While you're correct, there's generally a correlation with something that's not only existed for that long, but IN USE for that long. I think that's the bigger selling point. Maybe I only get this idea from going through all comments on HN, I see your comment is from 8 hours ago, and I don't know what comments existed at the time you commented. I apologize if you didn't have much context when making this comment.
The point is to communicate a large amount of personal investment - love, sweat, and tears. As opposed to someone who scraped together some side project in a weekend and hasn’t yet faced the demon horde of edge cases.
No, the issue is not “mugshots” bad it’s “automatic enforcement mechanisms with a very well documented tendency to produce false positives” are bad.
The issue is not “facial recognition to prevent fare dodging”, it’s facial recognition to provide “reasonable suspicion” to warrant arrest and detainment of specific groups. NYC has a long documented history of creating laws solely for the purpose of racial discrimination - “stop and frisk” laws that functionally only applied to black residents for example, IIRC it was only the lack of probable cause that did anything to limit that. Systems like this launder the racism and provide “probable cause” for unconstitutional search and seizure, as well as false imprisonment.
It also means you get subject to the stigma of being stopped and questioned by police when entering a station while the wrong race - it’s obviously worse for black Americans whom the police routinely execute because they’re scared (specifically racist claims of super human strength, claims the victims are substantially larger than they are, etc), but these systems mean you’re more likely to be falsely accused if you’re any group other than white with european descent. So obviously black people are going to be victimized here, but Pacific Islanders, Hispanic, more or less any Asian country, etc are demonstrably subject to higher false positive rates, and there’s no penalty for the false accusations or detention.
Are you suggesting Reddit is ad-free? It is not, at all. Using the official app or the website that is not located at old.reddit shows a promoted post every 5 or so posts for me. Yes, you can use old.reddit and not get those ads, but then of the content, I'd estimate about 1 in 10 or so posts on r/popular are native advertising.
Reddit is one of the worst and covered in commercial, paid content. Some of it is labeled as an ad, much of it is not.
