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> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads". There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still servin

by swed420 12d ago

> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads". There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads. > The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable. This vision is ripe for the picking: https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/ https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

WarmWash 12d ago
>Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable. What rubs me the wrong way about statements like this, is that it is almost always said by people who totally miss that they are advocating for things that are personally profitable for them. A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. That same end user, who detests the idea of having to spend money, then complains loudly that corporations just want their money. And it is completely lost on them they are playing the exact same game as corporations. The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. But that overwhelming is not what we see. Instead it is just two entities fighting over money, because they both have the same root motivation to maximize money.
- swed420 12d ago
  > A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. login wall != paywall As for your apples:oranges comparison about maximizing money, which group do you suppose has an unfair advantage these days? Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-have-upended-how-modern-capitalism-works.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h... (https://archive.is/wSmtd https://archive.is/wSmtd)
  - WarmWash 12d ago
    All the evidence in the world that corporations are greedy doesn't detract from the fact the end users are also greedy. It's all greed, all the ways down. I also can't read the article, not going to make an account, and I stand by not backdooring.
    - immibis2 12d ago
      What's wrong with that? Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible. If you aren't greedy while your adversary is greedy, you give up everything you have.
      - cindyllm 12d ago
        [dead]
      - WarmWash 12d ago
        The wrong part is fooling yourself that you are above those principles while actively devoting all your energy too them. And I'm not talking food, water, medicine here. I'm talking entertainment and general internet stuff.
        immibis2 12d ago
        If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right. The current global power imbalance was shaped to a large part by us not being greedy while the rich people were being greedy. It only resulted in them owning all of our stuff. It's about time we tried to own their stuff, to restore balance.
        WarmWash 12d ago
        >If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right. It transcends capitalism (or really free markets, I haven't bothered so far in this thread to make the distinction) and is just kind of base human behavior. You can watch animals in the wild and they have the same "maximally greedy" behavior. Your groundhog won't leave any carrots in your garden for you. Communism unwinds exactly because everyone is there little own min-max engine working to ultimately serve themselves (not to be confused with colloquial selfish behavior, group good can be in ones best interest). At least with free market capitalism, this idea is embraced and turned back on itself to act as the natural mediator. The friction of the mediation though, obviously, is pretty uncomfortable for everyone. And more over, worse for some more than others.
- 8note 12d ago
  profitable? whats the revenue and whats the expense? give an example of real money somebody makes by seeing a bad meme on twitter through xcancel
  - WarmWash 12d ago
    I can't write out here how economics works, how things have value, and how humans barter time and energy using abstractions like money. By virtue of people spending time on twitter, twitter has value. If that sentence is non-sensical to you, then now is not the time to for it.
- like_any_other 12d ago
  You neglect to consider that these social media websites were giant bait & switches - they were open-access to trick people into going there and making them popular, and only when they got enough network-effect lock-in, did they turn hostile. Morally equivalent to fraud.
  - spullara 12d ago
    this entire thing is about people that aren't even users of the service.
    - like_any_other 12d ago
      Users were affected in exactly the same way. And every user - i.e. poster - was first just a visitor. Much fewer would have become posters if they'd been greeted by a login wall that wanted an e-mail and phone-number.
      - spullara 12d ago
        i don't think there is a page on x that just gives you a login wall that a normal non-logged in user would go to. if you link to something like a tweet or a profile page it shows you them. these services are for scraping.
        like_any_other 12d ago
        Don't lie. When not logged in, if you visit someone's profile, X shows you only 5 tweets. If you visit a tweet, only 3 replies are visible. It's not "scraping" (which is perfectly fine and legal to scrape public content by the way) - you cannot read conversations or follow someone's posts in any meaningful capacity without logging in.
        spullara 11d ago
        it is legal if you can do it, doesn't mean they have to like it. keeping features for logged in seems super reasonable to me.
- lovich 12d ago
  I’m personally upset that the modern day companies have decided only extracting profit matters and not building a better product that makes people willing to pay. At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don’t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it’s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~50% of the time and its notifications page not registering my clicks and instead clicking on the page behind it. Or like Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers as another article today showed. Or the fact that activities in Windows that used to be lightning fast like searching or opening an application now take seconds to 10s of seconds. We’ve reached a point where companies are too entrenched in their monopolies and are currently in a mode of just figuring out how to extract as much rent as possible. The only companies I know of still in heavy competition are AI companies but they are doing the tried and true method of heavily subsidizing their business until they kill their competition and I have no doubt that whoever wins will switch over to rent extraction as well.
