Following in the footsteps of Hashicorp, Hudson, etc. Zed has chosen to cash in the good will of its now substantial user base and start going to full corporate enshittification. Among other things like minimum age nonsense, they have also added binding mandatory opt-OUT arbitration.
I find such agreements very troubling, because it gives up public funded dispute resolution for private which nearly unanimously benefits larger entities, it lowers transparency to near zero, and eliminates the abilities to act as a class and to appeal. But I worry most will just accept it, as is the norm.
You can however opt out by emailing arbitration-opt-out@zed.dev with full legal name, the email address associated with your account, and a statement that you want to opt out.
I’ll just consider my days of advocating for Zed as an interesting new editor over and go back to Neovim bliss.
For those that don’t know what any of that means (like me 5 minutes ago):
Arbitration is an alternative to going to court. Instead of suing each other in front of a judge, both parties agree to have a neutral third party (an arbitrator) settle disputes privately. It’s usually faster and cheaper than traditional litigation.
The class action waiver means you give up the right to join with other users in a class action lawsuit against Zed. So if many users had the same grievance, they couldn’t band together, each person would have to resolve their dispute individually.
Why tf are they afraid of being sued or class actioned against?
I haven’t really used zed much and I’ll delete my account and uninstall, just to show them that this sucks.
The “neutral” third party is chosen by the company. So… yeah.
Fun fact: these forced arbitration clauses can backfire spectacularly
Any lawyer who wants to make a shit load of money fucking over a company engaging in these kinds of abusive business practices should look at what Bucher law firm did to Valve.
Could be fuck ups from AI, i saw several openings from them about integrated AI