RadDevon

RadDevon, 9 months ago

Ending slavery doesn’t reset everything back to zero. Imagine if you’re running a race against someone else. The person officiating the race (no clue what this kind of person is called 😅) lets your opponent start running the race and keeps you back at the start line. Then, they have a moment of clarity and say to themselves, “Wait a second… This isn’t fair!” So, they stop that person where they are, apologize to you, say they promise never to do it again, and blow the whistle so that you can both start the race.

But wait! That person still ended up starting way ahead! But we already ended head starts before the race started so it’s OK, right? Well, no, because the person who got the head start still got to start from their advantaged position.

But this isn’t quite the same because your issue crosses generations. So, a better analogy might be a relay race. Maybe the head start is stopped just as the second person on the opposing team receives the… thing you pass in a relay race. (Why am I making an analogy to a thing I know nothing about? 😅) They didn’t personally get the head start. So, it’s OK to go ahead and start the race now with one relay team already on their second runner while the other is on their first, right? It wouldn’t be fair to punish that person who didn’t directly gain the advantage of the head start.

Well, no, because that team still got an advantage and the other team still started at a disadvantage. Reparations are less about punishing an individual and more about leveling a playing field.

RadDevon, 9 months ago

Cars are frequently stolen when parked outside. Private ownership of cars is ignored if not openly mocked by car thieves. If you park your own car outside, you should assume it will be stolen. So make sure to always post a sign on your car whenever you park it outside reading “This car is mine. Please do not steal it,” if you don’t want it to be stolen, or better yet, don’t park it outside at all.

It’s a bad take. It’s not how ownership works. You have copyright protection by nature of the fact that you created a piece of content. You’re not required to remind people of that fact in order to be protected, even if random internet person asserts that you should in their social media post.

That’s not the only reason it’s bad though. The idea that “I don’t like the way Reddit is treating their users, so to get back at Reddit… I’m going to violate the rights of the very same users I claim have been wronged by copying their content and posting it somewhere without their consent” is just baffling to me. You’re banking on the fact that random internet user probably won’t sue you… and you’re probably right! By taking advantage of that situation, you’re not “pwning Reddit.” You’re taking advantage of the person who created it in the first place. Ironically, if Reddit had further abused the situation by not just creating the honeypot where people would create free content for them but also by claiming ownership of that content, you’d have a cease and desist in a matter of days once your bot went live and we wouldn’t have to see this same question posted 2-3x a week on Lemmy.

I’m no intellectual property crusader. It’s messed up that corporations can consolidate intellectual property to the extent they have and extend copyrights for generations. It’s wild that we grant trademarks on vague ideas and then allow trolls to build businesses that do nothing but hold them and use them as weapons against people trying to actually make things. But if anyone should have the benefit of copyright protection, it’s the lowly internet user who posts content for free on social media for your entertainment.

RadDevon, 9 months ago

I guess my example is that, isn’t it? 😅 My point is that you generally don’t have to remind people of your rights in order to enjoy them, and that’s true for copyright. Pick your own favorite right and replace my car analogy with it.

Now, I just need to find a way to compare cross-posting Reddit content without permission to the Nazis and describe Lemmy as “the Uber of ,” and I’ll have achieved the triple crown of cliche analogies. 😆

RadDevon, 9 months ago

Yeah, I get it, but I figure if someone doesn’t understand why it’s a problem to blame someone for having their content stolen, they probably won’t understand why it’s wrong to blame them for having other intangibles stolen either. The transition to tangible object was intentional in hopes of bridging that gap. The only right that is exactly the same as copyright is copyright, but that analogy wouldn’t really work for someone who doesn’t understand how copyright works. 😅 It’s kinda the point of an analogy: to highlight the similarities between two things that are similar in some ways but necessarily different in others for the benefit of someone who understand the subject but not the object of the analogy.

But again, the point isn’t that car ownership is the same as copyright. That’s a (intentional, I think) misunderstanding of how analogies work. They don’t claim that every attribute of the two things being compared is the same; only that there may be enough similarity to bridge a gap in understanding. I can’t see anything so wrong with this analogy that it invalidates the point I was making with it. The point was that having the law commonly ignored doesn’t open the door for victim blaming if they don’t jump through all the hoops armchair lawyers define for them. That’s often the case when the law grants us rights: we just have them at a certain point and don’t have to do anything else. I have a right to continue owning a car that I bought. I have a right not to be punched in the face. I have a right to be involved in my children’s lives. I have a right to continue to own the works I create. These are different rights which apply to different sorts of things, but the principle is the same. If I had made any of these analogies (or any analogy period), a bad faith argument could certainly have found a trivial difference between the two… but it would have been just that: a bad faith argument based on a trivial (for the purposes of this analogy) difference.

