greenskye @ greenskye @lemm.ee

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2

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362

Joined

2 yr. ago

My experience with executives is that they don't necessarily want yes men, but there's a range of acceptable criticism or feedback that they'll accept. As long as you're within that range, it's fine.

If you try to address fundamental problems that might require real change... well those people tend to get suppressed.

They'll happily take feedback on meeting structure or project planning or whatever. But try to do a retrospective on what the true longterm costs of their decision to go with the cheap, but unreliable solution and they'll blackball you.

Maga efforts assisted by Democratic leaders that also focus on everything else but class issues as well.

I'd have gone with the idiot

Typical enshittification. Brilliant and amazing technology taken over by private equity and run into the ground

Yes, but actually managing to use crypto for commerce is pretty tricky.

Not sure of the state of things currently, but back in the day it was so volatile that you had to buy more than you need because it might lose value before you could pay with it. And the company also couldn't cash out with the same value either. That's why Valve stopped accepting crypto if I remember correctly.

It would be nice if it actually worked well for that, but I expect if it ever did approach broad adoption the powers that be would come down hard on it to prevent losing their control.

You were saying they were motivated by advertisers. That these websites can exist if only they chose not to use ads.

But hosting a website of any decent size takes money. So to pay for it you need ads OR payments from your users. Either a subscription or donation.

So if the websites, like you suggest, avoid advertisers to get away from advertiser sensibilities, they're still subject to payment processors. Which have many of the same kind of hang ups.

Patreon has had several crackdowns on content solely because of payment processors getting upset. Patreon doesn't care. The patreon creators are happy and their fans are happy. Everyone involved in the commerce was happy with the business. But PayPal was unhappy and the fans couldn't send money to the people they were supporting without that middle man. So a company almost entirely unrelated gets to dictate what can and can't be hosted on Patreon. And this has happened multiple times on multiple sites.

Primarily right now it happens to NSFW content, but there's zero protections from PayPal and visa doing the same for LGBT content, content critical of China, etc. They're a private company so all our rights and protections don't apply.

Theoretically there's an alternative. You could always make your own banking system and your own Internet (good old 'free market' at work) just so you can pay for your website hosting costs. Since that's technically an option, then they aren't legally interfering. It's just business and they can choose not to do business with you if they want. Just as easy as building your own power grid and water system. (Though even if you did try to make your own, they'd heavily interfere to stop you).

So yes, avoiding ads will free you from their control, but it will also limit you to only the size of website that can be hosted for free. Anything of a size that would need funding is subject to these company's morality rules. Which also makes these communities small, isolated and easily dismantled if they prove to be a problem.

As soon as any one instance gets big enough and needs to get funding, the payment processors will crack down on allowed content. Don't like it? Tough luck in receiving the money people are trying to send you.

No it's really payment processors.

There have been multiple successful ad-free websites in the past. But they still need revenue to function. Revenue their users happily pay.

But then Visa or PayPal or whoever is handling the transactions starts to pay attention and then all the sudden there's new rules in place or else they hike fees or just stop processing payments altogether.

And on the Internet, there is no true alternative methods of payment (hint: any viable methods are quickly suppressed by those same payment processors).

So the only way any website gets big is left to the whims of advertisers or payment processors (usually both).

I have no idea why we as a people are somehow fine with private companies having a complete stranglehold on all significant online business. Why we've allowed the government to privatize digital transactions, subject to very little rights or protections. It's allowing private corporations to massively suppress free speech, commerce, and social gatherings in the digital sphere.

Honestly our supposed freedoms are more and more limited these days because they only apply to public spaces, but there's been a continual erosion of 'public'. Where is the modern town square? If the only place you can practice your 'rights' is almost nowhere, do you really have those rights at all?

The government should be mandating that 'digital infrastructure' (ISPs, data centers, payment processors, etc) are neutral and can't be utilized to bully others out of business. That their privileged position also comes with extra responsibilities and restrictions so you don't have the digital equivalent of cutting off water to an abortion clinic because the water utility is pro-life.

I hate researching appliances. Literally every brand and model has a ton of haters (often with tragic stories of how the appliance caused thousands of dollars in damages). There's no way to research an appliance and come out with any sort of objective view point on it.

