Comment by alexvoda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexvoda | Hacker News Reader

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Talking about wallpapers is derailing the conversation. The point was that just as we see the social networks of today and the games of today getting enshitified so will every VR experience get enshitified.

As for writing it yourself, care to talk about the price of the developer account, the approval process, the risk of getting banned, the ever changing API surface, the time you use for all of this, etc. etc.? You are NOT the owner of anything in the "metaverse". You are just allowed the privilege of playing in the platform owners sandbox as long as you pay. When the platform owner will decide it is profitable to exploit users ability to set wallpapers there is nothing you as a user or as a developer on top of the platform will be able to do to counter that.

Here, read this (1) and watch this (2) and tell me you feel confident the same will not happen to any "metaverse".

(1) https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g16heGLKlTA

Your app does not need to get approved if you are the only one using it - in fact you don’t even need to have a developer account if you’re the only one using it and are ok resigning the app occasionally.

With regards to enshittification: all the examples listed were software companies or service companies. I don’t see any hardware companies on there, and I’d go so far as to say hardware companies that sell with high margins do not undergo enshittification. From the article: “… they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers …” Apple doesn’t have business customers. Their core business strategy is not to sell ads, or data, but rather hardware.

Your first paragraph misses the point. The argument was not about the current rules of any current platform. It was about the potential for abuse on future VR/AR platforms by platform owners. The platform owners are the rule makers and can change the rules at any point. Others platforms like the gaming consoles are proof the rules can be a lot tighter.

Apple is in no way excluded from enshitification.

Apple refusing to support more than one external monitor on non-Pro or non-Max M* laptops is an example in hardware by virtue of being intentional market segmentation.

On the software side, ads are slowly encroaching previously ad-free spaces on Apple software too. Apple is also a services company providing everything from an ads platform to apps marketplaces to media to payment services to banking services and leveraging their position in anticompetitive ways. It's platforms are subject to the same pressures of enshitification.

The part you quoted is just one of the steps. The strategy for a platform is to act as an indispensable middleman and abuse everyone both upstream and downstream.

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