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> If it's my app Not picking on you specifically, because this attitude is extremely common among software developers these days, but I think this mentality of

> If it's my app Not picking on you specifically, because this attitude is extremely common among software developers these days, but I think this mentality of treating software running on users' machines as "yours" rather than "theirs" is at the core of a lot of problems with the modern software industry. Software should serve the interests of its users, not its developers. The advent of ubiquitous internet connectivity, automatic updates, and business models based around selling ads rather than selling software have changed this dynamic somewhat and I think that's really unfortunate.

rbanffy 4y ago
> Software should serve the interests of its users, not its developers. It is my belief the software is serving the betterment of society if it offends the people who don't approve my activism ;-) More important than serving the individual users is serving society as a whole.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  > It is my belief the software is serving the betterment of society if it offends the people who don't approve my activism ;-) When has ideological grandstanding ever been a successful strategy for convincing anyone of anything? Surely it would just further entrench the convictions of those who disagree with you, harming your own cause and helping theirs gain legitimacy in the eyes of those who are not convinced either way.
  - aaomidi 4y ago
    I disagree with this. Minds don’t changed based on one interaction. It changed based on your observations from the world. Pride logos and icons in companies have made it so you can’t “not think” of LGBT anymore for example. This is HUGE for a lot of people. I’ll give you a specific example, before pride no one in Iran dared speak about LGBT. Now it’s unavoidable when all the apps and services you use have a pride version. This has already lead to more acceptance privately re: lgbt. The next steps are pushing acceptance to welcoming to them “you’re not going to be treated differently”. It’s one tool in your entire arsenal.
    - barrysteve 4y ago
      This just gives fuel to the Christian street preachers who complain about pride being shoved in their faces and being unable to opt-out. To oversimplify and quote Obiwan, you were supposed to bring balance to the force, not destroy it. There are some people you're never going to win over, and pushing them into a position of persecution is sadly a naive political move.
      - aaomidi 4y ago
        I legitimately don’t care what the Christian preechers are complaining about. They’re not the group I’m optimizing for, and their population is dropping YoY. If the existence of a group of people is triggering them that much, then they can go disconnect and live in isolation or something. No one here is, for example, calling out marriot for shoving bibles and Book of Mormon into my face. Christianity is constantly shoved into my face with no ability to opt out. They can deal with pride flags.
        barrysteve 4y ago
        This is the naive blindness. There is acres of christian art and media that simply doesn't register for the populace. People scroll by Jude Law as the Young Pope on Netflix and ignore the methodist Christian substructure of star wars. People can be told via memes that ObiWan is like space jesus and it's like water off a duck's back. Christianity doesn't oppress people, they can't even identify it, when it is infront of the open eyes. People naturally don't even know what it is, that they reject. Can't describe what a priest would even say. Bibles in the marriot is a charity and mormons are debatably not christian at all. Joseph smith was not jesus, sorry. But make no mistake we all know what pride is, what lgbtq people want legislated and exactly how it's going to affect us. Our choice be damned.
        Conclusionist 4y ago
        1. You’re claiming Christianity is so normalized people don’t notice it. That’s exactly the point with pride. 2. Am I reading this right? You think LGBT people and pride is oppressing people more than Christianity?
- throwntoday 4y ago
  Yes virtue signalling serves society by identifying attention seekers.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    Or those unwilling to be silent accomplices.
voussoir 4y ago
> automatic updates This is one of the most important points of the conversation. The other most important point would be the difficulty / impossibility of reverting to an older version of the application on mobile systems. When you put them together you get users powerless on their own devices, stuck in a needless dilemma between keeping the application in its new, worsened state, or throwing away the whole thing. On my PC I download "portable" / .zip releases of software whenever possible, and I keep every single package. If a program has an update with a regression, I can just choose to not use it, or run it side-by-side with the older version. On Android, F-Droid serves the last couple APKs for each app, and I download these to my PC also. However, Android makes side-by-side installation difficult unless you recompile the app with a different package ID. If it's a closed-source app from the Play Store, you're screwed. I would not be surprised if it's impossible on iphone. So, I disable auto updates, and I ignore the boy who cries "important security fixes". Better luck next time.
vineyardmike 4y ago
> Software should serve the interests of its users, not its developers. The history of “rainbow washing” in corporate marketing material served the original purpose of saying “you’re welcome here”. There are many stores/places that choose to not serve queer people. Publicly sharing that you will allow queer people to use your product is serving the interest of those users, but perhaps not the interest of every user. But the remaining users thankfully never had to question if they’d be served by that business, so there’s no need to signal anything to them.
- Thorentis 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure we are past the point where LGBT people need to be worried about whether a major bank will serve them or not. And yet the rainbow washing continues. Why is that?
  - avocadvocate 4y ago
    Interesting you mention banks. > A 2019 study by Hua Sun and Lei Gao of Iowa State University found that from 1990 to 2015, same-sex couples were 73% more likely to be turned down for a mortgage than similarly qualified different-sex couples. In addition, same-sex couples who were approved for mortgages paid about 0.02% to 0.2% more, on average, in interest and fees. https://www.investopedia.com/mortgage-lending-for-lgbtq-people-5120688 https://www.investopedia.com/mortgage-lending-for-lgbtq-peop... The US government has made positive changes to combat this practice, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lgbt-banks/u-s-banks-banned-from-discriminating-against-lgbt-people-idUSKBN2B82TQ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lgbt-banks/u-s-banks-... but you would be mistaken to assume such discrimination has completely disappeared or doesn't still exist in similar forms.
    - Thorentis 4y ago
      I'm going to dispute "similarly qualified". Being married is a huge indicator of future financial stability, and for most of the cited time period, SSM couples could not get married. There are also many statistics which point to SSM relationships (regardless of marital status) ending sooner. So if the banks are inputting this to a "go/no go" algorithm, the results do not surprise me at all.
npteljes 4y ago
Yeah, software turned into service. Especially when speaking of apps, they are much more like a service, as opposed to a traditional good that you can own.

