Re:YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut d...
by dvfjsdhgfv on Thursday July 04, 2019 @02:39AM
(#20352118)
It's intriguing to witness this phenomenon live, for example with Google: first we were all in love with it, so refreshing, fast, humble when compared with Yahoo, Lycos et all. We loved their "do no evil" mantra. When they started to offer their free e-mail, we were queueing to migrate. Then the phenomenon you're describing started to happen and people are struggling to de-googlify their lives only to discover it's already too late to do it 100%.
Re:YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut d...
by spydum on Thursday July 04, 2019 @09:50AM
(#20354599)
It happens everywhere - similar concerns raised for cloudflare. Diversity is a good thing, big monolithic providers of services CAN be good as long as leadership is aligned, but once they start optimizing towards less altruistic goals it’s scary. You could argue government works the same way.
Re:YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut d...
by justinclift on Thursday July 04, 2019 @06:44PM
(#20358390)
> ... first we were all in love with it
People commonly seem to express this idea. That's not actually true.
Plenty of people haven't believed the PR from day one. What you're seeing now, is the reason why.
As I cast my eye over the FSF's basic definition of free software [0] I can't spot much of a mystery.
If a user don't have those freedoms, then someone else is in control of their software. It is inevitable that sooner or later the situation will change and the person who does have control the software is going to do disagree with what the user wants to use the software for - and at that point the user is the one with the problem.
Stallman isn't using a genius level of insight, but he is avoiding some very common shortcuts people take where they assume that because people are on 'their side' today that they will remain on 'their side' even if the incentives change. They are then shocked to discover that when the incentives change that nobody was ever actually on 'their side', it was just that the shark swimming placidly alongside wasn't hungry before.
I'm usually with Stallman's theories, it amazes me people keep being surprised that liking someone doesn't mean that the person is immune to the incentive structures that surround them. People have a remarkable and underappreciated capacity to make decisions that are good for them rather than good in the abstract.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html