this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
315 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37739 readers
606 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's a struggle. Boycotts are historically very hard to be effective and I feel that the Internet has made it even more difficult. Protests need their own marketing and companies at an international scale feel almost immune from any public movements.
That said, voting with your wallet, like boycotts, do work. They just need people to be consistent and informed. But it does work.
Look at Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the 2nd). Prerelease it got over -600k downvotes and substantially hurt the game to the point that they reworked the entire system. If gamers had just bought the game and played anyway, EA wouldn't have needed to actually rework it. But they were so worried about the performance of the game that they actually made a change.
Same for Sonic the Hedgehog. He looked so, so terrible that the fear of losing money made him get fixed.
Granted, these two are examples of something becoming changed before full release, but in spirit the effect is the same. Corporation scared to lose money so changes are made to help make money. Voting with your wallet does work. It just needs to be marketed right. Edit: and I completely forgot the context here, which is that for something like tech, while consumers can have a choice, corporations do too. That's where the struggle comes in