I think it’s easy to underestimate how much censorship and enshittification people are willing to put up with. People will put up with a lot before they switch platforms.
Compare also: the people who bitch about McDonald’s, Walmart, Amazon, or similar, yet still spend money there. In many cases (not all), there’s an option to spend elsewhere, yet folks still vote with their wallet to pay into the system that f***s them.
Capitalists don’t care about our gripes. The only language they know is profit and money
To be fair, a lot of that is due to significant, meaningful pressures that prevent them from actually shopping anywhere else. Corporations that provide things with much more inelastic demand (food, home goods, etc) are harder to escape from than social media sites that nobody actually needs to, for instance, stay alive.
For instance, Amazon’s “most favored nation” policy means that you’re literally not allowed to sell your product anywhere else for cheaper. Amazon becomes the only place where products have the lowest possible price you could afford.
If you need to buy a given product, whether it be groceries from Amazon Fresh, or diapers for your baby, Amazon will give you the lowest price (by effectively just causing all other prices to go up), and if, like many Americans, you live paycheck to paycheck, you can’t exactly afford to switch stores.
That isn’t true across the board of course, but it’s definitely a bit different from social media.
People use the Internet without an adblocker
Compare also: the people who bitch about McDonald’s, Walmart, Amazon, or similar, yet still spend money there. In many cases (not all), there’s an option to spend elsewhere, yet folks still vote with their wallet to pay into the system that f***s them.
Capitalists don’t care about our gripes. The only language they know is profit and money
To be fair, a lot of that is due to significant, meaningful pressures that prevent them from actually shopping anywhere else. Corporations that provide things with much more inelastic demand (food, home goods, etc) are harder to escape from than social media sites that nobody actually needs to, for instance, stay alive.
For instance, Amazon’s “most favored nation” policy means that you’re literally not allowed to sell your product anywhere else for cheaper. Amazon becomes the only place where products have the lowest possible price you could afford.
If you need to buy a given product, whether it be groceries from Amazon Fresh, or diapers for your baby, Amazon will give you the lowest price (by effectively just causing all other prices to go up), and if, like many Americans, you live paycheck to paycheck, you can’t exactly afford to switch stores.
That isn’t true across the board of course, but it’s definitely a bit different from social media.