It's hard to say it's not X when we can't really define X.

It's a fairly commonly-held belief that certain high up individuals want the protests to escalate so that they can point to them as examples of the lawlessness they've been warning about and/or declare martial law. That's just one reason protesters have been trying their utmost to not let things escalate. People are trying to do things "the right way" through legislation as well but that's extremely slow.

Some of that is seeking to kill competitors before they can get established. That's normal and has been around for generations, if not since trading was invented.

But most of what we've seen during the "enshitification age" has been to burn money until you achieve a critical mass of users. However, this only really applies to social platforms where the point of it is communicating with people you know. That's the lock-in. You convinced Grandma to join Bookface and now you feel bad leaving if she doesn't leave at the same time, and more importantly, who wants to join Google Square if nobody else uses it?

That's not going to work for AI platforms.

What I do see potentially working is one method that email platforms use to lock in users: having tons of data you can't export/migrate. If you spent lots of time training your AI by feeding it your data, that's going to make it harder to leave.

So far none of them have capitalized on this (probably due to various technical reasons) but I expect it to start eventually.

It's not quite as cut and dry as you suggest. Besides, in which way was a trademark being violated? Last I knew merely talking about and referencing a celebrity by name was not a trademark violation.

I really wish this was true. It should be true. It used to be true. But I don't think it is now.

> With enough users, they will have to respond.

Well, yeah. But even if we had millions of people lined up (which we don't) it still wouldn't be enough to force a positive response.

Frankly there's too much money wrapped up in this now. Because of that, open computing will always be under attack. I hate coming off as so defeatist, but what we need is a culture change, and a new device which is (from the perspective of the 99%) worse and more expensive than Android isn't going to get us that.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47426010

Points: 1

# Comments: 4

None of this matters anyway. If a 15yo boy wants to see boobs on the internet he's gonna find a way. There's so many ways to muck with the connection. Not to say these age verification checks work either; the recent usage of the Death Stranding character's face to bypass the checks is evidence of that.

Ok, what sort of facts would you accept here?

It sounds like you're implying that's what happened here, but I don't see any of that in the article. Was additional info shared elsewhere?

Edit: oh, I see links to the article author's social media saying this. Nevermind my question, and I agree.