  - WarmWash 12d ago
    Read the story of vid.me, YouTube's only ever credible competitor. There is also nebula and curiosity stream, which also illustrate my point. Both solid good services with <1% conversion rates. There is no better service than YouTube while using an ad-blocker, and no amount of "awesome new platform" can break that. Most people's response to "YouTube sucks" is to ad-block on YouTube, not go to a competitor(and pay/view ads). It totally breaks the market and ultimately makes things shitty. That debt must be repaid somewhere.
    - immibis2 12d ago
      It's interesting to think about what is actually so good about YouTube. Is it being able to go to the homepage and see a bunch of stuff to click on? Nebula has that. I signed up to Nebula to support alternative platforms, yet I still click on YouTube all the time and not Nebula. Why is that? I'm not sure.
      - 12d ago
- vladgur 12d ago
  How does one not engage with the corporate product at all? Im typing a comment on a website of a corporation whose goal is to grow companies into corporations, via a computer manufactured by a corporation on a keyboard produced by a corporation, staring at a screen produced by a corporation, while connecting to an internet service offered by a corporation. Never mind that im also employed by a corporation, dressed by a corporation, drive a car manufactured by a corporation that takes fuel from a corporate gas station that is extracted and proccessed by a corporation. What is the alternative exactly
  - WarmWash 12d ago
    On some level there is local/small businesses. They are less efficient and hence you usually have to pay more for less, but it avoids the a lot of the "power structure" that people have strong distaste for. On a deeper level there is none. Overwhelmingly peoples complaint is that they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is, a shared annoyance that is just a fact of reality.
    - swed420 12d ago
      > they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is FLOSS invalidates that statement. Many people are happy to contribute to something greater than themselves. They also happily acknowledge they're standing on the shoulders of giants.
      - WarmWash 12d ago
        I'm not totally dismissive of FLOSS, but it's kind of a unique situation so you can't really extrapolate broad generalities about society from it. Software basically has zero marginal cost, and is pretty unique in that regard. If baking 1 loaf of bread was identical to baking 10,000,000 loafs, we would have solved hunger centuries ago... There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101), and one rung lower, an exercise in ego building ("my design runs on millions of computers daily" is definitely something a human would value). So I wouldn't call it completely selfless (we are now also at the boundary of the philosophy of "selfless acts"). But in short, there is a reason software is pretty much the only field with a vibrant "free/open source" scene. It falls off a cliff once more than pressing keys on a keyboard a few hours a week/month is involved.
- butlike 12d ago
  Well, to be fair, time is more valuable than money. You can't make more time.
  - scottyah 12d ago
    Scarcity is only one factor in a valuation. You can't make more of my boogers yet I doubt you'd trade any of your time or money for them haha.
    - butlike 12d ago
      True, but I can make my own boogers, and kind of do automatically, so that's pretty common. Some people get fecal transplants, which is rarer, but let's say if I want to build... I don't know, lets say a house. I can lay the bricks myself, which is a transaction against my lifespan (not just a transaction on a product of my body like boogers or fecal matter), or I can hire you. When you're hired, I essentially get two lives since I can do life things at a rate of 2x while you remain employed. I guess the real value comes in buying your time, not necessarily the product of 'you.' Life is both scarce AND irreplaceable, which is why the valuation is so high.
- pennomi 12d ago
  Advocating for demonetization of a service is not the same as trying to maximize personal profits. Maybe not everything in the world is about money.
  - WarmWash 12d ago
    No, it's about value. Money is just a convenient abstraction of time and energy. Basically everyone, all the time, is focused on min-maxing their time and energy (optimally is another question, hah). These are both fundamentally scarce things and likewise have intrinsic value to everyone. If you spend time reading an article or watching a YouTube video, it defacto has value to you, and the creator of it spent both time and energy making it. And just like that, there is a market.
    - Dylan16807 12d ago
      And when the creator decided to make that free to access, it's improper for a company to throw up a wall in front of it.
      - WarmWash 12d ago
        I think you might be confused, because any creator can make their content free to access. If they are playing in someone else's house, yeah there might be rules they don't like, but it's also not their house. Nothing stops creators from self-hosting and absorbing the full cost themselves.Yt doesn't even care if you link to your own hosted version of the video on their platform.
