Apple is literally the group implementing the change, it's accurate to say "Apple is cracking down".
You're trying to paint Apple as a helpless victim here, but they didn't get blindsided by CCP tyranny. The company has spent years developing this exact situation and repeatedly choose to do the bidding of the Chinese government.
"Just following orders" is a pitiful excuse, and even worse when the orders are coming from an oppressive foreign government.
> Apple is literally the group implementing the change, it's accurate to say "Apple is cracking down".
I think it would be more accurate to say that the CCP is cracking down, and Apple is one target of that push.
I don't think it's completely accurate to say that Apple can "choose" these things. There's no "choosing" with the CCP, and there's no "choosing" to manufacture outside of China, at this point [1]. This isn't an Apple problem, it's a worldwide supply chain problem, that all tech companies are stuck in [2].
They're choosing to continue business in China. They're choosing to continue to manufacture in China. Like everyone else, they're choosing to leave China, with manufacturing being pushed to India, Taiwan, Vietnam, and S.Korea. But, in the short term, there's exactly one choice, for both, for them and the rest of the tech sector, that keeps the bills paid. This is a systemic problem, not an Apple problem. It's good to see the world is, finally, waking up to this, beginning the transition, and I think the beginnings of the transition should be celebrated.
Google is successfully ignored China's request even though their Pixel uses many Chinese parts and some are made in China, because they don't service in China.
Which request? Android's version of AirDrop, "Nearby Share" is disabled in China [1].
> even though their Pixel uses many Chinese parts and some are made in China, because they don't service in China.
Google is an ad company. Only 5 million Pixel 6 sold in the first 6 months [2]. It's just a few percent of their income. Nobody would notice if they decide to stop selling the Pixel line, worldwide.
Apple is a hardware company, with around 50% of their income from iPhones [3]. It's a very different context. Again, they appear to building speed to move out, and like the previous reference shows, that's all any of these established companies can do in the short term: build speed.
Apple could move out, but at great cost to themselves. Being a socialist, I think the cost of such a decision should come from the government who should mandate it for all companies so there is a single national standard on ethics.
However some people think that Apple should bear the cost in its own, since it’s the not an existential choice. It’s simply the choice between taking a loss this year then recovering later, or continuing to make the maximal amount of money this year.
> the government who should mandate it for all companies so there is a single national standard on ethics.
I think I agree with this. What could you see that mandate looking like, and what would the "standard" be? Would it be something stronger than the sanctions we have now? As my previous links show, complete isolation is impossible, in the short term, so I imagine this would have to be a slow process.
> It’s simply the choice between taking a loss this year then recovering later, or continuing to make the maximal amount of money this year.
I would suggest reading the references I provided. This definitely isn't a "loss this year" thing. It's losses for decades. It not only requires rebuilding direct vendors, but vendors that supply to them, and to them, and so on.
What is the alternative? Apple exits the country and we use.. android? Is that a better, more privacy-respecting, government-order-rejecting alternative?
Edit: The alternative is Apple doesn't comply w/ government orders and leaves the country. That is the alternative.
Whatever "Apple's" feelings (really, the executive team's; a corporation does not have feelings) about it, Apple is the entity that made the change.
And it is a weird kind of "force" they face. Apple, over the course of decades, has willingly made a huge investment in a state with an authoritarian government in order to pursue their goals. They did this knowing full-well that China's suppression apparatus would take great interest in Apple's pocket bugs, and that China shows little hesitation about using their leverage. Apple knew they would be asked to make these sorts of concessions. There's no chance they didn't think this over.
So when people say they "Apple doesn't have a choice", what they mean is Apple made the choice some time back.
This is the part you're wrong about: Apple, like any public corporation with effectively-zero internal controlling-share ownership, is constitutionally incapable of doing things that would make its share price drop; and is constitutionally compelled to do things that make its share price rise. Any CEO who attempts to do anything "against" the share price is fired by the board (which consists of external shareholders, not idealists) and replaced by a CEO who will serve the share-price god.
"Things that make Apple's share price rise" include "entering the Chinese market", "committing to the Chinese market", and "doing whatever customization to their products is required to stay in the Chinese market."
