For example, I spent years on Reddit happily arguing with wrong people, deriving my "value" from just having fun interacting with folks about stuff. The server resources that Reddit expended supporting that were fairly trivial in dollar terms. [...] Instead Reddit hired 2000 staff for some reason
They hired 2000 staff because they were running one of the most highly-trafficked websites on the Internet, with hundreds of millions of users, something which unsurprisingly takes quite a lot of people to administer and maintain. Were Reddit to not invest in people and resources to keep the website running at that scale, you would not be able to use it in the way you enjoy and it would have nowhere near as much utility to you.
This is the entire point of the article that you missed - there are a shit-ton of costs in running a massive community that have to come from somewhere. Your approach is "well I don't think those costs are necessary". But they are.
You don't have to be a Randroid or a libertarian, or even right wing, to understand that a discourse predicated on everyone getting everything for free with no real trade-off doesn't really make sense in the real world.
It gives my partner absolutely banging migraines in more than tiny quantities. I find it gives me huge cravings for junk food about an hour or two after drinking it.
No trying to be explicitly contrarian, but the EEE strategy (embrace, extend, extinguish) is well known by this point and it always ended up with the open standard not being used anymore and falling into irrelevance (as it happened to XMPP after google and Facebook embraced).
XMPP was irrelevant before Google and Facebook had anything to do with it.
Gotta say I have no love for the big leftist subs but that's a pretty cheap shot.
Their choosing to purchase luxuries, in a world where luxuries must be paid for in a system they didn't design, choose or want to live under, doesn't negate that they are opposed to capitalism.
If you want to argue that they're possibly a bit too sanguine about the prospect of their favourite luxuries existing under communism or whatever, fair enough. But that's a separate argument from whether they're stupid to pay money for stuff that makes them happy.
In addition to games, which is one of the primary reasons I use my PC, I don't like LibreOffice and I don't like the big Linux desktop environments that exist and I can't be bothered to sort through the smaller ones to find one I vibe with, when I'm perfectly happy with Windows as a desktop OS.
That furry spam was infuriating. Especially since on Kbin, you have to navigate to the specific domain itself using the Kbin interface, which means seeing more furry porn.
While it's just annoying in the case of furries getting to shove their fetish in peoples' faces, it poses a serious issue in case there's a domain that starts posting less-than-legal porn or whatever - in some jurisdictions, even having that in your browser cache is a crime, so specifically having to look at all the content from such a domain is... sub-optimal.
They hired 2000 staff because they were running one of the most highly-trafficked websites on the Internet, with hundreds of millions of users, something which unsurprisingly takes quite a lot of people to administer and maintain. Were Reddit to not invest in people and resources to keep the website running at that scale, you would not be able to use it in the way you enjoy and it would have nowhere near as much utility to you.
This is the entire point of the article that you missed - there are a shit-ton of costs in running a massive community that have to come from somewhere. Your approach is "well I don't think those costs are necessary". But they are.
You really couldn't be more wrong.
You don't have to be a Randroid or a libertarian, or even right wing, to understand that a discourse predicated on everyone getting everything for free with no real trade-off doesn't really make sense in the real world.
For context, Instagram has two BILLION users. Facebook has just shy of three billion.
Mastodon has a total of ten million.
It gives my partner absolutely banging migraines in more than tiny quantities. I find it gives me huge cravings for junk food about an hour or two after drinking it.
I'd be happy if it disappeared.
You've literally quoted two industry bodies who have a vested interest in keeping aspartame on the market.
Should have thought about that before you started treating them like serfs.
ODF has been supported natively by Office for years now, and LibreOffice is able to open .docx files just fine.
I've never found a PDF "broken by Adobes bs".
XMPP was irrelevant before Google and Facebook had anything to do with it.
What else do you expect them to do? Say "oh yeah I guess a bunch of guys on fedi say we are arseholes, so we must be"?
I mean... realistically, why would that be their fault if they were to start a fedi instance and everyone else blocked them?
That kind of oversells what bias they might have.
They're well known as a reputable and honest polling organisation, regardless of their origins.
YouGov is a top-tier reputable polling company that weights its samples to avoid any such confounding factors.
Proton can't run a lot of the games I want to play and like to play.
Nobody. But they want to have Reddit coins to reward people who do things they like. So they have to pay for them to satisfy that want.
They might also pay for pizza, beer and cinema tickets too. Same difference.
Gotta say I have no love for the big leftist subs but that's a pretty cheap shot.
Their choosing to purchase luxuries, in a world where luxuries must be paid for in a system they didn't design, choose or want to live under, doesn't negate that they are opposed to capitalism.
If you want to argue that they're possibly a bit too sanguine about the prospect of their favourite luxuries existing under communism or whatever, fair enough. But that's a separate argument from whether they're stupid to pay money for stuff that makes them happy.
This is one of the key issues with the entire Fediverse setup and it's not one there are any good answers to.
Not least since it makes being on the biggest instance objectively the best experience, this defeating the point of decentralisation.
In addition to games, which is one of the primary reasons I use my PC, I don't like LibreOffice and I don't like the big Linux desktop environments that exist and I can't be bothered to sort through the smaller ones to find one I vibe with, when I'm perfectly happy with Windows as a desktop OS.
WSL offers the best of both worlds.
That furry spam was infuriating. Especially since on Kbin, you have to navigate to the specific domain itself using the Kbin interface, which means seeing more furry porn.
While it's just annoying in the case of furries getting to shove their fetish in peoples' faces, it poses a serious issue in case there's a domain that starts posting less-than-legal porn or whatever - in some jurisdictions, even having that in your browser cache is a crime, so specifically having to look at all the content from such a domain is... sub-optimal.
It was unfair for the lettuce, which still hasn't recovered.
Emotionally anyway. Career wise, it's doing much better.
Interesting assfuck.
That is all.