        Dylan16807 12d ago
        I meant what I said. Companies are allowed to be rude to everyone but it's still bad for them to be rude.
        WarmWash 12d ago
        Rude that they don't give you free unencumbered access?
- GolfPopper 12d ago
  >The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. This is difficult to do when corporations control elements of the public sphere and the proceed to run them in such a way as to maximize profits but to the disadvantage of the public. In its infancy, I recall frequent descriptions of Twitter as the "new public square". A company doesn't get to have its cake and eat it, too. If something that is a public good is operated to maximize private profits instead of the public good, there's going to be conflict with the public. Perhaps what we need is a broader classification of utilities, and then run them for public benefit rather than private profit, so the citizenry truly can choose to live their lives as something other than rural hermits without engaging with for-profit corporations.
- Dylan16807 12d ago
  I do not "immensely" benefit from free access to servers that will relay public microposts. I don't think my accesses even cost X a dollar per year. I would happily step in with my own server to replace 10x or even 100x the server resources I consume if it was possible. And if it was actually expensive they should be jumping at a way to make it possible.
  - kalleboo 11d ago
    I remember when you paid your ISP for internet access and in that cost they also provided you with an e-mail address, they ran a Usenet server for their customers, and gave you space for web hosting. Now all of that is expected to be paid for with ads instead.
    - abustamam 11d ago
      Im too young to remember this but it would be an interesting idea if ISPs paid website hosts (kinda like cable companies pay networks based on viewership) The privacy implications of this are many, but the idea itself could be interesting.
      - psd1 11d ago
        That battle was called "net neutrality", and the reason we who lost it fought it was to prevent web 2.0 becoming a set of giant moated properties.
      - fuzzfactor 11d ago
        That's creative and could probably be crafted so it turns out better than it is now. OTOH how about commercial websites paying ISPs for access to the ISP's valuable customers' eyeballs? And structuring it so that it more than covers everything, then the ISPs can pay the non-commercial websites to be there. If nothing else but to have an abundance of relief for tired eyeballs :) If the average commercial websites aren't rolling in the dough well enough to afford supporting the non-commerical, what are they doing there anyway, find some that are ;)

by swed420 12d ago

WarmWash 12d ago

>Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable. What rubs me the wrong way about statements like this, is that it is almost always said by people who totally miss that they are advocating for things that are personally profitable for them. A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. That same end user, who detests the idea of having to spend money, then complains loudly that corporations just want their money. And it is completely lost on them they are playing the exact same game as corporations. The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. But that overwhelming is not what we see. Instead it is just two entities fighting over money, because they both have the same root motivation to maximize money.

swed420 12d ago
> A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. login wall != paywall As for your apples:oranges comparison about maximizing money, which group do you suppose has an unfair advantage these days? Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-have-upended-how-modern-capitalism-works.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h... (https://archive.is/wSmtd https://archive.is/wSmtd)
- WarmWash 12d ago
  All the evidence in the world that corporations are greedy doesn't detract from the fact the end users are also greedy. It's all greed, all the ways down. I also can't read the article, not going to make an account, and I stand by not backdooring.
  - immibis2 12d ago
    What's wrong with that? Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible. If you aren't greedy while your adversary is greedy, you give up everything you have.
    - cindyllm 12d ago
      [dead]
    - WarmWash 12d ago
      The wrong part is fooling yourself that you are above those principles while actively devoting all your energy too them. And I'm not talking food, water, medicine here. I'm talking entertainment and general internet stuff.
      - immibis2 12d ago
        If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right. The current global power imbalance was shaped to a large part by us not being greedy while the rich people were being greedy. It only resulted in them owning all of our stuff. It's about time we tried to own their stuff, to restore balance.
        WarmWash 12d ago
        >If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right. It transcends capitalism (or really free markets, I haven't bothered so far in this thread to make the distinction) and is just kind of base human behavior. You can watch animals in the wild and they have the same "maximally greedy" behavior. Your groundhog won't leave any carrots in your garden for you. Communism unwinds exactly because everyone is there little own min-max engine working to ultimately serve themselves (not to be confused with colloquial selfish behavior, group good can be in ones best interest). At least with free market capitalism, this idea is embraced and turned back on itself to act as the natural mediator. The friction of the mediation though, obviously, is pretty uncomfortable for everyone. And more over, worse for some more than others.
