Ah yes, Hanlon’s razor. Genuinely a great one to keep in mind at all times, along with it’s corollary Clarke’s law: “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”
But in this particular case I think we need the much less frequently cited version by Douglas Hubbard: “Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system.”
I thought of that too, but I don’t think Trump’s ego allows him to consider that he might die some day.
I was thinking about this. How funny would it be if Trump just… Did nothing? Refused to sign legislation, made zero executive orders, just golfed for four years straight? It’s not like he needs to keep people happy so they’ll re elect him, he’s no longer eligible to run.
The problem is that winning only postponed his problems for four years, and he certainly is already worried about when that time comes. He’ll be looking for a solution, and for that he’ll need the favor of people in power. So it’s amusing to think he might just chill, but I really doubt he will :(
I think the critical difference is “Meta pushes for changes” vs “Meta pushes for changes with the support of thousands/millions of users”.
If Meta convinces Thread users that a certain change is good for them, it’s going to be that much harder for the people developing ActivityPub to push back on those changes. And even if the developers succeed, Meta can just use that to say “fine, we’ll fork off and make our own ActivityPub with data collection and advertisements” and if enough instances in the Fediverse are reliant one Threads for engagement they may just switch to the Meta version of ActivityPub, taking a chunk of our community with them.
And maybe that’s alright for some folks, but a lot of us don’t want any of that to happen, even potentially. I think it’s pretty unethical to deliver people into the maw of the beast like that, so to speak.
You’re 100% correct, but don’t think that’s enough for Meta. It’s inherent to the nature of corporations to sell to grow, ie increase market share. If Meta thinks it can increase it’s market share, even a little, by destroying mastodon.social it will.
You know how long Caesar was dictator for life before he was assassinated? Less than a year.
But the damage was done, and Rome had a civil war over whether it would go back to being a Republic like it had been or if it would have an autocratic ruler. Obviously, the latter won out.
A lesson from history.