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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Related joke going around right now:

Does Microsoft understand consent? Yes / Ask me again later

In general, options like "never ask me again" seem to have disappeared, and we should bring them back.

This is what software freedom means in concrete terms. I wonder if it will be easier to explain the principles of the FLOSS purists to the average person now that multiple facets of their lives are being meddled with by aggressively hostile software, and not just being stung now and then with dropped support, format lock-in, or forced obsolescence.

CoC destroyed all of that. There has been nothing more effective at alienating the general public from open source than CoC. It worked exactly as the corporations behind it intended. CoC is so corrosive that instead of using BC and AD, there should be BCoc and ACoc when discussing the world of open source. There will be no "Normie Revolution" into the open source world until CoC is under control, which is exactly why it never will be under control. It serves its corporate masters extremely well and to the cheers of those who once upon a time were against corporate power.

What is CoC in this context?

"Don't be a dick to your fellow contributors" but spelled out in explicit detail because OSS attracts various degrees of neurodivergency and need social norms spelled out.

Especially evolving social norms like cut it with the replying "go make me a sandwich" to women like it's the late 90's.

PMs don't like it when their funnel gets shut off. They hate true rejection and always think the user is just some finagling away from falling down the funnel.

And they don't understand that respecting users (and non-users) has value, and changes how people see your company.

Respecting the users does not have value FOR THEM. That's how the job works - they're measured on how much people they trick into falling into their feature so they can put together a slide deck with nice DAU numbers.

Same for engineers - user respect doesn't have value for them either, you'll get the laziest, easiest implementation of a given ticket. Or the most complex and one if they're up for promotion or want to learn a new tech.

Afterwards, both groups will happily run towards greener pastures by the time any of this "respect value" materializes.

It's going to take a cultural shift in awareness of how abusing peoples freedom harms society before this really changes. Probably 95% of people on hackernews works for corporations that do this. Do what you can to shift the awareness.

They understand it just fine. Their reward metrics only care about the impact they had, not the externalities.

The more general problem is that software companies started having their own goals that are at odds with just serving the damn users that pay them money.

I have begun calling this practice "rapey software" in casual conversation. People usually object when they first hear the term, but when I ask them why they would defend such practices they usually fold.

They didn’t “fold”, they wanted a very uncomfortable conversation to change direction. I’d advise finding a less objectionable term, because many people probably stop listening after your opening salvo.

Objecting to calling a practice rape is not defending the practice. Consider you persuaded most of those people only how little they wanted the discussion to continue.

Objecting to someone comparing a popup to rape is not defending the popup.

"Enshittified rapeware" ... does have a bit of a ring to it, no? Think I'll stick with malware.

I said this last year here: it's not a choice nor consent but a plain harassment. And it won't stop until you give up and let the software/company do what they want.

I doubt anything can be done nowadays without some law enforcement. We're long gone from times when companies offered actual options and features for the user and not for themselves.

Never ask me again is available here: https://www.debian.org/distrib/

We? If "we" want this ability, we first have to stop using software by Google, et al. and instead use FOSS. Google isn't going to add this into YT for us. They aren't driven by our satisfaction...

Legislation will be necessary. Otherwise, why would they bother?

The legislation required is allowing reverse engineering for interoperability. If there was a legal, alternative Youtube frontend that everyone used and didn't do this crap - YouTube's UI would be forced to compete. As it is, writing such a client/frontend (even if you preserve the ads) will probably land you in legal hot water.

See also: how reddit shut down superior competing UIs by changing their API terms.

It depends on the country. In some, reverse engineering a proprietary product for the purpose of interoperability is explicitly allowed.

In the US, as far as I know, there hasn't yet been a precedent about this.

One can publish their client/frontend pseudonymously, using Tor if necessary. Not like one is gonna profit off it anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

That massively limits your audience. And without something like the EU's Digital Markets Act locked down platforms like iOS would be a non-starter as well.

I don't think YouTube is going to feel compelled to change their UI if 1% of users are using some alternative UI off of Tor.

No, I mean the developer publishes under a pseudonym, and said developer can use Tor if needed to hide their tracks so they can't be served legally, as no one knows who they are in real life. Joe Public isn't risking going to prison or being sued to bankruptcy because they downloaded some random YouTube client, so they don't have to use Tor.

Or refusing to use software that does this kind of thing, and using more respectful software instead.

The problem with that is that this is often not a real choice. You don't get to pick individual properties, you get to pick from a (usually pretty small) selection of products which bundle a lot of properties together, and these annoyances are usually not deal-breaking enough to cancel the other reasons why you are using that product.

Often, there simply is no respectful alternative because everyone is doing it, or the respectful alternative is utterly useless due to other issues, or the disrespectful platform is the exclusive distributor for some content that you really want to access.