Sure there's high level takes (Samsung bad, speed queen good), but then if you dig deeper into those off the cuff statements you realize even that isn't true.

So I've generally just said fuck it and gone with whatever.

I feel like a huge number of franchises were started back in the day, but everything now is just sequels and remasters of old games.

How many of the current biggest AAA titles got their start in the 2005-2015 era vs the number of new franchises in 2015-2025?

Creativity seems to be mostly dead and games all have to be mega hits or they're considered a failure. There's also a distinct lack of AA games (the successful of which often later became AAA titles).

AAA games are legitimately worse now than before, but the gulf isn't as big as people are claiming.

This is why I think it's funny people still believe 'the Internet is forever'. Data disappears all the time. If you really start paying attention it's scary how ephemeral the Internet truly is and how much is lost all the time.

Xitter is pronounced 'shitter' I'm pretty sure

Same. They also don't allow password managers and I have multiple systems that don't use my main password, so I have at least 5-6 work passwords for different systems.

Nobody can remember all that.

So everyone makes the simplest password they can (since it has to be regularly typed in) and writes it down somewhere so they don't forget it.

I also think that, after getting up to speed, they'd fight pretty hard against measures that are meant to backslide us to that point again.

I'm struggling to believe these articles are anything but pandering to the left. I struggle to believe there's any significant number of conservatives actually having real second thoughts.

I mean during COVID you had conservatives literally claiming COVID was no big deal as they died. I think that was when I understood just how far gone these people could be. They will happily drink the Kool aid no matter the personal cost to themselves.

So losing their jobs is questionable as to whether or not it's going to actually result in a different mindset, rather than some fleeting complaints that are forgotten by the next election cycle.

'How to treat a sprained neck'

So not sure if I'm the one with the neck injury or if I managed to get killed treating someone else

Yep. My 2025 resolution is to be as uninformed as I can possibly be. My mental health can't handle it and I stress out and obsess over things that I can't fix.

15 years of being informed did fuck all for me. I'll go vote when it's time (where I will do a minimum of research on my vote), but otherwise my goal is to entirely ignore all politics and political figures for at least the entire year, but hopefully longer than that.

If there ever comes a time where I can actually make a difference, I'm sure it'll be obvious and widely spread. All the outrage, pointless and ineffective protests and 'awareness' campaigns were utterly worthless. The last 10 times I called my local rep they laughed at me for being from the opposite party and told me to go pound sand.

I do not have the capacity, competency or mindset to run for politics myself, so as far as I'm concerned there's nothing of value added by being informed and involved.

I think for many purposes, regular people just like cool art. We've very much become accustomed to a near overwhelming tide of reasonable quality, but ultimately transient media.

'Content' has a much lower value than it once did, simply by benefit of sheer quantity. Even ignoring AI, I have access to endless art, music, video content, etc.

AI art is not really different from the non-artist perspective. It's just accelerating the flow. But do people really even care where their current art comes from in most cases? The average person might download some art for their phone or computer desktop. They'll be exposed to marketing and cover materials (that they'd have no clue or care about how they're made), and they might buy some art for their house. Either from a home goods store of cheap, mass production art, or perhaps on a vacation or art fair for something a little more personal. Beyond that, I doubt most even think about it at all. AI art will be largely invisible to them because the human artists already are.

I do think you'll see a similar surge of 'human' art niches like we have for Vinyl collections today. A small subset of people will pursue the story and mystique of hand crafted art, but this will be a drop in the bucket compared to the entire industry. Only a small few will be able to fit into that new niche.

I've spent an astronomical amount of effort trying to remove as much depressing and outrage content from my feeds as possible. It's a sisyphian task with new things constantly slipping through the cracks. Which has made me mostly check out of all but a very small list of online spaces (and even then ads and other impossible to turn off 'recommendations' show up).

Outrage and depressing content fuels the web and it's best to recognize that. I've been a lot happier in my ignorance so far and would recommend it to anyone who's privileged enough to get away with it. It's not like being informed and engaged did fuck all for me in the last decade except give me a variety of mental issues.