[hdjrudni]

That's just because corporations got greedy and made their apps suck.

Strip away the ads, the data harvesting, add back the power features, and we'll be happy again. I'm more willing than ever to pay a one-time fee good software. I've started donating to all the free apps I use on a regular basis.

I don't want to own my own slop. That doesn't help me. Use your AI tools to build out the software if you want, but make sure it does a good job. Don't make me fiddle with indeterministic flavor-of-the-month AI gents.

[moring]

> That's just because corporations got greedy and made their apps suck.

It is true for me with Linux. I code for a living and I can't change anything because I can't even build most software -- the usual configure/make/make install runs into tons of compiler errors most of the time.

Loss of control is an issue. I'm curious if AI tools will change that though.

[safety1st]

I think there's room for both visions. Big Tech is generating more toxic sludge than ever, and yeah sure this is because they're greedy, but more precisely the root cause is how they lobbied Washington and our elected officials agreed to all kinds of pro-corporate, anti-human legislation. Like destroying our right to repair, like criminalizing "circumvention" measures in devices we own, like insane life-destroying penalties for copyright infringement, like looking the other way when Big Tech broke anti-trust laws, etc.

The Big Tech slop can only be fixed in one way, and actually it's really predictable and will work - we need to fix the laws so that they put the rights and flourishing of human beings first, not the rights and flourishing of Big Tech. We need to fix enforcement because there are so many times that these companies just break the law and they get convicted but they get off with a slap on the wrist. We need to legislate a dismantling of barriers to new entrants in the sectors they dominate. Competition for the consumer dollar is the only thing that can force them to be more honest. They need to see that their customers are leaving for something better, otherwise they'll never improve.

But our elected officials have crafted laws and an enforcement system which make 'something better' impossible (or at least highly uneconomical).

Parallel to this if open source projects can develop software which is easier for the user to change via a PR, they totally should. We can and should have the best of both worlds. We should have the big companies producing better "boxed" software. Plus we should have more flexibility to build, tweak and run whatever we want.

[bergfest]

And then they will take away your right to boot whatever you want. For national security reasons and the children, of course.

[mentalgear]

Very good points, I agree and would add : "Interoperability" is the key to bring back competition and open the ecosystem again.

[LancelotLac]

and being able to fire employees for profit gain when they already make a profit, thats illegal in other countries

[peepee1982]

What you're describing is the expected and correct outcome inside a profit-oriented, capitalist system. So the only way I see out of this situation would be changing policy to a more socialist one, which doesn't seem to be so popular among the tech elite, who often think they deserve their financial status because of the 'value' they provide, without specifying what that value is (or its second-order consequences). Whether that's abusing a monopolistic market position they lucked into, making apps as addictive as possible, or building drones that throw bombs on newborns in hospitals.

[throwaway13337]

I think we're after the same goal but have a different view of mechanism.

Regulation enforcement against the anti-market behaviors would bring a lot of good.

Putting too much power in any centralized authority - company or government - seems to lead to oppression and unhealthy culture.

Fair markets are the neatest trick we have. They put the freedom of choice in the hands of the individual and allow organic collaboration.

The framing should not be government vs company. But distributed vs centralized power. For both governance and commerce.

The entire world right now suffers from too much centralized power. That comes in the form of both corporate and government. Power tends to consolidate until the bureaucracy of the approach becomes too inefficient and collapses under its own weight. That process is painful, and it's not something I enjoy living through.

If you see through that lens, it has explaining power for the problems of both the EU countries and the US.

[peepee1982]

I'm not arguing for state capitalism. I consider the "company vs. government" framing as fundamentally flawed. I see it as "a few in power vs. Everyone gets exactly one vote".

I want things in society organized in a way that gives everyone agency, not just those adjacent to capital.

If a company employs me to extract value from my work, I want a vote in how that company operates. Not just one vote every four years in the hopes that policy will shift to benefit workers more over a few decades.

I want to be able to say no to doing a job without the existential threat of not getting another job offer ever, so I can base my decisions on my values, not my fear of not bein able to pay next month's rent.

Capitalism goes against that, because it centers profit hoarding and parasitic value extraction from the working class at the center of attention. It's an inhumane ideology at its core, and only even ever slightly successful in creating wealth because of all the socialist mechanisms wrapped around it to hold it together.

In essence: I want to abolish centralized power and class hierarchies.