The Airbnb argument does not hold water. Would someone love to live for free in a vacant Airbnb? Yes. Almost everyone would. So let's then give everyone free housing forever, what are we, capitalist pigs?
In aggregate, Airbnb pushes real estate prices upward. If we didn't have them, and the utility of dwellings was limited to its use as primary home, more people could afford housing. As it stands, the people with more money earn more money.
I didn't suggest squatting is a solution. You punched your own straw man.
To me, this conviction to just let mentally ill people roam the streets is enabling, not compassionate. A truly compassionate view cares about well-being, not just agency. Would you rather see your own child rot on the street in a psychotic delirium or get them help, even if it's not voluntary?
The easiest thing to do is to say "it's their own choice".
I don't know if it's some extreme libertarianism or just pure lack of compassion. Some people need - and deserve - help. "Your body, your choice" is just an all-around horrible argument to use for justifying suicide due to mentally or emotionally compromised state.
It's not the offering of help I take issue with. It's the use of force/violence to impose it, most especially in cases where there is no criminal wrongdoing.
Personally I find your stance far more judgmental than mine; no one needs to 'justify' to someone else why they will or will not commit suicide. It's not even for me to justify or not when someone else does that and I reject your allegation I've done so.
Have you ever faced a person cutting their veins in a psychotic episode? I have. Saying that it's OK to let them bleed out because they refuse help is an asinine, inhumane position. It seems you are speaking from a very disconnected theoretical standpoint, ignoring the vastness of extreme human conditions.
I imagine that was a traumatic experience for you. Trauma has been known to make people make irrational and poor choices.
I can't honestly say I know that living in a psychosis (medicated or not) is always better than dying. I defer that judgement to the owner of the body contemplating suicide. Personally no I would not stop the bleeding if asked not to, whether their choice was rational or not. I believe consent and personal choices trump my feelings or trauma from past experiences, even if it turns out the choice of others may be misplaced.
So this isn't meant at all to provide an analogy, as it's a different circumstance. But I'm curious about your personal opinion. Someone has curable cancer (but definitively imminently fatal), but they irrationally reject treatment saying "the stars aren't aligned properly for it" or some nonsense like that. OK to tie them down and cut out the cancer? I'm always curious where people draw the line for when force is ok to use to make someone do the 'better' or more life-giving thing.
It would be odd indeed if it was OK to stop the dying only if they intentionally performed the action that led to their (imminent) death, but not OK to stop the dying if it was caused by something like a disease.
On the surface that seems like a solid argument - but I think there are some key differences when comparing a situation where a cancer patient refuses surgery and somebody with mental illness refuses help getting their lives in shape.
For a start surgery is clearly a much more invasive and risky operation, and even if successful at removing the cancer, can leave the patient in a physically weakened/dependent state for some period of time. It also clearly requires highly-trained specialists to perform the operation and can only be done in controlled environs (operating theatre etc.). If there were any suggestion this were true for providing assistance for the severely mentally ill, then I'd be more inclined to agree with you that there's no good justification for imposing such treatment without their express consent. As it is, I certainly agree that there needs to be a strong system of checks and balances for any such scenario, including time-limits over how long it's legal to hold somebody against their will.
As it is, we don't let dementia patients simply do whatever they like even if they initially consented to entering a care facility, but then no longer want to stay there (which is not uncommon). Whether it's a duty-of-care argument, or simply that doing so would result in too much risk to others, at some point we have to accept even grown adults are no longer capable of rational/informed consent, and we do actually have doctors trained in making such diagnoses.
I think the gulf between opinions here is I see adulthood (and fundamentals like ability to do as you please to your own body) as irrevocable until at least a crime against a (not yourself) victim has been performed. Ideally I would live in a society where people have agreed to such, in practice I've just tried to move to places where the least number of people such as my counterparty above exist so as to reduce my exposure to such impositions of violence. In practice I've ended up in fairly rural western states where individualism is highly preserved, you can do things like buy weed without a card or carry a gun without a license and hell even be senile/demented/schizophrenic at the same time as both and as long as you don't fuck with anyone else people tend to not impose anything on you -- notwithstanding no such place perfectly does this and you'll no doubt find horrible counterexamples where this didn't play out.
