Huh you got me with this analogy. On the other hand, can't this be said about any bad thing? Few bad things are always bad. A few examples:

* My liberal relatives won't own guns because they keep hearing stories about how guns are deadly, even though I own guns and nobody's died yet

* My friend's kid won't pet puppies because he heard they bite sometimes

* My aunt in Moscow didn't want to vote for Putin because he's "authoritarian", but my life is going great

How do you distinguish between things that are actually bad vs overreactions? Maybe it's just based on individual risk tolerance? I don't see the need to put my digital life in the hands of some unresponsive corporation, but the risk is worth it to you and we just have to agree to disagree?

Bad isn't a binary judgment you can place on something.

Everything has a level of risk and reward associated with it. It's up to everyone to judge the risk versus reward.

The flaw I see a lot in the HN comments trying to get people to abandon Big Tech is that they're coming from people who overestimate the risks while underestimating the benefits to other people.

Abandoning a lot of convenience for fear of some rare outcome might be a perfectly good choice for someone who doesn't use those conveniences (e.g. Linux user who doesn't want cloud storage for photos because they enjoy setting up their own elaborate backup schemes) but it's not a good tradeoff for the average person who just wants their photos backed up and either doesn't want to or doesn't trust themselves to set up a good backup solution.

By using a service you also chose to support it.

This is how one should make the choices.

You are going to have false positives in fraud detection. You are going to have to investigate those or pay in reputation. Fail to fight fraud may also cost rep.

When you run out of reputation people should take their business elsewhere.

It's how we are suppose to keep people honest.