I think you've misinterpreted broadening the conversation ("this was interesting, but what about this other topic?") with deflection ("are MLMs harmful? Well, other businesses are not angels either you know, what about the crimes of startup culture?").
Whataboutism is necessarily a deflection relying on a stated or implied moral equivalence between something under scrutiny and something irrelevant. Accepting the premise that something is problematic and asking whether that reflects a problem in other places is introducing a new topic of discussion to a conversation. You are free to criticize that, but whataboutism is a mischaracterization.
> You are free to criticize that, but whataboutism is a mischaracterization.
I think this is the root of it. That the parent comment does the moral equivalence action with "You could easily change that to:" and then inserts startups.
The assertion that I'm rejecting is the mischaracterization of startups. There absolutely are predatory startups, 100%, but to say as-a-group/whole that they're anywhere near the moral equivalence is what I'm rejecting.
[edit]
I realize replying to the other comment is - I didn't want the most upvoted thread to be about how toxic, predatory startups are. I could see this forum would easily agree to that and discuss it at length. And that's why I called it "whataboutism" because it's focus shifting and you're right, probably less about mischaracterization.
May I offer you a piece of advice, which is to try not to let it bother you too much if the top thread is something other than what you'd prefer? I know how frustrating that is, I experience that all the time on this site. But it's outside of our control what people want to talk about. You can't push the river, but you can exhaust yourself trying.
Paradoxically, I personally believe that only by accepting this and giving up on trying to steer the conversation or convince anyone of anything can you engage in a way that might accomplish those things. Or at least, for myself personally, I find that when I get too invested my rhetoric gets too heated and I feel all sorts of perverse "someone is wrong on the internet" pressure, and I write dumb stuff that makes people angry but convinces no one of anything.
Whataboutism is necessarily a deflection relying on a stated or implied moral equivalence between something under scrutiny and something irrelevant. Accepting the premise that something is problematic and asking whether that reflects a problem in other places is introducing a new topic of discussion to a conversation. You are free to criticize that, but whataboutism is a mischaracterization.
(And in a strange coincidence, this is the second time I've defined whataboutism today, in unrelated threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34919705)