HN has been consistently contrarian. That’s about all that you can say without quickly becoming mistaken.
Sure, you can sell yourself and make good money with software on some proprietary app store with proprietary tools. You are a freelance employee of the company providing that infrastructure at that point.
It is short-sighted, lazy and stupid in my opinion. There is merit for such security mechanism, especially for cloud applications, but it should be crystal clear that there are secondary motivations here. And that the security argument often falls short if you take a good look at current threats.
until recently. Just like reddit, it has become less niche and more mainstream. For eg: HN majority opinion on covid's origin. It matched the official US govt lines as it switched back and forth between market and lab.
As far as hn being contrarian, the only thing I see hn being consistently contrarian on is crypto. Any other examples?
Keep in mind that now many of the people who post on HN earn a lot of money by working a company for which it is part of the business model to track users and collect data about them (officially for advertisement purposes).
You really wanna be scared? Go look at the multiple comments on the EU DMA announcement complaining that having a sideloading option is just a ploy for malware vendors to get into their iPhones. Or that someone else being able to sideload or jailbreak somehow hurts their security. These are coming from actual HN users!
Was it voted so high it triggered some bot detection? That would only explain the former, not the latter. Either way, there's something funny going on.