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Comment by awongh | Hacker News Reader

I'm not against this in principle but I am a little skeptical that it would actually work in this case- I think search could be a good case for this (Google) but it's also in the process of being disrupted by LLMs so I feel like it's becoming less relevant.

One thing that I do believe could be relevant is regulation that forces open the platforms- social media and messaging as an open standard. Now that the technical underpinnings of it are well understood I don't know why we couldn't have an open standard for making posts that my real friends could see and rich-media standard for me sending messages and being in group messages. It's ridiculous that we're locked into these messaging platforms that want to show us ads when the tech to run these things is well understood and should be commodified in a more open market. The cost of switching should be near zero.

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You’re not actually locked, and the open protocols exist

You're locked in because everyone else is already on the closed one and the switching costs are too high.

If the big companies were legally required to allow you to migrate your group texts onto another platform with a push of a button then I would say you're not locked in anymore.

Companies would complain that "it's not technically possible"- but of course we all know it's completely doable.

I know the rhetoric but I disagree. You can create accounts on open protocol platforms for free. You don’t have to do a cost intensive migration. You can use multiple platforms at the same time. Over time you can influence your peers to move to the open protocol platform more (assuming it’s actually one that considered UX seriously).

The feeling that you’re locked is more a psychological barrier you have to pass than anything else

This thinking lets these big companies off the hook for purposely designing their apps to be incompatible with each others (iMessage message reactions for example).

Even though it's just a text message reaction we need to hold these product managers accountable for purposely making messaging an iOS person a worse experience in the name of selling more iPhones. The micro-aggression enshittification of stepping outside this walled garden adds up in the end to anti-competitive behavior.

Dismissing their behavior by pretending that there are viable alternatives is actually making things worse, not better.

Even without regulation I think there could be a chance that open platforms gain traction- but only because there's just enough money, enough profit motive and enough public political sentiment for people to switch (I'm thinking of BlueSky).

Apple is for sure abusing their position. At the same time, the iMessage thing is a US cultural phenomenon as far as I'm aware. I've never seen anything like that outside of the US, because pretty much nobody is using SMS to communicate in other places in the world. Over the past 15 years I've been using various google chat platforms, Telegram, WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, and others. There is a pretty healthy competition in the messaging world. And creating new accounts to get features of a more interesting platform is a very low barrier of entry.

These communication platforms are a source of power and control, there are big interests involved who do not want to let this opportunity for power slip between their fingers.

And you think OpenAI (long rumored to be an interested buyer of Chrome) is less of an interest?

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