This was interesting. It made me think about which services each provider has that I personally would really miss if they were to suddenly dissappear tomorrow, and the only one that would have a big negative effect would be google maps.
I don't use facebook at all. I can count the things I've ordered on amazon (in all 30+ years of my life) on one hand. I don't use microsoft or apple products unless I'm forced to because of some work related project. And this isn't even out of any crazy principles or anything. I simply like linux distros better than apple/msft. I use an android phone but mainly just the phone functionality personally (i.e. like a good ol nokia + gmaps).
Funny, I would of thought it would have effected me personally a lot more, especially me being a software developer and all. But honestly it would make my life a lot easier, then cross-platform would be just linux :)
As someone who doesn't particularly like social networking sites, and especially dislikes Facebook compared to other social networks... I'd drop Facebook first. Heck, I only joined because I had to in order to add a page for a business I was working with.
Apple I could drop pretty easily too. An iPhone is nice, but it's not exactly the be all and end all. Any old Android phone could work well too.
Amazon... personally I'd be able to drop it easily, though most people would have more trouble there. That's because nowadays the products I mostly buy from there are computer accessories and games, and the latter is under serious competition from the likes of Steam, various digital download stores on consoles and even the companies themselves selling boxed versions.
Still can't imagine how people buy food on these sites. I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered? The supermarkets here are both pretty cheap and within walking distance.
Microsoft would be tough, simply because Microsoft Office is really important to me, and I'm really used to Windows at this point.
Google is arguably the toughest one to drop. Why? Mix of services needed (it's damn hard to promote a website about certain subjects without YouTube nowadays, and Gmail is very convenient) and the fact their alternatives are just nowhere near as good for a search engine. Which is depressing given how far downhill Google's own search results have gone recently...
> Still can't imagine how people buy food on these sites. I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered? The supermarkets here are both pretty cheap and within walking distance.
I sometimes buy groceries on those sites, but not all of it; only the things I don't need immediately but will soon (and if it doesn't have weirdly high pricing on it). I also usually use Prime Now and not Amazon.com.
> I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered?
As a foreigner, Amazon ( and others ) offers food that is simply not accessible in the local supermarket.
All the food that requires a trip to a larger supermarket or a specific shop ?
For example, my last buy was some sort of pasta that is difficult to find in London. I'm 100% certain I could find it in some Italian shop. I'm 80% certain at least 1 of the major supermarket stock at their largest store. To find out, I would need to explore the city. I don't want that pasta enough to dedicate a whole week-end to search for it. Alternatively, I can use internet and the first results are generally a shop that offers delivery. Again I don't want to dedicate a significant part of my we to go to that shop to buy 4 GBP worth of pasta.
I stopped using Facebook and Twitter for a few months. Once the initial pains of withdrawal subsided, I couldn't even remember that was something I wanted to check. Don't need either one of them.
Fascinating to see that people choose to drop fb first in most cases. I'm wondering how many are considering WhatsApp as part of fb. In my case I could drop fb and Instagram tomorrow. WhatsApp? That'd be really really really hard to just drop out of touch with family or force them to install something else.
Pretty easy to just switch to Telegram. There are tons of messaging apps that use phone number as identity. Signal, WeChat (I think?), Allo, Hike to name a few.
I ranked in order of how easy it would be to get equivalent services elsewhere.
Amazon is a particularly good ecommerce site, but by no means alone in its class, and there are plenty of IaaS providers. (Getting locked in to AWS specific products is a bad idea anyway).
Microsoft products already have superior competitors on the marketplace. Retooling and retraining the entire business IT world will cost something, but it needs to happen anyway.
People have been trying to replace Facebook since it started; some new entrant will supplant it overnight.
No one is really competing with Apple on quality. I think it would take a long time for someone to replace its offerings with equivalently polished products, if it ever even happens (the demand for cheap stuff might be so strong that Apple is only viable because of brand inertia). I'd miss it.
Alphabet is unmatched in search, drive, email, and Bell Labs-style R&D moonshots. I doubt it's repeatable outside of the specific time and place from which it emerged.
> No one is really competing with Apple on quality.
I would dare say that Microsoft is encroaching on this slowly but surely. Between the Surface, Surface book, the upcoming niche desktop PC, and air-esque laptop, they are steadily coming up with compelling offerings that are eating into Apple's space.
Google's Pixel devices are also squeezing Apple, though mostly in the mobile market.
From the perspective of what the impact would be if these companies disappear:
Apple would be the easiest to lose. They mostly just design high end consumer products that we don't particularly need and the gap could be filled by others. Foxconn would have to find another design studio to outsource to.
