We wanted it all to be free. It was free. I remember the early days of the internet, the webforums, the IRC, it was mostly sites run by enthusiasts. A few companies showing their products to would-be customers. It was awesome and it was all free.
And then it got popular, it got mainstream. Running servers got expensive and the webmasters were looking for funding. And we resisted paywalls. The internet is free, that's how it's supposed to work!
They turned to advertising. That's fair, a few banners, no big deal, we can live with that. It worked for television! And for a while that was OK.
Where did it all go sideways? Well, it was much too much effort to negotiate advertisement deals between websites and advertisers one website at a time, so the advertisement networks were born. Sign up for funding, embed a small script and you're done. Advertisers can book ad space with the network and their banner appears on thousands of websites. Then they figured out they can monitor individual user's interests, and show them more "relevant" ads, and make more money for more effective ad campaigns.
And now we have no privacy online. Which caused regulators like the EU to step in and try to limit user data harvesting. With mixed results as we all know. For one it doesn't seem to get enforced enough so a lot of companies just get away with. But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.
And now we're swamped with ads, and sponsored content written by AI, because capitalism's gonna capitalism and squeeze as much profit as they can, until an equilibrium is reached between maximum revenue and user tolerance for BS. Look up "enshittification"
I wonder how the web would look like if we had not resisted paid content back then. There were attempts to do things differently. flattr was one thing for a while. Patreon, ko-fi and others are awesome for small creators. Gives them independence and freedom to do their thing and not depend on big platforms or corporations. The fediverse and open source are awesome.
There's still a lot of great stuff out there for those of us who know where to look. But large parts of the internet are atrocious.
Great comment. I made a community called !oldweb today to share and discuss old style websites and sites that aren't just the top social media sites. So things like quirky personal websites, webrings, website lists made by others etc.
In a broad sense its bringing old school web architecture (everyone owns their own self contained corner of the internet with internal and external links) to modern web technology (things look nice)
I'm new to lemmy. Do you know a way to link to a community that works everywhere? I see only „!oldweb“ as text without a link in your post an don’t know on which instance it runs. Probably !oldweb? Or what is the correct way to link to a community?
If the content was paid, a lot of countries would simply be excluded from the internet.
Unfortunately, for most sites, using ads in the only viable alternative. I think we are so fast to reject ads, instead of finding ways to make non invasive ones. A balanced use of ads could make the web free and readable.
There are balanced ways to use ads, and a few places use them... but most soon get onto the "maximize income" bandwagon, and turn their site or app into an ad infected cesspool. They don't get penalized for that, all to the contrary, while advertisers see their ad conversion go down from sites over-infected with ads, so they don't want to offer deals good enough for those who only show a reasonable amount to survive.
This is a real problem. Ans they don't realize it just push people into using adblock, which, in turn, reduce their revenue and push them into more aggressive adds, which push even more people into using adblock...
It reminds me when Jaron Lanier said in today's world, anytime two people come together on the Internet, that arrangement is financed by a third party, that believes he can manipulate the first two. I really miss the good old days when the Internet was still a dirt road you could meet fellow travelers on, and have fun exploring it.
honestly heartbreaking in a lot of ways to see the current turn of events and how the web is today.
but what could we have done to prevent it? im not sure paywalls would've been feasible, i feel like most people would refuse to pay or just avoid your website all together. maybe a paywall network of websites of some kind could've worked? but its really hard to say.
i don't even have a problem with ads on sites to an extent, as long as they aren't overly obnoxious and don't spy on you and track your every move. that shouldn't be too much to ask, right? but alas, i guess it is in 2023. 🤷♀️
just such a sad state of things. the web is currently unusable without a content blocker or protection of some kind, which is insane to think about. this all really only scratches the surface too of the modern web's issues. in general a lot of the individuality and freedom of the internet is just... gone. all completely corporate and shall now, so much seo spam and clickbait and other garbage, just for the most clicks or revenue possible. there's little quality left for sure.
feels like we lost the internet in a lot of ways. i wonder what the solution is, if there even is one. i guess we just can't give up fighting.
Lemmy does give me a strong nostalgic feeling of old school forums. I think the Fediverse is going to give enthusiasts what they've been missing. I just hope it lasts and continues to grow.
Trust me, there will come a day when commercialism finds itself upon Lemmy and makes a tempting pitch to the website administrators, the same as has happened to Reddit. I'm very conservative with the causes I donate to and I understand that people want the freedom, and breath of fresh air that that nostalgia provides. But too many users aren't willing to pay for it, or expect some other user will front the money. I have no problem regularly donating to fund the upkeep of the site to keep things within the median of expectations, but I hope others would be willing to as well.
they'd have to talk to a lot of website administrators. even if they contact the developers directly and somehow convince them to include adware (a snowball's chance in hell), instance admins can just remove the adware and run their own ad-free version of Lemmy
this. I like the fact that for Lemmy you can just set up your own instance if you don't find one that suits your needs (and hope this feature never goes away). sure, it can lead to some fragmentation, but it's not like entire communities didn't switch forums and providers in the past
@Skimmer5728 I think what we're doing right here in the fediverse is a good solution. We're just building a parallel infrastructure to their dumb web3.0 garbage. Those who want a better Internet can come over here and those who want to stick with garbage can stick with it.
well said, i agree, the fediverse is definitely a good approach.
i think the only concern will be getting more people to move here and adopt it, it'll be harder to convince and appeal to more mainstream people. but i guess that'll be easier and easier as the web goes to shit and gets worse and worse over time than it already is, lol.
Fediverse is really still in its infancy. Its only just shifted from those with a lot of technical knowledge to those with a fluency of it.
It's when the average person can create an account and start engaging that it will reach critical mass.
It's not a bad thing that its taking a while to get there so that certain cultures, terms of engagement and stable/viable instances (each with their funding streams) can be established. If there were a sudden mass exodus from centralised systems to the fediverse, it would just mean a massive loss of the signal to noise ratio rather than a slow, measure integration of each wave of new users.
Eternal September. There's no integrating the masses to a 'better' network. I think to some extent you're going to get what the big names have now because it's the people, not just the sites.
And the fediverse sign up is exactly as hard as an email sign up already. Idk how you make it easier.
The "web3.0" is also an attempt to escape the nightmare that "web2.0" has become, just centered on Blockchains and the technologies they allow. Technically, the web3.0 is not at odds with the fediverse, it might even be that some day both might end up working together.
For example, one of the alternatives to Reddit that's being worked on, is a Blockchain + IPFS solution that already has some features like user migration between instances. It's a bit hard to expect to onboard the average user to a full crypto experience, but things like Lemmy could be the "base service", while someone looking for something more could look into integrations with other solutions.
The comment was getting long and I didn't want to get into socioeconomic side effects, mobile, or other factors.
It's not all bleak. The internet is still built on a foundation of free and open technology. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (aka ECMAScript), TCP/IP and DNS …
The best thing we can do is teach those things. Keep them accessible to as many people as possible and make sure they don't become forgotten arcane voodoo knowledge. Anyone can set up a website and share it with others. We don't have to depend on big social networks.
