Comment by viraptor
5 years ago
> Then move off.
It works for you (as in, single person). Not for your friends and family who will ask you one day what to do about the account they lost.
We (technical people) know this happens and have seen it happen - it is on us to push for better solution than convincing one person at a time. Unless one prefers nihilism and watching the world burn of course.
The world is not burning. Do you know what was before play store, YouTube, twitch, whatever... nothing.
It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden.
This is not about accounts on media consumption services - those can be easily replaced. From the tweets, this is the problem:
> My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay. [...] My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
This can be literally the end for a small company which started relying too much on that environment.
We've all been signing those nefarious EULAs for decades, long before Google play store.
Stallman has been shouting about it for equally as long and we either called him a crank or label GPL as viral whatever. We reap what we sow.
> The world is not burning. Do you know what was before play store, YouTube, twitch, whatever... nothing.
You know what was before electricity? Nothing. But switch that off today, and the whole world will burn.
Between Google Drive, Photos, GMail, and Google account being used as authentication, losing a Google account is a life-crippling situation for many people.
> It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden.
That's the thing, though. They did. They put a highway next to it, and now nobody is gardening, the garden shop closed down, everyone's commuting to the city, and no one wants to buy my produce because my garden is too close to the road...
...or, to unpack it: the big platforms, by their very existence, killed off people's "beautiful gardens". Facebook and Reddit are why discussion boards are mostly dead. Google is why it's infeasible for most to host their own e-mail server these days (the heuristic of distrusting senders other than the big e-mail providers only works because there are big e-mail providers).
Sorry I couldn't disagree more, mobile devices were little more than mono function curiosities, app stores, love them or hate them, opened that too a whole new market where many software providers have made money. You can cry all you want about the Google and Apple profiting on it but there really wasn't any alternative before.
And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle.
The email spam issue is a problem. I'm not sure the solution for that because people are going to expose their email address and the spam torrent is real.
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