rbanffy 4y ago

> Software should serve the interests of its users, not its developers. It is my belief the software is serving the betterment of society if it offends the people who don't approve my activism ;-) More important than serving the individual users is serving society as a whole.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
> It is my belief the software is serving the betterment of society if it offends the people who don't approve my activism ;-) When has ideological grandstanding ever been a successful strategy for convincing anyone of anything? Surely it would just further entrench the convictions of those who disagree with you, harming your own cause and helping theirs gain legitimacy in the eyes of those who are not convinced either way.
- aaomidi 4y ago
  I disagree with this. Minds don’t changed based on one interaction. It changed based on your observations from the world. Pride logos and icons in companies have made it so you can’t “not think” of LGBT anymore for example. This is HUGE for a lot of people. I’ll give you a specific example, before pride no one in Iran dared speak about LGBT. Now it’s unavoidable when all the apps and services you use have a pride version. This has already lead to more acceptance privately re: lgbt. The next steps are pushing acceptance to welcoming to them “you’re not going to be treated differently”. It’s one tool in your entire arsenal.
  - barrysteve 4y ago
    This just gives fuel to the Christian street preachers who complain about pride being shoved in their faces and being unable to opt-out. To oversimplify and quote Obiwan, you were supposed to bring balance to the force, not destroy it. There are some people you're never going to win over, and pushing them into a position of persecution is sadly a naive political move.
    - aaomidi 4y ago
      I legitimately don’t care what the Christian preechers are complaining about. They’re not the group I’m optimizing for, and their population is dropping YoY. If the existence of a group of people is triggering them that much, then they can go disconnect and live in isolation or something. No one here is, for example, calling out marriot for shoving bibles and Book of Mormon into my face. Christianity is constantly shoved into my face with no ability to opt out. They can deal with pride flags.
      - barrysteve 4y ago
        This is the naive blindness. There is acres of christian art and media that simply doesn't register for the populace. People scroll by Jude Law as the Young Pope on Netflix and ignore the methodist Christian substructure of star wars. People can be told via memes that ObiWan is like space jesus and it's like water off a duck's back. Christianity doesn't oppress people, they can't even identify it, when it is infront of the open eyes. People naturally don't even know what it is, that they reject. Can't describe what a priest would even say. Bibles in the marriot is a charity and mormons are debatably not christian at all. Joseph smith was not jesus, sorry. But make no mistake we all know what pride is, what lgbtq people want legislated and exactly how it's going to affect us. Our choice be damned.
        Conclusionist 4y ago
        1. You’re claiming Christianity is so normalized people don’t notice it. That’s exactly the point with pride. 2. Am I reading this right? You think LGBT people and pride is oppressing people more than Christianity?
throwntoday 4y ago
Yes virtue signalling serves society by identifying attention seekers.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  Or those unwilling to be silent accomplices.

voussoir 4y ago

> automatic updates This is one of the most important points of the conversation. The other most important point would be the difficulty / impossibility of reverting to an older version of the application on mobile systems. When you put them together you get users powerless on their own devices, stuck in a needless dilemma between keeping the application in its new, worsened state, or throwing away the whole thing. On my PC I download "portable" / .zip releases of software whenever possible, and I keep every single package. If a program has an update with a regression, I can just choose to not use it, or run it side-by-side with the older version. On Android, F-Droid serves the last couple APKs for each app, and I download these to my PC also. However, Android makes side-by-side installation difficult unless you recompile the app with a different package ID. If it's a closed-source app from the Play Store, you're screwed. I would not be surprised if it's impossible on iphone. So, I disable auto updates, and I ignore the boy who cries "important security fixes". Better luck next time.

vineyardmike 4y ago

> Software should serve the interests of its users, not its developers. The history of “rainbow washing” in corporate marketing material served the original purpose of saying “you’re welcome here”. There are many stores/places that choose to not serve queer people. Publicly sharing that you will allow queer people to use your product is serving the interest of those users, but perhaps not the interest of every user. But the remaining users thankfully never had to question if they’d be served by that business, so there’s no need to signal anything to them.

Thorentis 4y ago
I'm pretty sure we are past the point where LGBT people need to be worried about whether a major bank will serve them or not. And yet the rainbow washing continues. Why is that?
- avocadvocate 4y ago
  Interesting you mention banks. > A 2019 study by Hua Sun and Lei Gao of Iowa State University found that from 1990 to 2015, same-sex couples were 73% more likely to be turned down for a mortgage than similarly qualified different-sex couples. In addition, same-sex couples who were approved for mortgages paid about 0.02% to 0.2% more, on average, in interest and fees. https://www.investopedia.com/mortgage-lending-for-lgbtq-people-5120688 https://www.investopedia.com/mortgage-lending-for-lgbtq-peop... The US government has made positive changes to combat this practice, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lgbt-banks/u-s-banks-banned-from-discriminating-against-lgbt-people-idUSKBN2B82TQ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lgbt-banks/u-s-banks-... but you would be mistaken to assume such discrimination has completely disappeared or doesn't still exist in similar forms.
  - Thorentis 4y ago
    I'm going to dispute "similarly qualified". Being married is a huge indicator of future financial stability, and for most of the cited time period, SSM couples could not get married. There are also many statistics which point to SSM relationships (regardless of marital status) ending sooner. So if the banks are inputting this to a "go/no go" algorithm, the results do not surprise me at all.

npteljes 4y ago

Yeah, software turned into service. Especially when speaking of apps, they are much more like a service, as opposed to a traditional good that you can own.