"Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms."
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
Facebook, instagram, uber, lyft, doordash, instacart, and hundreds of unicorn businesses are literally built on top of ecosystems that are controlled by 2 or 3 companies.
The only counter point I can think of is that you can always choose to build upon multiple tech platforms simultaneously, and depending on the technology you need, it might not even add all that much additional cost to do so.
Which is why we need regulation for those big players (gatekeepers as the EU has taken to calling them). If you're going to be so huge that you essentially operate your own market and economy, then you need to be regulated like one, and forced to play nice, interoperate, and not favor your own services.
But realistically , if Google and Apple both for whatever reason banned you from all their services, idk why, then you would not have access to a phone. So then you say, well, it was just one person in ten million, and they probably did something wrong-- and now you share the same perspective as Big Tech on this specific issue.
I am not convinced those businesses are good examples. Could they have redeployed elsewhere if they had to? Where they tied to one supplier? Did they have backups else where?
Most businesses and individuals do not have to take that risk and can avoid it.
The fallacy I hear often is that because something like AWS is sooo much more expensive than co-location or VPS, that it must be easier.
Yeah, it can be... sometimes. It almost never is. You trade off the complexity for new complexity. You replace your sysadmins with Dev Ops. It's not like it just magically gets better.
It's the same way with a lot of things. A more expensive car is not necessarily better. It can be, sometimes, if you're very careful and know what you're doing. More expensive clothes aren't better either. Popularity factors into this, too. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good. Plenty of really shitty things become popular.
You can absolutely build your application without relying on other companies too much. I'm not saying you need to go rogue, but you also don't need to use every single Google feature under the sun to, like, display some photos. And, if you do that, that's actually probably way worse and more expensive (effort + money) than if you didn't.
No it is not
It is often difficult and expensive, relative to letting Facebook (or the like) do the hosting.
But VPSs are a thing, you can run almost any software on them.
Stretching the analogy: Build your castle on your own bedrock, and build "forts", or "outposts", on the enemy territory
Ignoring Facebook et. el. is stupid, but depending on them is fool hardy
Requiring an online ID to log into a local computer creates all sorts of vulnerabilities. When Microsoft gets hacked again, it can let hackers lock you out of your computer. It's basically ransomware-in-waiting.
Are we supposed to have been beaten down to the point that none of this is a story? Granted, it is only one side of the story. We have no idea what other things this account has done.
Having a bad support experience is not being "beaten down". Talk about hyperbolic. If this is a systemic issue, that could be a story. But why isn't my grandmother's bad experience at Costco story? My friend had to call his ISP to sort a billing mistake. Is that a story now too?
But sure, you go right ahead and just roll over and take shitty service and then go ahead and add a tip too while you at it. The rest of will continue to make noise and call a spade a spade. Some of us might even tell them emperor he has no clothes on
When hundreds or thousands of companies live and die by your platform, you can't just close accounts arbitrarily.
Either that or you get split up for monopoly. Take your pick, but this shit doesn't work
2) I cannot prove that this (opaque) process has been retrofitted to use LLM's in its decision making, but I would not be the slightest bit surprised. Neural networks are, intrinsically, even more opaque than the processes they replace.
3) Using Big Tech as a place to backup your work/files/etc. is fine, as long as you have a local copy, and sometimes you have no choice but to deal with them. However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time. Plan (as best you can) accordingly.
I could agree with the beginning of that but not the classification of a misfire. A misfire implies a brief, exceptional occurrence and neither of those adjectives seem likely here.
That's based on a few years spent in Microsoft's forever-shuffling admin carousel (EAC, Exch Migration, Intune, Azure hydra, 365/Copilot-all-the-things). Thru that, I have come to believe that incompetence is almost always the right answer for MS-generated woes.
Google is similarly notorious for brining businesses to a halt and only fixing the issue when it makes the news and a human at Google finally sees it.
this risk goes for any 3rd party, at least the ones that follow sanctions compliance or suspicious activity monitoring. if your name shows up on a denied party list, it's illegal for anyone to tell you why they arent talking to you anymore.
