7 ms·
It is sadly part of a dark pattern called "stickiness". You can dress it up as functionally useful or even important but ultimately it is about companies wantin
by lbriner 5y ago
It is sadly part of a dark pattern called "stickiness". You can dress it up as functionally useful or even important but ultimately it is about companies wanting to create enough of a dependency that you have to continue using them, which is anti-competitive.
Gone are the days where you bought something from a shop with no stickiness other than good service brought you back. Now there are far too many Marketing Managers who see stickiness as a win, even though the win is only to the supplier and not to the customer.
It is similar to those web sites who ask you whether you want "notifications" from them in your OS! Nope.
- OhHiMarkos 5y agoI would love to see a stickyness map for the top companies that apply these patterns to their customers.
- swiley 5y ago> bought something from a shop with no stickiness If you want this you can still have it, you just need to follow a simple rule: Absolutely no non-free non community maintained software ever period.
- bostonpete 5y agoThat rule is simple to state, but damn near impossible to actually execute. I can't imagine the hoops you'd have to jump through to have a cell phone following this simple rule. I appreciate the push towards open source -- obviously a lot of good has come of it, but I'll happily take stickiness for convenience in many situations.
- swiley 5y ago> I can't imagine the hoops you'd have to jump through to have a cell phone following this simple rule. It was hard, thankfully pine64 exists and it's no longer any more difficult than following on the desktop.
- orangepanda 5y agoRolled your own cellular infrastructure as well?
- swiley 5y agoThey're working on that interestingly enough, but that kind of thing does take time.
- pschastain 5y agoPlenty of community-maintained software for it?
- swiley 5y agoYeah! The entire desktop Linux software library is available and that has a lot of really good, community maintained software.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoIs much of that library good on mobile?
- swiley 5y agoIt depends on the UI configuration. I run an overlapping desktop WM on mine and as long as the software doesn't need a second mouse button it's fine.
- rovr138 5y agoPinephone. I believe the idea is that anything with blobs can be hardware disabled.
- orangepanda 5y agoHe said, on a non community maintained forum. --- Do you mint your own hardware as well? The problem with hard rules is there's numerous exceptions when it doesnt make sense to follow, invalidating the "rule" all together.
- rovr138 5y agoThey also did say ‘software’.
- Retric 5y agoYour monitor has software, as does basically everything built lately significantly more complicated than a fan.
- TheFreim 5y agoIt's a general rule that solves the stickiness problem, I don't think you need to go deeper than that. Is it or is it not true that going with community maintained software as much as possible prevents stickiness? We don't want to miss the forest.
- Retric 5y agoOSS software isn’t immune to this stuff either. Many projects want to increase the number of people using them. What’s different is the community pushes back on annoying examples where customers are mostly stuck with that they purchased and don’t have a say.
- ajdude 5y agoYou’re getting downvoted but I’ve seen this even with Firefox and Ubuntu lately. No, I don’t want to log into a web account! Then you have stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114194
- ghoward 5y agoAnd this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27068400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27068400
- pschastain 5y agoSo you don't do mobile? Because I don't know of any truly functional mobile platforms other than Android and iOS, neither of which is community-maintained.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- GuB-42 5y agoFree, community maintained software have all sorts of problems too. Essentially, the problem is that the software is made to fit the developers needs, not the user needs. If they both have the same needs, that's great, if they don't most people are better off with a commercial solution. Also keep in mind that in most major free software, the "community" is mostly for-profit companies that want the software to fit their own needs and they have no money to spend for anything else. This is free software working as intended, and in some cases (like Linux), it works really great. But it is not a silver bullet and proprietary software still is the best answer in some cases.
- swiley 5y ago>fit the developers needs, not the user needs. This is why I qualified open source with "community maintained." When there's a strong partition between the community and the developers then FOSS looks a lot like closed software.
- vimacs2 5y ago> This is why I qualified open source with "community maintained." When there's a strong partition between the community and the developers then FOSS looks a lot like closed software. I'm just going to come out and say that I think Gnome and Firefox are two of the worst offenders of this.
