I hate community notes, it’s a cost free way of fact checking with no accountability.

I don’t think it’s necessarily bad, but it can be harmful if done on a platform that has a significant skew in its political leanings, because it can then lead to the assumption that posts must be true because they were “fact checked” even if the fact check was actually just one of the 9:1 ratio of users that already believes that one thing.

However, on platforms that have more general, less biased overall userbases, such as YouTube, a community notes system can be helpful, because it directly changes the platform incentives and design.

I like to come at this from the understanding that the way a platform is designed influences how it is used and perceived by users. When you add a like button but not a dislike button, you only incentivize positive fleeting interactions with posts, while relegating stronger negative opinions to the comments, for instance. (see: Twitter)

If a platform integrates community notes, that not only elevates content that had any effort at all made to fact check it (as opposed to none at all) but it also means that, to get a community note, somebody must at least attempt to verify the truth. And if someone does that, then statistically speaking, there’s at least a slightly higher likelihood that the truth is made apparent in that community note than if none existed to incentivize someone to fact check in the first place.

Again, this doesn’t work in all scenarios, nor is it always a good decision to add depending on a platform’s current design and general demographic political leanings, but I do think it can be valuable in some cases. (This also heavily depends on who is allowed access to create the community notes, of course)

There is some logic to using crypto, but solely using it as « haha numbers go up, profit, profit! » is stupid

I heavily agree with this. I see too much blanket anti-crypto sentiment regardless of the possible use case.

When I pay for my VPN, paying in XMR means they can’t tie my real-world name and address from my card to my account. That’s objectively beneficial compared to my VPN knowing my exact name and address in conjunction with my browsing activity.

If I want to donate to a creative in a different country but they can’t use traditional banking rails that connect to my country, how else do I send them money online?

Sure, there’s a ton of issues with crypto not just in practice, but even in concept, but as you said, there is some logic to using crypto.

This makes sense to me from a framing perspective. As an American myself, despite my best efforts, I still fall into the same trap of sort of assuming everything is much more American centric than it actually is, including other people’s opinions on American politics from outside America.

His post does come off as wildly tone deaf, but seeing how he would have perceived it, it makes a lot of sense. He endorses policy by a party that shared his values, and then gets pushback for it from people who support his values. I’d probably be as confused as him if I was in his shoes.

It’s “linked” in the sense that it licenses Alex Jones’ name, but with the intent to sell supplements. It would then be promoted on the show, paid for as if it were a sponsorship, but it wasn’t actually “his” company. It’s technically owned by a different person, and isn’t directly financially tied to Infowars, only paying for product placement.

If I recall correctly, it’s owned by a friend of Jones.

They’re refusing to encourage the venue to underpay the person while using tips to make up for it. In practice, it’s not the same thing.

The immediate direct implication is, yes, not giving that person money, but if people as a whole continue to engage in that behavior, companies can go ahead and tell their workers “sure we aren’t paying you a living wage directly, but everyone will tip you enough to make up the difference” and that will allow them to keep more of the sale proceeds for themselves as profit, rather than paying it to the worker.

However, the more people refuse to tip, the less and less the employer can use the excuse that “they’ll make up for the difference with tips,” and will then be forced to pay the employee directly without making their income dependent on guilt-tripping people for extra cash, because otherwise, that employee will simply quit because they’re not getting paid enough, and no new employee will fill that position if it’s clear there aren’t enough tips to cover the difference between their actual wage, and a livable one.

The only reason tips as a concept exist is to allow employers to pay people less, then promise other people’s generosity will bring that pay up to par. If it’s too expensive for the business to offer fair wages with their current prices, then they should just incorporate tips into the price if it’s going to be necessary for their workers to receive tips anyways. If the business is making more than enough, and is simply using tips to subsidize what they would otherwise pay their workers, then a lack of tips necessitates them slightly cutting into their margins and paying their workers fairly.

The inherent act of not tipping in itself is denying the employee a payment in the moment, but the goal of such an action is to discourage the behavior by the corporation, to then make it necessary for that corporation to pay a living wage directly, which is objectively good for all parties involved (workers know how much they’ll make and get stable, livable wages, and customers know what they’re paying without feeling bad if they can’t afford making their $12 water $15.)

The longer you allow a system like this to exist, the more you’ll see what’s already happening, companies pushing it in where it traditionally was never present, minimum suggested amounts going up from 10% to 12% to 15% to 18% etc, and wages staying low as companies try using your generosity to subsidize wages they would otherwise have to pay themselves to retain workers. Not tipping is inherently a rejection of this system, and the only way you stop such a system from expanding is by rejecting it.

Most people going to concerts can’t exactly leave the building, find a different store selling water, buy it, then bring it back in through the concert venue. (Nor are they capable of magically knowing the prices inside beforehand) The reason the price was so high was likely because the venue knew they had a captive audience, and when people need water, they need water. If someone is just forced to pay $12 for water, asking them to subsidize your worker’s wages on top is a shitty move, and if nobody tips, then maybe that company will realize that they can’t subsidize the wages they pay with tips, and stop relying on them.

