alt Hacker News> How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future?
You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?
Replies
Hackers always use this argument against everything because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.
Thus they argue that you should not trust your things to other people but do it yourself, because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
> You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future?
You absolutely can know something about what someone will do in the future. You gain those insights by looking at their past and present behavior and the behavior of others in similar circumstances. Hackers tend to be pretty good at pattern recognition and can often see where things are heading. Enshittification is a pretty smart bet.
Allow me to translate: “It a near certainty that they will fuck you over eventually; the question is will it be next year, next decade, or will you win the lottery?”
Its the terminating argument for FOSS hackers. When there is no good argument left, they fall onto that.
"You're only going to get 20 years of use out of this proprietary service before you'll need to spend a few hours switching off! You must switch now!"