this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Technology
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Just like Chrome will stop being anti-consumer when people stop using it. Or Blizzard will stop being terrible if people stop buying their games. People are not very good at this whole "voting with your wallet" thing.
It's almost as if people are fucking idiots.
The unfortunate truth ain't it
What's funny is that I vote with my wallet, and I tell my friends about it and they think I'm the weird one for not having a Facebook account, not having insta or Twitter, or shopping at Amazon or Walmart or Chick-fil-A.
Then I explain it and they say, "that makes sense" and not 30 minutes later are telling me about how I should look up somebody on tiktok, which I don't have, or asking about windows 11, which I don't use, or telling me I should buy a Tesla, which I don't want, and its for all the same reasons I keep explaining to them.
You vote with your wallet. My vote goes for people over countries and corporations.
As a side effect, countries and corporations have ensured that anyone who doesn't comply gets ostracized.
Almost like people with more money than sense can outvote everyone else.
How do you even count "people who didn't buy product X"? There could be millions more, either out of revolt or sheer disinterest, but that just doesn't matter for the companies selling a product. The only votes that end up counting are the ones from people buying.
People really need to drop that saying, because the market was never a democracy and it will never be. Hell, companies can even ignore the paying customers to do something else entirely because the ones who have the most money are the investors.
Or maybe most people just don't care all that much.
The good thing about voting with your wallet is that people with more money get more votes, the way god intended.
Well... I bought an AMD card, I have been using Firefox for a few years now, and I'm not buying anything from Blizzard. There are literally dozens like me... Unfortunately, only a small number of people know these things and have these views and care enough to boycott. These companies will continue to do what they do until there is sufficient pushback (if ever) to make it less profitable than alternatives.
Dozens + 1, friend!
Almost like voting with your wallet doesn't actually work. Or only works in same way 'communism' and 'well regulated free market capitalism' concepts work... in theory only.
It works a lot better when there are many choices, fair competition in the market, and the traits being voted on are painfully obvious.
Because the free market is bullshit. It always results in a few major companies hand-shaking and fucking over consumers. Smaller businesses almost never have a chance and are just as easily bought out. To win in this capitalist iteration of society, you have to be the worst and greediest you can be. Add in the fact most people prefer to remain ignorant or are just generally apathetic from years of conditioning, and 'voting with your wallet' rarely really works. You should still do it though of course.
It's a struggle. Boycotts are historically very hard to be effective and I feel that the Internet has made it even more difficult. Protests need their own marketing and companies at an international scale feel almost immune from any public movements.
That said, voting with your wallet, like boycotts, do work. They just need people to be consistent and informed. But it does work.
Look at Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the 2nd). Prerelease it got over -600k downvotes and substantially hurt the game to the point that they reworked the entire system. If gamers had just bought the game and played anyway, EA wouldn't have needed to actually rework it. But they were so worried about the performance of the game that they actually made a change.
Same for Sonic the Hedgehog. He looked so, so terrible that the fear of losing money made him get fixed.
Granted, these two are examples of something becoming changed before full release, but in spirit the effect is the same. Corporation scared to lose money so changes are made to help make money. Voting with your wallet does work. It just needs to be marketed right. Edit: and I completely forgot the context here, which is that for something like tech, while consumers can have a choice, corporations do too. That's where the struggle comes in
They are also not very good in voting for politicians that actually act in their interest. It baffles me every day… what do you guys think is the reason for this?
undereducation. The missing skill here is critical thinking, and critical thinking is something that you don't usually get a lot of practice with until college. The conservative strategy of raising the price of college, refusing to spend money on student aid, and demonizing college professors as liberal brainwashers has been quite effective in keeping their constituents away from higher education.
I think quality of education is a big one too, but as long as teachers are underpaid, schools underfunded, understaffed and stretched as far as they can go, things can't improve ☹️
I agree completely! Underfunding of public schools is all part of the plan. Congressional Republicans get to send their kids to private school while their impoverished constituents are forced to send their kids to public schools that are literally falling apart. Most of those kids learn to hate school, so they don't go to college. The cycle repeats.
The browser one is especially bad since there are plenty of good options and they all cost nothing except the most minal amount of time to switch to
No, actually I don't need to buy the worse product. Privacy considerations are part of the package, just like price and performance are.
I use firefox, because in the performance - privacy - price consideration it beats chrome.
I have a Nvidia graphics card, because being able to run CUDA applications at home beats AMD.
You don't have to do anything, but you're still encouraging this behavior no matter how you choose to look at it. If that doesn't bother you, then idk why you're even replying.
Or maybe they are and you just don't like how they are voting.
I'm not saying that's actually the case, but that point of view always seems to be absent from these types of discussions.