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1. throw1+oe1[view] [source] 2025-08-26 02:51:51
>>kotaKa+(OP)
This is really bad. I think that most people on HN will agree with that.

The problem is that most normal people (HN is not normal - mostly for the better) don't even understand what sideloading is - let alone actually care.

How can we fix this?

(aside from making people care - apathy enables so many political problems in the current age, but it's such a huge problem that this definitely isn't going to be the impetus to fix it)

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2. earthi+fh1[view] [source] 2025-08-26 03:24:53
>>throw1+oe1
This certainly won't solve the problem, but I would at least like to banish the term "side load", which is a kind of Orwellian word that takes something everyone used to do all the time and makes it sound obscure and a bit nefarious. Maybe we, the tech literate, can start calling sideloading a "free install" or something. When asked, we can clarify that the 'free' stands for both freedom, and not paying middlemen 30%.
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3. ManlyB+lL1[view] [source] 2025-08-26 08:26:02
>>earthi+fh1
I really don't understand this war on language that is so prevalent in tech circles. There's a bunch of these like switching git branches from "master" to "main" or "blacklist"/"whitelist" to "allowlist"/"denylist" and I have yet to see a single problem that all of this term shuffling has actually solved.
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4. andrep+mU1[view] [source] 2025-08-26 09:51:35
>>ManlyB+lL1
Apples and oranges. Blacklist→allowlist is 2010s social justice virtue signalling thing. Sideloading→installing is about a word that is scary to normies vs a word that's completely normal and neutral.

See the history of words such as "jaywalking" or "carbon footprint" and how their usage cements the respective ideas.

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5. ManlyB+r02[view] [source] 2025-08-26 10:41:00
>>andrep+mU1
It's not an apples and oranges thing, it's the same practice of changing one term to an another because someone out there chose to believe that these words are somehow so powerful that they're pushing away swaths of people. You have no way of proving that "side loading" somehow scares away people because such proof does not exist.
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