I do not think the alternative society that say maximizes certain utilities at the cost of consent is wrong per se as long as it's possible to freely enter/exit such a society, I just find it incompatible with my values. While I disagree with the notion of stopping someone who has asked his/her respects to be honored in regard to suicide, I don't think it's some moral failing if a private individual makes an in-the-moment reaction to stop them. It's pretty much human instinct to try to preserve innocent life of those around us, so hopefully it hasn't been read that I think you're a bad person or something if you see someone cutting themselves and you stop them.
No. Refusing treatment for some cancers might be a sign of mental illness, though not definitive proof. Testicular cancer, for example, is highly amenable to treatment. Whereas pancreatic cancer is not. Refusing treatment for pancreatic cancer is entirely rational - the chances of a cure are almost nil unless it's caught incidentally during another procedure and can be surgically removed.
Do you completely refuse to accept that there is such a phenomenon as mental illness? If you are of a sound mind and want to starve to death - have it your way. If you are a schizophrenic lying face down on the street - there is something we can do to help you. It's possible with the help of modern medicine to give you a decent life, restore your function.
What is this theoretical individual losing if we help them? What is the society losing if we act to help?
The dictator part in me, if given the ability, would wave a magic wand and make these individuals 100% neurotypical for 24 hours. At the end of the time, I would ask them if they want to (1) wave the wand again and stay this way as long as they like (2) Go back to their <diagnosed disease> self or (3) commit suicide. I don't know what the answer would be, but I imagine the vast majority would pick (1), a few would pick (2) and a few would pick (3). From that point on, I would defer their suicide decisions to themselves.
Sadly that is not the reality we live in. The dictator, in this case is New York and various government entities. A government notorious for putting mentally ill in wards where people are "living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo." [0] Without magic wands, the doctors are not always returning them to neurotypical condition, but rather often some other, perhaps clinically more palatable often drug-induced different mental state. There is often no neurotypical state the wand can be waved to, and often the decision for suicide overlaps between "ill" ad not ill persons particularly when they're subjected to indefinite stays in facilities under conditions of sexual abuse such as historically found in New York mental wards. Hell I might argue it may be cruel to stop someone from committing suicide to avoid being "helped" by New York.
That is, we are dealing with gritty, dirty reality where the mentally ill entity that is the state of New York, itself unqualified in its mental facilities, has a history of sexually and physically abusing people [0, but that's not all] to "protect" them from their own mental illness/suicide etc. Even if the consent argument fails on merits (I disagree), I argue the decision cannot and should not rest on the state in non-criminal concerns of imposing force on the ill (and notwithstanding the dystopic notion of government entities choosing who meets often poorly defined mental diseases).
With the state totally unqualified, and the individual on his own on the street often with family far removed, I defer to his perhaps ill consent. Notwithstanding, of course all help that can be offered should be.
Do you think at least some of the content that was shared would have been purchased otherwise? We can't measure the impact directly but it's odd to assume that pirating content somehow does not affect the wellbeing of creators and other participants of the market.
I can say anecdotally with 100% confidence that when I can't easily find a freely available copy of a movie to watch online I pay for it.
> pirating content somehow does not affect the wellbeing of creators and other participants of the market
Why are we assuming there's a viable market? People are trying to sell something that's worthless[0] and they're whining when other people offer it for free. I get that someone had to go through the trouble -- admittedly it's usually a fair amount of effort -- to make the thing that others want but, unfortunately, they didn't make something from which they can expect to profit. I think many people would prefer that to be different but that is just how it is (from my perspective).
[0] This is controversial, and thus the likely point of disagreement for most. If the only thing I need is 1 copy of The Little Mermaid (and a computer) to make 1e9 copies of The Little Mermaid, then The Little Mermaid doesn't have value as a thing to be sold.
So no books, movies, music - anything that can be duplicated digitally - has value as a thing to be sold? I am sorry, I am not sure this is a genuine argument.
Why does digital duplication make any difference? When you are buying a physical book you are not paying just for the paper and the printing process. So the remaining part of the cost - writer's check, publisher's check, etc - is what you should be paying for when consuming things digitally (plus the cost of streaming, storage and whatnot).
> Why are we assuming there's a viable market?
Because there is? There is a proven, big, viable, essential market for creating and distributing ideas.
You seem to be understanding me correctly.
When one buys a physical book, they are paying for the paper and the printing process.
That is the barrier to entry for producing such a copy for sharing, distinctly different from producing a shareable copy of, e.g., a .mp4 file.
This person did not have this barrier to entry and therefore they did not see value in selling what they copied.
The work does not have value in a market unless the value is propped up artificially as is currently being done by copyright law.
