It's the same for people who don't understand basic electronics or mechanics. Any problem just becomes "it's broken" and the only solution is to take it to an expert and pay for their time, or toss it and buy a new one. It's expensive to be ignorant.

To kill any competition and ensure they retain control over future standards. Money. It's pretty straightforward.

The basic idea is that a huge company with infinite money creates software that supports an open standard, such as Threads. Next they spend significant amounts of money driving users to their software, rather than an open software equivalent. Once they've captured a huge percent of all users of the open standard, they abandon the open standard, going with a proprietary one instead. They'll make up some new feature to justify this and sell it as a positive. Because they control almost all of the users at this point, many of the users they don't control will decide to switch over to their software, otherwise the value of the open standard drops significantly overnight for them. What's left is a "dead" open standard that still technically exists but is no longer used. You can find plenty of past examples of this pattern, such as Google and XMPP.

This reminds me of the low-background steel problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

I see this at my local supermarket chains after they received pressure to reduce plastic usage. The exact same plastic bags are in use, except now they have printed on them "REUSABLE PLASTIC BAG". Such a predictable outcome.

It truly made no sense to me when they started the process of migrating stuff from control panel to the "new" Metro-style Settings, then just kind of... gave up and left everything as a spread-out mess. I can't believe they've left it this long to address, it's an awful user experience.

I can't speak for Craigslist, but in my area Gumtree is big, and I know from first-hand experience that they "handle it" by waiting for the crime to occur and be reported to police, then they give police the list of all IP addresses that viewed a listing. Having stared down the pointy end of a knife right outside my own home, I feel there's an opportunity to build a better system that keeps people honest and discourages thieves.

One of the biggest challenges with online marketplaces is personal safety for physical meetups and scam prevention for online sales. It'll be interesting if there are any efforts to solve this, such as an escrow system or other process to keep buyers and sellers honest.

robots.txt is the perfect summary of the web era. A plain text file that politely asked web crawlers not to do certain things. Such an innocent time.

Another vote for Mikrotik, but only if you're technical-minded and want to learn how routers work. One of the things I like the most about it is the ability to import/export the router config as plain text. That makes it very easy to do things like bulk-editing (I have a lot of IOT devices I need to configure), storing your config in version control for safe-keeping etc.

It really shouldn't be possible in a EULA/agreement of any kind to essentially say "you agree you can't sue us in future for anything ever".

God, even if they didn't have QA test it, they should have had continuous integration running to test all new channel updates against all versions of their program, considering the update will affect all of them. What an epic process failure.