And for those that are able to keep to just one subscription, switching to another when they’ve finished watching whatever show it is that said service had, they aren’t safe either.

One of the next steps that these corporations are going to take is to add fees for dropping their services, with year long contracts.

They don’t want competition, so they will try to force you to stay.

Go for it. It was already an old, long dead meme when I posted it here.

This but corps

So it’s just a coincidence that they ended up killing their competitors? Yeah right.

Then why did they once support XMPP?

I never said defeating them or out competing them should be the goal. The goal should be the survival of services. And corporations will kill these services.

So what?

Keeping users siloed in Facebook’s garden shouldn’t be seen as a win for us.

Sometimes the only winning move is not to play. If people hadn’t federated with google’s XMPP back in the day, google wouldn’t have had the same level of control it had to kill XMPP as a competitor.

We need to learn from the lessons of the past, and the past has resulted in the deaths of services when federating with corporations.

And for those that don’t:

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

“Make Sure You Are Square With Your God Before Trying To Merge This”

Our electoral system is inherently biased against 3rd party candidates due to the spoiler effect of first past the post voting. The only solution is election reform that regulates election finances, a switch to approval/STAR voting, and regulation on political ads.

Sure they could. But that’s not going to stop me from circumventing their attempts if it is reasonably possible.

Why would I do that when it can be automated with a script that removes HTML and scripts responsible for ads?

I updated my original comment to make it more clear.

if you were able to ascertain with 100% accuracy that an ad was not a security or privacy violation

Security isn’t the only part of this.

if viewing ads on your PC had as little potential for harm as viewing ads in the newspaper did, would you still block them?

I basically already do this with the radio. The moment an ad plays, the radio gets shut off. I turn it back on at the next 0 or 5 minute mark and it’s over.

Advertisers do not have a right to force me to listen. The same applies for internet ad blocking. One of these is just automated.

therefore it kinda is piracy.

It’s not an illegal form or copying though. It’s the equivalent or turning off the radio when an ad comes on, then turning it back on once it’s over.

All websites are unable to be trusted.

Because ad blocking is a security and privacy feature. We have the right to choose what HTML and scripts are loaded into our browser. Without that right, we have no web security or privacy.

We also have the right to not listen to ads, turning off the radio the moment they come on. Internet ad blocking is effectively the same thing, just automated. Piracy is completely different, because it is the unlawful copying of digital data.

What I am saying is, I don’t think people who use duolingo are any better/worse off than most other methods.

I think that would go for most learning methods. When you don’t practice a skill you’re always going to get worse with it over time, especially if it is a language.