apparently, the path to profitability was “shamelessly sell out on AI hype bullshit”

As of 2019 the company published 100 articles each day produced by 3,000 outside contributors who were paid little or nothing.[52] This business model, in place since 2010,[53] “changed their reputation from being a respectable business publication to a content farm”, according to Damon Kiesow, the Knight Chair in digital editing and producing at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.[52] Similarly, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab deemed Forbes “a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism” as of 2022.[49]

they realized that they could just become an SEO farm/content mill and churn out absurd numbers of articles while paying people table scraps or nothing at all, and they’ve never changed

It’s been just a week since US telecom regulators announced a formal inquiry into broadband data caps, and the docket is filling up with comments from users who say they shouldn’t have to pay overage charges for using their Internet service. The docket has about 190 comments so far, nearly all from individual broadband customers.

Federal Communications Commission dockets are usually populated with filings from telecom companies, advocacy groups, and other organizations, but some attract comments from individual users of telecom services. The data cap docket probably won’t break any records given that the FCC has fielded many millions of comments on net neutrality, but it currently tops the agency’s list of most active proceedings based on the number of filings in the past 30 days.

The FCC will surely hear from many groups with different views on data caps, but Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel seems particularly keen on factoring consumer sentiment into the data-cap proceeding. When it announced the inquiry last week, Rosenworcel’s office published 600 consumer complaints about data caps that Internet users recently filed.

“During the last year, nearly 3,000 people have gotten so aggravated by data caps on their Internet service that they have reached out to the Federal Communications Commission to register their frustration,” Rosenworcel said last week. “We are listening. Today, we start an inquiry into the state of data caps. We want to shine a light on what they mean for Internet service for consumers across the country.”

who knew that removing the block feature and “Twitter’s new ToS says all disputes will be heard in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas located in Tarrant County (Tesla investor Reed O’Connor’s court)” were not going to be winners among the remaining userbase

Aside for all his pedophile view points, he is correct about infantilizing 12-17 year olds.

…you’re just repeating my point back to me, and why Stallman is the worst mouthpiece for this position.

It kind of reminds me of ASD symptoms, not reading social cues properly, etc.

i know you mean well but, respectfully: having autism or another disorder (if Stallman even does) is probably not the reason why Richard Stallman has historically defended what amounts to pedophilia; why he continues to defend bestiality and necrophilia; and why he has extremely malformed opinions on what constitutes sexual harassment and sexual assault. and even if it is, that’s an explanation and nothing more. it does not excuse or make acceptable his behavior or the consistency with which it has skeeved other people out. he deserves to be strongly rebuked, as anyone else would, for his refusal to take accountability in this situation.

Agreed that he himself isn’t particularly relevant, but his supporters are still very influential in some areas of the open source community.

hilariously you can see some of the reflexive defense of him over in the FOSS thread of this article. way too many people feel obliged to run defense for this guy and it’s just cringeworthy to watch

i mean, whom among us has not said such things, without retraction, as:

Cody Wilson [who at the time of his charging was 30] has been charged with “sexual assault” on a “child” after a session with a sex worker of age 16. […] The article refers to the sex worker as a “child”, but that is not so. Elsewhere it has been published that she is 16 years old. That is late adolescence, not childhood. Calling teenagers “children” encourages treating teenagers as children, a harmful practice which retards their development into capable adults.

Mere possession of child pornography should not be a crime at all. To prosecute people for possessing something published, no matter what it may be, is a big threat to human rights.

A national campaign seeks to make all US states prohibit sex between humans and nonhuman animals. This campaign seems to be sheer bull-headed prudery, using the perverse assumption that sex between a human and an animal hurts the animal. That’s true for some ways of having sex, and false for others. For instance, I’ve heard that some women get dogs to lick them off. That doesn’t hurt the dog at all. Why should it be prohibited?

and whom among us has not had to retract such positions as:

There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.

these are obviously positions that everyone would take the fall for if they had a blog.

Not defending pedophiles, but

you are about to defend pedophilia. rethink this and stop talking.

there was a time when 13 was considered adult.

and? Stallman is not talking about a previous time at any point here. also: that previous time was bad anyways. why would we want to–especially with respect to age of consent–go back to considering 13-year olds and younger to be adults? they cannot meaningfully consent to sexual relations with adults; it’s just child abuse. all of this is why Stallman’s words are abhorrent.

It’s still legal for teenagers to marry in most countries.

Stallman is not talking about teenagers. he explicitly distinguishes children (again, people <13 for him) from teenagers (people 13-17).

An anonymous hit job

it’s literally his own words all the way down here. if it’s a “hit job” it’s entirely Stallman’s own fault for being a freak with morally abhorrent takes. one of the first things mentioned here is that he had to retract the position that “voluntarily pedophilia” doesn’t harm children (a category of person he defines as anyone under about 13)! any reasonable person would find this abhorrent and Stallman a horrible person for ever having defended said position in the first place, because it is genuinely abhorrent to defend something like that. that’s just child abuse.

he’s not particularly relevant at this point, but even this one note (and its retraction) feel like they should put to bed whether or not Richard Stallman should have any influence over anything:

Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.

I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.

