Ploum: How We Lost Communication to Entertainment

I completely agree with Ploum. Back when Facebook and Twitter started taking off with regular people, I tried for a long time to resist using the term “social media”. I would always correct people and say “it’s not social media, it’s a social network”. This was before we lost what Ploum describes as the old-school mentality that valued lossless communication protocols. Unfortunately, what I didn’t recognize at the time either, was that regular people didn’t understand or value lossless communication protocols either, and all they were familiar with was entertainment, primarly television, cinema and radio.

It’s amazing to see how easy it is to change society by depriving them of something for a relatively short time. Another problem we have these days is a lack of liberty in software distribution. Young (and even early-middle-aged) software professionals don’t even realize how much we’ve lost. Before the App Store, independent personal computer software was primarily distributed as shareware. You could download an app, and use it (usually with limited features or a nag to register) for a while, sometimes indefinitely, without paying. When you paid for the software (directly from the vendor’s website) you’d get the full set of features. Usually, you’d also get free updates until the next major version of the app. So, for example, if you paid for version 2.1, you’d get 2.1.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc, all the way until version 3.0 was released. There was usually an “upgrade price” that was significantly cheaper than paying for a new license. If you didn’t want to upgrade, you could just keep using the 2.x software as long as it continued working on the operating system you used. Vendors were incentivized to keep improving their software, and users were incentivized to keep supporting the vendors that made the tools most important to their workflows. This system worked very well.

This was great for software vendors and for end users. I’ve never understood why Apple refused to allow people to use this simple and sustainable economic model for software licensing with App Store apps. I mean, I assume it’s just not ideal for them, and that’s just tremendously sad. I think they got away with it for the same reason “social media” companies got away with replacing social networks with social media - inexperienced people had no idea what they were missing out on. Couple that with having to follow their App Store rules and therefore not being able to make a living writing whatever software you can that people want to pay for to run on devices that they paid for and own, is just unjust and yet another example of how we’re living in a techno-feudal society.

I wonder what wonderful freedoms and opportunities were taken away from us in the decades before I was aware of them.

Happy New Year.

PS: Today would have been my Grandpa’s 106th birthday. Happy Birthday Grandpa!