Then the attendant gets paid fairly from the get go, and they don’t need to be offended if someone doesn’t tip, because why the hell should anybody have to subsidize a corporation’s wages? If they want workers, charge what’s required in the price to pay those workers, no tip required.

Who exactly? At present I’m wholly unaware of anybody on the FB board who I’d call a Nazi.

I’m genuinely asking by the way, that isn’t meant to be some kind of rebuttal.

However, I would again note the fact that any current board members were likely not on the board when many Facebook users joined, (and the lock-in they experience keeps them there) and even if they were, what kind of person is ever aware of individual corporate board members?

Extrapolating that back out to your Nazi bar analogy, that would be like if you went into a bar, the people in there were your friends and family, the workers at the front were normal people, but the person who owned the LLC behind the bar was a Nazi. In that case, to “be astonished at the fascist rhetoric of the Nazi bar” isn’t exactly unexpected!

Comparing Facebook to a Nazi bar is ridiculous.

Facebook, just like all social media companies, has continually used the overton window as its standard for acceptable content. When political leanings shift, the way the company polices content on its platform, chooses what topics to boost or bury, and decides what topics to promote as part of its corporate culture changes.

It is by its very nature the thing that maximizes the political acceptableness of content for advertisers to appear next to. Most people joined Facebook when the political climate was nowhere near as right-wing as it is now, so it’s not like they walked in, saw a sign that said “We’re Nazis” and went “okay, this is fine.”

The fact they’re changing their hateful conduct policy now is what’s turning them into the Nazi bar, they weren’t always that way. (and yes, I’m aware Facebook and Zuck did tons of horrible shit in the past, but as a platform it wasn’t anywhere near the level of terrible it will be now, nor did it have anywhere near Nazi levels of political leanings)

And not to mention how the network effect kind of changes this from “Nazi Bar” to “Nazi City” because it has a much more difficult process to escape due to it quite literally holding you and all your friends, family, photos, and videos hostage. There’s less of a choice when it comes to leaving platforms that ensnare you with network effects than there is to simply leave a bar.

It’s what drives most billionaire mentalities: elite projection.

They think that what they want must be what everyone wants. They believe that what’s best for them is best for everyone as long as they believe it to be morally okay for their own interests.

For a billionaire that regularly isolates himself from not just society, but also his own company’s employees, having fake profiles where computers do the communication instead of a human, go along and agree with whatever you say, remain eternally unoffensive, and exist solely to increase engagement doesn’t seem like a bad idea, since it seems almost like what he’d want for himself.

All requests are proxied through DuckDuckGo, and all personalized user metadata is removed. (e.g. IPs, any sort of user/session ID, etc)

They have direct agreements to not train on or store user data, (the training part is specifically relevant to OpenAI & Anthropic) with a requirement they delete all information once no longer necessary (specifically for providing responses) within 30 days.

For the Llama & Mixtral models, they host them on together.ai (an LLM-focused cloud platform) but that has the same data privacy requirements as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Recent chats that are saved for later are stored locally (instead of on their servers) and after 30 conversations, the last chat before that is automatically purged from your device.

Obviously there’s less technical privacy guarantees than a local model, but for when it’s not practical or possible, I’ve found it’s a good option.

And there are also free, online hosted instances of those same LLMs in a (relatively speaking) privacy-protecting format from DuckDuckGo, for anyone who doesn’t have a powerful GPU :)

Please explain how having ads or subscriptions in any way requires you to have a marketing department and c-suite executives that get to siphon money from operational budgets.

It’s possible, but funding changes at scale.

For example, more people using federated protocols like Mastodon or Lemmy are going to be early adopters that care more about underlying technology and have stronger ideological views about online platforms, compared to, say, your average Facebook mom.

So of course, they’re going to be more likely to donate. Once you scale outside of those groups into groups of people who don’t care as much, and are less invested in the technology, you get less donations.

Sites can work on donation models (again, see Wikipedia) but it’s much more difficult to have such a system stay afloat than one where monetization is much more heavily required, and thus generates more revenue.

It’s not ideal, but it’s also difficult to have such a system work otherwise in many cases.

and do not have to deal with the added tasks of ads and trackers commercial sites use.

They use these things because it makes them more money than it costs. If ads and trackers costed more to implement than not having them, then they wouldn’t use them in the first place.

You could pretty easily build a youtube like site around it.

PeerTube exists if you’re interested, by the way.

Sites can be distributed, the technology to do that has existed since the mid 90’s.

Certain aspects of sites can be distributed, but others can’t as easily be. For instance, you could have a P2P federated network where every user of, say, Mastodon, helps host and redistribute content from posts, but that’s not how these systems are built right now, and they’d have difficulties with things like maintaining accurate like counts.

