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Comment by cartesius13 | Hacker News Reader

You are in charge of what runs on your computer, nobody is forcing you to use Discord.

There's no jerk dictating what is allowed to run on your computer, there's someone offering a piece of software that you can willingly install on your computer if you want.

If you don't want that, you're always free to not use the software or use workarounds to avoid the things you don't like.

I, for example, hate ads and use adblock always. But I don't think it's fair for me to go and say that everyone should forced to not put ads on their stuff.

I'm not a fan but I understand that I have no right to dictate what people do with their software

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This is not true for platforms. If a community decides they're going to use Discord, then you, the individual, are out of luck. You either use that or miss out on the community or convince the entire community not to use Discord.

How is that different from, say, being forced to buy a PS5 or an X-whatever to participate in a gaming community, or to get a Spotify membership to hear a particular podcast?

They aren't very different. With Spotify we actually gave up a lot of power that custom clients had for the lowest-common-denominator sort of stuff, which is really sad.

With each of these products we keep giving up more and more of the powerful variety that was available before. While the average person doesn't lose much, the average person doesn't really exist and we've really lost a lot of long tails of value.

I see the potential value, I just don't understand the principle that enables us to dictate that private companies provide it to us.

I feel a lot of laws dictate what private companies provide us. For example a butcher's meat cannot be covered in rat poison. A hyperbolic example but for giant chat services like this where the wield an incredible amount of power because of scale they are still subject to restrictions by the government for the benefit of the people. The government totally has that overriding right because your companies operating in there county. Don't like it the same way the user has no choice but to not use your interface the company has the right now to operate in the country. Personally I think the api format is a little ambiguous but it's incredibly naive to think that companies cannot be subjected to laws on how they do business just because they built a computer service. With adoption comes regulation to protect both users and companies

The same principle behind antitrust laws: dismantling monopolies is good for the public and good for innovation

Lacking an open-for-all-comers API is not in fact an antitrust violation.

I agree of course, it's not a violation of any laws. I just thought you were asking for some moral principle to justify pressing a developer to make an API available

I mean, it's just not antitrust, at all. A vendor is not coherently a "monopoly for their own products".

As the world changes, we can't always expect new behaviors to ideally fit existing moral principles.

Is there a moral principle preventing a power company from providing you with all your electrical appliances and forbidding you from using those not provided by them?

There are a LOT of jerks coercing people into being used by Discord. Not only that, actively defending it.

FOMO on "community" is a considerable factor. The regular person is quite likely a social being. They will care and value being able to use the same platform.

It is a personal sacrifice to resist it while it remains. Even when a Free Software alternative becomes wide-reaching enough for an exodus, it'll be years too late.

> I, for example, hate ads and use adblock always.

> But I don't think it's fair for me to go and say that everyone should forced to not put ads on their stuff.

You can use ad blocking software because browsers are on our side. Our browsers support uBlock Origin whether webmasters like it or not and they don't have the power to force us to switch.

What companies like Discord and WhatsApp do is akin to contractually requiring us to use a specific browser that does their bidding on pain of banishment from the platform. That's how they get away with advertising, spamming, surveillance, DRM and countless other abuses: by forcing us to run their software on our computers if we want to use their service. If we could run our own clients, they would be powerless.

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