Which is all to say: Apple never made a choice. Free-market capitalism made this choice. If individual Apple employees don't like "the market" being their true boss, they're free to leave and work instead for a private company, or an internally majority-owned company, or a non-profit, or a B Corp. But Apple itself — the aggregate emergent behavior of the organizational entity — is not free to do anything, any more than a train is free to drive off of its rails.
This is the most wrong, reductionist take on Ford v. Dodge. Companies make decisions all the time that aren’t exactly what shareholders focused on quarterly results want. The quintessential examples are Costco and Amazon. The former pays associates above market wages and benefits, the latter had losses or broke even for years by investing for the long term.
This isn't about Ford v. Dodge. I said nothing about legal compulsion. This is about the "realpolitik" of operating a publicly-traded company.
Consider:
1. The market has an ability to "lose faith in" an equity, and do a mass sell-off of that equity, destroying/bankrupting the company — see e.g. what almost happened with British bonds a few months ago. Essentially, an uncoordinated boycott, as a result of a suddenly different output to a Keynesian beauty-contest (i.e. everyone thinks that a sufficient number of other people will sell based on the news to trigger a collapse of the price; so they have to sell first.)
2. In companies owned by majority-external shareholders — especially when those shareholders are market-makers (as is true in Apple's case: https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...) — the board is very well aware of #1, and so hires/fires the CEO based in part on whether they will avoid actions that will result in the market "losing faith" in the company. (How do they know? Because those market-makers are the ones who would, in aggregate, do most such selling-off!)
That's what I mean by "Apple is constitutionally incapable of doing X" — not that they'd face some sort of corporate malfeasance suit if they did (who even cares?) but that any CEO hired by a public corporation is operating under a dagger of Damocles that they know will fall the moment they do anything to lose the public's faith in their company's stock.
Costco paying above-market, and Amazon not putting out any dividends, are not actions that result in mass sell-offs — especially because they're things the companies have done from the start (so if anyone got in on these companies in the first place, they got in knowing that these are things these companies do.)
Apple exiting China is the opposite: a stark, sudden shift in strategy, in a direction the self-interested parts of the global(!) market wouldn't care for. (Emphasis because mutual funds et al have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, and those shareholders aren't just American, but all over the world — including China!)
That doesn't make it better, though. Plenty of companies have decided not to do business in China on ethical grounds. Hell, even Google pulled out of China way back when, a company I certainly don't think all that highly of.
Yes, not doing business in China means less revenue, and unhappy shareholders. This is why capitalism sucks: it more or less requires companies do unethical things, when not doing those things means much less money.
IMO it does. I would rather have a generally good product with concessions as opposed to no product at all. If apple, google, everyone exits out of protest, what is left? Chinese-developed tech that is 100,000% susceptible to the same government orders. At least with apple they know what they're getting.
I know it’s in vogue to blame capitalism, like our economic system is a faceless AI that decides things in a perfectly efficient market (It’s not).
Behind the curtain there are humans making decisions. They may be hedge funds, investors, board members, etc. There are humans that deliberately want to do business with China and know exactly what is happening with those workers. It wasn’t capitalism that outsourced iPhone production to a sweat shop, it was a group of real people who are morally bankrupt.
Wait what? How can you claim that capitalism requires a company do unethical things while in the same comment giving an example of a company that chose not to do an unethical things?
Yup - the suicide nets story is pure disinformation. Yes they had nets, but the suicide rate at the factory before the nets were installed was lower than of students at US colleges.
> tech people who learned to program because their 8088 was completely open and free to let you actually create things and learn about computing, so many of you will defend this terrible situation.
There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use.
I have a Mac, and I also have Linux machines. Nothing is stopping people learning about computers.
Why would anyone spend $1000 on a computer from Apple if it’s not what they want?
> There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use.
This - this line is the part of your argument I find fairly bullshit.
There is nothing stopping Apple from making the same device, but giving you the keys to install your own software on it. Hell - They can even bury it in the settings, or lock it down through a provisioned profile so you can help your mom by turning it off if you're worried.
Instead - you're arguing that apple should abuse their position to keep other competition locked out. Because you think it makes you "safer". I don't think it makes you safer. I think it makes life easy for you, at the expense of everyone in the long term.
You have fallen - hook, line, and sinker - for the marketing of the richest company in the world, telling you "trust us - we'll keep you safe". You should ask more questions about why they need to do it this way. Why keeping you safe involves abusing their power.
