His friends started responding to his emails for a span covering years? That's a bit strange, I don't understand why or how they'd do that unless asked to and given the credentials.

If those friends are included in the people who haven't heard from him in years, I'd consider that behaviour a little suspicious.

If you can't find any evidence of activity, or anybody to vouch for him - I'd consider filing a report.

Those titles don't, the person you're responding to is being sarcastic because the article sorta implies that removing the microtransactions from an indie title is somehow novel.

I don't think it's especially likely that you'll find consistently interesting, well-reasoned discussion through any platform bringing together anonymous strangers in an ephemeral manner.

I think consistently interesting discussion has shared stakeholding as a foundational aspect - participants need to actually care, either because the discussion is a product of some commitment they've each made (e.g. reading something for a book club), or because the participants are familiar with each other and the outcome tangibly matters (e.g. a physical town hall meeting).

Otherwise, I think you're more likely to get what you're looking for from adopting some tangential hobby and having those discussions with the friends you get through that.

Good.

I'm far from a social media fanatic, but make no mistake that the primary purpose of legislation like this is to increase the degree of control that parents can exert over their children - not to improve the wellbeing of young people.

For teenagers from marginalised groups living in oppressive households: social media can become an outlet for self-expression amongst trusted peers which might otherwise put them at risk of retaliation from abusive parents, or a venue for them to discover like-minded people and organisations who might be able to help them cope or increase their available options by offering sanctuary should they ever need it.

It also can't be overstated that social media is one of the main venues for political expression nowadays, particularly beyond the orthodoxy. There remain issues with misinformation and the far-right, but nonetheless the breadth of opinions can help people to develop a degree of political consciousness which they might not otherwise. Consider how infrequently sympathetic portrayals of protests, strikes, and unionisation drives make the mainstream media in comparison to social media.

It's unsurprising that the politicians most aggressively pursuing legislation like this are also the ones who are trying to prevent, for example, queer people and especially queer youth from being able to express themselves without fear of reprisal - and who are actively trying to prevent access to information and depictions which might contradict their political ideology through mechanisms like internet censorship and book bannings.

The rule of the 196 community is that you're supposed to post a submission of your own before leaving, and it's customary to include the word "rule" in your post in reference to that rule.

I don't care about sharp words from a brutish authoritarian.

You're free to continue endorsing an institution and approach which generates further undesirable behaviour as recidivism whilst preventing little wherever it's implemented. You can continue to pretend that criminality is a phenomenon completely local to the actor and not a reflection of broader social and structural issues which we need to address. You can proceed with turning out more victims by proxy of the traumatised ex-incarcerated continuing to deal harm if it'll satisfy the sadistic streak inside of you demanding that infractions incur the infliction of suffering and trauma in turn.

Regions which engage with mass incarceration and operate more sadistic prison regimes overlap with those regions with the highest rates of repeat offending. That's not a coincidence, but a product of thinking like yours.

Prisons which exist with actual commitments to rehabilitation, and which respect the dignity of the incarcerated, while imperfect, turn out far fewer repeat offenders than those who don't.

If you care about victims of abuse, as I do, then you'll turn instead to approaches which result in fewer of them to be counted: alternatives to incarceration, and the pursuit of relative normalcy within the institution for the incarcerated where it still exists.

I hope for a future without coercion, abuse, violence, or pain. I would hope that we all do.

I don't especially care whether there's a formally enshrined right for incarcerated people to be vegan - I'm saying that if we continue to insist upon locking people in cages with an ostensible objective of rehabilitating them and not simply performing retributive cruelty for its own sake, then we must treat the incarcerated people with diligence and respect as baseline. You can't expect for well-adjusted people to emerge from a system of institutionalised dehumanisation, cruelty, and uncaring indifference.

I don't think it's unreasonable to respect an incarcerated person's ethical commitment to not exploiting animals, and to be diligent in providing food of a reasonable nutritional standard which doesn't violate those commitments to consume. Peanut butter sandwiches do not fulfil that criteria by themselves.

I'm not sure what you mean by "my cultists" - I didn't bring anybody here, and I found this thread independently through my own feed.

In order to preemptively address some of your assertions in reply to another person in this comment thread:

This thread is not about you, not about vegans

It's not about vegans, no.

It's about respect for a person's ethical commitments in a scenario where you've deprived them of the ability to satisfy those commitments themselves. My argument would not have to substantively change in order to comment on a person whose religious dietary restrictions aren't being respected by the available options, to give an alternative example.

It's true that the final paragraph of my original response speaks specifically to animal liberation, but that's because I'm passionate about that issue independently of this one. That said, I think my original reply would remain perfectly sound with that paragraph removed if you'd prefer to take it that way.

the fact that a dude who stole billions

I don't think the crime or characteristics of the incarcerated are especially relevant here. My argument would remain unaltered if the incarcerated person was poor, from a marginalised background, and in prison for much less exceptional reasons.

is more important than justice and literally everyone else

I don't think that whatever justice there is to be found in the prison system is nullified by respecting incarcerated people's ethical commitments, and I think that applies to all incarcerated people.

Unless you think we haven’t noticed you’re hiding behind a debate about the importance of punishment, the viability and legitimacy of the prison system and abuses of the U.S. prison system in a situation that has nothing to do with them because you’re trying to promote veganism.

I'm a prison abolitionist first and foremost, and I thought that'd be clear from the overall thrust of my original post - but apparently not. Respect for the incarcerated, their humanity, and their ethical commitments is very much the compromise position.

I feel like you'd be interested in the Web Monetization API, if you're not already aware of it.

There actually is a Web 3.0, and it predates the cryptocurrency-oriented conceptualisation of "Web3" by quite some time.

Web 3.0 is otherwise known as the Semantic Web, a set of standards developed by the W3C for formally representing (meta)data and relationships between entities on the internet, and for facilitating the machine-reading and exchange thereof.

I find it amusing that language is classified based upon frequency of use. If your average thirteen year old hears fuck once, maybe they'll be okay - but how profane for them to hear it twice or even three times in a two hour timespan.

It's fairly silly that this course of action is the consequence of a desire to manipulate search engine results, but at least they're archiving the articles before taking them down.

To address the headline, though, I don't think that anybody reputable ever seriously claimed that the internet was forever in a literal sense - we've been dealing with ephemerality and issues like link rot from the beginning.

It was only ever commonplace to say the internet was forever in the sense that fully retracting anything once posted could range from difficult to impossible after it'd been shared a few times.

Only in the modern era dominated by corporations offering a platform in perpetuity have we been afforded even the illusion of dependable permanence, and honestly I'm much more comfortable with the notion of less widely distributed content being able to entropy out of existence than a permanent record for everything ever made public.

The bill says that commercial entities serving pornography are required to do age verification through either verifying a driver's license, verifying another piece of government-issued identification, or through the use of any commercially viable age verification mechanism.

So, yeah, I'd imagine compliance to look like either uploading a photograph or scan of an identity card or document for the site operators to check, or uploading it to an affiliated service which does age verification on their behalf.

Which is obviously horrendous from a privacy and information security standpoint for the consumer, and exposes the site operator to costs and legal risk associated with verifying and storing sensitive personal information.