I think they always need one company that people will forgive anything to normalize a practice and then everyone will start doing it. There was Twitter killing their API in all but name: Twitter still alive -> we can do that too without dying. Apple stopped including chargers and charges people extra if they actually want to use fast charging: People still buy iPhones -> we can do that too. This is like reverse competition. Someone will check how far they can push things and everyone else follows suit.
Watching businesses operate in the “how much can we get away with because the average capitalist consumer is either lazy, an idiot, or both” realm has been incredibly depressing.
Lemmy is the first time I think I’ve ever seen a significant amount of people actually fight back and abandon a shit product.
Well, usually they’re not making a change like this. You can add all kinds of transactions, you can have dark patterns, you can mistreat your workers, but the moment you do something that directly affects the basic experience that the user is there for, you open yourself up to competition.
Google Chrome is seeing users migrate to Firefox to keep adblock, the Battlefield series is seeing users switch to BattleBit Remastered (an indie game made by literally 3-4 people, which now has nearly 7x the players as Battlefield 2042 on Steam), Call of Duty has xDefiant advertising itself based on longtime CoD player complaints, Minecraft pissed off some members of its modding community enough that they decided to make their own game called Hytale with a focus on modding and custom games (and this got picked up by Riot Games, so there’s real potential here), and now we’ve got a bunch of people abandoning reddit because Steve Huffman decided it was a good idea to take away all the good reddit clients and mod tools without improving the official stuff first.
I think they always need one company that people will forgive anything to normalize a practice and then everyone will start doing it. There was Twitter killing their API in all but name: Twitter still alive -> we can do that too without dying. Apple stopped including chargers and charges people extra if they actually want to use fast charging: People still buy iPhones -> we can do that too. This is like reverse competition. Someone will check how far they can push things and everyone else follows suit.
Watching businesses operate in the “how much can we get away with because the average capitalist consumer is either lazy, an idiot, or both” realm has been incredibly depressing.
Lemmy is the first time I think I’ve ever seen a significant amount of people actually fight back and abandon a shit product.
Well, usually they’re not making a change like this. You can add all kinds of transactions, you can have dark patterns, you can mistreat your workers, but the moment you do something that directly affects the basic experience that the user is there for, you open yourself up to competition.
Google Chrome is seeing users migrate to Firefox to keep adblock, the Battlefield series is seeing users switch to BattleBit Remastered (an indie game made by literally 3-4 people, which now has nearly 7x the players as Battlefield 2042 on Steam), Call of Duty has xDefiant advertising itself based on longtime CoD player complaints, Minecraft pissed off some members of its modding community enough that they decided to make their own game called Hytale with a focus on modding and custom games (and this got picked up by Riot Games, so there’s real potential here), and now we’ve got a bunch of people abandoning reddit because Steve Huffman decided it was a good idea to take away all the good reddit clients and mod tools without improving the official stuff first.
Don’t fuck with the core experience.