I'm sorry, but I CANNOT agree. Coffee smells MUCH BETTER than weed. In fact, I think weed smells terrible. It reminds me of skunks. I would much rather smell coffee.
I have been writing to my county school board to ask them to abandon twitter. It is used by principals, coaches, and others in the county system all the time. I explain that the values of the school system do not align with the values demonstrated by the platform. So far I've heard crickets back. :-(
I don't care for Karma-farming, but I liked having some way to tell if someone was a real community member or a throw-away account. I liked that there were some subreddits that wouldn't let you post if you had low karma because it helped hold back the trolls.
Oh, I would TOTALLY buy some US Senators. You think I could afford both Sinema & Manchin?
I've been chipping in for my mastodon server for over a year. The admin there posts the finances so we all know when it's time to kick in again, but if we went to a paid rather than donated set-up, then I'd be OK with that. If my admin decided that he needed to run ads that were like printed newspaper ads then I wouldn't mind so much. But ads that track me, ads that change size, ads that show up and block some or all of the screen, ads that play video and audio, pretend to be content etc are the ads I dislike and I would flee.
Ehh, if Reddit is getting traffic from people going to see the trolling, then Reddit is still making money.
You made me chuckle.
Here's the first paragraph from Cory's post:
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." Reddit is in step 4.
You're completely right from a user's perspective. I think this post from Cory Doctorow helps explain what we're seeing. He doesn't talk about Reddit specifically, but it should be easy to infer the implications for Reddit from what he writes: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
I'm a fan of his so I'd be double-delighted if he did an episode of LWT about Reddit. I'd be triple delighted if he worked in ActivityPub.
Would you want to be responsible for checking IDs over the internet? No sane company would want to be responsible for getting it wrong.
Also, would you be willing to send a scan of your drivers license to a porn website? Any website?