Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

82mhz.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 83 posts

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#31

Post by tamimio »

While I agree you shouldn’t pay for a company that treats you poorly, but it’s not necessarily true that if you stopped paying or buying their stuff they will improve, remember Nokia? They were the gold standard when it comes to phones, I personally knew people back in the day believed Nokia is unbeatable and noway the devices will ever get bad, I personally too was planning to get the ultimate one the N900 (which also supports other OSes) then we all witnessed the fall of the company, and how everyone was complaining and ranting (or building open source OSes) in an attempt for them to ditch the ancient symbian OS or get in time with “apps” when android and iOS started, sales plummeting, people are switching to other competitors, and that didn’t change Nokia in the slightest, then they failed and now can only survive on B2B cellular modems and equipment industry.

I think the best strategy is having competitors, at least 4 worthy ones, it’s only when the consumers have an upper hand.

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#33

Post by dymk »

lapcat wrote: post #27
overgard wrote: post #16

Voting with your wallet doesn't work usually, because your wallet isn't big enough. Vote with your vote! Our system is dysfunctional in the united states, but if you look at the political unity behind something like blocking datacenter construction and how much of a headache it's causing for big tech, it's clear we still can have an effect. Most of the problem with big tech are solvable through existing anti-trust in…

> Voting with your wallet doesn't work usually, because your wallet isn't big enough. > Vote with your vote! My wallet is bigger than average. My vote is not. Of course in neither case are they big enough to make much of a difference by themselves.

People with big enough wallets have a bigger vote than everyone else

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#34

Post by Kuyawa »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #22

People have been voting with their wallets since forever, and look where it got us. The reality is that asking people to vote with their wallets does not work. But this specific case is even worse, because it's not possible to "vote with your wallet" to begin with. The specific things the blog post notes are "how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store a…

You forgot Harmony OS from Huawei used by 50 million people, oh wait, no you can't vote on anything

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#35

Post by fcarraldo »

Consumer dollars are worth nothing in tech. All of the money is B2B. B2C businesses exist to support, bootstrap, or grow the value (via ads) of B2B businesses.

Vote with your wallet works when you’re talking about local businesses. It doesn’t work when the only factor that determines where the money goes is the executives signing the contracts.

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#36

Post by skybrian »

Here’s a more positive take on it: alternatives need customers and/or patrons. Becoming an early adopter for some software or service or artist that you like is beneficial for both you and for them.

The trouble is finding them. Writing or sharing product reviews, etc. will help get the word out.

You shouldn’t expect to change the world this way. If they become generally popular, it will mostly be due to other people becoming customers, and that’s not up to you. Also, there are reasons why the leading products are popular. Such as, some people are probably happy with them! But at least you did your bit.

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#37

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

firasd wrote: post #6

It's interesting that so much of the 'Anti-Big-Tech' movement over the last decade focused on tangential things like potentially forcing Google to sell Chrome or breaking up Facebook while Apple had this chokehold on the actual financial transactions in their ecosystem. App store fees is a much more obvious example of something subject to regulatory scrutiny vs what much of what Biden's FTC under Lina Khan was workin…

As with many questions of what people seem to be focused on, I think this has a lot more to do with media coverage dynamics than the facts on the ground. A major case against App Store fees has been ongoing since 2020, you just don’t hear as much about it because it’s less controversial.

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#39

Post by pydry »

aliasxneo wrote: post #8

I'm guessing the number of non-developer Apple users is at least an order of magnitude larger than the developer users. So, no, I don't think developers can vote with their wallet to fix this crappy ecosystem. We'd be better off to just stop developing apps for the ecosystem in general - but that requires developers/companies to ignore the honeypot that is the Apple user base. Which will probably never happen. So yea…

especially since apple customers are more likely to shell out $$$ to buy the developer's wares.

Re: Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

#40

Post by conception »

morkalork wrote: post #3

This argument is tired when at the end of the day, demand for some products is more or less inelastic and the majority of consumers consume them because all the alternatives are equally enshittified.

And there are few alternatives because of a lack of trust law enforcement. Which of course is because of government/regulatory capture.
Post reply on HN