> I am sorry, I am not sure this is a genuine argument.
If it helps, these markets were clearly viable when certain resources were required to copy and distribute works.
The difference with today is the public internet and the proliferation of personal general-purpose computers that people like to keep on themselves at all times.
It's new and it's causing market disruptions.
Finally, I'll say that many people will choose to give money for things even if they aren't otherwise required to pay: Humble Bundle, Patreon, Youtube, Twitch, etc.
People donate to the Wikimedia Foundation only because they are asked, to the point that that the organization now has an order of magnitude more money in the bank than Wikipedia's annual operating costs (recent funding controversies aside, they donate because they think it helps keep around something they'd like to see stick around).
Your position somehow completely ignores the cost of... producing the content itself. It might come as a surprise, but people who write books, make music, film movies all have expenses. Yes it's "free" to make a digital copy, but that ignores the cost of producing content. It sometimes takes years to produce and release a movie, hundreds if not thousands of people are involved. Who is paying for that? Should they all go to Patreon and ask for donations?
Touring is the biggest source of revenue for the musician. If they show up and you buy a ticket to their show, you've just given them maybe an order of magnitude more money than they would ever have gotten from you from record sales or streams alone. If you buy one of the $40 fruit of the loom shirts they are selling then that covers the costs for another dozen pirates.
Plus, what about used physical media? Do you think if I bought a used Beatles cd, I should be mailing a $20 bill to Paul McCartney? Am I stealing from Paul when I listen to that CD for free from the library? Or when I borrow my friends CD? Should the FBI come a knocking if my friend remixes it into a mixtape? Absolutely not. So it shouldn't be considered stealing when someone passes me a digital file that came from someone down the line buying the album.
> Yes it's "free" to make a digital copy, but that ignores the cost of producing content.
I am not ignoring the cost, I am simply not respecting it.
They are trying to run a business; the costs of doing so are their problem.
If they cannot capture revenue to offset the mentioned costs, then they do not have a viable business.
Currently, copyright law is required for the revenue to be captured, thus the business is not viable.
It is unfortunate, but I don't see how I am mistaken (I can understand disagreement that copyright law is broken, but it would be disagreement).
I don’t respect the bakery down the road and will steal their products. Yes it’s protected by laws, but I don’t respect that either. It’s unfortunate, but it’s their own fault for not creating a viable business.
Nobody is being deprived of anything.
If I buy a pastry from the bakery and then use a machine I own to materialize perfect copies of the pastry, what did I steal?
Certainly not anything that needs to be replaced.
A market that relies on government granted monopoly is not a market.
> buying a physical book you are not paying just for the paper and the printing process
But it should. Books should only be priced the cost of the paper and ink.
The very first Nobel winner Paul Samuelson[0] makes the argument here[1] when discussing how lighthouse economics works that anything with zero marginal costs that has a price other than free is by definition an economic loss. If it is in the best interest to have lighthouses, or firemen, or media, they should fund the creation themselves and everyone should be able to enjoy the results.
If I get a copy of my friend's copy of The Wolf of Wall Street -- of course which they got from a torrent -- the real world value of a new copy that I create approaches nil.
What I mean to say is that the thing has no value in a market where it's being sold digitally. If it's so easy for a person to make copies of something and share it with their friends then some people will make every copy they can and give it to whomever asks. In this world of proliferated general purpose computers and the public internet, it turns out people can make infinite copies and give them to everyone. I 1) do not think it's necessarily wrong for someone to choose to do that and 2) do not agree with where the line has been drawn for when it is considered wrong. In this case, the person downloaded 100TB and uploaded 20TB and we're saying it's wrong enough to be 5 times more receptive than giving that we threaten prison.
All that being said, I see a situation where someone thinks they have something they can sell, but then it happens that anyone can indiscriminately make and share copies of the thing so it's not actually worth buying. The producers of the thing then start whining about people making copies and those people who choose to do that get thrown in prison. It's very hard for me not to see the people being imprisoned as the victims when the people alleging harm have done fuck all to prove that they were caused any harm.
>What I mean to say is that the thing has no value in a market where it's being sold digitally.
Again, yes it does. If it had no value no one would buy it. If it had no value people would not pirate it. People would not hoard it.
And even marginal value is not zero. For someone to make a copy costs some input (time. energy, desire), and they do it because it has value.
I think you have a really bad handle on the meaning of value. All of your misunderstandings seem to be trying to rationalize taking things others created that do have value (both to them and to you) without exchanging value to them.