That's the same safety China promises with their great firewall. Trust us - we'll keep you safe, happy, and ignorant.
Maybe that's a good deal to you - I think it's a shitty trade.
> There is nothing stopping Apple from making the same device, but giving you the keys to install your own software on it.
They do, at the app level. As a developer you can install whatever app you want on your own devices, even apps which would never be allowed in AppStore or TestFlight (although still not with all the entitlements Apple’s own apps can get.)
Even then - apps which might want to do things like send multicast packets (very useful in lots of home automations situations) can't do it, using the developer program, without going through approval on the store.
You utterly do not own those devices. Apple sells a house where they kept the keys to all the locks, but people think it's ok "because they'll keep me safe and unlock my doors when I need them to!".
Nevermind the risk is mostly a marketing boogeyman in the first place.
You can do this only if you pay Apple $99 / year and deanonymize yourself with billing details. If not, you have to reinstall weekly, losing your local data.
His 80 year old mother isn't using MacOS. She's on an ipad or an iphone - where I do genuinely think I can't install my own software.
They're both perfectly fine general purpose machines - except apple holds the keys to the engine, and only hands them out when they approve of the use case.
I think it’s useful to remember why so many people jumped to iPads, because we did that experiment for a couple decades. When people have the ability to install arbitrary code we know they will, and will click through almost any warning if they’ve been promised money, games, or porn. I think the sandboxing approach is getting closer to where you could potentially safely have third-party stores but I think that would still leave a lot of abuse if it allowed VPNs or content filters, full screen use, background operations, etc.
I don’t love where that leaves us but it does make me wonder whether a better compromise would be something like regulation requiring third-party app installs but with some kind of business liability & registration requirement so e.g. Epic could set one up but fly by night scammers couldn’t easily set something up and spam AARP members.
They didn't jump to a completely new category of device because of the toolbars and malicious software.
They bought them because it was a new category of device (and extensive marketing from Apple - although I don't mean to discount the product with that statement - very solid phones, but also very excellent marketing). If anything - the early tech adopters moved to the iphone because it was more open than the existing phones at the time, which were definitely not general purpose computers. The iphone got us halfway there - I'd like to see us take the last few steps.
> Why would anyone spend $1000 on a computer from Apple if it’s not what they want?
Because marketing.
Then again, maybe the truth is that what people really want isn't the best tool for the job but the best-marketed tool for the job, and they spend their money accordingly.
Except that Apple's computers aren't locked down. That canard really needs to die. iPhones and iPads are locked down. Macs aren't. I can run whatever the I want on my Mac, and I do.
> Nothing is stopping people learning about computers.
Hell, it's easier and cheaper than ever. You can run Linux in your browser on an iPad, just by visiting a URL. Or shell into various free-tier VMs, for... free. Maybe a one-time cost for an SSH/Mosh client if you're on iOS I suppose. Swift Playgrounds and a hundred other learn-to-code apps and sites exist. And that's if you're "stuck" with a locked-down device running iOS—you can pick up cheap but pretty damn powerful second-hand x86 computers with money earned from a shift or two at McDonalds and do whatever you want with them. Practically all libraries have lots of computers now (and see again that you can run Linux in a browser, or remote into VMs from the browser, if you're concerned about how locked-down a library computer might be). I routinely end up with free or nearly-free surprisingly good computers (even Apple ones!) without even trying.
Resources, including entire books, available for free and on demand—and almost any information relating to computers is free if you're willing to sail the high seas and hoist the Jolly Roger, which is exactly what learners did back in the "good old days", too (but we pirated software, not books, mainly because the books were rarely available in digital form and we had worse ways to read them than we do now, even if they had been available).
But hey - I'm free to send multicast packets from that iphone on a network I own, right? Because part of the learning is the doing things with the skills you learn later.
I'm free to install software I write on that iphone, right?
I'm free to sell the software I write using those skills to those other people, without risk of Apple arbitrarily shutting me out, right?
Or much more malicious, moving me down below their own shitty version, right?
All of those things - the things someone who goes to the trouble to learn about computers might want to do - I'm free to do those?
My point is that broadly speaking, learning computing is something like 100x more accessible than it was in the "good old days", and that mostly holds even on an i-device.