Hardest would be MS. The impact wouldn't be immediate but there would be a made scramble to replace all sorts of business software (internal and external) to other platforms. There would also be some massive hardware compatibility issues to deal with while doing so. I'd quit my job and make bank "porting" c# projects to mono, maybe even do some win32 to wine work.
Of course that depends on how much you use the online services of any of the companies too. The only impact on me would be the loss of gmail, but I'd get over it pretty quick.
1. FB (because it doesn't serve any really important meaningful purpose... I much prefer reddit),
2. Apple: Because I hate apple products and their closed walled gardens when it comes to building apps and things (I'm android/linux desktop user).
3. MS: DOn't much use any of their products anymore, but did for a long time, and if I were to leave linux I'd probably go back to windows, since I like custom built computers.
4. Amazon: Love amazon, great deals - only place I shop, but if they didn't exist I'd probably find somewhere else using google.
5. Alphabet: Self-driving cars, android, youtube, gmail, search (I've tried bing, etc... but no other search provider gives the quality of results -- esp for coding questions), and they're even my isp: Google FIBER... so yeah this one would be a hard one to sever for me.
I kind of don't understand why people would drop these, who else would take over? I realize you don't want monopolies, want competition to bring out innovation. But at the same what else do you have left from the internet unless your life isn't already heavily integrated with these services.
edit: I don't have an Apple product myself. Though the build quality is nice, it's expensive (and I am poor) also never used/could be confusing to use iOS/Mac OS.
Use Gmail... but you can use hotmail (microsoft), Yahoo (yikes). Chrome browser (google) ... Youtube (google) ahh you can use Vimeo... Don't use Facebook (don't have friends) though their marketing/advertising for a business is great.
I'm interested how reddit of all things acts as a replacement for Facebook.
What do you use for IMing, group chats, organising events and sharing jokes (memes?) between friends? I'd imagine those are the main use cases of FB for most people. Nobody I know cares in the slightest about the news feed, it's just private groups and messenger.
Iming --I use hangouts, mostly I only chat w/ wife.. Group chats--Slack, and only my dev team. Events: EventBright, or Meetup.com.. I only read the newsfeed on FB, don't use it for much else...I did just recently start using FB Messenger as my sms, and switch to that for some IM'ing but there's a million different IM apps so not like they couldn't be replaced easily enough.
For me, the hard choice was whether to drop Facebook or Apple first, and then whether to drop Microsoft or Google last. I don't really use either Facebook or Apple (or Amazon either, I guess, but Amazon ended up in the "no opinion" category more than anything else)--I've not looked at Facebook in months, and I've not posted anything in years, and the newest Apple product I own is well over a decade old.
Ultimately, I'd drop Facebook first largely because I see Apple as still providing some value-add, whereas it's hard to see any value-add from Facebook. I ultimately dropped Microsoft last because they're the only ones who have made decent office productivity software (I say this having used both Corel's stuff long ago and LibreOffice for several years).
For all of the visualization stuff that the NYT does, I'm surprised that the visualization here is pretty sucky. Only bar graphs of the top and bottom choices? Really? That's the most you could come up with?
I have never really used Apple or Facebook much, dropped Microsoft years ago, loss of support for my Kindle would be at most a minor inconvenience but Google? Crippling.
I use G Suite both privately and at work, basically run my life via Calendar/Maps/Keep, and get a nervous twitch in my left eye just at the thought of what a massive hassle it would be to first switch, and very likely second -- maintain the alternative.
That's even before I consider that there would be no Google to turn to when configuring that alternative, that my phone would essentially become a Nokia E52 with a larger screen (no Google Apps, no Uber without Google Maps, not even the local bus/directions app would work, not sure about Signal), and I that would need to dig up a ton of data from a cold, cold storage.
On a lighter note, NYT is now writing HN-tailored clickbait. We captured the zeitgeist.
92 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadHowever, I don't have any realistic replacement business model to offer.
Makes me want to give up using computers.
I sometimes use Facebook to talk to non-close friends, although I do use Whatsapp daily, so I guess that counts too.
All in all, I don't think it's impossible to escape at least one of them.
You guess Android counts, well of course it does.
My contacts and calendar are synchronized with a webdav server called radicale that I self-host. I also self-host my own mail with a postfix+dovecot setup.
Really, the last remaining google service I use is google search. And I've hit a brick wall there. The alternatives just suck too much. DDG's search result has been consistently terrible, and while I still hope qwant will one day turn into a great product, right now the search result are still significantly poorer than google's.
Android doesn't count with a setup similar to mine, because it's all open source and doesn't communicate with google outside of expectations :).