The biggest challenge is how do you get people to be curious about this stuff? Back in the day, we had to learn, we had to look under the hood, because half the time stuff just didn't work and we needed to figure out how to fix it. But today everything is hidden behind a shiny UI and most things just work. There's no need to look under the hood (if you even still can, and it's not some encrypted blob or compiled binary webASM nonsense).
Anyone can set up a website and share it with others
Not as simple as it used to be. Thanks to the abuse from ad, social media, and other tracking networks, now you need to comply with the cookie laws, personal information laws, data retention laws... and so on. It's no longer as simple as setting up a website and just sharing it; just having an uncontrolled log, or lacking one, can land you in trouble. Allow random users add content (like comments) to the site, and you can get drowned before even realizing what's happening.
Back in the day, you could set a site, have the webserver write whatever log, and not worry about it. Whether you used for access statistics, or forgot about it and deleted, nobody cared.
Nowadays, depending on the legislation of wherever you live, there might be requirements for a minimum amount of information you need to log and preserve for a minimum amount of time, and restrictions on what information you can't log and need to remove after a certain amount of time, or upon request provide to users, delete, or save apart.
Nowadays, depending on the legislation of wherever you live, there might be requirements for a minimum amount of information you need to log and preserve for a minimum amount of time, and restrictions on what information you can’t log and need to remove after a certain amount of time, or upon request provide to users, delete, or save apart.
You're not wrong, but I don't think anyone is actually trying to enforce this for small-scale things like personal websites or lemmy instances.
There was the original idea of microtransactions, where you could buy some credit, say $10, and every time you read an article, the author would get fraction of a cent. Or you'd need to manually approve it, such as with a like.
Of course companies saw a good idea and ran it into the ground, so now microtransactions mean something very different, and in their stead there are subscriptions for everything.
but what could we have done to prevent it? im not sure paywalls would’ve been feasible, i feel like most people would refuse to pay or just avoid your website all together. maybe a paywall network of websites of some kind could’ve worked? but its really hard to say.
So people don't want advertisements but they also don't want to pay for a bajillion subscriptions. I think the solution is socialization of the Internet. Governments should simply guarantee funding and make up the cost in taxes.
A lot of the VALUE of a news article on the internet is the ability to share it and discuss it with everyone else. Paywalls remove that value, or require all of the people you share it with to already have subscriptions to everything else.
News has been paid for via advertisements for a lot longer than the internet. The subscription fees for Newspapers really only covered the printing and distribution costs, while the reporters' salaries were paid for via advertising.
The problem is that the advertising has gotten TOO intrusive. It isn't just a banner ad anymore. It is a ton of banners speckled between every other paragraph on the page. As soon as advertising gets in the way, people will look to get around it.
I have found that I am overly sensitive to almost all forms of push-advertising (as opposed to pull-advertising where I am looking for marketing materials on something I want to research). I have browser ad blockers as well as DNS based ones on my wifi. I also watch very little broadcast TV. I have no problem waiting for a season of a TV show to be on DVD so I can watch it without breaks, or the annoying banners that pop up while watching.
I don't understand why so many people are making concessions towards advertisements. Yes, some aren't too bad, but at the end of the day all advertising is just brainwashing you to buy more things. If we're going to dream about an alternate universe where the internet was better, we don't need to compromise with our imaginations.
I'm not inherently against the idea of advertising. I get why it exists, and I'm all for it. What I resent and have no intention of complying with, are the attempts at identifying me and collecting my data, as a means to 'manipulate' me into buying things. And, it also can't ruin my experience on the site. If advertisements were minimal and invasive, didn't try installing all kinds of ad/bloat-ware on my machine, you'd never see me making any attempt to protect myself against it.
i think most people would be fine with advertising, as long as it 1: isn't overly obnoxious, 2: isn't scammy and doesn't contain malware or other garbage, and 3: doesn't track you and everything you do. advertising itself isn't the problem, it's the way it's being currently handled on the internet that's the issue.
I run a website and get about 160GB worth of traffic on it per month, and 3TB a year for the files I'm hosting. You'd think it would cost a lot, but that's not true in my case.
The rough estimate is about 300 USD per year.
I have no ads, no referrals, no Google analytics, it's all paid out of my own pocket.
My point is, those companies are just greedy, servers cost less than they used to, and with services like cloudflare, it's even less of an issue.
I use uBlock Origin in Firefox, with all the boxes ticked. It's not only adds it blocks also plentiful of trackers. Just to make my visits on today's web usable. As a result, my laptops / smartphone resources are saved up, more battery time or cooler device as example.
Personally I like ads, totally ok for it - if informative, sharing some kind of relevant value with greater good. Companies should let the product or service itself advertise, not throw these on people constantly.
This is why I whitelist duckduckgo in firefox in my ublock extension. I will gladly look at the relevant ads at the top of the list, knowing they are just that. I glance at them, most of the time it's a sales pitch, I go "not interested" and just move down the page to the results. 100% fine with that.
I don't know if it's the theme I use on DDG or what, but I've seen ads barely marked as such in the search results.
I'm all for non-intrusive (video/sound) ads, but I think not making text ads obvious is not good behavior. Especially if they call themselves an alternative to the ad-addicted search engines.
I'm working on a home project, so when I search on ddg for "how to build raised garden boxes" I get some "shopping" links with the word "ads" right next to it clearly visible, which I instantly skip over, then two text results labeled clearly as "ads" then the actual results. One text result is a sales pitch for a premade garden box and the other is a link to a video instruction (which I'm assuming will also have a sales pitch) so I can easily skip over those two links and now I'm at the results. No video or sound at all and it's all labeled as such for me. I'm using a default "dark" theme under the appearance settings.
What I'm saying is that the ad looks like a search result. A little "ad" next to it doesn't make it stand out for me. In some themes, that has the same color as the link title. I've clicked on them more than once thinking it's an actual result (my eyesight is not the best, I know).
The ad block should have a distinct color scheme based on the overall theme chosen. Otherwise, I consider it dishonest.
Personally I'm starting to try just paying for search with neeva and kagi. Not sure it's worth what kagi wants, but neeva is inside my yearly threshold.
The first big problem was malware in ads (and web in general). This has caused people to install adblocks on their parents' and friends' devices.
Then there were the annoying ads: autoplaying videos, popups and other shit. This has caused a lot of normies to install adblockers themselves.
Then the privacy concerns, where even basic users notice that they look at a product on one store and now the recommendations follow them everywhere.
But the marketing companies keep pushing, and the OS providers like Google, MS and Apple keep restricting what you can install on your machine, this is a full-on war between users and the big tech.
Nobody was complaining about small banner ads. But they just have to keep pushing and break things. It's like with banks, or mythological creatures - insatiable.
Everybody hated banner ads. The first adblockers were targeting banner ads, and they were the beginning of the arms race. Advertising? On the Internet? Not a chance!
Maybe my memory doesn't go quite as far. But still, I believe adblockers didn't take off in such a huge ways until we've seen all those popups, malware and other shit on a massive scale.
I feel like that's where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn't a privacy and fee nightmare, I'm sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.
But I also fear a lot of the damage could've been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.
I like your suggestion with easily payable small amounts. Because the way payment currently works is just not scale-able on an individual level. Sure, $20 per month for a technical news site would be worth it ... if that was the only news site you are consuming. But it isn't. I consume multiple tech news, local news, etc. I can't get back my full worth of spent money per site, because my time is split between multiple sites; and my time is finite.
