edited to meet rule #3!
Do you really take a pragmatic stance like this for everything in life, or do you just not like to talk about abstract concepts like emotions, trust, having principles etc.?
What I’m really asking is, does being treated like shit and taken for an idiot by a huge company have any bearing on your decision or is it truly only about the user experience of using said company’s services?
Uh… I suppose I am taking a pragmatic stance? At the end of the day it’s just an internet service, I don’t have any “personal connections” with Reddit so I don’t feel anything remotely close to “being treated like shit and taken for an idiot”.
They’re doing stuff that’s inconveniencing and disrupts my expected flow, so I’m leaving the platform - that’s more or less the whole situation for me.
The issue I have with your stance is dependent very much of the nature of the service we are talking about.
It’s not “just an internet service” in a vacuum. It’s a huge base of influence, powerful enough to affect election results, public policy and a platform for ideas which can have life and death level importance for some people.
I wouldn’t talk about principles and trust if the service in question was something like an app to manage your personal finances, watch tv shows on or anything like that. We’re talking about a company with enough influence to affect millions of lives, which can in turn be affected only by millions of lives taking a stance towards it.
I don’t know how else to explain this. Some things are, by their nature, aren’t supposed to be personal choices. One can have an opinion, and one can have personal reasons to do as they please, but I think one should at least have some awareness of what the thing they’re forming opinions on influences ultimately.
You may say “what difference could my personal choice as a single person make”, and that’s valid, but if that was true in every case, marketing and outreach wouldn’t have any effect on life, crowdfunding wouldn’t be a thing, people on youtube wouldn’t literally beg for likes and subscribes, of which everyone can have one per video and per channel respectively.
I see, I think that’s a valid point to make. For myself though, I don’t really see or use Reddit in that manner since I always considered it to be a content and link aggregator. It has a collection of communities that I subscribe to see links/images/videos, and that’s it. So in that sense I don’t personally view it more than, as you say, an app to to manage your personal finances and watch TV shows.
Of course that’s not to say that it’s not capable of the things you’ve mentioned, it’s absolutely able to influence the opinions of those that participate in the platform. And by extension it’s reasonable to expect that the management of the platform needs to be trustable - which is being put to question with their recent actions.
To a certain extent (almost) every large company treats it’s consumers poorly. I would argue it tends to start around the time the company starts thinking of the shareholders above everything else.
Ethical consumption (as I’ve heard it called) is difficult, if not impossible, to completely perform. I think most of the time, you take the company that fits your needs the best and rarely do you inconvenience yourself in order to boycott a company that takes unethical (or similar) actions. Even if you do, usually the replacement company (or going without that product if there is no acceptable replacement) has some sort of new benefit.
Note: I am not super educated on this topic and am mostly talking out of my head.