4 ms·

> What has the world come to, where technology has been appropriated and we are left paying rents every month and companies are increasingly becoming user-hosti

by rakoo 5y ago

> What has the world come to, where technology has been appropriated and we are left paying rents every month and companies are increasingly becoming user-hostile and predatory and monopolistic! This is the expected outcome of Capitalism and was only a matter of time until it happened. If you let for-profit companies run wild, power will consolidate, allowing them to enact whatever policy has the best ROI at the cost of being user-friendly. Hoping for such an individualistic system that rewards greed to be nice is, to put it gently, naive. The only way to ensure that users are the priority of a software is when users collectively have the power to make decisions. This can either happen when they own the whole process, or if it is run under a license that gives them the power to keep the admins in check. The Copyleft model is the only one that can give those guarantees, and it doesn't prevent admins from earning money

bell-cot 5y ago
This +10 (if I could). Modern Corporate / Wall Street capitalism will brutally optimize for whatever schemes squeeze the most money out of the victims. Oops, sorry! - I meant customers. (Though I don't really agree with your second para. If users actually cared, at scale - vs. reacting like Pavlov's dogs to corporate marketing & such - then the nastier corporations would have to change or die. Note what happened to the "American" car companies, back when they were selling un-reliable gas guzzlers, and Americans decided that buying reliable Japanese econo-cars was the smart way to fight back.)
- rakoo 5y ago
  > Though I don't really agree with your second para. If users actually cared, at scale - vs. reacting like Pavlov's dogs to corporate marketing & such - then the nastier corporations would have to change or die. Note what happened to the "American" car companies, back when they were selling un-reliable gas guzzlers, and Americans decided that buying reliable Japanese econo-cars was the smart way to fight back. So the solution is to wait for another for-profit company to be slightly better, migrate en masse, and hope the new one isn't as nasty as the old one. This is what people did when migrating to gmail (so much free space ! so much speed ! so much cool !) and look where we are now. Same with Apple, Facebook, and others. It's the perpetual myth that competition keeps bad actors in check - but it assumes that starting a competitor and gaining users is so easy that anyone can do it if they don't like the current offer. It's wishful thinking at best, and still doesn't give any guarantees to the user.

by rakoo 5y ago

bell-cot 5y ago

This +10 (if I could). Modern Corporate / Wall Street capitalism will brutally optimize for whatever schemes squeeze the most money out of the victims. Oops, sorry! - I meant customers. (Though I don't really agree with your second para. If users actually cared, at scale - vs. reacting like Pavlov's dogs to corporate marketing & such - then the nastier corporations would have to change or die. Note what happened to the "American" car companies, back when they were selling un-reliable gas guzzlers, and Americans decided that buying reliable Japanese econo-cars was the smart way to fight back.)

rakoo 5y ago
> Though I don't really agree with your second para. If users actually cared, at scale - vs. reacting like Pavlov's dogs to corporate marketing & such - then the nastier corporations would have to change or die. Note what happened to the "American" car companies, back when they were selling un-reliable gas guzzlers, and Americans decided that buying reliable Japanese econo-cars was the smart way to fight back. So the solution is to wait for another for-profit company to be slightly better, migrate en masse, and hope the new one isn't as nasty as the old one. This is what people did when migrating to gmail (so much free space ! so much speed ! so much cool !) and look where we are now. Same with Apple, Facebook, and others. It's the perpetual myth that competition keeps bad actors in check - but it assumes that starting a competitor and gaining users is so easy that anyone can do it if they don't like the current offer. It's wishful thinking at best, and still doesn't give any guarantees to the user.