The corporate price gouging and death by 1000 cuts fees have gotten out of control since the COVID era. Not just for Amazon either, though they are a very strong case in point. I am trying to do as little business as possible with these globocorps anymore.
It's not just nazis on substack. There were plenty of other people who joined it thanks to the willy-nilly censorship that was happening on the large platforms in the past few years. The problem is that it's hard to avoid some parasitic free-riders like the nazis if you want to have a genuine free speech platform, which none of the major platforms are any longer.
Personally I think it's a good trend that more people are blogging and not all of the money is getting funneled away from creators to platforms owned by billionaire sociopaths like Musk and Zuck.
Sorry to practice thread necromancy to respond, but what the internet is really good for at this point is aggregating the previous output of culture. Social media has gotten way past the point of "too much noise" but sites like archive dot org are gems, and there are a bunch of private curated libraries like that as well. So in other words, the internet is good for learning if you are a self-directed person. But that's about it, and so that's what I use it for at this point.
It's also an interesting question to ask what will happen to the web in a declining net energy world, over the next 1-2 decades. Probably a slower, text-only internet could be preserved well into the future. But the question is will it be? The corporate stewardship of the internet has been very poor.
I'm not surprised. An instance of this would be the monarch butterfly which was abundant when I was a child. Then there were years where no one saw them and they even were presumed extinct in our area. Finally in 2016 I saw them again in a different part of the same state I was living at the time, and slowly they returned. But the overall volume of insect life in general is down. I would guess a large part of it is owing to both destruction of habitat and excessive use of pesticides. Suburbanization in my region has accelerated this process.
Yes, that makes sense. There used to be this place called Tower Records in London, which I visited the one time I actually stayed in London (I'm from the USA). And this was, at the time, probably the biggest and best-stocked record store I had seen, so I bought a bunch of stuff. Hawkwind albums were among them. In those days there was an "old rock revival" ongoing and also that was the heyday of the first wave stoner rock/metal as well. Very interesting to reminisce on those days which seem like a lifetime ago.
I vaguely remember Hawkwind: wasn't that a project that Lemmy Kilminster was in before Motorhead? I listened to them back in my stoner daze. But I left all of that behind, so I haven't listened to as much psychedelia ever since.
I think it represents people being fed up with both institutions in the real world and the decline of the quality of the internet since the last couple of decades. As for them tuning in to something else, I have seen much more interest in DIY, hard skills, personal projects and such of late, but nothing societal beyond that which would really bring people together. I think that's the best we can hope for at this time -- at least people learning useful skills or not sacrificing their whole lives to corporate ambition is a plus.
I have been using Linux Mint in recent years, however the most recent version is quite buggy. It has regressed to 2014 levels of usability and I'm thinking about switching. The last LTS version worked great, best ever in fact. Not sure what explains the difference.
Yeah, they should have the resources to hire pretty much the best devs, it's not like they are a startup or in some kind of backwater situation. They're an old company with a big name and a lot of money.
Splintering communities suffer from major attrition events that lower their value. We already have a model for where Twitter and Reddit are going -- FB. Compared with 10 years ago it is a graveyard. If it weren't for their ownership of IG, it would be far worse for them. It is now a site for older people and for an awful lot of fake accounts. Twitter and Reddit are headed this same direction, but it's probably a 2-3 year timeline before it is really obvious. More generally, the model of centralized social media has already peaked. I am not disputing that they will still have large user bases but there will be a slow grinding down.
Platforms get arrogant and eventually overstep the bounds. It already happened since a long time with FB and Twitter, and now it's Reddit's turn. You can only take your user base for granted for so long. The problem is that economic conditions are changing rapidly right now and all these Silicon Valley firms are trying to find new ways to make money in a much more hostile climate. This has led them to some desperate moves that are alienating their users. I think it will be a slow war of attrition from here on, just like what happened to most of the other platforms that made this same mistake over time.
FB is a desert compared with the old days, and Twitter will get there as well. Maybe the "AI revolution" can replace all the organic human content with fake people, but that's about their only chance long term. If you can even call such a thing a "win".
I'll say. The kings of proprietary code grifting, but they sure want YOU to share all your code on GH, which they own (so that corporations can rip and run with it).
Hillmarsh @ Hillmarsh @lemmy.ml Posts 0Comments 38Joined 2 yr. ago
The corporate price gouging and death by 1000 cuts fees have gotten out of control since the COVID era. Not just for Amazon either, though they are a very strong case in point. I am trying to do as little business as possible with these globocorps anymore.