Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

Let's say I found a way to bring back the number of dislikes of YT videos. Knowing that some YT devs are on the platform, I'd be reluctant to share it so that they won't know about it [0] and ruin the already-ruined YT experience. It shouldn't be like this, I know. But I've lost hope in the well-intentions of some devs in the industry. I thought we were supposed to have each other's back, but apparently money makes people do anything.

[0]: At least for quite some time.

Edit: By "well-intentions" and "having each-other's back", I mean devs doing something that most devs would enjoy, not making each other's life harder. Going back to my example: As a dev, how many times have you watched a YT tutorial to sharpen your skills? Now w/o the dislikes count, all devs have a much harder time filtering useless videos. Whoever removed the dislike count on YT has caused millions of wasted hour-man. Then again, if they're paid well, many devs would do the same.

Whatever is here, or anywhere on the Internet, assume the world knows about it. This spot is just a larger megaphone to the developer/tech community. For regular folk they have different watering holes like Twitter or Reddit with overlaps of course.

> Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

Of course. Do you think I'm going to identify such things here? That's no different than submitting them.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_...

the ratio will stay though

with a like and ratio number you can reverse-calculate the amount of dislikes

Yeah I do this. Most of what I build, nobody knows about it nor is it release into the wild.

Latest example: at my current workplace we have some crappy custom compilers for our platform.... I've rebuilt them in a way that I like (and using C# instead of Java), that enables me to use it in a small visual studio code plugin that enables me with real time error messages as I code against our platform, so basically constantly compiling in the background as the file changes. It's great. Can it improve the lives of the 50 or so other devs working on the same platform? For sure (it saves a ton of time and frustration). Will I tell them about it or release it onto our private git repo's and make it part of our platform/build chains? Nope.

I can give you 20 good reason why I won't do it but really don't want to get into it. If they want it, they ask for it & while they are at it, they can pay me a cool sum of money for it. Until then, it is my own private competitive advantage that allows me to work 2 hours per day instead of 8. Not embellishing.