swordgeek

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

Fuck off with your spam.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Followong a user.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Apple is worth THREE AND A HALF TRILLION DOLLARS!!!

Say that again. Three and a half trillion dollars.

They have cash-on-hand reserves of in excess of $60bn. They could give every single employee $200,000 and still have half of it in the bank.

Tim Cook is a relative pauper in the CEO game, with a net worth upwards of two billion. He could personally pay a team of a three thousand reporters with full benefits and remain a billionaire.

It's not people refusing to pay for journalism, it's robber barons refusing to pay journalists.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

People always have.

How many people get paid to go to ham radio clubs, to write up plans for model airplanes, or to share telescope mirror polishing techniques? How many people try to profit off of community seed/plant exchanges?

The only difference is that people are now looking for venues to generate profit by producing content, rather than producing content for its own sake. The concept of "every sharing of information must be financially profitable" is a sickness - a festering disease.

Domain names cost about $50/year. Self-hosting can be done for free with most ISPs; and if you're getting enough traffic that you need to pay for hosting, it starts pretty cheaply.

Profit is destroying community at every turn. Resist the relentless lust to make an extra buck, and ENGAGE with people.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

No, you really really really don't.

I'm old enough to have been online when commercial content was illegal, and I've watched as aggressive commerce has crept into every single corner of the internet.

You don't need to have ads to support a website, you need ads to profit from a website. The idea that everything - information, news, community, society - not only CAN be monetized but MUST be monetized is relatively new, destructive, and anti-human.

The mere idea that you have to choose between two ways of throwing money at billionaires is a symptom of the terminal stages of capitalism. We're going to have a rough 50 years or so, but this has to end.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, "good journalism" is definitely what you're paying for with ads or paywalls.

To be clear, I support journalists - and they deserve to get paid for their efforts.

But (a) OP didn't specifically mention news sites, and (b) the revenue from websites via ads or paywalls is going directly into the coffers of the ultra-wealthy. Find me a news outlet that successfully implemented a paywall and then started paying their journalists and reporters vastly more money.

You won't, because they don't.

[–] [email protected] 70 points 4 weeks ago (30 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I get what you're saying, but it never works like that.

You said it yourself: "I hope reddit exists to...be a breeding ground..." And it will. The worst of humanity will collect and fester and grow in numbers. And what's going to happen then? Some will spill over to here, and other 'safe' communities.

There's no way we can thrive and simultaneously isolate ourselves from assholery; and by encouraging it to thrive elsewhere, we're only expanding its power and reach; and at the same time, enriching and empowering asshole billionaires like spez, Zuck, Musk, etc.

No, we need to fight them. We need to wade hip-deep in the shit to shovel it down the drain, rather than hoping it'll just go away on its own.

Look at it another way: If you have a garden, what happens if you designate one corner as "the weed corner?" It grows, spreads, and takes over the rest of the garden.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Yep, agreed. The biggest problem there is that Meta is generally not making life worse for its users than they're used to. Facebook and Instagram are giving you almost the same shitty experience you got a decade ago.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Nope.

If you encourage it, it will continue to fester and rot, and the entire internet will lower their expectations.

We need to destroy these companies. We need to smash them to pieces, and hey guess what - it's going to hurt a bit! We need to be prepared to stand up against evil, corrupt, racist, bigoted robber barons. We need to make some sacrifices to fix the internet.

Burn the fuckers to the ground, and let spez rot in a hole.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

It's true that Qobuz pays more per stream, although I've heard that they pay an amalgamated sum to the label instead of direct payment by artist.

Furthermore, while MQA was a bit of a bait-and-switch (basically lossy versions of much higher quality), Tidal always offered pure lossless as well.

Qobuz apparently has a better classical catalog, but worse customer support.

Basically, I've found Tidal to be - at this point - a bit ahead of Qobuz. Not a real complaint, just a "if I had to choose..." opinion.

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