Can We Make the Virtuous Choice Easier for Platforms?

1. Anger Is Understandable, But It Is Not a Strategy

Anti-consumer decisions deserve criticism. When platforms make their products worse for users through increasingly invasive ads, hostile browser changes, or burdensome developer rules, people are right to be annoyed.

But anger alone does not usually change the incentive structure. Companies often double down when the profitable path is also the anti-consumer path. I agree that capitalism should be a system of profit &codswallop loss, and that boycotting is an important part of consumer sovereignty. But boycotting should not be the only tool in our arsenal. 

Digression: I love short sellers too (like Hindenburg Research & Michael Burry). At their best, short sellers are like market rogues with lanterns, crawling into the walls of corporate codswallop [nonsense] and finding the rot everyone else was paid not to notice.

Consumers should also think about whether we can have a more symbiotic relationship with the companies that annoy us. That does not mean excusing bad behavior or pretending corporations are our friends. It means asking whether some of their worst decisions come from warped incentives, high transaction costs, legal fears, revenue pressure, or clumsy attempts to solve real problems in user-hostile ways.

Part of this idea connects to Adam Smith’s view that human beings desire not only to be loved, but to be lovely: to be worthy of approval. People & institutions often fall short of that ideal when the easier path rewards uglier behavior. When circumstances are hard, when trust is expensive, or when every good option creates friction, the worse option can start to look inevitable.

That is where users & developers may have more power than we think. Instead of only punishing bad decisions after they happen, maybe we can build tools, standards, & alternatives that make better behavior easier [Here's my attempt to help the Blogger Platform]. We can reduce friction. We can lower transaction costs. We can create ways for companies to make money without treating users like cattle, developers like suspects, & privacy like a technical inconvenience.

The more useful question might be this: can users and developers build systems that make the consumer-friendly path cheaper, easier, & more attractive? [See: https://futo.tech/projects]

In other words, instead of merely demanding that companies stop being shitty, maybe we should also build things that make the virtuous path easier than the shitty one.

Another Random Digression: Big companies often try to block upstarts by using government power, especially after their own enshittification has created a gap in the market for someone better to enter. Instead of competing directly, they lobby for rules that raise the barrier to entry in their niche: licensing requirements, compliance burdens, identity checks, KYC laws, vague safety regimes, often in the name of protecting the kids or some other noble-sounding pretense, & other forms of competitor’s-veto whatnot [See: Bootleggers & Baptists].

In an ideal world, the government would not have the power to vitiate markets this way. But if the alternative is entering a political battle we are probably going to lose to big money, maybe there is another angle: make virtue easier for crappy corporations. Reduce the friction around doing the right thing. Build tools & standards that let companies make money without being so hostile, extractive, or paranoid.

There is a weirdly redemptive idea here. The Christian ethic says nobody is beyond repentance. Luke Skywalker saw the good in Darth Vader. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is built around the possibility of moral awakening after degradation. Maybe markets need a little of that too: not naive trust, not corporate absolution, but the belief that even bad institutions can sometimes be nudged toward better behavior when the better path is made easier.