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Interesting, I wasn't aware that capitalism and the free market absolves everything from criticism.


Criticize Facebook. It sucks. However, arguing that it sucks because the developers are privileged white dudes motivated by making money is not a valid argument. The author even points to an example of a good api from Microsoft. Do you really believe the developers at Microsoft back in the 90s weren't motivated by making money? The Facebook API sucks for so many reasons. Zuckerburg originally wrote Facebook in PHP, he was not a computer scientist scientist, their motto is "move fast and break things". It's an experiment and they made some mistakes. To imply its flaws are rooted in capitalism is wrong. I realize profit and money are popular punching bags. It feels good to think you are morally superior and have other people think you are a good person. However, the hate and bile being spewed at anyone trying to make a buck is irrational. No one is holding a gun to anyone's head telling them they have to use Facebook. Go out and make something better.


I think you're reading some kind of general anti-capitalism into the post that isn't there. Bogost's view seems to be that chasing short-term profit is a significant problem in this sector, which is why he uses Microsoft as a counterexample of something that was a profit-oriented business but still managed to keep stable APIs, because they were oriented longer-term. If he were trying to make a general anti-market or anti-capitalist point it would make no sense for both his pro and con examples to be large for-profit tech companies.




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