I also can't just say "well, this month I consume only site A, next only site B, etc.", because that defeats how "news" work. In the end I skim headlines (or even sometimes content) and THEN it shows what is actually of interest and where I stay longer/dig deeper/actually read full.
In a perfect world we probably could have a "tip jar" at the end of every article that people throw in digital cash when the article was worth it. Unfortunately too many people would abuse it and simply not pay at all, so authors will have to ask for payment upfront ... but then I pay for something which I don't even know will be good. Maybe after seeing the full article (not yet reading it in detail) I realize it's not the kind of content I hoped for.
That thing was indeed easier with print media. You go to the store, flick through the magazine/paper and if you like it you pay for it and go read it.
I worked for a startup in the 90s, pre-enshittification, that wanted to empower micropayments on the web. Obviously, even when mostly "frictionless", users rejected the concept. Capitalism is going capitalize, but this is also the fault of users who demand "free".
Nowadays there is crypto, some of it is already perfect for micropayments. But it needs to be integrated into the browser/app to be truly frictionless, and there should be a "get your money back" option for the content that's click bait and not worth the asking price. Unfortunately the largest browsers are Chrome and Edge, by companies who aren't all that interesting in changing the way things are.
I am pretty convinced crypto as it currently is is 99% a scam or a way to waste a lot of money compared to a traditional financial transfer. It's made worse by the environmental impacts of mining. Crypto would have to be something completely different before it'll take off for any kind of traditional payment system. And I actually think we just need the government to mandate a better bank to bank payment system with no fees like they have in Europe. Anything else is too fragmented which means friction in use and higher fees converting between the competing systems.
You're not wrong, but not all crypto is the same. Some have switched to "proof of stake" which removes all the energy wasted on mining, some allow to write programs into it that can execute automatically to do some interesting things, and some allow sending fractions (thousandths, millionths) of a USD with barely a transaction fee.
Even in Europe, free bank-to-bank transfers take a couple days to execute (there is a paid option for instant transfers), and have a minimum of 0.01€ which might or might not be what you want to tip/pay someone for their content.
I know about that stuff, but I just don't see how you fix the fundamental problems of crypto without turning it into basically another ACH anyway. I.e. to regulate out the scammers, enable people to reverse transfers, tamp down on the straight out pump and dump schemes, wallet hacking / securing, the central exchanges going bust or being a scam themselves...
I just think that by the time you make it equivalent to Visa or PayPal for end users, you've now made it basically one of those.
this is also the fault of users who demand “free”.
This is in my opinion the crux of the matter. People want content for free: they won't pay for it directly and they won't watch ads (because they're often much too intrusive.) Of course the root problem is the economic system, but barring a near global revolution that's not going to change
Especially now that cost of living is through the roof. Who can afford to pay for content online when they can't even afford to feed themselves every day?
I could imagine it functioning as a tax-funded budget, but coordinating such a thing globally and coming to a consensus seems impossible, that's something we're really bad at, and it would have the very same underfunding problems as other even more urgent expenses have.
As an existing alternative to ad-funded sites, I've seen non-profit news survive on donations and tax deductions, so maybe strengthening that model could work, but it would only help with larger entities that can be registered.
We need something to replace ads, that's for sure, or at least decrease their influence.
No it didn't. Running a server today is dirt cheap compared to the bad old days. So is registering a domain. Getting a TLS certificate doesn't cost anything at all.
However, there are a lot more people here now. It used to be you could feasibly run a moderately popular website off a single server and it'd be fine. Now, with billions of people on the Internet, you need an army of servers distributed around the world if your site gets even remotely popular.
But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.
That's a feature, not a bug. Consent banners were manufactured as a way to turn public opinion against GDPR and generate political pressure to repeal it. “Look at how those Europeans ruined the web!” GDPR was supposed to pressure these unscrupulous advertisers into giving up their spooky tracking, but they did this instead. And it's working—most people blame GDPR for ruining the web, not the sleazeballs who actually ruined it.
Sure, servers are cheaper now. Domains are cheap now. TLS certs are free now. But that happened after the advertising business model became dominant.
For a while, server power was barely keeping up with the rise in demand, and you couldn't just add another cloud server or bump up the RAM allocation on the one you have, you had to physically install new hardware. That took a larger chunk of money than adding $5 to your hosting plan, and time to set up the hardware.
By the time the tech stack got significantly cheaper (between faster hardware and virtualization, not to mention Let's Encrypt), advertising was already entrenched and starting to coalesce around a handful of big networks.
PC: Install Firefox. Then install these extensions: Sponsorblock for YouTube, Enhancer for YouTube, uBlock Origins with all the filters turned on except the language filters (you can use them if you wish) and Return YouTube Dislike. Keep uBlock Filters updated by checking for filter updates once a day.
Android: There’s Revanced. I use pre-built apks along with Vanced MicroG from RVX Lite in Telegram.
This is the best an iOS user can do I think. Does Firefox exist in App Store? If yes, if it doesn’t use Safari as base, it might be supporting extensions. Never had an iPhone so don’t know much about it.
Slightly better, instead of Altstore get your device registered on the apple developer program (there are cheap ways of doing this) then you can sign as many sideloaded apps as you want and they stay working without having to constantly connect altserver.
It uses Safari as a base, for now. Hoping that with the EU forcing other app stores or sideloading we get full Firefox on iOS. Would be amazing.
I remember seeing something saying they were testing a full build for iOS a while back. They essentially have one feature complete with the macOS Apple Silicon version as well.
Hey I had a lot of problem with invidious how can u mitigate the long loading times and what about the front page … it changes content maybe once a day yeah I know I probably consume too much yt but it’s pretty annoying to search for content manually…
Sorry for the delayed responce, but yeah I understand if it’s not working for you it might not be a great option sadly.
If that’s happening, I’d try a few different instances. Try inv.tux.pizza which works well for me. I do sometimes have to click the address bar and then enter though instead of just reloading, which is also strange
People always recommend this, freetube, revanced, etc. When I looked into these, each one either did not work or seemed complicated to setup so I said screw it.
I’m just curious… why not use Firefox and install ublock origin? Even if you’ve never used Firefox before the whole setup process would still be far easier and it works 100% of the time.
Definitely. Ads are eye cancer at best, and infiltration channels for malware at worst. Compromised ad networks pumping out executable code via javascript (or back in the days, Flash) are still a major source of trojan infections.
if ads were just static PNGs with a link you went to if you clicked I wouldn't have ever bothered. but ads became a major malware and tracking risk so plugging that security hole became mandatory.
People are gonna say I’m being hyperbolic or crazy, but I swear that the internet died the day the first line of production Javascript was ever written.
Yeah, there’s no proper screening process and companies aren’t help liable for malicious advertisements. It’s the Wild west out there, and companies take money from anyone due to there being no consequences. Internet advertising has no proper screening process like network television.
And just to add to your important point, Ad Blockers are really Content Blockers. They allow the user to delete annoyances that have nothing to do with advertising. We should all start calling them Content Blockers.
I have said it before, snd I will repeat it as many times as it takes.
