Libertarians are mostly just neoliberals who are upset they’re not allowed to be more psycopathic.

Their new utopia will tear itself apart with greed, drugs and sex abuse just like all the old ones.

It doesn’t need to be profitable, let alone have every fraction of a cent squeezed from it.

And to be logically consistent, do you also shame people for trying to remove things like child pornography, pornographic photos posted without consent or leaked personal details from the internet?

I consented to my post being federated and displayed on Lemmy.

Did writers and artists consent to having their work fed into a privately controlled system that didn’t exist when they made their post, so that it could make other people millions of dollars by ripping off their work?

The reality is that none of these models would be viable if they requested permission, paid for licensing or stuck to work that was clearly licensed.

Fortunately for women everywhere, nobody outside of AI arguments considers consent, once granted, to be both unrevokable and valid for any act for the rest of time.

Yeah it’s their fault for daring to communicate online without first considering a technology that didn’t exist.

Now delete your posts from ChatGPTs memory.

Exploding head syndrome only a beep? Brains do weird shit.

Then either make your comment and eat the downvotes or just don’t make the comment at all. You’re functionally complaining that a Facebook anti-vax group isn’t listening to your science.

Regardless, there is an important distinction.

You can argue all you like that political systems like communism and socialism may have lead to things like corruption, famine, wars and genocide but ultimately, the people who support those systems are seeking a fairer way to run society for all people and believe in it despite its history.

Head over to the far-right and the genocide is the point. They want “undesirables” to be killed, enslaved or completely repressed.

The user agent is in the request header, so it’s known before any response is sent from YouTube.

I don’t know if that’s what they’re doing, because it’s not possible to know what their server code is doing, making it a far better place to hide sleazy code.

• The alternative to current model of game launch + DLCs/features added over the year is that the game is not launched at all until ready and full featured.

I haven’t seen significant numbers of people complaining that their drip feed of content isn’t coming fast enough. I’ve seen people complaining about spending a non-trivial amount of money on a visibly broken game that clearly had plenty of developer resources for microtransactions and loot boxes.

Gamer audience is privileged, consumerist and impatient. And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.

Being a game developer had its moments but was still easily the worst job I’ve ever had, predominantly due to the community.

That said, I still wouldn’t go diagnosing millions of people with some bullshit I just made up.

To block AI from hoovering up all our data, without paying them.

That’s not how greed works, nor how reddit works.

The only time they’ll do something that reduces profits is when they’re confident it will mean more profits in the near future (and they can’t figure out a way to have both).

That’s why they were happy to platform mask off neo-nazis, the dangerously stupid and communities dedicated to getting as close to child pornography as possible without technically breaking any laws and why they waited until the last possible moment to pull the plug on them.

They’re not uninformed, they’re lying.

They are fully aware that if a politician tried to introduce gun laws that were an exact copy of Switzerland’s, they would be staunchly opposed by the pro-gun community, Republicans and the gun lobby that owns them.

They just want to muddy the waters and drag out the conversation forever. The Switzerland excuse is just as bad-faith as when they blamed video games, music or too many doors.

Edit: also, might make the government think twice about fucking with democracy or stepping over the common man.

That’s just a marketing campaign from gun manufacturers. If it actually worked, it would have worked in America.

Instead, they get to choose between a neoliberal and a fascist every few years (if they haven’t been disenfranchised or gerrymandered into irrelevance), which decides whose rich friends and donors get to pocket the most public funds.

Steam got to where it is by good will, good prices and good features.

Well, eventually.

When Steam was first released, the running joke was “steaming pile of shit”. It was slow, unreliable and only a couple of shades of green away from the worst color in the world. People complained about the birth of “always online” games and about paying full price but not even getting a box with it.

It’s not exactly unassailable now either. It’s my platform of choice as a user but for indie developers, the 30% cut is brutal and last I used it, the Steamworks SDK was pretty rough. The app itself also has a lot of legacy bloat like a built in MP3 player.

It’s ahead of the rest but I think “good will, good prices and good features” might be an overly romantic take on “it’s where all my games already are”.

That’s incompatible with corporate greed. They will look at a billion transactions for $0.05 and start thinking “What if each of those was $0.50? Or $5.00? Or $50.00?”.

Without a regulating force (such as laws or consumer power that isn’t just neoliberal lies) , it will always grow to absorb every available dollar it can.

And realistically, charging people 0.045€ for the service they actually use won’t make them nearly as rich as charging people $50 each month for the $3 dollars they use.

They’ve already done the maths to prove it. It’s why it’s never happened.

There’s demonstrably millions of people who are absolutely fine with being assholes, especially if it’s profitable. It doesn’t matter to them in the slightest.

With any change on the site formerly known as Twitter, there are 3 lenses to examine it through:

1. Reducing the massive financial loss that Musk will almost certainly take
2. Amplifying the voice of the far-right
3. Stroking the ego of the man child who owns it

This is probably mostly 1. He’s looked at the number of users and said “what if they were dollars?”.

But like you say, there’s probably a bit of 2. Reactionaries are more likely to hand over a dollar for a Truth Social with outside their choir to abuse.

It probably won’t dissuade bots and astro-turfing, but it will make it pay-to-play, with the richest welding the most influence. That’s definitely 3 since by any other metric besides money, Elon is average.

I can only approve of people paying for services they use. It isn’t free to run. But there are several things to consider:

I don’t mind paying for services, but I now have 20 different services. Each one is trying to extract the maximum amount of money out of me while giving me a minimum in return.

I also accept that those services are not free to run, but realistically, these companies aren’t just trying to cover their operating costs, they’re trying to further line the pockets of executives and shareholders.

And its never enough for them. I could give Twitter $100 a month and they’d still sell my data for a few extra pennies. I could give YouTube an unlimited supply of servers and bandwidth and they’d still show just as many ads.

We will never get the cost living under control until this corporate greed is addressed because no matter how much money we pay people, there’s an army of psychopaths ready to milk them of every cent.

So fuck em. They can have an extra dollar when they can prove it will actually end up in the pocket of an employee. Otherwise, the richest man in the world can fund his own little reactionary pet project.