I couldn't (practically) develop for my NES, either. But it'd have been rad if I could at least write software on it that'd run somewhere else. Or in a sandboxed environment on the NES, also allowing me to share it, even if the capabilities were a slightly nerfed. Way the hell better than nothing. ("Well yeah but you could have bought a Commodore 64"—OK, cool, sooo.... why are we worried about iOS devices when the same 'so get a different device' counter applies there, and also you actually can learn a great deal of computing on them?)
Meanwhile ordinary computers are practically free. Like you can probably go beg around and make a couple Reddit or Craigslist or Facebook posts (use the library computer I guess if somehow you live in the developed world and don't own or have access to any other Web-capable device?) and land one (maybe not a great one, but hundreds of times more powerful than what many of us learned on) for $0 in a matter of weeks, at most. Or scrape together $100 or so and go to Goodwill. Not $0, but it's very cheap. Your library probably even has free computer classes. So might your community college. Learning how to "really" use and program a computer is vastly more accessible now than it's ever been, and i-devices aren't harming that a bit.
They might not be harming the learning (I'd argue they are) - But they are unquestionably harming the practice.
You keep harping back to some bullshit hand-me-down machines, as though that's what my customers will want to carry in their pocket. As though that's the ideal machine to implement software on - and I'd argue you're just soundly avoiding the real discussion by mentioning them (perhaps intentionally, given your fascination).
Trust me, I fucking have those machines, they're great for some things (they run my home network, they run my home cluster) - but they're not the things that people walk around with. They're not the computer in everyone's pocket. They're not the laptop my potential user-base is working on at work.
Doesn't it strike you as somewhat sad and pathetic that you're arguing that folks who want to do general purpose computing should be relegated to cast off devices, or be subject to the whims and mercy of the richest company in the world? Begging for the scraps after Apple shoves their own products right to the top, cuts off and strangles any real competition, charges racket money to allow users to even install your damn software, prevents you from using the devices they claim you own?
Pathetic. Locked down proprietary systems that trap folks in what they believe is a benevolent dictatorship. At some point you'll look around and realize you're being robbed blind. You claim to value learning computer skills, without realizing the learning has NO value without the ability to use those skills. And if you can only use those skills when Apple lets you... who's really in control?
>>There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use.
I just don't understand this argument. Never did and I don't think I ever will. If apple allowed you to install custom apps, it would change NOTHING for your 80+ year old mother. Literally nothing. Her device would still be just as safe and secure as ever before.
At the same time, almost everyone in my family over the age of 60 who uses a non-Apple device has their devices completely sodden with crapware (and probably worse), to the point where they periodically have to taken them in to some sort of computer "repair" person to have them serviced (i.e., the garbage removed).
Some people apparently need help making judgment calls about what is and is not safe to install on their devices. I feel like Mac OS might strike the right balance here: you can install anything you want, but the OS throws up speedbumps if the app doesn't have the right signature, is not from the App Store, etc. These protections can be easily circumvented, but they send a signal that you should think twice about doing so if you don't really know what you're doing.
Apple lets you install custom apps on Macs, it’s just iOS devices where it’s a pain.
On iOS devices, you have to use a developer account to sideload the app and it only works for a short time, IIRC. I’m fuzzy on the details because the places where I’ve worked, it mostly just worked although the experience was way, way better on Android. At one point I was on a team that ran a system for deploying apps for sideloading, and for years I’ve been carrying both an Android and iOS phone, so I feel like I have a handle on these differences, but I also am missing out on some of the problems that our team already solved.
On macOS, you can download an app and run it. Depending on the provenance of the app and the security settings, you may get a message like “this app is from an unknown developer” with no apparent way forward. The solution is to right-click the app and select open from the context menu. When you open an app by right clicking on it, the OS gives you an option to open the app. This depends on security settings, but I think this is allowed by default.
There’s a lot of malware out there these days and I think it is good and correct that it should not be obvious how to run arbitrary software you downloaded. We know people will just click through dialog boxes to try and get where they’re going, which is way (for example) there’s no button to visit an HTTPS site with a broken certificate in most browsers these days. Some things should not come with instructions, because the risks are too great for unskilled users.
I believe the right click method for opening an unsigned app no longer works as of MacOS Ventura. It appears to work on your own computer but once someone downloads it and tries to run on a new computer, you can’t get around it through regular UI, I think.
