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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

If people accept it, then it will get normalized, then the next level of abuse will come and you'll be happy because the water is only going up a degree or two. Frogs are best boiled slowly. They'll never notice, the suckers.

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I think this logic should be reserved for the cases where it really matters, like the erosion of freedom of speech. Potentially permanent changes.

This is just slimy sales tactics. The level of ‘acceptable to most people’ swings back and forth. It’s not a slippery slope.

It really matters. That it doesn't matter to you is something I'm fine with, but user freedom to use their computers as intended is not something that is trivial to me.

It does matter to me, I hate it when slimy sales tactics are the norm. I’m saying the boiling frog idea does not really apply here. It is essentially a spam issue.

Ah I see, when you look at it that way, yes, the instance itself is a bad enough thing. But the problem is that the step up from the previous n abuses is small enough that some percentage of the users will accept it, hence the froggy bits. They just keep doing worse thing, I'm trying to imagine the FF from a decade ago doing this and trying to get away with it. The users that are still left are the die hards, everybody else is already gone, they either can't leave or the won't leave (or both) until it is too late.

It's about the erosion of computing freedom. How distant is so helpfully nudging you to use a particular, blessed program for your security and convenience, to just mandating it? See Apple, for example, who has successfully normalized the device manufacturer dictating what software is allowed to run on the OS, and it's conveniently the one from its own store, paid for through its own gateway and sometimes whose cloud storage and network functionality is controlled by state agencies. That's something that really matters.

> I think this logic should be reserved for the cases where it really matters

I disagree, because by then you've lost the ability to fight back. If you let the little bad behaviors go, you set a precedent that's hard to fight against.

One could argue we're seeing that in realtime with your argument that everything is still fine...

Do you have any proof for the boiled frog myth? Would love to read.

I don't think we need to rehash that bit over and over again, it's a well known that the story is apocryphal but it serves as a useful metaphor, which I think by calling it a myth you are well aware of. Or were you genuinely interested in boiling living frogs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

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