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Comment by poisonborz | Hacker News Reader

Care to explain further why there should be zero regulations on the UX of monopoly applications used by ~15%+ of world population? Good luck on trying to avoid the 3 top messaging applications in today's world. How is this different from regulating content moderation?

It's like telling a wheelchair user to just use another station or form of transport. If you have global reach, you have global responsibilites. And the end goal wouldn't even be regulated apps - it should simply be too complex to create apps with such a reach. Forcing open protocols instead of proprietary gardens. This is what the messaging interoperability of EU's DMA act is also supporting.

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> Care to explain further why there should be zero regulations on the UX of monopoly applications used by ~15%+ of world population?

Because there isn't a monopoly on chat apps. What you're asking for sounds like rules for the sake of more rules. I can think of more than half a dozen chat apps offhand: Signal Messenger, Whatsapp iMessage, all manner of IRC clients, Slack, Teams, stock SMS, Discord, Matrix/Element, Telegram, Session, and so on and so on.

We're not talking web search here, the market for chats is diverse and competitive. You got walled gardens, open source, and everything in between with a bunch of different UI's.

Out of your examples there is like 3 over 100m MAU all other are negligible. Try to tell your peers you prefer "all manner of IRC clients". But regardless, don't you think an app used by 100m+ people should be regulated in this way? Can elderly or disabled persons choose what messenger they want to use to connect to most people? And don't tell "AI will solve it", the industry will not want these interfaces to be simple, they want to maximise profits. Black patterns should be discouraged.

Yes, they can choose one of hundreds of text messaging apps. If not someone can help them. If your bar for a product is that a disabled person has to be able to use it easily, no exceptions, then you are going to destroy a lot of products, from mountain bikes to headphones to pepper grinders.

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