If it didn't have value, don't copy it. If you take the time and effort to copy it, it has value. Everything else is trying to rationalize taking something you do value at the expense of the creator.
So sure you can wish everything were free to take or copy. But fortunately society does realize there is value in getting people to create things we can all enjoy, even if you decide in your world it's ok to take enjoyment from the labor of others without returning value to them for it. Thankfully the rest of the world doesn't see it that way, otherwise there would be an awful lot less stuff to enjoy.
I get the feeling you stopped reading my previous comment after reading the part you quoted. At any rate, you don't seem to be addressing what was expressed. I can understand that you disagree but please have more respect for the opinions that are offered to you.
(sorry, posted this comment in the wrong thread by accident)
Do you think at least some of the content that was shared would have been purchased otherwise? We can't measure the impact directly but it's odd to assume that pirating content somehow does not affect the wellbeing of creators and other participants of the market.
I can say anecdotally with 100% confidence that when I can't easily find a freely available copy of a movie to watch online I pay for it.
I don't have a link to a scientific paper. But if you want to sum the losses yourself, here is something to start with:
1. Last Sunday I streamed a movie called Stutz (2022) for free instead of purchasing it from Netflix. That's a loss of $16 for the industry (1 month subscription, but I am not interested in anything else from their catalog).
This example is a good demonstration of my point: when the copyrighted digital work is not made artificially scarce, it is worthless.
Prior to digital copying, that scarcity was not artificial; it actually cost people money to copy and distribute things and those people more often than not were trying to see what they copied.
Someone was distributing that movie for free because the movie did not have value in a market.
> when the copyrighted digital work is not made artificially scarce, it is worthless.
If an artist digitally releases a music album for free - it's worthless? Meaning it has no value? Let's break this down. If I construct a physical object and sell it - it has worth because you can hold it in your hands. If I record an album and release it digitally - it's worthless, despite costing me 100x more than the physical object I created. And despite you appreciating the music 100x more than my physical object. So what defines value? Then physical aspect only? I guess that's a theory, doesn't help to navigate the world increasingly dominated by intangible things, but okay.
> If an artist digitally releases a music album for free - it's worthless?
That is my intended meaning, though it doesn't need to be released for free, only digitally.
If the album is a series of mp3 files in a zip archive why would one pay for it when they could just get a perfect copy from their friend (who got it from a friend, who got it from a friend, who got it ...)?
I do know the answer to this question: kindness (Patreon and similar).
I don't know market forces to be particularly kind, however.
You probably would have never bought the subscription for a single movie anyways regardless of the ability to download it elsewhere. Netflix has an all-you-can-eat buffet model, casual watchers are incentivized to not use the platform because it's not cost effective.
In the economic pricing models, free is counted separately as any other kind of pricing.
This debate has been settled for more than a decade, major copyright holder conglomerates have tried their best and poured a lot of money to try to demonstrate losses and they have failed.
Why do you search out pirated content when you can pay for it? Since I'm an adult with a decent paying job now, I pay for everything I can afford. I don't think I've pirated a program or movie in 5 years now.
That's a completely different question, of course. But to answer: on many occasions I am not committed to a particular movie, so just watch it in the background for a while and might end up not finishing. Sometimes I don't want to deal with different services or even a subscription required to watch a single movie/show legally (Paramount+ on Amazon or a Netflix show). Again, if I have to I will pay, but the convenience of free movie websites is great.
There are probably other reasons but I would be really surprised if my behavior was an exception. I can pay for movies but it's more convenient not to (sometimes).
When you live outside the USA? Some content you cannot get for any amount of money due to syndication deals, and providers like HBO have spotty availability.
I already pay for Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV+, but their content libraries are smaller outside the US by some margin.
I pirate HBO and other services since there is no legal pathway to stream it where I live, and I’m not forking out to get it from whichever shitty local service bought the rights.
Happy to pay once they actually offer it worldwide as a first party option!
Can we agree that different people have different urgent needs? I agree with you that you need a house. A mentally unstable person who can’t take care of themselves needs mental help. A person with hard drug addiction destroying them needs physical and mental help. Not all problems can be solved with free housing, just like not all problems can be solved with involuntary hospitalization.
I have been using Android since Nexus 2 and iPhone since 6s. Never in my life I felt like I have experienced censorship in default app stores.