[Many years after posting this note, I had conversations with people who had been sexually abused as children and had suffered harmful effects. These conversations eventually convinced me that the practice is harmful and adults should not do it.]

like, bro, what are you doing. beyond being abhorrent, this is the sort of nonsense Reddit used to be infamous for and it made the website fucking rancid. why would anyone want to share a political movement with Stallman when he has to be debated out of positions like “you should not have sexual relations with people under the age of 13.”

the issue isn’t really with federating messages per se (that’s actually quite easy afaik, at least in federation terms), it’s with how to display them and everything associated with them. my understanding–based off of the fact that i’m working on a project where we’re having to fight how ActivityPub works, and how to display things is a big problem–is that ActivityPub is structured in a way you can be fast and loose with the stuff you’re federating, and it’s not a super big deal necessarily. but how it displays is a big deal, and that’s a total mess. and a lot of that mess begins with how Mastodon does stuff and the need to accommodate its choices (which i think are mostly bad for anything that isn’t microblogging, so non-microblog platforms have to design around it). it’s then amplified by differences in front-ends and clients, none of which can agree exactly on how to display or handle things, and some of which can’t/don’t display certain things at all and create differing user experiences as a result.

how Mastodon handles content warnings, for instance, is a big problem. functionally it’s just a details tag and i think in ActivityPub it’s literally just a “summary” field. but the field is–in addition to being used as a details tag, a readmore, and a summary field–primarily used as the load bearing content warning functionality on Mastodon. so everything has to kind of assume the field will be used the way Mastodon uses it, which is… an issue, to say the least. obviously, not everything can handle that (or wants to handle that) the same way by design, so you get a bunch of differing ways to display the field that might not even contextually make sense for what’s in it.

that’s what the issue is with translating from Mastodon-to-Lemmy and vice versa, and likewise would probably be the difficulty with translating stuff from forum-to-Lemmy even in a best-case scenario. i’m not even sure what the best way to handle our conversation would be, for example, since forums are often chronological/basically never indent replies/exchanges, but Reddit-alikes like Lemmy allow for different ways of sorting thread replies and do indent exchanges.

interoperability is the problem with this. what “integration with the fediverse” means practically for novel forms of software is “handling a trillion really annoying edge cases that Mastodon created for every other thing that isn’t Mastodon.” Lemmy, for example, handles interoperation with Mastodon incredibly poorly (and vice versa). you can do it, but for meaningful interaction it’s not very good. and forums have their own sets of edge cases that would probably make, say, forum-to-Lemmy interoperation a giant mess.

i mean my first layer of contention is that Substack is even a “journalism platform” for “independent creators” and not just a gentrified blogging platform like Medium, with a corresponding lack of vision in who it exists for and what it should be good at doing.

like, there are some actual journalists on there, yeah, but a lot of them are literally paid to use the platform/overlook the fact that it won’t do basic moderation like “banning fascists” (because the owners believe in the same technolibertarian nonsense as every other major platform). they wouldn’t be there at all without monetary incentives, which induce network effect and lock people into the infrastructure. and the scope creep is already real with Substack’s features, just like with whatever the hell Medium was doing 5-6 years ago. it’s trying to be an Everything App―even though nobody asked for that―and still the only things it does well are things that are basic functionality it can lift from elsewhere.

we clearly took a wrong turn somewhere because “less a journalism platform and more a payment system for creators” is nauseating on like 5 different levels

there is a comment on the article to this effect, for what that’s worth:

Angel

Hello Kris,

A lovely idea, but I won’t be visiting any public bathhouse any time soon. For many of us, the pandemic isn’t over. It’s contagious, airborne, and still killing and disabling people (including healthy people who have previously been infected and been ok) every day. Some ways to address the transmission of covid in bath houses can include rigorous HEPA filtration; required testing (using LAMP tests, for example, which are €10/test once you have the machine to read the results (another few hundred euro), and you can pool several people in one test); and maybe masks (I’ve read that they don’t work if they get wet, but I also read an article where someone tested several and went swimming with them. From memory, a regular Aura (~€1) worked nearly as long as an intentionally waterproof model). None of these are cheap by my standards. Not sure what you do about warts, foot fungus, and many other common bath house diseases.

Thanks, Angel

basically, put it this way: if a cop stops you and asks you for your phone–what are you realistically going to do in that situation the moment they don’t respect your “no” and begin to pressure you, threaten you, and decide to throw the legal book at you (however dubious) for saying no? for most people, the answer is going to be “just give up the phone and start complying with the cop” even though that is not something the cop should be able to do. because at the end of the day they have a gun, and can put you in jail (or at least make your day hellish) more-or-less unilaterally, with very little recourse for you unless you want to do expensive litigation.

But if we’re talking about a law that actually says the cop cannot take your phone no matter what, and they do, then any public defender would be able to point it out and the judge would certainly have to enforce it. I can’t think of a way the cop would abuse their power because, in this case they don’t have it.

they can abuse their power because they’re a cop, with a badge and gun, and the right to maim or literally kill you with it (and probably get away with it even if it’s not strictly legal) if you don’t comply with their demands in the moment. again: cops consistently do not care about or follow legal procedures they’re supposed to, frequently fuck up those procedures even when they do, and most cops probably don’t even think of it as their job to secure some airtight case that stands up to legal scrutiny. it’s not a profession that lend itself to the kind of charitability that’s being given here, and the record of the profession makes it even less deserving of that charitability.