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Comment by fyredge | Hacker News Reader

Unintended consequences is the price of progress. The alternative is to continue farming by hand, and carry after from the river for your daily needs.

We legislate away unintended consequences, that is the job of government. We put in laws and remove them if they are unsuitable. Analysis paralysis does no one any good.

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I don't see how you can legislate away a move to subscriptions. That's not unintended consequences, that is an entirely foreseeable and direct consequence.

which will also encourage more people to switch to indie games who don't abuse their users.

$company might see this requirement, to treat people with respect, as a threat to their business model and will respond by becoming worse.

Is only a problem if you're not willing or able to introduce additional requirements to compel ethical behavior.

The problem isn't companies are evil and we're hopeless to stop them so it's better to bend over. The problem is we're unwilling to force companies to behave ethically. Its more profitable to be evil. And it's not technically illegal to do so.... yet. (It's also more profitable to just steal.)

Games that are sunset without a way for the players to continue playing it are already effectively subscriptions. The whole point is to force companies to stick to what they are selling. Having companies advertise their games correctly would be a win as it would give their already honest competition making games that you can actually play indefinitely a huge advantage compared to the current situation.

You can't think of any cases where unintended consequences dominated the equation and made the initiative completely detrimental? I can. The cookie consent popups we all have to click on every website started out with good intentions, wouldn't you agree? And how has that overall turned out? Are we educating people about privacy or are we just producing pointless pixel updates and burning the ozone layer?

Then table a bill to remove that legislation, that is entirely possible. The point being that all legislation have consequences, but it is better to move forward with the best step we could take than to stand still and do nothing.

Just as there is iteration in software, we should iterate our laws. That is what a functioning government looks like.

I don't have the time money or energy to introduce my own competing law, but I can post and try to spread my point of view, which seems to be very effective. And I agree with you, we should iterate laws, but starting with a good one is a lot better than starting with a bad one wouldn't you agree?

Definitely, and both are also a lot better than starting with none. At the end of the day, I'm not asking for perfect, I'm asking for best effort.

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