>presents themselves as a self-appointed representative and declares what the users really want

Since you're making rude false accusations like that, let me ask you, are you saying most people DON'T want "the best, frictionless and most familiar experience"?

Because I never met anyone who said they wanted a slower jankier less intuitive product than what they used before.

So how was my statement wrong when I said what people want?

>either The People want serious privacy and FOSS commitments

Most people don't care about privacy and FOSS, otherwise Google wouldn't be one of the most valuable companies in the world with some of the most popular products.

To clarify, by "most people" I mean most people in absolute terms, like the ones you when you touch grass, not just those from your HN/tech bubble, those are not "most people".

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cauch 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Since you're making rude false accusations like that, let me ask you, are you saying most people DON'T want "the best, frictionless and most familiar experience"?

People want frictionless and familiar experience. But they also want tools where they are not the product (either by having their data sold, or being fed ads, or being captured by enshittificating services because alternative services cannot compete due to artificial barriers, ...). (edit: and I'm not saying that Chromium does that, just showing that "what people want" is not so simplistic)

Can you prove me that this other statement is incorrect? Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?

Of course not. The problem is not that your sentence is not true, it is that your sentence is loaded: you just provide one obvious sentence saying "most people love having the benefices of this product", but totally ignore that 1) this product also has disadvantages that people don't like, 2) alternative products provide other set of benefices and disadvantages.

I personally agree with the previous comment: these "most people" arguments are usually very poor, and it does not reflect very well on people who make them. (the fact that "best, frictionless and familiar experiences" is an advantage can be a good point to bring to the conversation, but it is way less simplistic than that (what is "best", what is "familiar", did people did not want browser tabs because it was not familiar, is a monopolistic situation as with IE6 at the time really "frictionless" when it allowed IE6 to not progress or fix bugs, is "open in 0.62 seconds" being better than "open in 0.75 seconds" really matter for the majority of people, ...) and this discussion can easily done in a better way than with the poor "most people want" argument)

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PorciiVorbesc 5 hours ago | parent [-]

>Can you prove me that this other statement is incorrect?

I already did before: Google.

>Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?

Firsty, most people don't consider themselves as "being abused" when they use Google Chrome instead of FF, otherwise they wouldn't use it voluntarily in such great numbers. That's just a hill HN and techies love to die on that not representative of the majority.

Secondly, most people (outside of tech) either don't even know they are the product, or they don't even care. See facebook, instagram, X, etc as proof.

	▲	cauch 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		People don't WANT to be abused. This is soooo stupid to pretend it is the case. Simply, people are just making choices and no choice is perfect. They use Google Chrome DESPITE the disadvantages of Google Chrome. And that is exactly why the argument "people use Google Chrome so Google Chrome cannot have negative consequence" is simplistic. But more importantly, some of the advantages of Google Chrome only exist because some people are not using Google Chrome. It is not a zero sum game: the best situation is when we have an healthy balance when people are using alternative. The initial comment you answer to did nothing else, just said "me, I use Firefox", it did not even said "everyone should use Firefox". And the fact that they are not aware of a bad consequence that is bad for them is really not a good argument. In fact, it demonstrates that your logic is flawed: the fact that the majority of people use something does not demonstrate that this product is a good idea. This is the usual race to the bottom: let's enshittify as much as the people can bare. That is just creating a shitty society. Civilisations would be so much better if this mentality did not exist. I had this conversation so many time before, and it is so simplistic and naive. Can you not just do better?

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glenstein 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

One person's "rude" is another person's request to tether claims to objective reality in some tractable way, even if it's just a report of plausible enough anecdotal experience.

>Because I never met anyone who said they wanted a slower jankier less intuitive product than what they used before.

Well someone's having big feelings, but this is a straw man, speed and privacy don't have to be mutually exclusive and in practice they aren't for the most part. Users who are casual enough that ad tech telemetry and privacy are mysterious words to them are also not people who are going to note the 0.1% difference in performance that you claim they're prioritizing. Belligerently repeating a just so story based on a flawed framing of trade-offs faced by users doesn't make it more true.

>Most people don't care about privacy and FOSS

Again, this is a just so story, and I think it's just something weird about the vernacular of HN that people are comfortable making claims like this or thinking they can be leveraged to make authoritative judgments. But one person's trust me bro is as good as anothers, and I don't even think it's right that people really are trading privacy for performance and any sort of margin that significant enough to really be noticed. And frankly, if they do notice a performance difference, it's probably because they don't have ad block and if they don't have ad block it's probably because they're using Chrome.

Google actually maintains their market share through a combination of strong user experience and an utterly dominant position as a distributor. Chrome is the default browser on over a billion devices and is advertised and deeply integrated into the ecosystem of the world's most used website. I've said it a million times but if it was just about the inherent quality of the product then Opera would have conquered the world back in 2012.

This mechanism is well understood pretty much anytime software monopolies face legal scrutiny. Microsoft wanted people to believe that Internet explorer was just that much better than the competition, and Google probably wanted the world to believe its search was so much better, which is why it had to be the default option for Apple devices in Europe. But if that was an organic manifestation of consumer preference, it wouldn't have to be maintained with billion dollar arrangements, or hostile ecosystem lockout that came under legal scrutiny.

	▲	PorciiVorbesc 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>One person's "rude" is another person's request You can also make requests without being a dick and calling people "self appointed X" just because their viewpoint doesn't match yours. Conversation work better that way.