It would be ideal if they could be built in a way that removes the need for a central platform in the first place, and can run on general-purpose devices, and thus doesn’t carry costs that require monetization, but because they aren’t built like that, they will eventually need to monetize as they scale up. Unless they change the entire underlying technological model of these federated platforms, they will inevitably need to monetize if they gain enough users outside the (relatively speaking) small bubble of dedicated users that can easily fund a platform through hobby money and donations.

There is no larger site the internet wouldn’t be better without.

You’re targeting the larger sites as they exist, not the concepts and underlying functionality.

If you want social media, no matter if it’s Lemmy or Reddit, it costs a hell of a lot of money to host that. If you wanted social media, even a federated model like Lemmy or Mastodon to actually scale to all the people that are otherwise using other sites like Meta’s, you have to fund it somehow, and those funding models change at scale.

I’m not saying needing money like this is good, but it’s simply objectively difficult to fund any platform, for any purpose, when handling so many users. The only reason Lemmy and other federated platforms are funded so well right now is because they can be done at a hobbyist level, for a hobbyist cost, in most cases.

Once you scale up to the whole world, your funding model simply has to change. Donations can work, but they’re much more difficult to get working than either ads or subscriptions in terms of securing long-term funding at scale.

Because most mastodon instances are running off donations, and have a relatively small user base.

The kind of people who use Mastodon are substantially more likely to be heavily invested in the technology and the vision, and thus more likely to donate.

Expand that out to the billions of people who use social media, and you have a funding problem.

Not to mention the much lesser need for moderation due to more homogeneous and well-intentioned micro communities and substantially lower rate of bots, which all means less “staff” you have to pay too.

It’s not a matter of minimum viability, it’s a matter of scale.

The early internet also couldn’t provide most of the larger sites and platforms we now use. As it grew, it had to monetize in order to actually operate. If you want something outside the scope of a passion project, you need funding outside the scope of a passion project. The early internet did so well with people who actually cared because they didn’t have to operate platforms that couldn’t just care. They were operating things like personal sites and chatrooms, not social networks, document editors, or newsrooms.

Federated servers with donation-based models can function as of now, but you’d have a hard time covering hosting costs if every normal social media user began using federated platforms. There’s simply too many of them.

I’m not saying ads improve content, I’m not saying they’re the best model, and if you refuse to accept ads anywhere, that’s fine, but sites simply can’t all provide services for free, and if we want sites with the same functionality we have today, they need to monetize somehow.

Donations are definitely an option (I mean, hey, look at Wikipedia) but it isn’t necessarily viable for every online venture. For a lot of platforms, monetization must be compelled in some way, whether it’s by pushing ads, or paywalling with a subscription. The best option a platform can offer if it’s not capable of just running off donations alone is to let users choose the monetization they prefer to deal with.

This isn’t really much of an issue, practically speaking. The likelihood of someone buying a subscription is different than buying a product from an ad.

For instance, while I’m highly likely to pay for a subscription to a streaming service that lets me watch videos from creators (in my case, Nebula) I’m not likely to buy any products from a sponsorship or YouTube ad. (and haven’t, thus far)

My likelihood of paying for a product in an ad is entirely separate from paying for the service those ads are on, and this is commonly true for many people.

If there’s an independent news outlet I want to support, I’m going to feel more inclined to pay them than I am to buy a product in an ad, just because each carries different incentives for me. I want to support the news outlet, I don’t want to buy a product somewhere else.

This is anecdotal, and I understand that, but as someone else had also mentioned before, even companies like Netflix are promoting their revenue from the ad tier, and having both is a good mechanism to keep the business afloat and allow it to acquire customers who don’t want to spend too much.

True, but that’s a matter of technical implementation that I believe should be changed along with any proposed change to monetization models like I’d previously mentioned.

For instance, the site should delay ad loading until you pick “yes, I want to see ads,” or if you pick “I have a subscription” and sign in, it shouldn’t load them at all.

This isn’t impossible to do, it’s just something they haven’t made as an easy implementation yet, since things like Google’s ad services auto-load when a page is loaded, since no site really has a mechanism to manually enable or disable the core requests to Google based on user input.

While a lot of us hate ads and subscriptions, I have the unpopular opinion that they are generally still viable considering the state of how we use the internet today.

The thing is, I think that if there are ads, there should be the ability to pay to remove them, and if there is a subscription, there should be an ad-based tier as an alternative.

Let your users choose, respect their preference for funding model, and allow them to choose if they want to support a given monetization policy.

Of course, seeing as how they raised $15m from VCs, I doubt this will be nothing but what will inevitably devolve into a pay-for-reach scheme similar to Twitter Blue (or, sorry “X Premium”) that just leads to those with wealth getting more engagement, and a louder voice.

They should be, but currently it depends on the type of bailout, I suppose.

For instance, if a bank completely fails and goes under, the FDIC usually is named Receiver of the bank’s assets, and now effectively owns the bank.