Is stealing a Reddit post the same as stealing a car? No, because as everyone has pointed out, the car cannot easily be copied, but is violating someone’s copyright the same as violating their ownership rights over some item they purchased? Yes. When you violate someone’s right to own the car, they do not retain an identical un-violated copy of their right to own it, just the same that way when you violate their copyright, they cannot retain an identical un-violated copy of that right somehow. Both of these rights have been violated equally, and the tangibility of the object they applied to doesn’t change that.

RadDevon, 9 months ago

These “categories” are only superficially the same thing. Here’s what social/casual games and PC/console games have in common:

• Both show (usually) moving images to a player
• Both accept input that is (usually) reflected through an impact on the game’s outcome

Here’s a couple of things that are very different:

• social/casual games monetize by letting you pay to make the game less bad or by preying on psychology. PC/console games monetize by dangling the promise of some kind of experience you couldn’t otherwise have.
• social/casual games are useful for destroying time. PC/console games are useful to stoke imagination and elicit emotions.

I know I’m being reductive here, but I think the point is valid. They’re superficially the same but used for very different purposes. Putting them side-by-side on a chart like this is like comparing revenue across all car makers and determining that, because McLaren made $280 million in 2020 while Kia made $44 billion, sports cars are going away soon.

If McLaren did go away, the McLaren driver is not going to replace the McLaren with a Kia, because those are not the same thing, even though they are in the same way that a pair of scissors and a Hattori Hanzo sword are both blads, or maybe in the same way that both brass knuckles and a bazooka are weapons even though one cannot replace the other. If Baldur’s Gate 3 were never released, I wouldn’t have dumped my $60 into Fortnite skins because I’m looking for something particular out of a game. My goal isn’t just to burn $60 on anything that shows me moving pictures and maps my inputs onto those pictures. Those attributes of a video game may be what make it a video game, but they aren’t the attributes that will make me enjoy it or want to spend money on it.

If McLaren and all sports car makers go away, most of the money spent on those is not going to funnel into compact cars. It’s going to stay in people’s pockets. $280 million dollars doesn’t hold a candle to $44 billion… but someone is going to want to take that $280 million! So, someone will probably keep making sports cars… just like someone will probably keep making the games that will take the remaining ~$73 billion slice of the video games pie.

Some public companies may jump ship to chase the social/casual dollars… but these are the companies that have been trying to blur the lines anyway (think EA), so we’re really not losing much. The talent who delivered PC/console games we used to enjoy from EA have mostly moved on to other studios or to form their own studios so they can keep making what they like.

RadDevon, 9 months ago

Not a lawyer, but I believe if you want to take content others have posted on Reddit and repost it here, you would violate their copyright on that content. You would want to get their consent before you post it here or else the instance you post them to could start getting DMCA requests and could ultimately be sued. I’m guessing you could also be sued for writing the software that violated the copyright.

It’s not likely to happen but it could. My concern would be less about what ill effects you and/or Lemmy might incur and more around the ethics of taking content belonging to other social media users and reposting it without their permission. Reddit TOS says users retain copyright on their content, so it’s other users’ rights you’re violating in doing so.

Now if you’re talking about a bot that reposts only content you have posted on Reddit, you’re probably in the clear.

RadDevon, 9 months ago

Sure! Here’s one more thing I wish you would consider before you go forward with it: if you didn’t get sued for doing this, it wouldn’t be because you didn’t break the law. It would be because the people whose rights you violated can’t afford to sue (or maybe it’s just that they don’t have teams of lawyers scouring the internet to make sure all their rights are protected and haven’t noticed as a result). If Reddit claimed ownership over all content posted on the platform, it would be no less illegal, but you’d get a cease-and-desist in a heartbeat, followed by a lawsuit if you didn’t comply. Trying it only because the people whose rights you’re violating can’t protect themselves makes the whole thing feel like punching down.

The justification I hear for this sort of activity is usually to damage Reddit in some way… but it’s not actually Reddit that’s being damaged. It’s other people like all of us who ultimately have been used by Reddit for free labor for the last nearly two decades now. These bots are now victimizing them again in the interest of getting back at the entity who first victimized them… but that should really be their choice since it was their content. It just doesn’t feel justified to me.

Now if you wrote a script that a Reddit user could use that would grab all of their own Reddit posts, post them to an appropriate Lemmy community, and delete them from Reddit (not sure if deleting a Reddit post is even possible at this point 😅), and convinced a bunch of them to use it, that seems to me like the right approach. The users have full agency to decide whether or not their content gets moved, but you’re making it easy for them to do the thing you want them to do.

