4 ms·

Most people don't mind enough to put in any effort to move to something less sucky. Some do, and you get things like that one paid search engine that a few peo

Most people don't mind enough to put in any effort to move to something less sucky. Some do, and you get things like that one paid search engine that a few people here like to praise, or the various replacements for the big "social" sites.

grugagag 1y ago
Effort or actually pay for services that are good.
pixl97 1y ago
It's really more complicated than this. There are two things there that tend to work together building each other up at the expense of individuals. One is technology allows things to scale massively if you insert enough money. The other is there are massive amounts of capital available for those that can spin a good enough story that said investors will get a return. These two things together tend to lead to a few dominate sites at the expense of all the others. Especially when it comes to social sites and the network effects from them. But it doesn't only affect social sites. In countries with strong IP laws like the US it leads to a few businesses that can raise capital to corner their markets by buying our or bullying any competitors leading to almost no competition.
kldg 1y ago
I think it likely needs to get bad enough that people actually stop using them altogether or ask government to step in. we do this with social media now where the school systems here strongly discourage social media use at home, and the government is considering bans or age restrictions (the latter requiring some kind of ID upload). this is similar to smoking; it wasn't that people would necessarily ban themselves from doing it, but bowed to a desire for the government to make forceful pushes to shove people out of it. of course, not all social media is bad, I think. maybe. -but I think it's easier to get people to make the government ban Facebook/Instagram/Reddit/whatever than have people individually switch; it's sort of inherently antisocial for a person to peel off from the main hive and switch to a smaller self-selecting platform, I might argue.

grugagag 1y ago

Effort or actually pay for services that are good.

pixl97 1y ago

It's really more complicated than this. There are two things there that tend to work together building each other up at the expense of individuals. One is technology allows things to scale massively if you insert enough money. The other is there are massive amounts of capital available for those that can spin a good enough story that said investors will get a return. These two things together tend to lead to a few dominate sites at the expense of all the others. Especially when it comes to social sites and the network effects from them. But it doesn't only affect social sites. In countries with strong IP laws like the US it leads to a few businesses that can raise capital to corner their markets by buying our or bullying any competitors leading to almost no competition.

kldg 1y ago

I think it likely needs to get bad enough that people actually stop using them altogether or ask government to step in. we do this with social media now where the school systems here strongly discourage social media use at home, and the government is considering bans or age restrictions (the latter requiring some kind of ID upload). this is similar to smoking; it wasn't that people would necessarily ban themselves from doing it, but bowed to a desire for the government to make forceful pushes to shove people out of it. of course, not all social media is bad, I think. maybe. -but I think it's easier to get people to make the government ban Facebook/Instagram/Reddit/whatever than have people individually switch; it's sort of inherently antisocial for a person to peel off from the main hive and switch to a smaller self-selecting platform, I might argue.