Swordgeek

  • 24 Posts
  • 491 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: November 15th, 2023

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  • SwordgeektoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldDo you prefer ads or paywalls?
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    3 days 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.


  • 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.


  • SwordgeektoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldDo you prefer ads or paywalls?
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    3 days 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.


  • SwordgeektoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldDo you prefer ads or paywalls?
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    3 days 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.




  • So I’m in my mid-50s, and I’ve honestly only come up with genuine lasting interest in my friends’ lives in the last few years.

    I noticed that I’d get together with friends and they’d say “hey, how did your kid’s sportsball tournament go back in July?” What struck me about it is that they cared enough to actually hear what I said, and remember it - not because they have a deep abiding interest in my kid’s life, but because they cared about me and the things that were important to me.

    And I wasn’t repaying the care.

    So I’ve tried to change. When people tell me stuff about their kids or vacation, I make a concerted effort to remember it and remember the significance of it, because the fact that it’s important to the people I care about means that to some degree, I care about it as well.




  • Depends on what you mean “effective.”

    The structure is very similar, and on the surface, it works about the same way. So in that sense, yes.

    The lack of centralization improves on reddit - no authoritarian rule-making, no limitation of content by the laws of a single country, etc. - but also adds flaws. The biggest one is the potential for redundant groups on different servers, but also a concern is the potential for someone taking down their server and leaving the users high and dry. (I don’t know exactly what happens to the content in this case, but that could be another issue.)

    Practically speaking though, it is not a meaningful replacement for reddit because it is lacking content. I browse “all”, and get fewer total posts that I saw on reddit on my 20 or so subscribed subreddits alone.

    Community is the key. Community is what made reddit, and lemmy doesn’t have a developed community. Yet. We can get there, and then discover what other problems with the platform are.