And literally none of it would be allowed on the app store, just like it isn't now. Again, it would change absolutely nothing. Scammers would sooner convince his 80+ year old mother to tell them her bank details than they would walk her through the process of installing a dodgy app through sideloading.
> If apple allowed you to install custom apps, it would change NOTHING for your 80+ year old mother. Literally nothing. Her device would still be just as safe and secure as ever before.
Not it would not still be as safe.
Malware and scams would come with instructions to install their custom bad app.
All I can figure is these notions that it'd be fine and exactly the same come from the generation after all of us who experienced the horror of removing 20 "search bars" from every single one of our relatives' computers... and repeating every few months. And that's when they didn't manage to get outright viruses on the regular, which many of them did. They simply haven't seen how awful Internet-connected computing was for most people, at exactly the time when most people finally started to use computers at home (in the US anyway), which was right around the year 2000.
"There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use."
There very clearly is something terrible about this level of control. You're arguing that there's also some benefit -- yes of course there could be. But the point is that there are also massive problems with this level of control, some of which pose existential threats in areas far more important than (entirely debatable) usability improvements.
These problems can be solved in other ways. You can do what I did and remove administrator access entirely. You can create a curated list of appropriate apps without the totalitarian aspect. You can let people opt-in to various levels of filtering and control over software without excluding people who want to ahem think different.
You're presenting a pretext, not a credible and necessary conclusion.
I am tech savvy. iPhones are not "easy" to use. It's a nightmare of hidden gestures to accomplish even the most basic things.
Yes, for someone who spend 8 hours / day on their phone you eventually learn the necessary gestures. But that's no different from Android or any other electronic device.
> making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use
only today, I was talking to a lady walking her dog, who's close to 80 (I don't ask her that), and she owns an iPhone. When my phone started talking, she commiserated that she's always getting woken up because the phone is making noise and she can't make it stop. I told her to keep it in another room like I do.
>There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use.
in contrast to what other phone? Was your 80+ year old mother sideloading bootleg apks on her android after turning on developer mode? This is the reverse version of "but think of the children" except it doesn't even make any sense. In every one of these threads there's a mysterious influx of senile parents who apparently can be trusted with the call function of the phone and fend off every fake grandson phishing attempt but not the option to install software
This isn’t in contrast to Android. That’s just a matter of usability.
It’s in contrast to the openness of the platform people seem to be demanding from Apple. Current Android is obviously not open enough for them, so it’s not a valid as a point of comparison.
> There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use.
You're right. It's also true that there's nothing terrible about making devices that Chinese dissidents can safely and easily use. Luckily there is no government that wants to limit your mom's freedom (unless she happens to be a Chinese dissident).
Why not? Twitter is now Elon’s private property, existing only to serve his personal interests. There is no reason for it to be given special treatment.
I'm still not sure. Billionaire titan buys what he has called "the public square". I think it's safe to assume that he's more interested in the effect that his speech can have, not whether he buys into the meaning of any given utterance.
I do, but I thought the question was whether or not he believed that woke activists are the proper blame for an advertiser not buying his services.
I wouldn't be surprised if he knows that advertisers have other valid reasons for not wanting to place their brands on his site, but that he's playing to the far-right base anyway.
For example, he used the number "88" in a hostile back-and-forth with Alex Vindeman yesterday, a pretty clear dog whistle.
This is further confirming that big tech is all in on controlling the conversation and controlling who can participate or not. Why isn't Apple blocking the phones of those toxic users? Why aren't phone carriers like ATT blocking phone calls they deem problematic? This is only happening with social media and online communication, which is increasingly the main way to communicate.
It's not just a publishing medium. You can use it privately as well. Social media is blurring those lines. People broadcast their messages daily to their own audience, whether it's family, group of friends, or the world. Eventually voice calls will just be another feature, and I guess providers will make a deal with the various apps like discord, whatsapp, etc., at that point these companies are effectively deciding what information people can consume.
Yeah yeah. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a publishing platform. If you don’t think Twitter is about public conversation then you take a look at it for yourself some time.
Even if it is publishing, companies align in intent and wield incredible amounts of power with how information flows. They decide what is a legitimate story, and what is a conspiracy theory, and I personally don't trust large corporations to make these decisions. They are far from moral actors. Twitter is attempting to strip this power away from itself, and Apple does not like that.
