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Comment by ndesaulniers | Hacker News Reader

I encourage folks with a PlayStation 5 (or 4) to participate in the blackout by unplugging their console for the week of August 23 at 7:00 PM your local time and run to August 31 at 7:00 PM your local time. Hopefully that helps send a message. We should irrevocably own our games, not rent a revokable license. And we should have price competition from multiple store fronts.

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What message are you trying to send? "Oh look, a bunch of people who have already given us money aren't using the thing they paid for for a week, and we can maybe even save a bit of money by reducing our server load"? Am I missing something? Why should they care? If you really want to send a message, don't buy a PlayStation. If you own one already, don't buy anymore games. That's the only message corporations care about.

Do they still sell those at a loss and profit from the games? Guess you could buy a ton of them and only use them as doorstops.

The message is you'll buy the PS5 anyway. If this bothers you, don't buy it. I'm certainly not.

The only meaningful way to discourage such actions from companies is to pass new laws. Not playing on your Playstation for a little bit will not change anything

What like le reddit blackout?

"le reddit blackout" was the beginning of the end for reddit, so idk what you're trying to imply here.

I think the implication is that the blackout did nothing, and Reddit didn't care. Like this message that really says "I will buy the PS5 anyway."

Reddit indeed didn't care. Reddit also slowly collapsed starting from that point in time. It's latest investor information said it's not getting much Google traffic any more.

That may also have to do with the rise in AI usage

Gemini is trained on Reddit data and seems to heavily weight it, so yeah

Really? In August 2021 Reddit had a funding valuation at ~$10bn. It announced the API changes in April 2023. The blackout started in June 2023. It launched its IPO at $34 per share in March 2024. It's now trading at $160, with a market cap of ~$30.7bn. In other words, it's tripled in value over a 5 year period during which the blackout happened. That's a phenomenal rate of growth.

Why would we measure growth in dollars?

This thread is about taking action to send messages to corporations, and whether said messages make any difference. We would measure growth in dollars, because that's what shareholders (and therefore corporations) care about. If you "send a message" because you aren't happy about some direction the corporation took, and a few years later the shareholders are 3x richer than they were before, do you think they're paying attention to your message? All your message does is tell them that not only were they right, they were so right that even a large scale boycott didn't make a dent in the bottom line. You and I might not like it, but that's the reality.

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