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This community is dominated by people who work for unicorns, believe their company is almost a unicorn, or dream they could one day work for one. As much as we

This community is dominated by people who work for unicorns, believe their company is almost a unicorn, or dream they could one day work for one. As much as we deny it, companies only tend to get that big through anti-consumer behaviour, walled gardens, vendor lock-in, etc. When your life's purpose revolves around the absolute power your dream requires, of course you will defend it. The fact that allowing other companies to behave this way makes it harder for you to do well is irrelevant, because you need that power for when you're in their place.

Slartie 6y ago
I think you are spot on, but that your explanation is only one half of the truth. The other is that a lot of people in this community despise "manual intervention" into algorithmic systems, as in lawyers and judges ordering Apple to change their perfectly integrated, fully controlled app store deployment system, which radiates some kind of "elegance", especially when compared to Google's less well integrated (and less sealed) system. It is a bit like the fascination for smart contracts - purely algorithmic elegance, ideally without any human intervention, is considered "beautiful" and there is an urge to defend such a thing against "dirty" human influence - especially if those humans are of a different profession than we are (like, lawyers, or economists, all those non-technical people who don't understand all this stuff anyway). Of course the truth is that smart contracts are close to useless without human intervention (see: the oracle problem), their inability to be changed is more problematic than useful because humans make mistakes writing them or change their mind later or are forced by law to change it, and Apple's app store system is already riddled with exceptions for entities that even Apple can't deny too many wishes (see: exceptions for Amazon) and weird constructs that draw artificial, blurred and very much human-defined lines in order to fix contradicting or nonsensical rules (see: the so-called "reader" app exceptions). But all of this is easily ignored when necessary to construct a seemingly contradiction-free world view and picking a "side". Also a very human imperfection...

Slartie 6y ago

I think you are spot on, but that your explanation is only one half of the truth. The other is that a lot of people in this community despise "manual intervention" into algorithmic systems, as in lawyers and judges ordering Apple to change their perfectly integrated, fully controlled app store deployment system, which radiates some kind of "elegance", especially when compared to Google's less well integrated (and less sealed) system. It is a bit like the fascination for smart contracts - purely algorithmic elegance, ideally without any human intervention, is considered "beautiful" and there is an urge to defend such a thing against "dirty" human influence - especially if those humans are of a different profession than we are (like, lawyers, or economists, all those non-technical people who don't understand all this stuff anyway). Of course the truth is that smart contracts are close to useless without human intervention (see: the oracle problem), their inability to be changed is more problematic than useful because humans make mistakes writing them or change their mind later or are forced by law to change it, and Apple's app store system is already riddled with exceptions for entities that even Apple can't deny too many wishes (see: exceptions for Amazon) and weird constructs that draw artificial, blurred and very much human-defined lines in order to fix contradicting or nonsensical rules (see: the so-called "reader" app exceptions). But all of this is easily ignored when necessary to construct a seemingly contradiction-free world view and picking a "side". Also a very human imperfection...