Worth noting that as we speak, the Chinese government is drowning out tweets about the protests by posting spam and porn to the relevant hashtags.
This is only happening because Elon fired the moderation team that used to guard against such propaganda.
He is a self-dealing hypocrite. Twitter isn’t about free speech. It’s a private company run for one reason alone. To further Elon Musk’s personal agenda.
> This is only happening because Elon fired the moderation team that used to guard against such propaganda.
Citation needed. I turned on "Show sensitive media" in my Twitter settings years ago, since many political posts were incorrectly classified as "sensitive", and having that setting turned on was the only way to see those tweets in the Twitter iOS app.
I couldn't use the Search function without constantly seeing porn (nothing "softcore" either, I'm talking dick pics and actual porn videos). Only later did I figure out there was a setting to hide sensitive media from searches, while displaying it in my timeline.
I just checked the Chinese protests hashtags, with these two settings turned on, and see no porn whatsoever, so none of this behavior changed.
You're not the first to claim that longtime Twitter problems were caused by Musk.
I saw that. I'm saying that while this bot farm may be new, this was a longstanding problem for years, even under the "fully-staffed" Twitter. And clearly, not all of this problem can be attributed to bots, since I saw this on practically every hashtag including non-political ones.
What a pathetic thing for him to say. The notion that in order to support free speech, you have to pay money to cover Elon’s debts is narcissistic delusion.
Turns out just about everybody, all around the world, loves authoritarian laws when they agree with the alleged goal, or when the psychological propaganda worked on them. If it's not the children, it's grandma, or someone else.
Turns out there are a small number of actual anti-authoritarians who have always been consistent. And then there are countless hangers-on who proclaim to be an anti-authoritarian resistance when it suits them. It's funny, the fact people co-opt it shows that they see it as a noble and worthy ideology, yet it's still one they're happy to discard the minute some talking head put on TV by a corporation tells them to be outraged.
I'd love to be put in contact with some of these true Scotsmen^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H anti-authoritarians. I need staunch moral support in my tireless, lonely fight against the soulless minions of orthodoxy who blithely kowtow to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 [0]. My perfectly fine produce deserves the embrace of the free market; it isn't up to some pencil-pusher in Washington to have the final say in how much lead there is in a tomato, it's between God, Man, and the Invisible Hand.
Are you one of the countless hangers-on who proclaim to be an anti-authoritarian resistance when it suits them?
I don't think a world where Yelp and the BBB managed the food safety ratings of restaurants would be a good one. That's a "solution", but is it a solution?
Besides, my tomatoes are certified safe by Nutr-Alert and SafeCo. SafeCo even lets me doctor the lab results myself, for a little extra! I'm still in negotiation with PureFood, but I'm sure this little speedbump will be ironed out before you know it. Iron is good for you, anyway; they don't even test for that.
>>>just about everybody, all around the world, loves authoritarian laws when they agree with the alleged goal, or when the psychological propaganda worked on them
You made a really strong claim in the post I'm quoting, and suggested that you are among those hardcore anti-authoritarians whom you lionize. But this is a real(ish) world example of that belief being challenged, and instead of explaining your principled stance, you're playin' around; you suggested you had "hit a nerve". Ah, right, I guess I'm just too emotional. Gotta stand up for what's right! No, not like that.
Of course I'm being facetious about my leaden tomatoes, but so too are you, and other readers of these words should think about how the "anti-authoritarians" actually practice their claimed stances, and where they don't.
By giving writers an incentive to write quality content.
Youtube pays their creators well, although I know that video is more engaging than text. Nevertheless, giving writers the chance to make good money on a platform will make them post quality content, and would make them continue to post quality content so that they get compensated. I'm a medium writer, and I don't get paid nearly enough what I should for the amount of work I put into my articles.
Medium doesn't have a great recommendation system. Tiktok does. The beauty of the tiktok algorithm is that it gives users what they want without them having to go through the trouble of finding what they want. On medium, you have to go to the topic and then from there see what you can find. On my platform, there will be a "For You" page that makes the content go to you.
That would be the plan, yes. In the beginning we would focus on using funding to compensate the writers until we start to gain network effects in which then we should be receiving ad money which would be shared with the writers.
This is absurd. Apple is doing this because of government pressure, not because of their own desire to crack down.