"Companies should be able to bully their staff, since their staff are free to quit" is not compatible with a decent society.

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amiga386 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"Companies should be able to offer massively addictive and manipulative websites, since their users are free to not look at them" is not compatible with a decent society either.

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andrepd 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> since their users are free to not look at them

It's even worse when you consider that even if you were to opt out of Meta services entirely (which is not practical due to how many essential things run on e.g. whatsapp), they still build a shadow profile on you based only on data other people upload about you. So yeah, not only "just don't use it" is not a reasonable argument, it doesn't even solve anything!

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mingus88 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> which is not practical due to how many essential things run on e.g. whatsapp

Where do you live that WhatsApp is essential?

I deleted my account when Facebook bought it and I don’t feel like anything of value was lost. Between messages/sms, signal, telegram, discord, I have no shortage of places to chat.

WhatsApp only has value because of the network effect. Quit the platform and make your contacts find you elsewhere. Every platform dies eventually. The users just need to leave.

I don’t really care about the shadow profile. Meta is hardly the first to build a database of non customers, and it’s not the only such database I’m in. I avoid all Meta services and will never see an ad from them.

	▲	piva00 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Where do you live that WhatsApp is essential? In Brazil, for example, without WhatsApp you are an outcast of modern society there, businesses communicate with customers on WhatsApp, whole families and friend groups only use WhatsApp. > WhatsApp only has value because of the network effect. Quit the platform and make your contacts find you elsewhere. Every platform dies eventually. The users just need to leave. The network effect is exactly what makes it really hard for any single user to decide "I'm leaving" and tell every single person they need to be in touch to contact on another platform they don't use. What you are suggesting is simply impossible on an individual level, the only way it happens is if the platform has major issues that bleed users because it isn't working or the platform is made inaccessible by the government. Even a better competitor appearing will have a very hard time to crack the market share of a established network exactly due to network effects.

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onemoresoop 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Their argument: users are free not to think about it.

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2ndorderthought 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Want them to stick through a 10 year lawsuit while they get fired anyways? Do you think there is a lot of hope of winning such a lawsuit? Metas CEO hangs out at the Pentagon and has bomb bunkers. They can do whatever they want to their employees

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maribozu an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This line immediately brought various Dilbert images to my mind.

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mystraline 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the old days, before federally recognized unions and those things, when the company/boss did something terrible....

The workers would arm up with shotguns, rifles, Molotov cocktails. They'd then go to the bosses' house and have a "chat". If they didn't listen, they'd have their house shot up or burned to the ground.

It was the very bosses that hired Pinkerton's to go murder the union leaders as well.

Some of the railroad unionization got so bloody and violent that even the US military got in on the action, in favor of companies.

In the end, we got the NLRB and a whole host of rights. The violence did indeed work, but saying that is somehow breaking unforgivable speech.

And if violence isnt up to these meta engineers, perhaps they should look into CIA's own simple sabotage field manual techniques.

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vasco 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree and consider a lot of regulation to be useful but there are some examples of this where I think we just perpetuate bad companies into existing when they'dgo bankrupt or have to pay wild salaries to compensate being shitty. But it just doesn't seem practical to expect people to stop working for bad companies. In the country I'm from the average salary is super close to the minimum wage with low unemployment so technically employees could change easily and find another job with the same minimum wage and still people stay at bad companies. It'd be the best regulator if people quit, even unions wouldn't need to exist, under this light a union just perpetuates a bad boss, but human nature is not changing so protections are needed.