| ▲ | Bolwin an hour ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
It feels like that should be a golden opportunity for competitors, but every time a competitor makes a decent replacement, the big tech company either buys it or briefly invests in their product again to make it good enough and since they have a long tail of users and the network effect, they win by default while still keeping their product mediocre | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | palata an hour ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The joys of monopolies, I guess. I think that the only solution is to break them, and that goes through regulations. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | tshaddox 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Competitors have the option of not selling to big tech (and not taking money from VCs who will then pressure you to sell to big tech). | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | shevy-java an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I thought so too, but they suck as well. It's really strange. I wonder if we can re-design the www stack. Keep what is working, discard the rest, but design it correctly up-front, so that e. g. Google or others can not ruin it anymore. The 1990s were better in this regard IMO. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The solution is non profits or open protocols. Internet Archive. Let’s Encrypt. Signal. AT Proto. (not an exhaustive list) Competition is not the way out, but building public goods through corporate entity structures that are protected from the usual capitalist forms of acquisition (B Corps are not required to maximize value, non profits can be made almost impossible to acquire). In other words, don’t build another car company, build a mass transit system, build the library, build the park. A great recent example was Mitchell pushing Ghostty into a non profit before using it as a component for a venture startup (Superlogical). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100329 > We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738228 (Our collective defense against people building moats to capture economic gains through the control of data or capabilities is to make it impossible to build the moat, and it’s never been cheaper to do so with LLMs, “computah make it so”) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | RicoElectrico an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One of the only actual levers in society is interest rates and let me tell you, the current state does not favor those who just want to have a sustainable business. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||