Adblocking is security, untill website owners take legal and financial responsibillity for the harm that a hacked ad spreading malware or attenpting any kind of deception, I won’t even consider removing my adblocker.
If this changes, I will consider it, but will still not do it, the risk to my data is too large.
It’s true. I work in a computer shop and we see literally thousands and thousands of dollars lost from people clicking on ads that look like normal buttons (things like “Download”, “Next”, etc). And not just the elderly either. Everyone has a a combination of inputs to get scared and comply. Folks that are otherwise extremely competent and savvy can get scammed too.
The best security you can have online is adblockers, only beaten by using trusted websites.
Edit, fair points with sites being slimy these days. I meant using legitimate versions of websites rather than copy/fake websites designed to steal credentials.
Yes, these exactly. There does seem to be a bias towards sites with multi-page articles (think Yahoo news, BuzzFeed type stuff), and what I’ll call “disposable income listings” like boat and sports car-listing websites.
First, I am with OP on this, but with mild counter points:
I block ads because they are intrusive, contain scam and viruses
I don’t want to pay YT because I am already the product, and my trust is long gone about them saying they respect my privacy
"Hosting is expensive" is what we hear left and right but…
letting people upload many hours long is not what YT was supposed to be,
4K vids and up are huge, so is HDR, do we really need such fat video files/streams? I don’t…
for those who need 2000inch TV size quality, yeah, they want to charge those.
I would be OK to pay, but google will rise the price eventually and it feels like changing a contrcat I signed to begin with and I dan’t agree with that. (price raising reason are the previous points above, I am not concerned by those and I don’t see why I should pay that much)
I am a google pixel user, google already got some of my money anyway, which I am happy with.
In the same vein, I wait Netflix to raise their price again (I bit the bullet twice) but there won’t be a third time.
Same for Spotify.
Those services should realize they are not essential, just bare useful, and should be priced as such.
While I can agree with the 4K argument a bit for the hosting is expensive part, I do think it goes way beyond that or long videos. Youtube exists on a scale most don't even realize. Tens of millions of people upload content every day. We're talking thousands of hours worth of video every day.
Not to excuse YouTube for a lot of dumb decisions they made, but even on their best day the site just breaks even due to the cost of hosting.
Reading your comment made me realize something important.
Creators should pay the hosting of the files (at a reasonnable rate of course), so the longer and higher quality they want to upload, they have to pay a little fee. Now, it’ll certainly skim off the stupid random uploads that nobody need, and lower storage cost of useless videos. (I only have a couple of vids, I don’t mind paying for the storage to keep them live, and I stop paying, they are free to delete them, no problem)
Next, viewers should pay for the streaming, which is legit anyway, why not, as far as it is at a - yet again - reasonable price.
This should make the plateform content of better quality without all the shit posts, then less ads for the free viewers if reasonable would be enough.
Problem is Google is greedy beyond return, they’ll never take a good decision that favorites us instead of them.
I started paying them and they jacked up the prices the next month leaving like 12 dollars stranded in my account because I use a gift card. Fuck their premium subscription.
At least Trump only really hurt America, unlike the third world countries everyone one of your presidents bombs and murders while you self title yourself defender of the free world or whatever wankery it was.
Pity. But judging from your vernacular, you’re from a Western country, none of which have a stellar history when it comes to colonialism and imperialism. So I would wager your particular nation has done some really shitty, fucked up things in the past. Probably at least a few genocides, eh? Maybe more? Shall we gloss over those atrocities, so your comment doesn’t come off as ridiculous?
Unless you’re addressing every Western nation with your remarks, then it’s just whitewashing your own nation’s crimes against humanity. Pointing that out isn’t whataboutism, it’s a perfectly valid argument addressing your hypocrisy. I’m not going to say you’re wrong, because you’re not. But I think we can all agree we had really good teachers on how to be horrible.
So maybe don’t call people laughingstocks over something your country is probably also still engaging in to this day, eh?
That's not how it works, you don't get to not be called massive jokes because of our utterly dysfunctional and pathetic you are just because other nations have done bad shit.
This idea that you have to be 100% pure to be able to comment on others actions is unrealistic.
Judging by your vernacular, you’re from the UK. I think the entire globe has something to say about the nightmares brought upon them by the British Empire. India and Pakistan in particular. Nothing the US has done comes even close to the outright chaos and bloodshed sown by the British in pursuit of global conquest. To quote the old PSA: We learned it by watching you. Except the US never quite had the stomach for for mass murder the way Britain has, so thankfully we’ve failed to live up to the legacy you’ve left.
No, but you should probably not still be perpetrating the actions you’re pointing out as problematic yourself. Now I don’t know exactly what country in Europe you’re from, but I’m willing to bet money you can think, privately in your head if you wish, of something your nation is doing right this moment that would probably fall under the same definition as the acts you rightly accuse us of. Am I right?
except, in a conversation about moralism, it’s a bit like Mao, Stalin, and Hitler all sitting at a table and Mao and Stalin ganging up on Hitler and judging his actions as reprehensible
Pity. But judging from your vernacular, you’re from a Western country, none of which have a stellar history
FTFY. There’s not a country around that doesn’t have something dark in it’s closet. I feel that a real patriot would accept the dark parts of their country’s history, and work to make the future brighter rather than putting their fingers in their ears and going ‘nananana’.
I’m not signaling any country out here since there isn’t a point.
This does not mean that we should never point out bad stuff other countries are doing just because at some point in the past our country also did terrible shit. Raising the plight of the Uyghurs does not lighten what happened in Algeria, but neither can what happend in Algeria be used as a justification (or whataboutisme) for what’s currently happening in Xinjiang.
Most of us don’t like Trump, most of us don’t like the bombings in other countries, most of us didn’t want to be in Vietnam, most of us didn’t want us to be in Iraq.
I don’t look at every person in the UK and assume you all love the Monarchy and love the current and past two morons you have had running the place. I mean fuck Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, and Boris Johnson and Brexit? Shit isn’t lookin great over that way either but I don’t assume it’s because every single citizen of the UK wanted it that way. Quit looking at America like one big collective individual and take a moment to realize that the system here is rigged to shit from years of political fuckery. We are stuck with a two party system and the past two presidents who did the most damage to our foreign relations and our political system didn’t even win the fucking popular vote.
Oh and if I incorrectly assumed you nationality just fill in the appropriate bullshit that is probably happening in your current country.
Sincerely,
One of the majority of Americans that don’t like what is happening in this country either
Did their government change? Did the military take over? No, the timing party just decided to elect a new front man to distract the population while the Tories resort and pillage society
Oh fuck off mate, accept a bit of responsibility in your pathetic life.
No one else on this planet is responsible for America except Americans.
You allow this system to flourish and support it year after year. Just because a small percentage of your population can’t vote doesn’t mean shit when you were founded without the right to vote.
Who tf else is going to fix us? There are a ton reasons why it’s extra challenging to effectively come together like the French do against their government, but it’s still up to us to change shit.
Yupp me and the other Americans were like “Lets push SCOTUS to rule on Citizens United in a way that allows unchecked amounts of money in politics and also lets create a system that lets a candidate that loses the popular vote become president anyway!” we all worked really hard at it… or we watched and let it happen without protesting or trying to change it at all…
…or that is completely wrong and you could go read both those articles I linked and realize that “the majority of us” literally did not vote for this shit and or voted against it.
