I find it shocking how many community organizations are completely dependent on Meta. I saw a poster for a club that gets together to play board games that simply had a heading that said "Board Game Club" and a QR code but no meeting times or places, no contact phone, email or web site url. The QR code points to... a Facebook page. If you want to engage with this organization you have no choice but to use Facebook and be subject to their system of pernicious personalization.
Many student organizations at Cornell use Instagram as their primary or only communications tool. There are so many problem with that, not least that you can't engage with that platform without giving a mobile phone number with a real cellular carrier and that doesn't have metadata about events so you get notifications on your phone about events that happened a month ago. It's absurd, but you'd make yourself a hermit if you eschewed these platforms.
That seems counterfactual when talking about Chrome. Microsoft has tried every trick in the book - short of simply blocking Chrome - to get people using Edge on Windows. It's been somewhat effective, but Chrome still retains a dominant lead. This is entirely due people going out of their way to install Chrome.
That's not inherently the case. Scummy dark patterns like these might show short-term advantages in numbers, but doing that burns user trust.
It's a pretty stark difference between classes of companies. Consider how people feel about Comcast and Facebook, versus how people feel about Stripe and Vanguard. (Random examples of companies with wildly different reputations.)
- Most users just use what is preinstalled on their device. That's how Windows got their share and its how Chrome, Facebook, Google, etc, retain theirs.
- As the blogpost points out, many people don't even realise there's an option.
- Which sometimes there is not: either literally or in practice. E.g. I'm forced to maintain at the very least a whatsapp and a facebook account to perform basic everyday tasks.
- Finally, what I think is the most important point: these behaviours give a competitive advantage, therefore there needs to be a floor enforced by law. It's much like environmental protections, it's not enough to say "the customers should pick the greener choice", because dumping waste into a river is cheaper than processing it or recycling. You need to enforce a level playing field via laws, to ensure this does not happen.