Except apparently, Google, Facebook and Microsoft [1]. If you have any apps installed then probably AWS also indirectly or maybe even fulfillment that you don't know is coming from one of their FCs
That's not even mentioning that you're tracked across the world by them even if you don't go there directly.
I think the only person that doesn't use any of those and is still on the internet directly is RMS [2]
The idea that you can actually live in modern society and not touch one of the big 5 is misguided.
[1]https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that-duckduck...
[2]https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
So nowadays I'm coding Linux production software on a Mac with a Microsoft editor ;)
Microsoft's release cadence is also fantastic. They are constantly releasing updates all of which contain features/bug fixes that are voted on by users. You can't ask for anything more than that.
Windows is definitely getting better.
I guess Google, since they're indirectly the most responsible for clickbait headlines.
Never again.
Actually whilst I'm having a bitch about the abysmal user experience on Amazon, here's another: Don't let me fill my cart with things I can't buy (after I already selected my shipping address before even started to add items), and then tell me hey this item can't be shipped to your location, which I then remove, only to be told hey this item also can't be shipped to your location. Repeat for all the items. Just tell me all the god damn items that can't be shipped at once, or shit how about this for a trip... maybe don't let me add them in the first place. /rant
(My ranking: I'd drop Apple and MSFT easily since I don't use anything by either company. FB would be easy to drop but I do use it and would miss it a little. Amazon and Google would be significantly more work to let go of.)
Edit: Found some data. https://www.statista.com/statistics/232790/forecast-of-apple... Suggests 30% of Americans have an iPhone. Not sure what iTunes usage is like.
A New York Times poll that possibly has only been posted here is always going to skew more towards Apple users who are typically more affluent and higher educated.
Also it's 10% of people who viewed this page. It's not representative or particularly meaningful to make broader conclusions from.
Never even owned an iPod or used iTunes.
I don't actually think anything in my life would directly change. I don't run windows, use azure, own an Xbox, etc... but do use a computer heavily, deploy to cloud infrastructure often, and own a modern game console.
I think mostly service providers would be affected.
Apple is the least of my concerns when it comes to these companies honestly.
I don't use any Apple stuff, except vary rarely iTunes for music purchases, because I've still got credit there from ~5yrs ago.
Amazon have little to no presence in Australia currently, but that could change.
I'd love to get away from Facebook, but as previously discussed[1], my nooby friends are the main thing holding me back.
Microsoft seem to have mostly picked up their game in recent years, so I have no problem with sticking with them. That said, I refused to fully integrate like I have with Google (mail, calendar, etc.), because their products just don't seem to work as well.
[1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14217083)
It's actually very easy, and once you do you'll realise Google's significance in your life is seriously overestimated.
I don't use facebook at all. I can count the things I've ordered on amazon (in all 30+ years of my life) on one hand. I don't use microsoft or apple products unless I'm forced to because of some work related project. And this isn't even out of any crazy principles or anything. I simply like linux distros better than apple/msft. I use an android phone but mainly just the phone functionality personally (i.e. like a good ol nokia + gmaps).
Funny, I would of thought it would have effected me personally a lot more, especially me being a software developer and all. But honestly it would make my life a lot easier, then cross-platform would be just linux :)
Apple I could drop pretty easily too. An iPhone is nice, but it's not exactly the be all and end all. Any old Android phone could work well too.
Amazon... personally I'd be able to drop it easily, though most people would have more trouble there. That's because nowadays the products I mostly buy from there are computer accessories and games, and the latter is under serious competition from the likes of Steam, various digital download stores on consoles and even the companies themselves selling boxed versions.
Still can't imagine how people buy food on these sites. I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered? The supermarkets here are both pretty cheap and within walking distance.
Microsoft would be tough, simply because Microsoft Office is really important to me, and I'm really used to Windows at this point.
Google is arguably the toughest one to drop. Why? Mix of services needed (it's damn hard to promote a website about certain subjects without YouTube nowadays, and Gmail is very convenient) and the fact their alternatives are just nowhere near as good for a search engine. Which is depressing given how far downhill Google's own search results have gone recently...
But yeah, interesting to see the stats there.
I sometimes buy groceries on those sites, but not all of it; only the things I don't need immediately but will soon (and if it doesn't have weirdly high pricing on it). I also usually use Prime Now and not Amazon.com.
As a foreigner, Amazon ( and others ) offers food that is simply not accessible in the local supermarket.
All the food that requires a trip to a larger supermarket or a specific shop ?
For example, my last buy was some sort of pasta that is difficult to find in London. I'm 100% certain I could find it in some Italian shop. I'm 80% certain at least 1 of the major supermarket stock at their largest store. To find out, I would need to explore the city. I don't want that pasta enough to dedicate a whole week-end to search for it. Alternatively, I can use internet and the first results are generally a shop that offers delivery. Again I don't want to dedicate a significant part of my we to go to that shop to buy 4 GBP worth of pasta.