If they are against the monopolized market make a clear argument, preferably consumer-focused. Don’t hide behind “censorship” and abstract ideas that have proven not to scale - such as users should be able to chose who they trust. This shows such an insane disconnect from the reality of the vast majority of consumers that it’s laughable to include it.
And as usual, a great example of a censorship free open market - China.
> Never in my life I felt like I have experienced censorship in default app stores.
You're thinking of censorship as a consumer that I presume lives in a developed country. Consumers elsewhere can face censorship [0][1]. I hope this can change your perspective a little bit.
Any local alternative app store is a far easier target for government censorship. Look at Chinese and Russian Android app stores. They comply immediately, often without even publicizing that. Apple at least takes longer to force to comply.
I mean… yes, censorship exists in many countries, including the US. If China forced _Apple_ to abide by their rules I struggle to imagine how an alternative store would avoid that. Biggest Chinese app stores are tightly managed by the state, same as the entirety of their tech market.
With free software and decentralized repositories, users in each country can decide which software they want to distribute and how. If someone thinks a local ban is unjust, they know they have the right and the tools to redistribute any app that is in f-droid.org, or other free software repositories. Free software is central to an effective decentralized ecosystem.
This reasoning doesn't seem particularly sound to me. On the topic of knowing whether or not something's been censored from reaching your attention, it's possible that censorship efforts prevented you from even hearing about an app that you would want to install, which is not available in the default store. Consider a person in China who has never heard of Tank Man and how they might think they don't experience censorship (or, at least, Tank Man is not included in the censorship they do believe they experience).
Points you make in other comments about how official app stores are relatively "safe" for the average user are strong and I don't want to sound like I disagree with your conclusion. Just that this reason to believe "I have not experienced censorship" is misguided.
It's an interesting argument even though I don't fully agree with it. The Tank Man analogy is that even though the Chinese person has not actively pursued this topic, they experience the effects of censorship because this topic has been basically erased from their cultural space. So of course they do not pursue it - they can't ("they don't have a word for it" in Orwell's terms).
However, we are not discussing censorship as a state-level concern. An app censored on iOS can still exist as a web app or as an Android app. Apple's AppStore does not encompass the entirety of our cultural narrative. On the contrary, an app banned from AppStore often generates a lot of press.
(again, anecdotal) I can't remember a single app that I have discovered on the AppStore. The process always starts with hearing about an app from someone else, or reading about it.
> I can't remember a single app that I have discovered on the AppStore.
Does fairly well suggest that the store itself is not implementing censorship. Again, I don't want to sound like I disagree. Just wanted to pick your brain a bit more.
(I guess Apple could be involved with censorship efforts to prevent news from getting out about a ban, but that's obviously harder to do when the information is disseminated outside their store. The kind of censorship I suggested is much more of a state-level actor concern.)
That’s not due to censorship though. And yes - both iOS and Android have great adblockers. I use AdGuard Pro on iOS and my experience is as good as using uBlock origin on desktop.
Saying that, I agree that alternative rendering engines should be allowed in AppStore. Don’t think we need an alternative app store for that.
I have worked in IT for a few years and dealt with many very tech illiterate people. Apple AppStore is a relatively safe space for them, if they get scammed into installing an alternative MyApps store with a ton of trackers and other scam software they will suffer tremendously.
And if you have ever worked in IT or helped your extended family with tech issues you would know the difference between the web and iOS in terms of viruses, scam apps, tracking, ransomware, etc.
On your iPhone, why don't you try installing a browser that doesn't use the webkit engine? How about installing an emulator to play some classic games?
It's a little ironic you're demanding they make a clear argument when your argument is just a simple anecdote that doesn't even hold up well. Sure you haven't experienced censorship in default app stores because you aren't actually trying to do much with your device.
Maybe one of the websites you use frequently doesn't have good support for WebKit. They make sure Chrome works, and often test Mozilla, but 80% of the time they roll out a new feature it's broken in WebKit for a couple of weeks before the devs fix it. Yeah, you'd like to go to a different website, but you've had an account on this one for over a decade and know a lot of other users, or they get scoops that none of their competitors do, so that's just not going to work for you.
Or, the other browser implements part of the `webext` API that WebKit does not, and there's an extension out there that you'd really like to use. Maybe one that integrates with your existing password manager, or rewrites Twitter URLs to nitter.net, or whatever, and the extension just won't work with WebKit.
Or, maybe WebKit's JavaScriptCore just isn't fast enough for some web-based game you like, and you'd like to run a browser that uses V8 or SpiderMonkey instead.