Ok genius since you are so well versed on the topic… tell me the solution? You know the solution to the problem you didn’t even know about because you started off saying the MAJORITY of us voted for this shit? I mean it will come to a head if the system breaks down but what exactly should we do now?
You keep moving the bar and now you are claiming that I am saying Americans are not responsible at all for the system we have. I am saying the majority of us didn’t vote for it, the majority of us are trapped in it and the majority of us have no simple solution to fixing it but you must have a stellar solution in your keen political mind so lets have it! What should us Americans do to fix the problems (which you are completely ignorant of) within our government?
It doesn’t matter that public support shifted later - of course people feel bad about doing something bad after the fact. But at the time, most Americans did want you to be in Vietnam and most Americans did want you to be in Iraq.
I’m sure that the people in your social circle do disagree with those wars and do disagree with some of the more recent things which have happened, but you need to understand that sometimes the majority does sadly support some very bad things.
We don’t make the decision to go to war the government does that without our input. The public supported for the war in Iraq after the government decided to go to war then spread propaganda saying that Iraq was related to 9/11. Those are graphs of how effective propaganda was on those polled after the government made a decision to go to war… we don’t vote on that shit.
It doesn’t matter that public support shifted later - of course people feel bad about doing something bad after the fact.
That is the propaganda losing the battle. People found out that the person (supposedly) responsible for 9/11 was in Afghanistan and had nothing to do with Iraq.
Vietnam was the same but it took longer for the general public to find out the truth. The government decides to go to war and spreads propaganda everywhere about why we needed to go to Vietnam. Propaganda weakens as real information about the war spreads then people no longer support the war.
Americans are not just inherently warmongering people I don’t think any citizens of any country are…unless their government has a super effective propaganda machine constantly brain fucking them into being that way (see Russia).
I’m sure that the people in your social circle do disagree with those wars and do disagree with some of the more recent things which have happened, but you need to understand that sometimes the majority does sadly support some very bad things
My social circles? I live in the Midwest there are people in my neighborhood with flags up that say “Fuck Biden Don’t blame me I Voted for Trump” in their front yards here. I have seen the worst of Americans and they are not the majority even here. There are some dumb fuck gravy seals that cosplay as soldiers and act like war is a solution to anything and everything but most of the people here who support Trump and have that “America first” mindset are just well meaning morons that fell prey to propaganda.
I am well aware that propaganda works champ the idea that there are brief periods of support for such things somehow cancels that the majority of the time the majority of everyone doesn’t support such things is moronic.
What you’re saying is there was a period of time where the war had support of the public. This is what Deceptichum is saying is not normal. There should not be any period where the majority of Americans thought invading Iraq was a good idea. This part is what the problem is.
Edit: You edited your comment to add that last point to it then claimed I didn’t respond to the point… that you edited in after the fact. Double moron points for you.
It doesn’t matter that public support shifted later - of course people feel bad about doing something bad after the fact. But at the time, most Americans did want you to be in Vietnam and most Americans did want you to be in Iraq.
You are treating Americans as a monolith. We don’t make the decision to go to war our government does then spews propaganda in the media and it can shift public opinion.
You posted two graphs with no sources and claimed that my statements were disproved when I never said “Americans never support war ever and if you can find a single instance of it happening for any period of time then everything I have said is wrong.”
I called you a moron because you cherry picked information from my statement then acted like it was self canceling.
There should not be any period where the majority of Americans thought invading Iraq was a good idea. This part is what the problem is.
What the fuck are you quoting? You never said that in your original comment.
Edit: ahhh you edited your comment. Originally you said “are you actually listening to yourself” or something similar then you edited it to that shit after I called you a moron for cherry pickin. Well now you are a moron for cherry picking and a moron for editing comments after replies.
You seem to have a large chip on your shoulder and I’m not sure why. I haven’t said anything insulting to you, and yet the stream of vitriol continues.
You are treating Americans as a monolith.
I am not. The only thing I’ve done is respond to your claim that “most of us didn’t want to be in Vietnam, most of us isn’t didn’t want us to be in Iraq”, and let you know that it’s not factually correct. Most Americans did support both of those wars at the start.
When I replied it wasn’t there 5 minutes is a small window so I guess I had the reply open and didn’t type it immediately and if I had refreshed before replying maybe I would have seen your seemingly stealth edit that completely changed the content of your comment. My reply makes sense when compared to your original comment but luckily you edited it quickly and here we are.
Anytime I edit a comment that changes the content of the comment I mark it as an edit. I edit comments to fix grammar and stuff without marking it because it seems tedious.
You are still acting like we went to war because Americans supported it when the truth is it works more like how it is described in Manufactured Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. The mass media in the united states is used as a propaganda tool to make Americans complicit with decisions made by the government after those decisions are made.
So if you think Americans not being resistant to propaganda is a problem… then yeah I think so too. If you are saying that the problem is that Americans should never support a war ever no matter how much propaganda is thrown at them then…ok cool? I mean that is kind of reductive and stupid does nothing to solve or understand any problem but …cool…I guess?
“most of us didn’t want to be in Vietnam, most of us isn’t didn’t want us to be in Iraq” — how is this wrong? I never said most of us never wanted to be in Iraq to begin with or most of us never wanted to go to Vietnam both don’t matter because we had no choice in the matter. Your two graphs of polls (without sources or reference to methodology) don’t show how many people were indifferent to the war in Vietnam in the beginning but do show that well before any of them reached their end Americans did not want it happening.
You keep trying to pick at me saying I am angry and have a chip on my shoulder. I called you a moron for cherry picking and somehow this means I am angry with a chip on my shoulder? Sure I am super mad grrrrrr anger rageeeeee! Unlike that Deceptichum person who was calm collected and wonderfully stated all their opinions.
Why did you even mention Deceptichum? Their point wasn’t anything like the point you are claiming to make now …their point was “Americans Bad” which is reductive and stupid. I have all kinds of problems with the governments of countries but I don’t make sweeping generalizations and assumptions about all the citizens of those countries.
Your point is Americans should never hold the opinion that going to war is ok … or that at the beginning of both the conflict in Vietnam and the Iraq war too many Americans supported it… I don’t know anymore and it really feels like your actual point is to try and catch me with some weird gotcha moment.
Ich dachte, dass läuft inzwischen andersherum: Der Bürger druckt ein ausgefülltes PDF-Formular aus, schickt es per Brief oder Fax zum Amt. Dort wird das dann eingescannt und elektronisch an den Sachbearbeiter geschickt, damit diese das dann digital vorliegen haben.
Nicht ganz. Ich habe schon mit eigenen Augen gesehen, dass der Inhalt des Papierformulars dann von einer Sachbearbeiterin in ein digitales Formular abgetippt wird.
Everyone in this thread is wild. Buying a phone on credit makes sense with how expensive they are. How else can Google protect themselves though? Just like cars get repossessed if you didn’t pay, this is a two-way street. Otherwise people could have a phone sent to them and then never pay anything for it.
I agree that this makes sense in the context of a creditor securing a loan, but I disagree that getting your phones on credit makes sense.
