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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad their efforts raised awareness of the Apple's closed messaging system and the "bullying" and social friction it causes. A company in Apple's position abusing it's power to make people, mostly young people, feel bad until they buy an iPhone is about as vile of a marketing tactic as I can think of.

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This is such an insane take to me. Apple hasn't done anything but provide a feature that some subset of their customers in a single digit number of markets finds compelling.

Do you really think that teenagers in America wouldn't be bullying the outgroup—to the extent that they actually are frequently ostracizing their peers over this, which is not at all clear—over something else if all the bubbles were blue?

Making it harder for bullies to bully is always good. Yes, there would be a small net reduction in bullying if apple stopped being bully enablers. Stop defending their evil practices.

This is what I mean! "You, as someone who isn't an Apple customer, can't use this one service" is not evil, for fuck's sake.

Making cars illegal would make it harder for bullies to bully. Your logic dictates that this is always good.

Growing up as a teenager in a time where there wasn’t iPhones it was tennis shoes. My kids dealt with it too—specifically backpacks (if I recall correctly). Point is, after we got out of high school it didn’t much matter and we got on with our lives in our off the rack shoes and no name backpacks.

We didn’t need special intervention that made all shoes Nike or all backpacks JanSport.

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