You're right, a lot of users don't have these problems, and don't care... until maybe one day they do. And maybe 99% of users will never have these problems at all, but 1% of Apple's userbase is still a lot of users who could benefit from browser choice, one day.
Since you’re choosing the example here, is there a better one? This is just not a compelling thing even for most technical users, so if this is all we’re missing out on then it seems like a ringing endorsement for Apple’s curation.
Do I want you to be able to install an emulator? Of course. This is pure protectionism by a monopoly.
Do I want my family to be able to install a fake banking or health app? No.
So based on this principle, I would say jailbraking is a viable option for tech-savvy people who really need something special on their phone that is being unfairly restricted by Apple.
> And as usual, a great example of a censorship free open market - China.
If China looks like a more competitive and healthy ecosystem, as an anti-China person you can respond either by thinking that's a problem, or by smirking about China.
> make a clear argument
Their arguments are a lot clearer than yours, which seem to be an expansion of "oh, come on!" You're appstore-splaining to people who run a successful appstore by telling them they're out of touch.
Chinese market is tightly controlled by the state. They have very strict rules for how western tech companies must behave. They have forced even the biggest players to abide by their censorship laws.
And yes, they are out of touch. But not from ignorance - they are intentionally appealing to our sense of fairness while pursuing their own interests.
I am arguing against their appeal. Censorship, decentralization, freedom to chose who you trust, etc. It’s the same appeal crypto uses to deceive inexperienced people into believing that these things are really relevant to their life. It’s manipulative.
Personally I think these aspects are important and will probably play a bigger part in the future. But censorship is not why I think we should open up such a huge risk surface on iOS.
here's one example where app store policy disrupted one platform and thousands of people's lives: tumblr. the way it played out ended up very directly impacting online communities and creators. even those who might've been not as directly affected by policy changes, still end up getting disrupted by shifts in audience. those appstores end up affecting users well outside of where their reach supposedly ends, not limited to the actual customers of those appstores. they continuously engage in censorship, and it doesn't stop at 'good censorship', it can be opinionated, prudish, or materialistic and self-serving (such as, prohibiting apps from telling people that they can subscribe directly, instead of going through the appstore). personally I don't need a frigid nanny with a hollier-than-thou 'let us decide for you' attitude. but even when you pick a platform that won't involve being beholden to such decisions, you still end up getting fallout from other platforms that do make decisions like that, even though you're not using them. and this is why it's worth raising a huge stink about monopolistic control over platforms. some policy decisions end up spreading to everyone, no matter what platform they use.
with vague talk about twitter possibly getting some kind of boot from appstores, which will invariably result in some kind of act of censorship to mold it to fit the appstore policies, i don't really get how one could go 'yeah, these things aren't actually impacting people in their day-to-day life'. they absolutely do. literally all of those things mentioned are playing out in real time for twitter and people who use it or affected by it in some kind of way. which turns out to be increasingly everyone.
We have to fight censorship, not introduce a new attack vector that will result in a whole new class of scams targeted at hundreds of millions of people.
Tumblr, Twitter, TikTok - ok, let's focus on preserving access to these apps if you feel this is important. Allowing users to install any unverified app is a massive problem. Just look at what we use our phones for: banking, health, investment, personal info, 2FA, and more.
F-droid is safer (reproducible builds of open source software) than the Play Store (static analysis followed by dynamic analysis in a cloud emulator), which is safer than the Apple App Store (human looking at a HIG checklist).
To be clear, F-droid is an excellent piece of software. It's small and is used mostly by quite technical people, so it's not as an attractive target as Apple's AppStore. But that's the thing: some technical solutions work amazingly well for the 0.001% (like HN users). But they do not scale to tech illiterate people. It's a completely different problem space.
> I am arguing against their appeal. Censorship, decentralization,
freedom to chose who you trust, etc. It’s the same appeal crypto
uses to deceive inexperienced people into believing that these
things are really relevant to their life. It’s manipulative.
I'm sorry if I misread this. I read it through carefully a few times
now.
Did you just actually say that people's "freedom to chose who you
trust" is irrelavent to their lives?!
That must win the prize for the all time most patronising semtiment
I've read on HN. Surely you're trolling at this point?
In absolutist, idealistic terms - yes, everyone should be 100% responsible for who they trust, should have no limits on this choice.
In practical terms what we get is "Banks are not your friend" being proclaimed by a scammer arguing that you should trust them, not a tightly regulated industry. And millions of people suffer from that. Sure, "it's their fault" because they didn't "look into it".
