Re:YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
by TeMPOraL on Thursday May 11, 2023 @03:18AM
(#35898849)
Indeed. The idealized market is supposed to be a feedback-based system. Publicly wining about what a company is doing is a form of consumer feedback just as much as "voting with your wallet" is, and arguably more effective.
For companies, it's Marketing 101 that if you can't or don't want to sell what people want, you can always brainwash or beat[0] people into "wanting" the thing you want to sell. But we do not have to take such treatment silently, or without a fight. By resisting, we raise the costs of anti-consumer moves ever so slightly. Maybe, sometimes, just enough to make the company - or the next one to follow - rethink if the change is really worth doing after all.
--
[0] - Metaphorically, of course. But when a company cancels the very product people like the most, in order to force them to use an inferior product, and knowing full well none of the competitors will come up with a replacement (because they're all in lock step, what isn't profitable for one won't be for another, etc.) - being on a receiving end of that does feel like being beaten into submission.
For companies, it's Marketing 101 that if you can't or don't want to sell what people want, you can always brainwash or beat[0] people into "wanting" the thing you want to sell. But we do not have to take such treatment silently, or without a fight. By resisting, we raise the costs of anti-consumer moves ever so slightly. Maybe, sometimes, just enough to make the company - or the next one to follow - rethink if the change is really worth doing after all.
--
[0] - Metaphorically, of course. But when a company cancels the very product people like the most, in order to force them to use an inferior product, and knowing full well none of the competitors will come up with a replacement (because they're all in lock step, what isn't profitable for one won't be for another, etc.) - being on a receiving end of that does feel like being beaten into submission.