interoperability. we take it forgranted everywhere else in life: when you have to replace a fridge it’s easy because they all have the same electrical/water hookups. replace a door, same thing: standardized size, hinges, and knobs. going further, i’ve been upgrading the cabinets/drawers in my kitchen: they’re standard size so i can buy 3rd party silverware inserts, or even inserts made specifically to organize anything that’s k-cup shaped. i replaced the casters on my office chair with oversized carpet-friendly wheels: standardized attachments. so many things in the physical world are made to be interoperable because it facilitates mass production and allows for any company to innovate in any sliver they see. it’s cheaper for producers, and improves the consumer experience.
i assure you those causes and benefits aren’t restricted to the physical world. i read this post in my RSS client, even as my roommate was fiddling with the router because all my RSS feeds get saved for offline reading in the background, before i even decide to read them. simultaneously that RSS standard allows LessWrong to get more reach.
i confront the crux of your post differently: “how do i navigate adversarial relationships (with a business)”? increasingly my approach is to just not engage (or engage less). when it comes to mid-size group stuff, it’s usually pretty easy: LW is just better than Facebook, reddit, or anything that sees its users as a resource to extract from.
for smaller groups or1-to-1 things i choose SMS over Discord; for the people where that’s too low-bandwidth and IRL hangouts aren’t practical, treat any monopoly replacement (signal, telegram, etc) as explicitly ephemeral: as these services switch to value capture we hop ship without losing anything. the world is large enough that there are plenty of substitute activities even if you disengage from Facebook, say. but it’s easier to adopt a policy of “don’t engage” a priori, rather than integrate them into your life and then decide to cut back on them..
Many large companies today are software monopolies that give their product away for free to get monopoly status, then do the most horrible things once they’ve won. (Previously, previously.) Can we do anything about this?
Unfortunately, “you’re the product” is a popular business model for a reason: businesses like Facebook would be really hard to support without them.
Facebook would be suicidal to charge its users money, because its entire selling point is that everyone uses it, and “everyone” hates paying money. In the US, Facebook makes over $25 per person on ads (source). Can you imagine if instead of ads they tried to charge people $25 a year?
Even on the margin, anything that costs Facebook users also makes it less valuable for its remaining users—it’s a negative feedback loop. The same goes for any other site where users create value for other users, like Twitter or Craigslist or Yelp or Wikipedia. (It’s not an accident that these are some of the most stagnant popular websites!)
In fact, this is a fundamental problem with network effects and low marginal costs. If a company wants to maintain a network effect, they need as many users as possible. If their marginal cost is low, then the easiest way to get users is to give the product away. To do that, they have to get paid by someone else. And when they start getting paid by someone else, they’ll inevitably start prioritizing that person’s interests.
Historically with other network-effect businesses, we’ve addressed this in a few different ways:
regulation (e.g. local utilities)
breakups (e.g. Bell)
standardization and interoperability (e.g. email, the Web, cryptocurrency)
So far for tech monopolies, people seem to be focused mostly on breakups—e.g. Facebook from Instagram/Whatsapp—but standardization seems to have produced much better outcomes in the past. (I like email and the Web a lot more than National Grid…) I’d be interested to see more exploration of that option!