I agree in principle, but controlled != regulated. It's (technologically) relatively easy to create a private, censorship-resistant distributed system, but if it's illegal people just won't use it. It's a human problem, not a tech problem.
in the usa heroin and meth are super illegal and people are using the fuck out of them
many 80s pc video games only survive in a playable form because of a very illegal system of organized copyright infringement that removed copy protection mechanisms; people used the fuck out of that too
in the usa gay sex was super illegal until, in many locations, 20 years ago. guess what gay people did
"if it's illegal people just won't use it" is clearly not correct; i think it's what dave chappelle would describe as an extremely white thought
the problem is if the design of the system provides law enforcement a bottleneck they can use for leverage against righteous lawbreakers
uber was just better
the legal alternative to pirating games was to buy them, geez
the legal alternative to gay sex was heterosexual sex, which many people actually preferred; possibly you haven't heard, but it's a more popular alternative even today
you're right about heroin and meth though, so, one out of four i guess
i mean if the objective is just 'euphoria' (as opposed to avoiding opiate withdrawal or having a 60-hour-long orgy) there are a lot of ways you can get it: hyperventilation, falling in love, roller coasters, exercise, praying, etc., and i thought about saying this, but i think that this really is a pretty weak counterargument to dtech's claim that heroin and meth have no legal alternatives; they're pretty much right about that
> the legal alternative to gay sex was heterosexual sex
Unless you're subscribing to a unscientific "people choose to be gay" philosophy, having sex with a gender you're not attracted to is not at all an alternative.
> the legal alternative to pirating games was to buy them
You mentioned surviving today, currently a lot of those games cannot be bought legally, which is what I meant with no alternative. Back then also a lot of people didn't pirate, and a lot of people who did did so because they had little money. I would count that situation as having no available alternative.
We were discussing a hypothetical chat application which currently are offered for free, so money is not an issue there.
i think it is incorrect for precisely the reason you state
Ask a Gen-Xer about Napster and Bittorrent sometime.
Napster lost several lawsuits in the US and filed for bankruptcy
But Napster the brand was sold to Roxio and continued operations
it's still active today
Anyway, in retrospective, Napster times were fun, university networks were clogged by students downloading music all day long and, at least in my country, many people bought a dial up internet connection just to use it.
But it had serious unexpected consequences, it gave birth to new generations of listeners that do not buy music, because they never had to, and the musicians are now paid virtually nothing for the music they create, while majors still make a lot of money, which isn't exactly what we hoped for when we hated on Metallica for suing Napster.
People were not using it because it was illegal, people were using it because it was cool. It was mostly young people.
Chats are a different beast, if they were ever made illegal, a lot of people would stop using them, because they would disappear from app stores and a prominent smartphone manufacturer we all know would probably delete the app remotely from the users' devices and report to the authorities whoever would dear to sideload it.
I feel sometimes a little bit conflicted about those years when I see my musician friends touring over and over because selling records and make a living of it it's not a thing anymore, and now I buy a lot more music than I did in the past (which was already a decent amount), directly from artists when I can.
anyway, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. lost a lot of lawsuits, I believe they are still not illegal.