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Comment by null_object | Hacker News Reader

Wow this currently has 111 points and is sailing to the top of HN... based on a user misunderstanding...

Edit: What's more, the person pointing to the solution isn't even the top-voted comment on this thread. Just everyone repeating their usual anti-Apple fixations.

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I can't find the solution post that you seem to be referring to here. The closest I've found is a link to Reddit where someone said "Turn off Sync Library and all that data will come back". But the original user responded saying that while the majority of songs came back, a few hundred were gone for good, and that Apple Support told them "sometimes that happens".

Is there a different, better solution that I haven't spotted yet? Or, what was the misunderstanding?

Are Dark Patterns the fault of the user or the company ?

> Are Dark Patterns the fault of the user or the company

But you - and supposedly the other people downvoting me - don’t seem to realize that absolutely nothing has happened to the user’s original files. They simply misunderstood how to sync files to their other devices.

The user was led to expect that their data would be in Apple Music. At that point, it would be completely reasonable for them to delete all copies of the files themselves in the understanding that Apple Music would actually absorb and retain the content it claimed to have imported.

Ah, but the User would be wrong, because the MPAA and RIAA outsource copyright enforcement to everyone else. So business-wise, you have to assume that anything you "try to import" will be looked at as tainted, lest it put the company on the pedestal of "accomplice to copyright infringement".

You must consider every service provider a hostile entity. No exceptions.

“Was led to expect” or “expected”? It may be the former, but I don’t see any clear evidence for that in this page.

The case that Apple led users to believe that, for me, would require showing what they tell users when you allow Apple Music to sync with your old iTunes library.

Do they even use the word “Sync”? I wouldn’t know, and AFAICT this page doesn’t tell me.

If the user told it "import these files over here", or "absorb that collection over there", and it said "OK, I did it", without providing a big fat "you must click to acknowledge this specific fact" sort of warning about lost or modified files, then it led the user to expect that the stuff was imported.

Actually it would probably take several warnings. "The following files will not be imported. Click to accept.". "The following files will be replaced with DRM-encumbered versions. Click to accept.". "The following files will be replaced with versions that may be different performances, mixes, or encodings. Click to accept.". "The following files will be replaced with censored radio edits. Click to accept.".

Anything short of that is misleading. If "what they tell users" is ten paragraphs of crap with an oblique mention of their losing your files or replacing them with their "improved" DRM-and-censorship-included versions, that does nothing at all.

> But you - and supposedly the other people downvoting me - don’t seem to realize that absolutely nothing has happened to the user’s original files.

This is incorrect. You are wrong.

They are clearly misrepresenting what they are doing if the songs they are matching are not the same ones uploaded.

e.g. I upload version A, and I get back a different version (version B). Some songs are dramatically different from version A to B, and "matching" a different version is not acceptable.

Further, why people are down voting you has very little to do with what is happening and more to do with your comments and how they are in some ways inappropriate.

The responsibility for a defective product that allows harm to be done to it's user through misoperation and lack of safety features lies with the manufacturer. Supplying the equivalent of a chainsaw without a blade guard, and then blaming the victims is not okay.

Based on a "misunderstanding" of obscure user-hostile behavior that no sane person would expect. Behavior that no sane designer would design, and no sane coder would code, absent evil corporate pressure.

And, no, it being "documented" does not excuse it.

I don't have an anti-Apple fixation. My "anti-" is decidedly unfixed, and ranges over Apple, Google, record labels, and all of the other scumbags who operate or influence 99.999999 percent of "the cloud".

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