New, flagship devices can be had around $500 US, which is attainable for most Americans in a fairly short timeframe. Spending years locked into a carrier contract where you don’t own your device just doesn’t make sense unless you’re spending thousands on a foldable device or something.
For people who know as much about technology as most people in this discussion the thing to do if short of cash would be to buy a cheaper phone. I recently got myself a quite decent Note9 for $109AU and I could have got something even cheaper if I needed to. But many people aren’t as well informed, the above article is one example of people who are less well off being scammed by a corporation.
If the creditor wants to collect on a debt, there is a court process for that. I’ve used it. It works.
Locking the phone is not repossession. It does nothing other than sabotage the device the consumer may need to actually make the payment. The phone remains in the buyer’s possession and useless to the seller.
Power is also misplaced. What happens when the creditor decides to (illegally) refuse cash payments on the debt? Defaulting is not necessarily the debtor’s fault. This in fact happened to me: Creditor refused my cash payment and dragged me into court for delinquency. Judge ruled in my favor because cash acceptance is an obligation. But this law is being disregarded by creditors all over. If the creditor had the option to sabotage my lifestyle by blocking communication and computing access, it would have been a greater injustice.
I guess a closer analogy would be rental storage. If you don’t pay your mini storage bill, in some regions the landlord will confiscate your property, holding it hostage until you pay. And if that fails, they’ll even auction off your contents.
So in the case at hand the creditor is holding the debtor’s data hostage. One difference is that the data has no value to the creditor and is not in the creditor’s possession. It would be interesting to know if the contracts in place legally designate the data as the creditor’s property. If not, the data remains the property of the consumer.
This is covered by human rights law. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 17 ¶2:
“No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”
If the phone user did not sign off on repossession of their data, and thus the data remains their property, then the above-quoted human right is violated in the OP’s scenario.
Don’t try to strawman this. Human rights are violated when someone is deprived of their property (their data in the case at hand). If food is withheld from starving people in Gaza, your argument is like saying:
“Claims human rights are being violated because someone failed to drive a truck”
They’re not at odds. We don’t have to choose between protecting UDHR Art.3 and Art.17. It’s foolish to disregard some portion of the UDHR needlessly and arbitrarily.
He presented his logic and included well-recognised definitions and sources. He literally could not have done better without a peer review in the field 🤣🤣
I’m OOP, I bought this phone outright. Google seems to be installing this on phones by default (the actual pattern based on people’s comments seems to be more recent phones, but not all have it).
It’s even shipping within de-googled phones, at some base ASOP level (or the hardware, I dunno, not that knowledgeable), as some GrapheneOS use reported having it on their phones too.
I’m pissed because: 1. It’s installed when it shouldn’t be, 2. Gives inappropriate power to creditors, which hurts the most vulnerable.
Imagine acting like having a $1000 phone is a right. If you didn’t want creditors shutting down your phone, pay for it. Apparently this is an undue burden these days.
Every OS, including Linux, has a way to install remote management. Every one. You are just pissed at how the phone company implemented it. Might as well blame Linus for making the os extensible.
You’re still not grasping how free software works. Users have a right to see the code and the right to change it. They also have the right to redistribute the code. Your complaint is unfounded because not a single user of a fully free platform is forced to have remote management code installed.
The fact you cannot even imagine a situation where this kind of power would lead to vulnerable people having their lives be made even harder for missing a payment, shows how little you imagination and empathy you have.
This kind of power should lie with regulators and the justice system, not private companies.
Also why is this app ON MY PHONE WHICH I BOUGHT OUTRIGHT? ffs.
I also paid full price and bought it from an official store with no connection to any carriers. Installed grapheneos and can confirm it is still present, whether anyone can use it is not is irrelevant if your putting shit in my phone that could potentially harm me. And you seem to take some kind of weird moral ground thinking people who default on a payment can have their phone which is a necessity in this era, turn into a brick if they choose to. You’re lucky you can afford to but be more empathetic to those who can’t.
Who’s taking about pixel mate? We are taking about android here. Not the hardware but the simple fact that a device I paid for has harmful shit I didn’t ask for. Pixel or whatever, this shouldn’t be installed on anything period
Buying something does not mean you control it. You might have bought an Amazon Ring doorbell but if Amazon does not like your behavior they can (and will) render it dysfunctional.
No amount of money you pay for your phone up-front will make that malicious code magically go away. You can pay cash, and you can even tip the seller. The code that reduces your control remains in that device. If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.
Lolol, nobody is using the API on my phone. Its existence doesn’t harm me in the last bit. You should stop using Linux if the existence of remote management bothers you.
Google welded anti-consumer logic into the kernel. Of course that’s on Google. Just like Intel started making CPUs with a management engine that can only work against non-corporate consumers, basically saying fuck the individuals’ needs… putting individuals at unconscionable risk without their knowledge or consent.
Consumers have decisions to make. Is a consumer happy to feed a supplier who sells them something that works against them? Some are. I’m not. Going forward they fail to earn my business because they have too many masters.
You going to ditch Linux because they support remote management too?
Linux is not locked down. Users can remove anything they want from it.
If you get Linux from work it school it uses the same exact tech. No, you can’t remove it. You don’t own the phone. That’s how credit works. Don’t like it, buy the phone. You are just pissed that creditors are using it. Welding against the consumers 🤦♂️.
No, there’s definitely some infrequent advertising on lemmy. I block it (and frequently any community that contains it) or I’d point you at two or three examples I’ve seen in my time here.
It already is a toxic witch-hunt here. Try posting that you like an Apple product or that you don’t like Linux or Android and you’ll immediately get called a shill. Try it! It’s fun!
If you get downvoted on lemmy you don’t get a 10min timeout and karma reduction like on reddit. So you may as well say what you want and wear the downvotes proud.
Oh I do. Downvotes don’t matter at all on Lemmy. It’s just annoying because some people think they do and they think if they get upvotes that it means they’re right.
If they don’t matter currently for moderation I have to imagine they’ll be part of a moderation toolkit eventually. Leveraging community voting to detect spam would be decently effective, especially for fresh accounts.
Yeah, but reddit automatically bans you for a few minutes in a specific community once you get enough downvotes. The more you get, the longer it takes to reply to people. So any opinion that’s truly unpopular (i.e. not “I like cats better than dogs”) will get you to post less, with toxic people throwing their 3 cents in, calling you names, and you can’t respond at all since you are limited to a comment every 20 mins.
I dobt lemmy would implement autobanning like that.
I’ve never understood why people gush over Linux as a windows replacement. Why yes having to manually search for drivers for every product known to man and not being able to run even a fraction of what is on steam sounds like a fantastic time!
You can run most games on Linux, you just have to enable proton, the steam deck uses a custom version of Linux by default, so at minimum anything marked as playable will work on Linux.
Also I never had to deal with drivers at all when setting up linux, but I'm not sure if that's normal, I've only used Linux mint, which was pretty easy to set up.
I work for a telecommunications company and we obviously sell mobile phones as well as our own brand of routers and repeaters. Here in Germany, there is no obligation to use anything your provider gives you, so ppl are legitimately free to use whatever modem/router they want. Our's is plenty enough for everyone who just wants a thing that sits in the corner and is never interacted with. Hell, It even has VPN via Wireguard and dynamic DNS and a little display. Are there more sophisticated routers out there? Hell yes. Yet, whenever my noob friends or family ask me for advice and I go "just by the one we're offering and be done with it", they call me a shill.
