Returning to the #FreeOurFeeds (FOF) initiative discussion (for background see links below)...
@pluralistic has a new piece (https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/) that extends his "fire exit" analogy and discusses how it is not corporate ownership, VCs or profit motive alone that causes enshitification. It also requires captive users, and FOF will make it so Bluesky users are not captive. It all sounds good, but it's not realistic because the assumptions behind it are based on vaporware marketing.
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Somewhere in the 1980s software companies discovered that they could announce products with fabulous features long before they were developed as a means of getting potential customers to delay purchase decisions for their competitors actual real products. The term 'vaporware' came to refer to these schemes. Over the years vaporware has evolved to be used for all sorts of clever market manipulations and you could say that most of Silicon Valley now runs on vaporware.
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@mastodonmigration @pluralistic AI is kind of the ultimate vaporware...