Yeah, I don’t judge people for pirating or ad blocking, but the ludicrous justifications do get me - quite the entitled mental gymnastics. They remind me of bitcoin people trying to explain how mining is good for the environment.
1) Ycombinator could not tolerate HN becoming a site known for sharing IP-law-violating content. And the people who come here by and large are smart and socialized enough to implicitly understand why.
2) At the same time, a large number of folks here mostly wink and nod at that sort of consumer infringement. And there's a society-wide bias towards "things like news are less protected", so that gets to slide.
3) But people also have a need to tell consistent-seeming stories about how things work, thus the mental gymnastics.
It ends up being similar to trying to explain why people pretend to be prudish innocents about sex. It largely reduces to "a small subset of the population goes sufficiently ballistic about what I consider to be relatively trivial stuff as to make it not worth fighting over, even if I find that to be ridiculous."
There are a lot of different versions of this that become so normalized it can be hard to notice.
