Or do you mean imply that a practical approach to reign in unregulated online casinos is to spread the message of, "Just Say No," in web forum comments to the ostensible addicts?
Or to be fair, something else entirely? My point is I can't tell without context there whether you are sympathizing with the user ("ah yes, something needs to be done because they've found your weak spot"), or chastising them for not having the force of will to resist dark patterns.
Edit: clarification
If you agreed to sharing all your contacts to listen to “musical tweets”, I don’t see why you’ll be complaining. You willingly made a trade off.
I know more about coding than 95% of my friends and I still don't fully understand the depth of info that I transmit to an app when I agree to give it permissions on my iOS device.
E.g., if I give Whatsapp access to my photos on my iPhone, does that mean all of the photos that are stored on my iPhone, including screenshots and hidden photos, are uploaded to Whatsapp servers? Does it upload when I take a new photo or when I open the Whatsapp app?
So if, in this case, Whatsapp is indeed pulling all of a user's photos, including hidden photos, to their servers, I imagine many people would not want that to happen. So 1) I'd want to know ahead of time exactly what will be pulled and 2) ideally, I could have a way to use the app without giving it the keys to everything.
“Oh noes I had to give up all of my contact’s personal information... but I got into that beta!!”
I have heard there's a way to share invites without sharing contacts, but I haven't cared enough to even do a cursory search on that.
So we can share the list, but they'll never get our real contacts, only trash data. Enough use it, maybe they'll stop
The next move on this side would be to keep contacts in a separate app from the std Android/Apple app, and then have to make calls, texts, etc. from there.
If only there weren't so many sociopaths running these companies... sorry, wrong planet
Signal does it with hashes which it doesn’t store anyway
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007061452-Do...
HN seems to be doing pretty well, and it's never done this sort of thing, as far as I know.
Reddit never did it during their growth phase, instead they provided their own seed content.
Metafilter has never done anything unethical to my knowledge.
There are many, many successful social networks which have not performed unethical contact harvesting and other shady things.
I don’t know any one outside some geeky sites and only one person personally who cares about any of this. Some do say lame casually. But it’s not going to be a deciding factor for using the app.
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To add on to the whims of the geeky communities. Some companies escape it more than others. Airbnb doesn’t get much shit for spamming Craigslist people in early days. Compared to the negative talk of Uber, Facebook, etc, they also get no where near any criticism for the way they incentivize negative aspects of their platform.
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All of this to say - there’s no real downside if money and power is the primary goal.
My experience is completely different from yours. Out of the dozens of people I've spoken with about this stuff, I can't remember a SINGLE PERSON who didn't express dissatisfaction with at least one of: lack of privacy and potential willy-nilly snooping by CompanyX employee; arbitrary blocking and post removal without good cause; bad interface design; low quality of content.
I don't go fishing for it either, it just happens in conversation, although I sometimes am the first to broach the subject of social networks.
So I see the same dissatisfaction. I find that to be closer to slacktivism level of caring for most people though. If they stop using an app or don't use it from the get go for X reason, it usually doesn't align with how they're using other apps. So technically they did not use something because of the dissatisfaction you described. However, they aren't actually applying that even remotely consistently.
That because they have a lot of VC money riding on it, they have to do "growth hacking" in order to justify the funds and grow quickly enough to satisfy the investors?
Well, I guess I have to agree.
Hacker News doesn’t have the same business model as others either. It’s to help the namesake incubator. It succeeds with that. Getting contacts etc wouldn’t benefit Hacker News. Hacker News could lose a decent amount of money yearly without any prospect of breaking even and still be run.
Most other apps of any kind can’t be run that way, including Reddit and Metafilter.
With today's technology, you can spin up a community website for, e.g. your family or your organization for the price of basic Web hosting and have all the perks of connecting without the downsides of e.g. your data being harvested and reviewed by anyone at CompanyX.
Sure, you have to do your own security, but the big social networks aren't impervious either. And you gain the advantage of not having your account randomly disabled or spamfiltered or shadowbanned.
It won't protect you from NSA or FBI, but I don't think most people care about that. On the other hand, people I've spoken with are aware and do care about snooping by CompanyX employees.
The more I think about it, even as writing this comment, the more I can see that we are very close to rapid disruption in the social network space.
On the other hand, the number of people I know who are either deathly afraid or just normally afraid of the government and its agencies like the ones you mentioned is high. This is definitely going to be a minority of people. My family and extended family aren't common cases.
I don't see either as big deals though. Not enough to have people not stick with bigger apps that have network appeal.
I don't believe disruption of anything but more of the same in different clothing happening. I'm a pessimist though.
I might have given them permission without realizing it, but what could've also happened is that they saw my phone number in someone else's contact list, and assumed we were contacts.