I’m no staunch defender of copyright, but it sucks that because access to the legal system is expensive, corporations like Reddit get the benefit of the law while regular people like you and me don’t get that if we can’t afford tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills. If we’re going to have copyright law, it should definitely protect regular people who take the time to share things with others online for virtually no benefit to themselves just as much if not more than it does massive corporations.

RadDevon, 9 months ago

Could this future give me glasses that can’t be smudged? If so, sign me up!

RadDevon, 10 months ago

If we defederate now, is it possible/does it make sense to re-federate with those instances when the moderation tools have matured?

RadDevon, 10 months ago

It was Quake, but I didn’t have the money to actually make it happen. That would come years later.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

In my experience, I’ve come across a factor that I don’t think has been mentioned here. When a lawsuit goes to trial, that means a judge has to do work. When a lawsuit settle, other people are doing the work. (Some) judges don’t want to work, so they will do everything they can to force you out of your courtroom into the waiting arms of mediators who will charge you hundreds of dollars an hour to try to settle the case. Surfing the internet is more fun than working, and part of the privilege of being a judge is that you can force people to stop making you work.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

Lemmy.world seems to be frequently under attack

You’ve seen for yourself that it does have a significant effect. You may not want the largest instance because that paints a big target on you. You also need to pick an instance with admins you can trust, or at least reconcile yourself to jumping ship to another instance if they do the wrong thing.

I started on lemmy.ml about a year before the reddit exodus. It was fine, and I didn’t use it much because there wasn’t much activity. I started using Lemmy more heavily when everyone came over… but at the same time, performance at lemmy.ml became horrible. They also disabled community creation because “(they) have enough communities.” What does that even mean? I still haven’t created any communities, but I would like to be able to if I choose to.

I ended up jumping ship to another instance I’m happy with so far… but I almost went to vlemmy first, which no longer exists. That would have had an affect on my experience.

If I were evaluating an instance today, I would start by scrolling to the bottom of the page to see what version they’re on. Is it the latest? That means the admins are engaged at least enough to keep the software updated. If not, you should probably move on. Are they on a pre-release version? If so, are you comfortable with a little instability to have bleeding edge features and fixes? Then, I would just poke around a little to see how performance is on the instance before creating an account. Is it acceptable? Read the server sidebar. Are you OK with the rules? Last, I would find the support or “meta” community for the instance. See what kinds of discussions are happening there. Are the mods and admins active and are they philosophically aligned with you? Are problems being fixed? What are the big announcements? Does the way the server is being managed make sense to you?

RadDevon, 10 months ago

Reddit can’t be divorced from the leadership. If you hate the direction leadership is taking Reddit, how can you still like Reddit itself? What is it apart from that?

This argument makes more sense to me with Lemmy. Yes, if you hate the direction one instance admin is taking their Lemmy instance, it doesn’t make sense to hate Lemmy as a whole… but Reddit has only one “instance,” so if you hate the “admin,” you hate Reddit.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

Drop will continue to operate independently

In the case of an acquisition, this sentence always has an implied “for a little while” at the end of it.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

This reminds me of Nick Arcade, which came a little later.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

How does it help though when the user inevitably uses it on their lap and covers those vents?

RadDevon, 10 months ago

I’m a long-time PC gamer but first time gaming laptop (“notebook?”) owner. I’m traveling at the moment, so I had to ditch my desktop for the laptop. Mine is still fairly portable so I’m often tempted to use it on my lap… but I’m always afraid to cover those vents so I’m left scrambling looking for something in my hotel room or AirBNB that would approximate a lap desk. 😅

I’ve been baffled by this design decision. Thanks for the context. It makes a bit more sense now.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

I would love to use mine on my lap… if not for the intake on the bottom. I’m traveling, so I don’t have a lot of control over what furniture I have access to as I move from place to place.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

Even if you can’t cover the whole thing with your legs, I assume they’re designed for those vents to be entirely uncovered.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

MacBooks don’t have any vents on the bottom, so it seems it would actually be safe to use them on your lap.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

It’s a 2023 Lenovo Legion 7i. I’m not aware of a feature like this on it, but maybe I just haven’t discovered it yet.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

Ah, that’s a good point. Hadn’t thought of it.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

Amsterdam made the transition away from car-centric in a much shorter time.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

I love this and check back in on it from time to time since the author does a pretty good job keeping it updated.

RadDevon, 10 months ago

Ha ha! Just noticed that you are the author, seemingly. If that’s the case, thank you for the awesome resource!