8note 12d ago
profitable? whats the revenue and whats the expense? give an example of real money somebody makes by seeing a bad meme on twitter through xcancel
- WarmWash 12d ago
  I can't write out here how economics works, how things have value, and how humans barter time and energy using abstractions like money. By virtue of people spending time on twitter, twitter has value. If that sentence is non-sensical to you, then now is not the time to for it.
like_any_other 12d ago
You neglect to consider that these social media websites were giant bait & switches - they were open-access to trick people into going there and making them popular, and only when they got enough network-effect lock-in, did they turn hostile. Morally equivalent to fraud.
- spullara 12d ago
  this entire thing is about people that aren't even users of the service.
  - like_any_other 12d ago
    Users were affected in exactly the same way. And every user - i.e. poster - was first just a visitor. Much fewer would have become posters if they'd been greeted by a login wall that wanted an e-mail and phone-number.
    - spullara 12d ago
      i don't think there is a page on x that just gives you a login wall that a normal non-logged in user would go to. if you link to something like a tweet or a profile page it shows you them. these services are for scraping.
      - like_any_other 12d ago
        Don't lie. When not logged in, if you visit someone's profile, X shows you only 5 tweets. If you visit a tweet, only 3 replies are visible. It's not "scraping" (which is perfectly fine and legal to scrape public content by the way) - you cannot read conversations or follow someone's posts in any meaningful capacity without logging in.
        spullara 11d ago
        it is legal if you can do it, doesn't mean they have to like it. keeping features for logged in seems super reasonable to me.
lovich 12d ago
I’m personally upset that the modern day companies have decided only extracting profit matters and not building a better product that makes people willing to pay. At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don’t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it’s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~50% of the time and its notifications page not registering my clicks and instead clicking on the page behind it. Or like Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers as another article today showed. Or the fact that activities in Windows that used to be lightning fast like searching or opening an application now take seconds to 10s of seconds. We’ve reached a point where companies are too entrenched in their monopolies and are currently in a mode of just figuring out how to extract as much rent as possible. The only companies I know of still in heavy competition are AI companies but they are doing the tried and true method of heavily subsidizing their business until they kill their competition and I have no doubt that whoever wins will switch over to rent extraction as well.
- WarmWash 12d ago
  Read the story of vid.me, YouTube's only ever credible competitor. There is also nebula and curiosity stream, which also illustrate my point. Both solid good services with <1% conversion rates. There is no better service than YouTube while using an ad-blocker, and no amount of "awesome new platform" can break that. Most people's response to "YouTube sucks" is to ad-block on YouTube, not go to a competitor(and pay/view ads). It totally breaks the market and ultimately makes things shitty. That debt must be repaid somewhere.
  - immibis2 12d ago
    It's interesting to think about what is actually so good about YouTube. Is it being able to go to the homepage and see a bunch of stuff to click on? Nebula has that. I signed up to Nebula to support alternative platforms, yet I still click on YouTube all the time and not Nebula. Why is that? I'm not sure.
    - 12d ago
vladgur 12d ago
How does one not engage with the corporate product at all? Im typing a comment on a website of a corporation whose goal is to grow companies into corporations, via a computer manufactured by a corporation on a keyboard produced by a corporation, staring at a screen produced by a corporation, while connecting to an internet service offered by a corporation. Never mind that im also employed by a corporation, dressed by a corporation, drive a car manufactured by a corporation that takes fuel from a corporate gas station that is extracted and proccessed by a corporation. What is the alternative exactly
- WarmWash 12d ago
  On some level there is local/small businesses. They are less efficient and hence you usually have to pay more for less, but it avoids the a lot of the "power structure" that people have strong distaste for. On a deeper level there is none. Overwhelmingly peoples complaint is that they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is, a shared annoyance that is just a fact of reality.
  - swed420 12d ago
    > they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is FLOSS invalidates that statement. Many people are happy to contribute to something greater than themselves. They also happily acknowledge they're standing on the shoulders of giants.