So... Why do you ask if you don't want to hear the response and why the hell would I sell you something I know doesn't fit your needs when you'd come to me with your complaints?!
That people call me a shill for recommending the stuff from the company I work for which I only recommend because
A) I know it so I can help them with their problems and
b) I got it cheaper, so I tried it and I know that it's alright
But people will first ask me "because I work at a Telco" and then not believe me because "of course you'd say that, you work at a Telco".
I was adding a personal anecdote to the argument you made that people calling out "shills" often depends on if they share your opinion or not.
Got it. I think we’re specifically talking about Lemmy, though, and online communities where people don’t even know your identity. Your anecdote just makes me think your family is crazy. They know you and still call you a shill? That’s nuts.
Apple legitimately makes super solid hardware. Their Apple watch heart rate accuracy is second only to chest straps and has a ton of very useful features. It is pretty much the best as far as integration, a “health watch” and haptics.
Their phones and laptops have some beautiful hardware design too.
Their business side just sucks donkey cock is all. But google is just as bad as Apple so potato potahto. Nobody should fanboy when every choice is shit lol
Well that’s the point. Linux, Firefox, custom Android ROMs - they’re not corporate owned proprietary software, they’re FOSS. And they’re what you should use.
Depends, if you mean for the average user then it’s good, but still overpriced as hell, and you have to deal with the Apple philosophy of “we did the thinking for you, if you dislike our choices it’s not matter of preference, you’re just wrong” no matter what.
Enterprise use cases you might as well pitch your Apple products in the trash, they won’t work and you’ll spend more time figuring out which USB-C Thunderbolt to 10G SR optical fiber converter actually works than you will getting productivity done.
No, pricing is the side of Apple’s business that is absolute shit. If you look at the PCBs, they are usually very well designed with proper shielding, high-quality components, and good layout. Apple Silicon is one of the world’s best silicon design orgs.
Most of what you describes is quite literally their business and aesthetic design choices that have little or nothing to do with the hardware. I agree that all of those are shit and that’s why I would never buy it. The only bad hardware they have are marketing/business choices (i.e. no sd card to sell higher NVM models, lightning to vendor-lock customers, dongle hell to sell more dongles, etc…)
Though indeed the dongle situation is really fucking stupid also.
Except it’s exactly what we saw on Reddit all the damn time. It felt like every comment someone didn’t like that even remotely involved a brand/product was responded to with “/r/hailcorporate.” God forbid you mention a brand that is particularly disliked on forums like Apple.
It was a cudgel for arguments first and a sub for actually finding corporate astroturfing second. Plus it encourages pitchforks/brigading.
It sounds like you want to help moderate it. I welcome some help, seeing the issues you raised. I’m a pretty hands-off mod but your description does make me want to get some mod help. I’d hate to have to decide what is astroturfing and what isn’t using modding actions
Ps. it doesn’t really matter anyway. Anyone can say whatever they want and post whatever they think is astroturfing. I am not going to be too heavy handed. People who are accused wrongly of being astroturfers can do what they do now move on with their lives and continue as they were.
id like to help mod… but the original hailcorporate wasn’t just about astroturfing…
/r/HailCorporate is to document times when people act as unwitting advertisers for a product or a brand with an aim towards raising awareness of the pervasive nature of commercialism in our society and culture. We have strict “Don’t be a jerk” rules that are enforced with immediate banning for violating the rules.
basically anytime people drop brand names, they’re licking the corporate boots…
I literally copy pasted the description in the sidebar into my community’s sidebar. I left out the banning part because this is Lemmy and I personally don’t believe in banning people (unless it is just absolute open and shut case of bigotry).
If you aren’t willing to ban people then you shouldn’t be a moderator. I’m serious man. You will lose control of the community before you know it. There are so many ways for people to cause problems in your community without ever uttering a racial slur directly.
That’s the kind of policy that trolls and bad actors love to abuse. They hide behind the “letter of the law” with no intention of following the community rules in any meaningful sense. You’re basically throwing up a big sign that says “you can be as disruptive as you want so long as you do it in the following ways that give you even the slightest bit of plausible deniability.”
even when someone sincerely enjoys a thing and talks about it, it’s impossible to tell the difference between that and a shill…
on top of that vote manipulation is a thing, and a genuine review can be buried or promoted to the top by robot jocks…
sometimes it feels worth it… like my Weldwood contact cement…
ive tried so many adhesives and it’s one of the oldest ones and one of the best… (and rubber cement isn’t contact cement)
but there are PR firms that represent, well probably not weldwood, but just about any corporation, and they have a lot more than google scouring every forum and comment and review… (see also: astroturfing)
…
while i think it’s possible to comment above the boot licking level, their boots will still find you and grind themselves into your tongue anyways, if a brand name slips from your mouth…
you’re missing the entire point of r/hailcorporate…
it’s not about astroturfing at all…
/r/HailCorporate is to document times when people act as unwitting advertisers for a product or a brand with an aim towards raising awareness of the pervasive nature of commercialism in our society and culture.
i guess, somewhat about astroturfing, but about commercialism in general.
— posted from my phancy ifone 69
p.s. astroturfing is very real, and shills do like to get in on the “ground floor” of any new movement…
I didn’t miss the point of it. The point is that isn’t how it played out. It’s like anti-work. That was literally a sub by people who are against the concept of labor entirely. The idea of a paid job. But as it grew in popularity it morphed into another, albeit more well known, work reform subreddit. Every other thread you had people in the comments complaining about this change and telling people to go over to the work reform sub.
Hail corporate quickly became a place for people to claim astroturfing by accounts, often because they simply didn’t like what the person saying or the brand mentioned. “Nobody could possibly like Apple for legitimate reasons” kind of stuff.
The reason this matters is we have no reason to believe it will play out any differently here. People use it to ping astroturfing on Reddit, they will do the same here, and it will be abused.
They weren’t thinking. Too many want a quick way to get eyeballs but aren’t willing to do the legwork to learn about the community they want to post in. People also don’t like to feel like you’re being opaque about your advertisement. I remember archer did an ad campaign on Reddit that was very successful done in the gone wild post style. Great example of knowing your audience, being 100% transparent, and making it actually fun to see.
How many people are actually buying suspicious dick pills on the internet? The I always assumed its scam/info stealing and you get nothing. There can't be enough people dumb to buy those to keep it profitable, right?
I tried to convince my small company to put an account on Mastodon instead of X. Our social media person opened a Mastodon account, but decided it wouldn’t be run until Mastodon was a little more, well, relevant.
Yeah I see this turned into a witch hunt for places where fruitful discussion may have otherwise happened.
It’s interesting to get an inside view and how some corporations do their BS, which usually requires discussing it which is often kicked off by some complaint or misunderstanding of how the world works.
You’re free to block it if you want. I’d argue that there is a non-zero chance that there are zero astroturfers here right now. The censorship on lemmy.world in general is enough to cause me to start this community. Look at the billionaire thread. The mods were so intensely pro-billionaire that they deleted MANY comments calling for the guillotine as a solution to the world’s billionaire problem. After a while, they had to give up because it was making them look like what they are: Lemmy’s staunch defenders of crony capitalism.
