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Comment by agluszak | Hacker News Reader

> Right about the time a product achieves a near-monopoly, some genius product manager decides it is time to tighten the screws. Make search just a little bit worse, so the company can make more from ads. Make the user’s experience just a little bit worse, to increase engagement, and make more money from ads.

That's exactly why capitalism must be regulated.

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> why capitalism must be regulated

It is regulated, pretty heavily, and we still get shrinkflation. I'm not even sure what sort of regulation you could propose that would protect against that - you don't seriously believe that this doesn't happen in communist economies as well, do you?

IMO capitalism isn't the problem, non-free software is.

We actually had chat interoperability between all the major social networks/email providers via XMPP and that ended about when the iPhone came out.

> We actually had chat interoperability between all the major social networks

No we didn't - XMPP is a federated protocol & none of the major networks ever supported federation. The XMPP protocol came with a lot of decently implemented open source packages that helped those companies get their chat systems off the ground & to a point where they could lock them in. Supporting federation from the beginning would've made that lock in much more difficult, so it wasn't in their interest. i.e. a capitalist disincentive.

Capitalism is the problem, you're just doing your best to find excuses for it elsewhere.

> XMPP is a federated protocol & none of the major networks ever supported federation.

Google Talk did. It was the only one, though, so GP's assertion that multiple major networks did is indeed incorrect.

But we came closer to federation between big players than you're implying. One more would have done it.

It can be a little bit of both.

For what it's worth, for a time Google Chat federated other XMPP services and it worked just fine. They eventually shut that down for $GOOGLE_REASONS.

Companies aggressively going after open source 3rd party clients caused interoperability to suffer greatly. Mandating open standards can help mitigate the most user-unfriendly parts, which often turns out to be the "business model".

you know what they say: capitalism is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones. i am at a loss as to what would work, here.

(edit: whoops, democracy, not capitalism)

Nitpick: they say it about democracy. Capitalism is (hopefully) not a form of government (yet).

I'm not saying that we need a completely different system. We need more regulation. Stronger FTC in the US, more anti-monopolistic policies everywhere. Prevent big corporations from locking in their customers/users and creating walled gardens. Use open technologies in state administration[1]. Release publicly-funded code as open-source[2]

Basically implement everything Electronic Frontier Foundation[3] and Free Software Foundation Europe[4] have been advocating for since forever.

That would be a radical change, yes, but not a revolution and cOmMuNiSm.

[1] https://element.io/blog/bundesmessenger-is-a-milestone-in-ge... [2] https://publiccode.eu/ [3] https://www.eff.org/ [4] https://fsfe.org/

right, democracy instead of capitalism, i should have looked it up. and yes, i would support all of that. the big roadblock, it seems to me, is that our government in the usa is now so dysfunctional as to make that stuff all but impossible. not sure how we get out of that quagmire.

"as to what would work" ... that's because we, the collective we, have not spent any sincere time and effort to find other ways. Capitalism in it's various incarnations and disguises has worked extremely well for just the right amount of people. Those days are coming to an end, and unlike, say, the laws of physics, we can adopt new beliefs, values and ways of doing things that benefit the collective we. Finance is basically made up as we go as it is.

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