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Comment by RulerOf | Hacker News Reader

This really hits home with me:

>But in a world of Felony Contempt of Business Model, that discussion changes to "Given that we can literally imprison anyone who helps our users get more out of this product, how can we punish users who are disloyal enough to simply quit our service or switch away from our product?"

>That is, "how can we raise the switching costs of our products so that users who are angry at us keep using our products?"

I keep telling myself that the reason interoperability disappeared is because software updates and platforms are just fast-moving targets, and we don't have the relative stability computers had 25 years ago. But I know that's not true, and it's really the other way around.

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Doctorow is gesturing at something significant, but he's still stuck in the '90s era copyright wars. I agree that the DMCA is awful, but it's irrelevant to the problem.

Today's tech corps don't need to sic the cops on you if you use their products outside their prescribed boundaries. They can just ban you, and that's punishment enough. We're already hearing Kafkaesque stories of people accidentally tripping automated abuse-detection and getting locked out of their GooFaceTwit accounts with no recourse. If you're considering actually violating the TOS... well who'd want to risk that? Better to just stay in line like a good little drone.

I can tell you from experience that being locked out of facebook is not the same as being sent to prison for a long time

I think the point was that both of those are consequences most people are not willing to risk. Corporations like to optimize after all...

Materially for the person in question no but as far as its impact on "the Internet"' "health" perhaps yes.

I summarize this behaviour as "hating your customers" and it seems to be a growing trend. I think it's a corruption of just being opinionated and looking for people who are on board with your product vision (common advice that I agree with), that comes with too much market power, or consumers that are so used to being treated like shit they don't even notice anymore. But you see it now in most corporate interactions, how much they hate their customers

> how much they hate their customers

We programmers are among the worst when it comes to this. The natural reaction so many of us have when getting a bug report, is anger and blaming the messenger. (The user)

Perhaps now in 2022, the most successful app purveyors have gotten so good at network effects, while treating their users as the product, the economics/game theory has started to breed contempt for users?

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