- swiley 5y agoRight. At least with Gnome even distro maintainers struggle to keep up with the churn and build it, users have little hope of success there. The result is a partition between the community and the developers who spend a lot of time in the code. Firefox has a similar situation although I would argue it isn't quite as bad.
- zxzax 5y agoIf you have suggestions on how to fix that I think a lot of people would love to hear it, but for now, sadly the task of building a fully complete desktop and application platform means that there is a lot of code and a lot of churn. This is true of every single major platform.
- criddell 5y agoFor most people it would mean giving up far more than they would gain.
- swiley 5y agoIt might appear that way but much of the cost of non-community-maintained software is hidden and people don't realize it until long after it becomes expensive to leave. Because of this I'm not sure I agree.
- criddell 5y agoDo you have any examples? I don't think it's true for most mainstream consumer-level stuff. For example, you're suggestion would mean I can't play console video games, stream movies, or even watch DVDs.
- xattt 5y agoI would love to see the internal documents that Apple has on maintaining stickiness. I’m sure it contains a trove of terms and concepts that would enable a meaningful discussion. For example, using Apple Music was the default for the HomePod. Using any other music service was clunky (coincidentally or deliberately). Another point is the Apple Watch. Switching to an Android phone would mean getting rid of two devices.
- donmcronald 5y agoI've always called it adhesive ToS. I hate it and I think it should be illegal. You set up an account and all you need is an email address. Then, all of a sudden, they need your phone number "for security." Then your name and DoB "for the security of your account." Soon it'll be a credit card for age verification. And the whole time you better give them accurate information because if they ever lock your account you'll be expected to send photo ID so they can verify it. The next step is subscriptions. The entire point of forced logins is because that allows them to build future features as subscription only. Think about how online SaaS works and how everyone eventually switches to a subscription product by keeping, but abandoning the existing service and building all new features on a subscription model. With everyone forced to log in Windows is essentially a SaaS. They're just not charging for it. Yet! Remember when you could get a free custom domain on Outlook.com or GMail? Anyone on those services was allowed to keep their stuff, but huge effort has been made to devalue and de-market those historical accounts. Microsoft shut down the entire admin side of things and Google excludes them from most new features. Get out your wallet. Prices are going up.
- hnick 5y agoI know someone who uses Facebook for work. Her account login stopped working, it always said she put the wrong token number even though she used their own token generator from the phone app. It's my pet theory they just randomly lock accounts without ID on file so you have to upload ID to unlock it, which is apparently now required for new accounts. Because that's the only thing that worked because they have no support.
- smartmic 5y agoI would not call this "stickiness" - it is about having control over your customers. The latter is hierarchical, not on eye's level. Stickiness could imply a quid pro quo status though.
- cloverich 5y agoFirst company I quit in my professional engineering career was over this. Not precisely this, but same concept. My constructive cynical take is this: If a company is spending money on this kind of stickiness, they aren't spending it on features users want and need. Which opens the doors for competitors to do just that. Their artificial moat will provide them some protection, but against a long term onslaught of "lock in" vs "features people want", the latter will eventually win. That company I quit has taken a long time to die, but its demise is of no surprise, because they lost focus on the thing that made them successful to begin with.
- akagusu 5y agoMore sad than companies using this pattern is that people know it but don't care about it. It does not matter how many bad things a company can do, people simply doesn't care.
- insulanus 5y agoThis is extremely anti-competitive. In the old days, this was called "lock-in". The reason it is wrong is the extreme power imbalance between you and the service provider. No matter how independent you are, or how much time you are willing to spend (another highly unequal resource), their ability to force others to use their system might also coerce you into using it as well. Once Apple/Intel/Microsoft normalize requiring TPM-verified https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module OS booting, this dark pattern will become even more oppressive.
- raxxorrax 5y agoBut it shows in the quality of Windows in my opinion. These feature get priority, aren't really thought through and some earlier versions of Windows 10 weren't able to sort or move icons on your desktop without serious bugs. Of course I will also not use a MS account to sign into my PC. Ridiculous thought.