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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

No, how will this ever fix a corrupt system if you play by their rules?

This is why it keeps getting worse and worse. People just comply!

They’re a $2 trillion dollar company, unless you have an incredibly strong case (this isn’t one) then you will lose a war of attrition every time... even sometimes if you do have a strong case. Choose your battles wisely, live to fight another day, etc...

Pound for pound you’d likely be better off putting your energy into policy. The scale is still tilted there, but there is some traction behind fairer app marketplaces.

You do this by leaving the platform. There are plenty of alternatives for Apple's products so those who get tired of the ever-increasing censorship inside the walled garden are better off outside of its walls. Eventually the Apple world will become something akin to Disneyland, nothing but "wholesome" infotainment without anything that could give offence.

Do you really believe the app developers should close their doors and stop making the app rather than change their name, all as part of an ideological fight? I just want to make sure that is really your good faith argument.

Yes, I really do believe there is no fighting a $2 billion (and counting) behemoth, other than by shunning it. If enough developers and users - in any order - leave their platform they will reconsider their stance. That is, after all, what it means to have (at least the semblance of) a free market where people make choices based on things like this. The same goes for the other digital empires, whether those be Facebook, Twitter, Google or any of the others. Absent regulation - and is regulation really where we want to go? - I do not see any other way than to "choose with (my) wallet".

This is also why I do not use any of these platforms, instead having spent the time to rig up my own alternatives: Google-free AOSP-derived Android on mobiles and tablets, Linux on laptops and servers, Searx for search, Nextcloud for "cloudy things", NC Talk and Jitsi Meet for videoconferencing, Exim and Dovecot for mail, Peertube for video, Airsonic and MPD for media streaming, etc. I've been doing this since the late 90's of the last century (minus the mobile stuff since that simply did not exist back then...) so I can state with certainty that this is not just hollow rhetoric, it is a viable alternative to submitting to the whims of companies like Apple (et al).

I appreciate that this is your genuine belief. For the record, I upvoted your response.

Not every fight is a 2-trillion dollar fight. If you say decide to commit some fraudulent chargeback against an Apple purchase they are unlikely to pursue it, for example, even though they are a 2-trillion dollar company that could crush you. Spending $5000 of lawyer time to recover $50 may not be worth their time and they know it.

you don't fix anything if you don't pick your battles. it has to be worth it, otherwise you will expend all your energy on doomed causes that ultimately don't even matter all that much

You change it by going for the weakest point in a peaceful way under the radar.

I believe it's Bitcoin, which is a silent, non-violent libertarian protest against the whole central banking system that produces huge powers, but I know that I am in the minority.

Well, I can’t help questioning the “non-violent” part: it takes incredible amounts of energy to maintain that is quite literally taken away from other - possibly more helpful at social scale - purposes.

not to mention the environmental impact

Yet another reason to implement a Carbon Tax & Dividend [0] ASAP. There's certainly an argument that the intentional waste of Proof of Work is more efficient than the overhead of existing banks; but I suspect the whole crypto world would migrate to Proof of Stake if forced to pay for their externalities. As is it, they simply borrow against the planetary credit card (probably at a rate of ~100x interest), sticking future generations with the bill for their "innovation".

[0] https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/

Actually not at all: the elegant design of the difficulty adjustment means that even if the price of electricity went up or down by 10x, the rate of new Bitcoin issuance would change only temporarily.

I haven't met any Bitcoiner who wouldn't want CO2 emissions to be heavily taxed.

The problem with proof of stake that it decreases the security of the system. There are many ways to trade security of Bitcoin for convenience and extra features (Ethereum is a great example), but so far it seems that the market chooses security.

I think we use a different definition of violence.

Yeah, you use the one that fits your narrative, and it works wonders until you try to pass it off to people who haven't latched onto that narrative, and then you come to a crossroads, do you summarily discount their perspective and go on your merry way unfazed and unchanged, or do you reconcile this new perspective and potentially confront issues with your narrative.

I don't know you but based on that facile response, I'm guessing you're more down for the former - considering the deleterious externalities of bitcoin mining at scale are pretty well known.

Uhhh I'm not particularly a fan of Bitcoin, but implying that this is anything like violence is absurd. I gotta go against the trend of anything you don't like that could conceivably lead to somebody being harmed somehow is the same thing as actual violence.

It's not really that absurd, it's just not the most conventional definition. But I've heard it used that way before, especially in the context of philosophy

It's absurd in the sense that, if you accept that definition, then anything at all - taking any action or even taking no action at all - could be called violent, which makes the word meaningless. It points to an Orwellian level of thought control. If anything at all can be called violent by any level of tortured logic, then it's very good to be the person who decrees what actions will be considered to be violent and what will not.

Well, no. This reaction is what people refer to when they say "loss of privilege" causes reactionary behavior.

If you think of it, even when you're not at the top of the food chain in your social order, being part of a dominant group makes your actions still causal to some sort of undesired or painful (and therefore violent) consequence to a member of the out-group. Nobody gets to decide what's good or bad, you just need to follow the chain of opportunity cost, determine who foots the bill and who reaps the interest.

It's indeed pretty hard to swallow...

I don't know, I think it's less absurd than your usage of the words "orwellian thought control" in the context of a different opinion on the definition of a word.

If I'm standing right next to the fuse box, and I see someone in the process of being electrocuted, isn't it violent to not flip the switch to save the person?

I'm pro-crypto, but so long as Apple maintains absolute hegemony over their ecosystem (backed in part by an artificial state monopoly on ideas!), even the rosiest scenario for Bitcoin doesn't change the power dynamic. Apple could literally add support for buying apps with BTC tomorrow, yet still disallow sideloading or competing stores, while kicking out apps they don't like on a whim.

This situation would not be solved by a change of payment mechanism, currency choice, monetary policy, or anything like that. It's not what makes Apple a large powerful corporation. The entire world could switch to bitcoin, but if millions of people still buy iPhones, Apple will still have power over what is done on those phones.

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