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Comment by hda2 | Hacker News Reader

OEMs and software vendors have been pushing hard towards locking-down and controlling people's computing devices and people have largely been indifferent.

It genuinely seemed all was going to be lost until the tech industry went crazy exercising their control. Their recent (and imo unjustifiable) actions have clearly demonstrated to everyone what it means to hand over control. It remains to be seen whether people will grasp this chance to reverse the course that this rotten industry has charted and is adamant on following.

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Stallman was right all along. The Google and Apple play to lock down your devices in order to "keep you safe" was not about malware or data privacy, it's about keeping away what THEY classify as thoughtcrime. It's about keeping you under their shoe. Now feed them your data or else!

People on here think that most "normal" people are going to figure out how to sideload apps.

No.

I visited my parents church at the beginning of this year and very few people were talking about that. What they were talking about is giving up on smartphones and social media altogether which is probably not a bad idea.

> What they were talking about is giving up on smartphones and social media altogether

That's incredibly encouraging to hear. It seems to be a common feature of "I quit Facebook/Twitter/whatever" accounts that once you break the immediate addiction there's no real urge to go back, so if this does happen it should have a decent chance of sticking.

(And as a mobile refusenik I sometimes feel like the last holdout left, so a bit of company would be nice.)

Yeah, I totally get the enjoyment of not being "always available". I have had lengthy periods without a phone, and it teaches you that; no, you don't have to be always available, and no the world will not end etc.

The only "social media" I use is Reddit, but it isn't/I don't use it as they person centric networks like boomerbook/twitter.

Reddit is by far the hardest to quit tho. I get constantly dragged into the shitshow, but can't really get off, because there is useful information there, I can't find anywhere else.

In a similar way, I can't quit smartphones for encrypted messaging and navigation (not even Google Maps, but OSMand).

I don't lump Reddit into the same bucket as FB/Twitter. It's perfectly possible to have a sane, even pleasant experience there if you stay out of the default subs and the obvious dumpster fires. And I think stable-but-pseudonymous identity is turning out to have been the right call.

No doubt, I absolutely agree.

However, I was just saying I cannot stay out of those dumpster fires. Sooner or later, I think to myself "Well, I wonder what's up in the world otherwise. Let's check out /r/all for a moment."... And there we go.

It's not like other people are idiots and I am in control over addiction, impulse, outrage and dopamine. I have spend waaaay too much time on reddit. I hate it, for what it is. Yet, I can't manage to not use it for a prolonged time. Too many niche forums I depend on, and I simply can't tolerate linear, unranked forums anymore.

Assuming from the subtext that GP means they're wanting to give up because of (app)(?) censorship. Having a whole strata of society no longer participating in the conversation is not healthy. Politicians are now looking to these platforms to guide policy decisions, so anybody not on them has no voice.

Surely politicians aren't using social media as the main driver for policy? The demographic who votes the most (the elderly) is also the demographic that has the smallest presence on social media, so only listening to Twitter seems like shooting yourself in the foot.

It doesn’t even matter if politicians aren’t making decisions based on social media—-their constituents are demanding action because of what they see on it. A video of one person in power choking another person to death got widely shared on Twitter and the result was massive and worldwide protests. Hell, in general social media has replaced pretty much every other form of it, we can’t keep pretending the internet is a niche place anymore.

"the conversation" is not held on Facebook nor on Twitter.

_A_ conversation is held there, which presumes to be _the_ conversation.

Anybody not on them still gets to vote. If anything, I suspect that making these platforms increasingly unrepresentative will end up hurting pols who pay attention to them, by giving them an increasingly distorted view of public opinion. If you optimize your messaging for Twitter, an actual electorate is going to drop you like third period French.

People will trade off convinience and representativeness. A lot of psychology studies are famously done on students, because it's just so cheap and easy. I think it's very likely they will just say "screw those backwards hillbillies, I bet they are all racist unpersons anyway"

Oh, I'm sure they will. And they'll end up losing elections as a result.

Both sides will. They can't both lose.

(LOL), you're not alone.

There's literally twos of us!

I am making an effort to also revert back to keeping physical notebooks. I have a mini library of notebooks that stop at 1996. That year I bought a power pc (for Java) and the record of my thoughts are spread over various boxes, legacy media, and buried deep in nested directories. It was a mistake, in retrospect.

My handwriting is far too bad for physical notebooks ever to be an option.

A lot of people already know that you can get apps directly as .apks, but the majority of them have been conditioned by corporate "propaganda" that they'll be almost certainly getting malware that way. The term "sideloading" was invented to ostracise and discourage the practice of acquiring software independently --- which was the norm up until Apple and its walled garden appeared.

But now, perhaps when sufficiently large numbers of people realise that what "malware" means to the big corporations is different from what it means to users, we'll have another mini-revolution back to the independent sharing and community trust model that the industry tried to eliminate because it would subvert their control.

I don't want to get too political here, but after seeing the outcome of the US election, and the events from then until now, I knew that stuff like this was going to happen.

Ok, that's some historical revisionism I've not see before. The term sideloading was invented by an internet storage service company to refer to copying files between remote storage buckets without having to do an upload or download. The term then got adopted by the community for copying MP3 files to a player from your computer.

But nothing about your facts help me hate on Google and Apple more... can’t the GP be right?

Whatever, I just think it's useful when evaluating an opinion to know whether the person is prone to fantasising and making shit up. There's way too much of that going around these days.

Keep in mind that you're making a somewhat pedantic point about the difference between "invented" and "adopted" and the core of the criticism is still true.

The thing you did with software direct from the developer used to be called "installing" but now the platform companies call it "sideloading" which sounds like something that would cause an airline to lose your luggage.

In the communities I participated in, that was just called copying, and generic MP3/MP4 player owners were often quick to point out that they could just simply plug in and copy files like a USB drive, whereas iPods needed iTunes and "syncing". I've never seen sideloading being used to describe anything other than to suggest "impropriety" or something that's not "officially unapproved", and only in the context of applications --- I haven't ever heard of someone "sideloading" music to a player either. I bet for the vast majority of others, this is also the case.

There are other terms many people use, for sure, but nevertheless, that’s where the term sideloading comes from.

Maybe in your social surroundings. In some/many other countries - granted, mostly non-English-speaking they just call it (literal translation) "Installing applications from a file" or "Installing APKs".

This would have happened no matter the outcome of the US election. The trend towards consolidation of corporate power is really inexorable.

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