That said, I should better automate my project backups... I also need to get my backup (redundant) NAS at a friends house (vpn) so that I can have an extra level of safety.
Hell, even Microsoft (on the enterprise side of 365) says do not treat their services as a backup.
But we do need to get stricter about the messaging these companies are allowed to put out there regarding their services. Microsoft with one side of their mouth says 365 is definitively not a backup, and then turns around and advertises OneDrive on Windows as a backup with the "back up your folders now" notification.
To consumers that don't know any better, it's misleading and leads to a false sense of security, though I suspect "this service is not a backup and you can lose your account and all your files at anytime" doesn't sell as many subscriptions.
I knew that if I didn't do that, the same thing would some day happen to me.
How many times do we as a community have to get bit by Microsoft before we learn?
GitHub (and GitHub accounts) do not seem to have this problem as near as I can tell. For better or worse, I've found that reporting spammers and bad faith actors is a largely a pointless exercise as it will all go in a black hole.
Mike doesn't make this claim in the original source: https://mikekaganski.wordpress.com/2025/07/25/microsoft-anyb...
Hotmail/outlook support isn't great (I've had a similar challenge but it was eventually resolved), google support is worse (a similar challenge, eventually denied).
toomuchtodo•13h ago
frumplestlatz•13h ago
southernplaces7•13h ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44720103
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240
There have been many, many other examples over recent years. Anyone making any claim to the superiority of the EU regulation state in how it respects digital rights for individuals is full of shit or sheerly ignorant.
thewebguyd•12h ago
The EU is a huge organization and too often the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing.
But, the EU isn't alone in curbing digital rights for individuals, it's a worrying trend all over the world even over here in the states, with congress introducing a bill of our own along the same lines (Kids Online Safety Act) - we'll see if it goes anywhere, but the overton window is shifting to being in favor of regulation like this, unfortunately.
Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere, and rapidly.
Mtinie•12h ago
bigstrat2003•12h ago
wonderwonder•12h ago
Spivak•12h ago
You can really feel the "big tent" nature of the GOP when these bills are being pushed despite being absolutely abhorrent to large swaths of Republican voters.
frumplestlatz•12h ago
The constitutionality of the current laws was upheld on the basis of treating age verification for access to porn as an incidental burden, and thus warranted only intermediate scrutiny.
My (naïve?) hope is that any future mission creep will be rejected by the Supreme Court under strict scrutiny, especially as it extends into general and political speech.
However, once you have the legal and technical frameworks in place, mission creep is almost inevitable, and it could easily take years of litigation to resolve.
“Think of the children” has always been the thin end of a wedge used by those looking to incrementally dismantle inconvenient civil liberties.
All that said, we’re in a much better position in the US under the first amendment. The UK’s “online safety bill” is already targeting a myriad of forms of political speech, and is just the latest example of the significant shift towards the curtailment of free speech across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
dgfitz•12h ago
But yeah, keep railing against the GOP.
wonderwonder•10h ago
dgfitz•7h ago
I’m just so tired of “fuck the GOP” when, as you say, it was inevitable. People love to hate a villain, I get it. “It was Hilarys turn, we will just keep marching forward” really didn’t work out. This GOP narrative is basically screaming into a mirror. Not your GOP narrative, not picking on you. Just frustrated.
wonderwonder•7h ago
We have left leaning main stream media organizations implying that a jeans commercial is a nazi rallying cry because it features a white woman. I just cant vote how I used to vote and look my young sons in the eye. The Dem party is gone.
wonderwonder•11h ago
Spivak•10h ago
wonderwonder•10h ago
I completely understand and empathize with why some people are upset or even dismayed at what he’s doing though; i just think it’s necessary.
bluecalm•12h ago
fooker•12h ago
graemep•12h ago
The UK's Online Safety Act's main effect is to strengthen big tech and protect them from competition, and make self hosing prohibitively expensive for many.
European governments will talk about digital sovereignty but will do nothing that involved actually spending money, or regulating the private sector or anything actually effective.