I had already stopped buying their products a few years ago because of similar moves. I didn’t write that I would stop buying ar future, not yet launched product based on this specific article.

This kind of thing is why I stopped buying their shit.

Are Email addresses kept and logged anywhere, or are they discarded after registration?

For privacy reasons, it’d be nice if we could somehow have a reliable bot blocking/spam blocking method that doesn’t require Email.

While Email adds a good layer of spam blocking just from the spam blocking the email providers are doing themselves, having an option to verify with Email OR jump through multiple hoops instead would be cool. Hoops that are difficult for a bot to be programmed to defeat all of them. Such as captcha, with a simple math equation, and something else all combined.

Just tossing ideas around, because this is all still being built out.

What are the typical actors in the Reddit and twitter spam scene? And what’s the likelihood of each type setting up on here now?

• Product spamming, to advertise.

• PR companies that offer to sway community opinions, upvote/down vote for their clients.

• State actors with various propaganda intent.

• Preparing the bot accounts early in order to sell them to PR companies or other actors above.

• Actors incentivized to try to turn this service into a shit hole to keep users in the normal channels for some reason or other. Give it financial incentives or ability to control narratives on other platforms.

• Bots push financial related news stories or sentiment, eg. Trying to pump crypto markets.

These are just ideas off of the top of my head of the type of bots or actors running them. But I don’t really have any experience with it, just wondering what everyone’s thinking the intent is.

I’n thinking it could happen over 20-30 yrs, they won’t collapse, but erode from where they are now.

A path to the decline could be decentralization of services combined with crypto currency. Money and infrastructure seems to be mostly what tech companies provide. Regulatory moats or other barriers to entry around payments logistics is a way they can still grip onto their positions.

Decentralized shopping, logistics (think decentralized Uber for package deliveries), and payments through crypto (BTC, stable coins, whatever), could be a path forward to break part of Amazon.

Web only services or middleman only services I think are a bit easier for them to sort of break out on their own, sort of like Lemmy and fediverse is. It’d just take longer for the quality of all of this to get better.