    - WarmWash 12d ago
      I'm not totally dismissive of FLOSS, but it's kind of a unique situation so you can't really extrapolate broad generalities about society from it. Software basically has zero marginal cost, and is pretty unique in that regard. If baking 1 loaf of bread was identical to baking 10,000,000 loafs, we would have solved hunger centuries ago... There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101), and one rung lower, an exercise in ego building ("my design runs on millions of computers daily" is definitely something a human would value). So I wouldn't call it completely selfless (we are now also at the boundary of the philosophy of "selfless acts"). But in short, there is a reason software is pretty much the only field with a vibrant "free/open source" scene. It falls off a cliff once more than pressing keys on a keyboard a few hours a week/month is involved.
butlike 12d ago
Well, to be fair, time is more valuable than money. You can't make more time.
- scottyah 12d ago
  Scarcity is only one factor in a valuation. You can't make more of my boogers yet I doubt you'd trade any of your time or money for them haha.
  - butlike 12d ago
    True, but I can make my own boogers, and kind of do automatically, so that's pretty common. Some people get fecal transplants, which is rarer, but let's say if I want to build... I don't know, lets say a house. I can lay the bricks myself, which is a transaction against my lifespan (not just a transaction on a product of my body like boogers or fecal matter), or I can hire you. When you're hired, I essentially get two lives since I can do life things at a rate of 2x while you remain employed. I guess the real value comes in buying your time, not necessarily the product of 'you.' Life is both scarce AND irreplaceable, which is why the valuation is so high.
pennomi 12d ago
Advocating for demonetization of a service is not the same as trying to maximize personal profits. Maybe not everything in the world is about money.
- WarmWash 12d ago
  No, it's about value. Money is just a convenient abstraction of time and energy. Basically everyone, all the time, is focused on min-maxing their time and energy (optimally is another question, hah). These are both fundamentally scarce things and likewise have intrinsic value to everyone. If you spend time reading an article or watching a YouTube video, it defacto has value to you, and the creator of it spent both time and energy making it. And just like that, there is a market.
  - Dylan16807 12d ago
    And when the creator decided to make that free to access, it's improper for a company to throw up a wall in front of it.
    - WarmWash 12d ago
      I think you might be confused, because any creator can make their content free to access. If they are playing in someone else's house, yeah there might be rules they don't like, but it's also not their house. Nothing stops creators from self-hosting and absorbing the full cost themselves.Yt doesn't even care if you link to your own hosted version of the video on their platform.
      - Dylan16807 12d ago
        I meant what I said. Companies are allowed to be rude to everyone but it's still bad for them to be rude.
        WarmWash 12d ago
        Rude that they don't give you free unencumbered access?
GolfPopper 12d ago
>The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. This is difficult to do when corporations control elements of the public sphere and the proceed to run them in such a way as to maximize profits but to the disadvantage of the public. In its infancy, I recall frequent descriptions of Twitter as the "new public square". A company doesn't get to have its cake and eat it, too. If something that is a public good is operated to maximize private profits instead of the public good, there's going to be conflict with the public. Perhaps what we need is a broader classification of utilities, and then run them for public benefit rather than private profit, so the citizenry truly can choose to live their lives as something other than rural hermits without engaging with for-profit corporations.
Dylan16807 12d ago
I do not "immensely" benefit from free access to servers that will relay public microposts. I don't think my accesses even cost X a dollar per year. I would happily step in with my own server to replace 10x or even 100x the server resources I consume if it was possible. And if it was actually expensive they should be jumping at a way to make it possible.
- kalleboo 11d ago
  I remember when you paid your ISP for internet access and in that cost they also provided you with an e-mail address, they ran a Usenet server for their customers, and gave you space for web hosting. Now all of that is expected to be paid for with ads instead.
  - abustamam 11d ago
    Im too young to remember this but it would be an interesting idea if ISPs paid website hosts (kinda like cable companies pay networks based on viewership) The privacy implications of this are many, but the idea itself could be interesting.
    - psd1 11d ago
      That battle was called "net neutrality", and the reason we who lost it fought it was to prevent web 2.0 becoming a set of giant moated properties.
    - fuzzfactor 11d ago
      That's creative and could probably be crafted so it turns out better than it is now. OTOH how about commercial websites paying ISPs for access to the ISP's valuable customers' eyeballs? And structuring it so that it more than covers everything, then the ISPs can pay the non-commercial websites to be there. If nothing else but to have an abundance of relief for tired eyeballs :) If the average commercial websites aren't rolling in the dough well enough to afford supporting the non-commerical, what are they doing there anyway, find some that are ;)