The platforms/apps know this and generally get more abusive the less alternatives you have.

You might be surprised to learn just how much technology and entertainment you can live without.

Many problems with that approach.

- Most users just use what is preinstalled on their device. That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.

- As the blogpost points out, many people don't even realise there's an option.

- Which sometimes there is not: either literally or in practice. E.g. I'm forced to maintain at the very least a whatsapp and a facebook account to perform basic everyday tasks.

- Finally, what I think is the most important point: these behaviours give a competitive advantage, therefore there needs to be a floor enforced by law. It's much like environmental protections, it's not enough to say "the customers should pick the greener choice", because dumping waste into a river is cheaper than processing it or recycling. You need to enforce a level playing field via laws, to ensure this does not happen.

Don't forget two sided markets. Now that your mother in law is on Facebook and is never going to jump platforms, you are stuck on Facebook.

I find it shocking how many community organizations are completely dependent on Meta. I saw a poster for a club that gets together to play board games that simply had a heading that said "Board Game Club" and a QR code but no meeting times or places, no contact phone, email or web site url. The QR code points to... a Facebook page. If you want to engage with this organization you have no choice but to use Facebook and be subject to their system of pernicious personalization.

Many student organizations at Cornell use Instagram as their primary or only communications tool. There are so many problem with that, not least that you can't engage with that platform without giving a mobile phone number with a real cellular carrier and that doesn't have metadata about events so you get notifications on your phone about events that happened a month ago. It's absurd, but you'd make yourself a hermit if you eschewed these platforms.

I'm kind of a hermit I guess.. but I haven't had any of that stuff since like 2009 and it's been just splendid. Email and sms/signal does the job well enough.

> That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.

That seems counterfactual when talking about Chrome. Microsoft has tried every trick in the book - short of simply blocking Chrome - to get people using Edge on Windows. It's been somewhat effective, but Chrome still retains a dominant lead. This is entirely due people going out of their way to install Chrome.

> these behaviours give a competitive advantage

That's not inherently the case. Scummy dark patterns like these might show short-term advantages in numbers, but doing that burns user trust.

It's a pretty stark difference between classes of companies. Consider how people feel about Comcast and Facebook, versus how people feel about Stripe and Vanguard. (Random examples of companies with wildly different reputations.)

Comcast and Facebook are B2C companies while Microsoft is also B2B, where this problem is most pervasive.

Facebook is B2B when it comes to advertising and also its use as a communications and promotional tool outside of advertising.

You think a few niche individuals refusing to use Microsoft os is going to make a noticeable difference in their stats in the slightest? Even apple is a fairly small fraction of that market share and the next smaller option is a rounding error.

I'm not suggesting that a few people doing this is enough, or that individual choice is going to be successful. But I do think it's one of many reasons for people to systematically use Open Source wherever possible, and it's a case study in what you get by doing so.

I think we’re seeing the effects of Microsoft’s treatment of their users. Windows 11 has been out for years now and we’re a few months away from Windows 10 being unsupported, but 10 is still the most popular version of Windows. I expect that hundreds of millions of users will choose to run 10 unsupported rather than upgrade to 11. Since 11 came out, desktop Linux market share has increased from 1.5% to 4% and Mac OS has seen significant gains as well. I think the more relevant factor is that Microsoft simply doesn’t care. We reached “peak desktop” in the mid-2010s and now Microsoft is simply following the MBA playbook of what to do when you have a widely used product in a market that’s stopped growing (spend the bare minimum on maintenance, redirect revenue to developing products in markets that are growing like cloud and AI services, use your market position to push existing Windows customers to use your new products in growth markets).

Unfortunately the government seems to have taken on the idea that its primary responsibility is legislation forbidding the government from passing legislation on given topics. This is because it's wholly owned by the people it's supposed to regulate.

It's surprisingly hard to do this. Never means never and then you have to remember the flag and decide what later things it applies to.

I'm not sure anyone who finds it difficult to write values to file and read from them later should be working on commercial software. I genuinely struggle to think of any single feature that could be more trivial than this is.

Later means you have to remember the flag and decide what later things it applies to.

Who's you? Large companies have many different people working at them and designing a business process that can make it so there is a "you" to decide this may actually be impossible.

....what? persistence is a solved problem.

i hate it when engineers do this song and dance "well actually it's really hard to do that" in order to justify the position that they already had before the conversation started. no it isn't, it literally isn't, it's just smoke and mirrors to justify your position.

I know a guy who made a career out of advising management about this sort of foot dragging in software engineering. He is very wealthy.

Persistence of flags in the database is a solved problem.

Persistence of /people who work at the company who remember what the flags mean/ is not. What if you've made a promise to never show something, it has legal effect in some country, and a new PM in charge of a new feature uses the wrong flag?

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