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Comment by bigyikes | Hacker News Reader

If that house or car provides sufficiently compelling features or other benefits then, yeah, I would totally buy one.

Should it be legal? I mean, why not? If you don’t want one, just don’t buy one. There are plenty of other houses and cars out there!

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Sounds like a similar situation to buying a house that belongs to a HOA. You pay extra to give up freedoms, but have the peace of mind that you won't have obnoxious neighbors that make your house difficult to sell.

The difference being that (in all cases I'm aware of) you get some sort of representation in the HOA (ie voting on things). Also there are almost certainly limits in any given jurisdiction on the sort of rules an HOA can impose.

One reason for this difference is that HOAs are kind-of eternal. They need some way to adapt to changing circumstances. Whereas things you will only use for a few years, you get to vote with your wallet. (As you do when booking a hotel, or renting an apartment.)

Are you serious? HOAs not only do not prevent obnoxious neighbors, they virtually guarantee it.

So when I buy an iPhone I get a seat on Apple's board like I do when I join an HOA, right? I can vote on whether they should change these policies?

In practice, it doesn't matter. Your share would be so tiny that voting with your wallet is equivalent. After all, people usually renew their phones every few years.

By that logic let's get back to monarchy.

HOAs are becoming ubiquitous. In my area, nearly every home built in the past 20 years is under a HOA, and of course there are older HOAs too. They're generally created by the home builder, not the home buyer.

When I was buying a house, I didn't want an HOA. I hate them. But the options were extremely limited, and it was a seller's market.

I think local governments like HOAs because they pay to maintain certain common areas, so the cities don't have to spend tax money on that. Also, local politicians are all on the take with... surprise, surprise... the home builders.

So now all housing companies start doing that, and we’re living in some unauthorized bread dystopia. That doesn’t sound like a world I want to live in.

Not necessarily - ideally if you don’t want to live in that kind of a house then someone will want your business and cater to you.

I don't want Apple's dictatorial control or Google's privacy invasion. Yet the market is not catering to me.

Or more accurately: the market is reacting to what consumers want. Librem phones exist; they’re just not popular because most people don’t care about privacy.

> Librem phones exist; they’re just not popular because

What's the marketing budget of Purism? What's the total budget of Purism? In which stores are these phones available?

Consumers can't buy what they don't even know about. Popularity requires availability. It requires awareness. These things are very costly. There are huge barriers to entry, especially in the smartphone market.

Marketing budgets are a function of sales too. If even the people that know about them (such as yourself) aren't buying them, they're not going to have a lot of money to pour into marketing.

Exactly. Folks are acting as if the iPhone is the only phone.

>Should it be legal? I mean, why not? If you don’t want one, just don’t buy one. There are plenty of other houses and cars out there!

Easy to say as an end-user, but what if you were a furniture maker by trade? You've been selling furniture for years and then houses start being built that can't use your furniture. Eventually these houses become the largest segment of the house market. Your furniture business goes bust.

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