People love pointing out the Streisand effect as though we’re still in the same social media dynamic that we were 30 or 15 years ago. Wake the fuck up.
Banning the app is 100% certainly going to reduce it all’s usage. The fact that you somehow think you could have the opposite effect is a sign that your head is buried so deep in the sand and you have no idea what the current state of the world is.
The authoritarians are winning and their censorship and propaganda has been exceptionally effective. Clinging to idealistic slogans and denying reality is a great way to accomplish nothing
In tech circles, we talk a lot about friction and user experience, and those matter enormously, but they're not the be-all-end-all. We have OSS developers underestimating friction on one hand, and tech companies overestimating it on the other.
Even if something requires you to be tech-savvy to set up, people will still do it if the need is dire enough, because everybody "knows a guy". Console modchips in the 2000s are my go-to example. They were devilishly complex to set up, often requiring proficiency with a soldering iron, with stakes for failure being very high (breaking the console you just spend all your savings buying), yet everybody and their mom had one. All you needed was a friend with such a chip, who could tell you who the "guy" in your town is.
This website is called Hacker News. It's not called Authoritarian Cuck News.
HN is widely known for being the home of the technocrat corporate bootlicker. Very little of the hacker ethos ever gets espoused here.
Nevermind the fact it was possible to bypass it, or that they didn’t detect that I did so… nope, just a scolding of “You shouldn’t do such things.”
In that regard the effect is effective in making sure bitchat cannot vanish from the internet.
We can argue that overall usage of it might still go down, but I don't think anyone was arguing that.