Guys really, we need to start treating _choice_ as a first class
software feature, something more than a "nice" thing that we can just
snatch away from young or old people, or people we deem too stupid.
I don't know. On the one hand - yes, let's stop patronizing people. On the other hand we need to be responsible. There are many vulnerable people, they can't just get their shit together and become tech-savvy.
You and I differ on digital literacy. To me it's the only way to
ultimately solve this problem. It's not about educating people
technically. See my paper on "Digital Self Defence as Civic
Cyber-Security". Here in the UK we're taking that line (officially) at
last. And starting young!
Before limiting peoples' options to corporate walled gardens on the
assumption that "its safer" we can try actually scuring the products,
hardware and OS is the foundation. Got to stop listening to the
negative, defeatist voices who say "that's impossible".
And y'know there are laws against computer misuse. We ought to
seriously try enforcing them, even if that means the inconvenient
truth of exposing criminals with fancy brand names and logos. :)
I like your optimism and on my best days I mostly agree with it.
My skepticism is rooted in two phenomena:
1. Our society seems to be unable to address criminal behavior at the current scale, how can we expect it to improve if we expand the attack surface? Counties are unable to stop basic phone and tech support scams for decades now. There are just a few dozen companies that are responsible and we still fail. I can’t trust the authorities to be able to address more sophisticated scams at a bigger scale. Corruption is at the core of this. So now we also have to solve corruption.
2. Tech literacy is not enough to effectively avoid tech scams. It’s helpful for sure, but look at how many educated people got burned by crypto. I agree it’s work in progress and maybe we will become better as a society. But I need to see more proof to feel confident in that.
It is true that many essential organizations cannot effectively defend their networks. But it is also important to point out that there are many orgs that _are_ effectively defending their networks. I've worked in IT in a huge range of companies, orgs, and context. One thing that is clear is the culture plays a huge role. Those with a culture of supporting people who deal with real problems fare much better, those with a culture of "Cover Your Ass" or "When you say jump, I say how high" are getting hacked left and right.
I might sound too antagonistic on this topic, that's not my intention.
F-droid is a great app repository, no problem with them whatsoever. I am highlighting the fact that a purist argument for a technological change that does not extensively invest into understanding the negative impacts on consumers is bogus. How many iPhone users really need an alternative store? Versus how many iPhone users want to have safeties around installing apps critical to their well-being?
To your point: maybe a hard to enable setting for allowing sideloading would satisfy both the safety and the flexibility concerns. But at the end of the day, if I ever need a hackable device I will just get an Android or jailbrake my iPhone. I explicitly separate my own needs from what I perceive as a very dangerous change for 99.99% of iPhone users.
I agree with basically all the points in this thread, one thing that is missing is that most of these points are not mutually exclusive. A decentralized system like F-Droid does not close out the possibility of walled gardens, it just gives users choice of whether they want to remain in it. For example, you can buy a CalyxOS device now and only enable F-Droid as the app source. That is a walled garden of the safest kind: all free software reviewed by bots and humans before inclusion. Users then can opt into other sources.
We have recently implemented some rudimentary controls where you can use Device Admin mode to lock F-Droid to a given set of repositories. That strictly enforces the walled garden, but doesn't require a single monopolist have all the power.
>And as usual, a great example of a censorship free open market - China.
the article is talking about the Chinese consumer application ecosystem, not the state and is indeed correct on this. The platform ecosystem offers significantly more choice and Apple for example does not enforce its monopolistic powers as it does in the Western market. As a result you have genuine competition on the distribution end, like WeChat.
Alternatives are not competition in a highly state-controlled environment. It’s an appearance of competition. Exactly what the Chinese government wants.
I agree that censorship is not the best angle the article concludes on but I don't think "user choice, decentralization, and community-controlled curation" are abstract ideas. The article is concrete what this looks like practically speaking:
> This means F-Droid gives you selected apps by default without bans or censorship. When you install the F-Droid app, it automatically connects to the collection on f-droid.org that is maintained by this community. F-Droid also makes it easy for anyone to publish their own repository, with their own curation rules.
i.e., yes, you do get the "F-Droid List" by default, but you are welcome to connect to a different list or publish your own "list" of apps that has its own curation rules.
Imagine if you could view Apple or Google's app store with an "awesome app" list curated by a list of experts you follow without all the junk of suggested apps or ads. That would go in the direction of "meta-curation" akin to what /u/hinkley is referring to in a another comment [1].