Amazon is a particularly good ecommerce site, but by no means alone in its class, and there are plenty of IaaS providers. (Getting locked in to AWS specific products is a bad idea anyway).
Microsoft products already have superior competitors on the marketplace. Retooling and retraining the entire business IT world will cost something, but it needs to happen anyway.
People have been trying to replace Facebook since it started; some new entrant will supplant it overnight.
No one is really competing with Apple on quality. I think it would take a long time for someone to replace its offerings with equivalently polished products, if it ever even happens (the demand for cheap stuff might be so strong that Apple is only viable because of brand inertia). I'd miss it.
Alphabet is unmatched in search, drive, email, and Bell Labs-style R&D moonshots. I doubt it's repeatable outside of the specific time and place from which it emerged.
I would dare say that Microsoft is encroaching on this slowly but surely. Between the Surface, Surface book, the upcoming niche desktop PC, and air-esque laptop, they are steadily coming up with compelling offerings that are eating into Apple's space.
Google's Pixel devices are also squeezing Apple, though mostly in the mobile market.
Apple would be the easiest to lose. They mostly just design high end consumer products that we don't particularly need and the gap could be filled by others. Foxconn would have to find another design studio to outsource to.
Hardest would be MS. The impact wouldn't be immediate but there would be a made scramble to replace all sorts of business software (internal and external) to other platforms. There would also be some massive hardware compatibility issues to deal with while doing so. I'd quit my job and make bank "porting" c# projects to mono, maybe even do some win32 to wine work.
Of course that depends on how much you use the online services of any of the companies too. The only impact on me would be the loss of gmail, but I'd get over it pretty quick.
1. FB (because it doesn't serve any really important meaningful purpose... I much prefer reddit),
2. Apple: Because I hate apple products and their closed walled gardens when it comes to building apps and things (I'm android/linux desktop user).
3. MS: DOn't much use any of their products anymore, but did for a long time, and if I were to leave linux I'd probably go back to windows, since I like custom built computers.
4. Amazon: Love amazon, great deals - only place I shop, but if they didn't exist I'd probably find somewhere else using google.
5. Alphabet: Self-driving cars, android, youtube, gmail, search (I've tried bing, etc... but no other search provider gives the quality of results -- esp for coding questions), and they're even my isp: Google FIBER... so yeah this one would be a hard one to sever for me.
edit: I don't have an Apple product myself. Though the build quality is nice, it's expensive (and I am poor) also never used/could be confusing to use iOS/Mac OS.
Use Gmail... but you can use hotmail (microsoft), Yahoo (yikes). Chrome browser (google) ... Youtube (google) ahh you can use Vimeo... Don't use Facebook (don't have friends) though their marketing/advertising for a business is great.
Just my useless opinion
What do you use for IMing, group chats, organising events and sharing jokes (memes?) between friends? I'd imagine those are the main use cases of FB for most people. Nobody I know cares in the slightest about the news feed, it's just private groups and messenger.
Google was surprisingly easy to drop. I use DuckDuckGo and quit GMail.
Microsoft I dropped more than a decade ago.
I never used Facebook.
I half-dropped Apple by switching away from Mac OS X, but I still own in iPhone that I'll drop when it breaks.
Facebook: Never had Facebook
Apple: Don't use any Apple products
Alphabet (Google): 90%+ searches are now through DuckDuckGo for me
Amazon: Needed as online shopping often through Amazon, and I still buy a lot of books through them
Microsoft: Must have, my life is intimately tied to Excel
Ultimately, I'd drop Facebook first largely because I see Apple as still providing some value-add, whereas it's hard to see any value-add from Facebook. I ultimately dropped Microsoft last because they're the only ones who have made decent office productivity software (I say this having used both Corel's stuff long ago and LibreOffice for several years).
For all of the visualization stuff that the NYT does, I'm surprised that the visualization here is pretty sucky. Only bar graphs of the top and bottom choices? Really? That's the most you could come up with?
I use G Suite both privately and at work, basically run my life via Calendar/Maps/Keep, and get a nervous twitch in my left eye just at the thought of what a massive hassle it would be to first switch, and very likely second -- maintain the alternative.
That's even before I consider that there would be no Google to turn to when configuring that alternative, that my phone would essentially become a Nokia E52 with a larger screen (no Google Apps, no Uber without Google Maps, not even the local bus/directions app would work, not sure about Signal), and I that would need to dig up a ton of data from a cold, cold storage.
On a lighter note, NYT is now writing HN-tailored clickbait. We captured the zeitgeist.