Talk:Mission statement

Concern about mission statement

The mission statement itself is a bit scaring. It's the first page to see and could turn away people that try to look up something in the future. This article has to move at some point to a more inviting page, maybe not in the next time tho. Tpat90 (talk) 22:06, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

     Agree, but until we are aiming to attract readers rather than contributors, I'm happy for us to keep it as is. It'll likely be a while before the wiki is useful to a casual reader  Keith

Thoughts on archiving sources

It should be mentioned that this wiki could be used as an index for solicitation with copyright requests, or through some other method, to take down at any point any of the sources listed on each page. Those sources, then, should at least be checked to make sure that they have been captured by the Internet Archive, or through some other service. I think it'd be tedious and unhelpful for every source to directly link to an archive page, but there should be some kind of policy to make sure that these sources are archived. User:Liana (talk) 17:11, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

What is the line in the sand for "new" consumer protection?

"A company remotely disabled software of consumers who posted bad online reviews" and "All consumer devices with needless cloud connection were bricked when a company went out of business" would be within scope for the wiki at the very top of the gradient of badness, but where along the gradient do these stories fall out of scope?

1. A car manufacturer sells a heated seat subscription even though the consumer already purchased the hardware with their car, but the manufacturer is upfront & honest about it when they purchase the car
2. A manufacturer that sells hardware also provides the software necessary to use said hardware, but it requires a subscription service lest the hardware becomes a brick which they are transparent about when purchasing the hardware
3. Same as 2 with some free functionality in the software, but the software (for the hardware you already purchased and own) is designed to be frustrating to use (subjective guess) to force users to buy the software subscription
4. Same as 2, but the software is a perpetual purchase at least (though still the hardware will be a brick without purchasing the software)
   • Does it make a difference between how "reasonable" the price is (subjective)? E.g. $100 purchase vs $5000 to keep your $5000 hardware from turning into a brick
5. Company which sold yearly releases for software that users would own in perpetuity (think Photoshop CS6 or pre-365 Microsoft Office) changes to a subscription model for new releases going forward so that now users who relied on their software can never "own" it again
   • This is "okay" in today's climate due to the gradual erosion of consumer ownership, but would have been an outrage 40+ years ago
6. Same as 5 except the company never sold perpetual licenses in the first place and is just riding on the coattails of other companies which have eroded consumer ownership
7. A consumer device has a cloud connection, which hasn't yet been bricked because the company is still in business
   • It would be fair game once consumer devices are bricked, but do we have to wait? Is any cloud connection which can result in a loss of functionality the consumer paid for fair game even before it is lost? I imagine consumers would want to know that a device they plan on purchasing is at risk before they make the purchase
8. "Schematics or Die": if the device is fully offline and cannot be affected by the manufacturer post-sale but they refuse to provide schematics to owners upon request, is that "intentionally [creating] obstacles to repair"?
   • Does it change if the reason is because they don't own all of the IP and can't legally release schematics? (would we even know the difference between whether this was the case or they were intentionally making it harder to repair if they did not directly tell us?)

These all "take away the consumer's right of ownership." in the words of the mission statement, but have become increasingly accepted and "fair" with the erosion of consumer ownership over time. They are not even necessarily a "revocation" of ownership because the consumer was never provided the opportunity of ownership in the first place. User:DrewW (talk) 06:58, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

I'll try to tackle a few of these:

For #1: yep, even if it's clearly communicated, it's taking away ownership and the ability to use your thing. The fact that it's clearly communicated and so on should be mentioned in the article for it.

Similarly, for 2 through 4, I think we can apply similar logic - it's anti ownership even if reasonable. i do hesitate at #4 though, as I think in that case it might come down to reasonability, and whether the cost of the software was advertised as part of the cost of the package, or whether it was more hidden.

Honestly, 5 and 6 are tricky... I'd need to think more about them.

For 7: It's fair game, as the product would be bricked right now if a tree fell on their datacentre's powerline. it's a problem when a perfectly good product has the potential to be worthless just becausee someone else turns off their computer. Obviously, if nothing has yet happened, the article should reflect that, and state as much.

For 8: I'd say so, though I think this might fall under the umbrella of 'old' consumer protection, and need to meet a size threshold. Situations like that one you mention with the IP being unreleaseable are exactly why tone is so important for this wiki - we should simply state that they are not releasing the schematics, that this is causing people problems, and any statements the company has publicly made. We should not ascribe intentionality to the company's actions when we do not know their intentions.

For now, we're mostly going to be drawing the line by feel, as we don't want to discourage people from writing potentially relevant articles. In a month or so we might revisit exactly where the line lies.

I think the key takeaway is that even if it's a relatively benign example, because we will be presenting things in a factual and neutral tone, it's fine to make an article about it. We will do our absolute best not to misrepresent things, so a benign example will read less severely to an extreme example when someone is reading an article.

Consider also that somewhere in the policy (I forget where, but I definitely wrote it) it mentions that it's perfectly ok to write articles about relevant positive incidents, such as steam removing forced arbitration.

Thank you very much for the question, and I hope this provides some insight as to our stance! Keith (talk) 20:59, 19 January 2025 (UTC)