this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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No they won’t. The whole point of a platform like Discord is to bind its users to it. At first because the platform itself offers good value, and second because of network effects. Once you’re good and hogtied the bullshit barrage begins.
It’s the default enshittification playbook.
Enshittification isn't illegal though. And making it illegal sounds pretty draconian and anti liberal to me.
I, for one, will never pay for discord, and if the communities I do use it for decide to move elsewhere, I'll happily move over.
It's definitely not "draconian" to make enshittification illegal. But you don't regulate the turning-to-shit part. You regulate the part where they offer a service for free or too cheap so that they kill the competition. This is called anti-competitive and we supposedly address it already. You also regulate what an EULA can enforce and the ability of companies to change the EULA after a user has agreed to it. Again, these concepts already exist in law.
We've essentially already identified these problems and we have decided that we need to address them, but we been ineffective in doing so for various reasons.
Yups, that's what I was getting at. There can be very good reasons to do things that are impopular with end users.
At the same time, without reddit turning to shit, Lemmy wouldn't have thrived the way it is now. Change is part of life, as is platforms turning to shit. You move over and learn to deal with it. You might be able to nudge it in the right direction, but in the end, corporations gonna corporate.
Yeah that's true, and I agree trying to regulate enshittification out of existence will probably have some heavy handed implications. However I do think it's worth rethinking how network effects as extreme as Discord implements them relate to monopoly.