Seriously it’s not fucking rocket surgery. Direct calls to violence like that are illegal in most of the world. In contexts where it seems like it’s meant sincerely and not as a joke, mods would be crazy not to remove it.
This is a pretty flagrant example of assuming the worst interpretation of mods’ actions while lacking context and while also just dogpiling onto “mods are bad mkay?”
That follow up comment is also super cringe, offensive, and unsympathetic.
Hilarious! Heavy lies the crown of modding the most mainstream Lemmy instance. They may not be the heros we want or even need, but perhaps they are the heros we deserve.
… maybe just don’t call for other people’s deaths. And incidentally, the guillotine is centuries old, and in the modern day would be completely ineffective in the face of offshore bank accounts and private jets.
753 people who, if they didn’t exist, the earth would INSTANTLY become a better place. We are being sent barreling enthusiastically toward climate collapse by those exact 753 greedy dragons who are sitting on piles of money that they literally couldn’t spend in 10,000,000 lifetimes, literally buying up governments rather than do ANYTHING to dial back their excess and you? You’re sitting here tone-policing people. If that isn’t hail corporate, I really don’t know what is!
Thanks for so clearly demonstrating exactly why I started this community. I’m guessing you’re a lib who thinks Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi are working hard in your best interest but those darned Republicans keep getting in the way.
PS. You’d have a point if mods had removed posts calling for the deaths of innocent Palestinian people.
Says the 8-day-old account with only one comment on an instance filled with tech serfs who are either too comfortable with their bread and circus and healthcare tied to their employment that they afraid of upsetting their billionaire bosses. That instance, while great for technical talk, is about as fertile ground for political discussion as an automated helpdesk inside of a student loan app.
I hope you are someday rich enough where you can recover the integrity that left you so early in your life. You don’t even realize that you won the birth lottery. You don’t even realize that if you were simply born in another country, none of the comforts that have found you in life would even be possible. You are clearly comfortable enough to point fingers but captive enough to still kiss the ass of your master. You’re a feudal serf and you don’t even realize it.
I empathize with your plight. I used to be a lot like you (a victim of hustle culture, monetizing all of my hobbies) before I realized how rigged this game is. One doesn’t often realize how rigged the game is until they get ground up like hamburger in it…and that is the difference between us.
It sounds like you’ve ping-ponged between two radical ideologies. Maybe you became so disillusioned with the lack of success from overworking yourself and now you’re angry at the state of the world, but lashing out at people trying to engage you in a discussion isn’t going to do any good.
I am what you would call empathetic. I’m actually comfortable in my life but I watched this happen to other people and I realized (after playing the stupid tribalist game over and over again) that this society tries to herd us into electoralism and socialist democracy while our demagogues flat out ignore their constituents with absolutely no regard for our needs. This society is too far gone for us to just keep voting for the lesser evil from between two people selected by a billionaire class that literally wants us to die so they can have more. We need to rise up and take back our societies before it is too late. There is no time left for incremental changes (which are actually just a disguise for austerity which has a ratcheting effect). The ruling class take a bigger chunk of our wages each year and you want me to play nice. No thanks. The time for half measures has long passed. If you don’t recognize that you either don’t have much empathy or you’re still very much asleep.
You are extremely obnoxious dude. You talk about morality, yet you are fine with putting people to death. You are a hypocrite. Having a person like you in charge of a witchhunting community is even worse. Rethink what you are doing and remember that behind every nickname is a human.
I’m so sorry that the truth is obnoxious. I find you to be obnoxious and incredibly misguided. Did you get an “atta boy!” from a billionaire or are you just that much of a kiss-ass?
I see a human behind your nickname; One that is such a smug, self righteous prick that they don’t seem to understand that we are at a turning point in society and if we don’t stand up now, we will have an Orwellian, fascist society where innocent people are bombed using our tax money and we literally CANNOT say anything about it or we will be imprisoned.
To me, your stance equates to this: It’s fine to liquify babies with my tax money but I draw the line at suggesting we liquify the people who are liquifying those babies.
Says the 8-day-old account with only one comment on an instance filled with tech serfs who are either too comfortable with their bread and circus and healthcare tied to their employment that they afraid of upsetting their billionaire bosses.
Dude just…I don’t know, slow down? Go for a walk or something you are getting into fights online over announcing a new community. You need to have a little thicker skin than this. You’re not going to make everybody happy, people are going to critique you and your efforts. You would do well to listen to a handful of them instead of just throwing accusations at people and grandstanding.
Also attacking account age? The vast majority of people who are on here regularly joined in the summer (including you). Most of the accounts probably aren’t even six months old, definitely not a year. It’s also just such a cringe way of discrediting people.
While it can feel good to cut loose, down this path lies madness. Try to remember, people trying to hurt you want you to feel backed into a corner, that perception causes you to disregard some of your real options.
You are not actually backed into a real corner, though. That perception is an illusion to try to make you lash out and hurt yourself in the long-run. It’s a propaganda technique.
If the truth is really on your side, you can use words to spread it, and convince others to help. The actual truth has to be on your side for this to work though, not just feelings and emotions.
i believed that naive shit for a long time, but then i realized that truth does not prevail because of its merits alone and that sort of thinking is what has allowed sociopaths to rule the world.
Try on a longer, larger view. For instance, we say “witch hunt, witch hunt” these days, mostly disingenuously, but when was the last time we actually burned one like we used to?
It’s tempting to wish for the world to be made perfect, it’s certainly nowhere near close. But focusing in on only the problems, like a propagandist might want, makes it harder to see the things that are actually good and getting better, and on our ability to actually genuinely change things, or sometimes die trying.
There is no quick, magical solution though. People will always be people, for the foreseeable future.
I haven’t seen any posts where people are calling for Palestinian deaths with no moderation action. Also, your holier than thou attitude is pretty off-putting. You usually get further trying to understand where someone is coming from rather than slinging unfounded accusations just to score points. Straw manning is wack.
I can already tell that this community is going to be an absolute dumpster fire with this sort of narrow visioned with hunt modding attitude.
And I don’t even think the problem is the community existing hail corporate is a hilarious and fun concept. I think the problem is the person creating and saying they are going to mod the community being narrow-minded, and toxic.
That’s a hilarious straw man. I said that I would mod the community by not doing any modding at all except in the worst cases of bigotry. I’m not sure how I could be any more fair, actually.
You seem to think that I should have created this community on threads with an explicit signed, dated, legally binding, and notarized promise to Mark Zuckerberg himself that I will do the work of censorship in the name of the grinding gears of the very capitalism that this community is a reaction against.
This is exactly what’s going to happen, the idea that corporate entities are even aware of us let alone investing resources into convincing the few hundred commenters on Lemmy of their opinions is ridiculous.
This will just turn into “oh, you have a dissenting opinion? You’re a corporate shill.”
Can’t wait, we’ll lose even more people and then I’ll end up just going to Tildes exclusively as the echo chamber becomes even more severe than it already is here.
Tildes is not growing, they still just have the one admin for the handful of thousands of posters. I honestly can’t figure out what the strategy is over there, because the stated plan was not being enacted last I checked. Also, the admin is a tightass.
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