Steam already has curators/curation lists exactly like you describe. They are usually not particularly interesting.
Anyone can make a web page with apps they think are great, and links to those apps that will go straight to store pages. Very few people do.
These are done rarely because there's little or no money in it. Give the curators a significant cut, and now you have a lot of curators and a lot of gaming of the system.
Now you need to curate the curators, which is still a significant problem.
Throughout all of that, you'll have those claiming that curation is censorship. They don't matter because you can never satisfy them.
Who ensures security in decentralized app stores? Curators, independently? Or can they "inherit" that from the major app stores?
With free software and reproducible builds, it is possible for small scale curators to inherit the security of the large scale curators. That is why they are key pieces of the f-droid.org collection.
> Imagine if you could view Apple or Google's app store with an "awesome app" list curated by a list of experts you follow without all the junk of suggested apps or ads.
My highschool history teacher once said the answer to nearly everything is money.
Why don't we have mobile app stores that operate in a manner similar to package managers? Money. Why can't I install what I want on my iPhone? Money.
This distinction is very minor. From my perspective there is almost no difference whether I am viewing a curated app list as a web page or as an alternative App Store. This has almost no consumer advantage and a vastly increased risk surface as an obvious downside.
This, from my perspective anyway, seems to be one of the biggest drivers of adoption for closed ecosystems. Users want to feel safe and not vet everything ( because it is hard to do well ) and it is genuinely hard to argue with that stance from a very pragmatic POV. As my friend once put it 'I don't want to spend my valuable time left fiddling'. For the argument you mention, I think I agree, because I still remember getting calls from family members, who installed something and now had constant unremovable popups everywhere.
That said, Apple seems to be more targeted now precisely ( compared to non-Apple linux and Windows ) because it has more people, who are lulled by the sense of security Apple curation model provides.
edit: I kinda get that the article is mostly about mobile devices, but the app-store concept appears to have moved to desktop world as well.
I agree - for most users safety is more important than "alternative stores".
This post is very manipulative in my view. It would be really easy to avoid that for the authors - just list the downsides of allowing any app to be installed on an iPhone. What are the consequences of allowing your parent to install "Bank of Amerika" on their phone? Exactly.
How people access apps is not a on/off switch between walled garden and dog eat dog free for all. Decentralized systems need to be designed with safety in mind, just like walled gardens do. Both can be done badly or done well.
Let's be fair - I don't think we're talking about simply swapping lists when you zoom out. At a minimum, any value prop would have to match the existing major app stores such as verifying binary sources, rejecting malicious apps, and the like.
I think the main question I see is - do multiple stores benefit the user?
I'm not sure of that answer but I think we can agree that multiple stores do NOT help the default app store, which in turn could be beneficial to the consumer (multiple stores that have to compete on pricing w/ deals, self publishers offering a cheaper price directly, etc. - think more like grocery stores selling the same stuff vs farmers market vs direct from farm).
I'm no economist but I think we could also agree that having at least a few options is generally A Good Thing.
edit: regardless, even in a world with multiple stores the point re: attack surface is a good one and one of your other comments regarding what users actually value like safety is an important one, which as a business are the things you need to weigh on to make a profit
I disagree that the main question is: "do multiple stores benefit the user?". The main question is: "Should the user have the choice in their stores?". Apple believes that their users should not have that choice, and Google used that to drive adoption with Android by making it more open. AS Google gained the market share and power, they locked down Android more and more to gain those monopoly-level profits. Based on data that was released as part of Oracle v. Google, it looks like they have over 40% profit margins. Plus notice how Google just cut their fee in half (30% to 15%). That means they were rolling in cash.
There are many alternative stores available for Android. In my experience this only leads to:
1. Less trusted software. Can I trust Russian Yandex app store? Can I trust Amazon app store?
2. Focus on upselling their own / affiliated apps.
3. No actual increase in choice. Some devices just come preinstalled with alternative stores for no other reason than their own monetary benefit.
4. A theoretical benefit that "I have choice" and if someone bans something I _might_ be able to install it from a different store. Of course oppressive regimes don't just ban apps, they often restrict internet in more severe ways.
I wonder if we are discussing different broadcasting options. If the incoming signal is stereo then adding a 3rd speaker shouldn’t make any difference. If the incoming signal is 5.1 then you either have to downmix or to add more speakers for a better experience. Just using 2 speakers for 5.1 might result in a noticeable signal loss.
