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

82mhz.net

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

#41

Post by lobofta »

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 is like voting with your vote. It both works, but to an extent that will never be noticeable by you. You vote more often with your money than with your vote though. Don't buy into the nirvana fallacy nor be fatalistic. Be a responsible consumer and inform others on why they should vote wisely too.

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

#42

Post by raincole »

zaik wrote: post #2

The EU shows that regular voting is also an option.

The top 5 smartphone brands are:

1. Samsung (KR)

2. Apple (US)

3. Xiaomi (CN)

4. Oppo (CN)

5. Vivo (CN)

Yeah, it worked so well for EU at ensuring that they can't compete against the US and Asia. The rest of the world should be very grateful to EU voters.

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

#43

Post by Noaidi »

Yes, more of this please!

(Seems like the site was hugged to death HN)

All of you saying "My wallet is not big enough" are suffering from the individualization that the internet created.

Our wallets, collectively, are what gives them the money. What needs to be taught to people is the benefits of sacrifice. This is an easy thing to teach Christians.

You need to do more than just boycott, you need to be evangelical. You need to show people the sacrifice is not only easy, but beneficial. The bigger sacrifices will come from those working in tech and we need to support them with GoFundMe's when they lose their jobs.

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

#45

Post by Noaidi »

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…

Regulation is a part of it.

But most of tehse companies make money off of the services. So if you want tos end Apple a message, cancel all your services...Music, iCloud, etc.

Android phones are easy to use without a google account.

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

#46

Post by numpad0 »

I had a weird feeling back in late 2007 when iPod touch launched and I had to run the jailbreak tool written by someone astronomically above my paygrade to get custom apps running on it. It was first real-computer-class-computer I had that had no official terminal access or total freedom to run anything I want - a lot of devs started fighting "algorithm" issues as soon as App Store opened. I was much younger but I still thought, this is going to replace all PDAs despite having what we know all knows it's called software freedom, and needs to be antitrusted ASAP, or we'll lose that thing. I was not smart back then and still isn't, probably like first few thousand millionth person to realize that in the world.

Fast forward 20 years(!?!?!??!???), we did lose software freedom. Did the world really have to wait 20 years?

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

#47

Post by Noaidi »

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.

Our collective wallets are HUGE. You need to do more than just boycott, yoiu need to spread the word.

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

#49

Post by killbot5000 »

Voting with your wallet can work, but consolidation increasingly makes voting with your wallet a double or triple whammy.

1) alternatives may be more expensive by dollars

2) alternatives may be more expensive by time

3) time/money lost to altered consumption has proportional opportunity cost

Market consolidation reduces the cost of using “bad” services and increases the cost of using “good” services over time.

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

#50

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

The standard problem with "just voting" to solve problems is that you can only vote for the options you're offered. If all the options on the market suck, voting for the lesser of the available evils will not address the fundamental source of your dissatisfaction, and may help entrench it. If you vote "with dollars" there's the additional problem that dollars are not uniformly distributed, and a few wealthy "voters" can and will disenfranchise everyone else.

Abstaining from buying from companies you disagree with can help, but it is only one part of the broader solution. When there aren't alternatives yet "on the market" you may be forced to hold your nose for a while and buy from the vendors you hate while advocating for change and working toward their replacement. You don't have to solve every problem in your world at once so long as you're building in the right direction.

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