What a brilliant way to put it, “theft from the public domain”. I’m gonna have to remember that one.

I’m not against nuclear power, but could they have concocted a worse set of motivations? Restarting Three Mile Island to power Microsoft’s AI ambitions? Shit reads like something a super villan would cook up.

The filibuster has never really been a thought out and considered rule of the senate so much as a fluke of debate rules. It’s basically just a loop hole noone has wanted to close since the first senate. Noone’s made it easier so much as debate rules have streamlined and the filibuster along with them.

Fuck it, I’d welcome an invasion at this point provided whatever country did it super pinky promised not to do half the shit Republicans do.

I’ve also ran into some issues simply accessing youtube through my vpn, but that’s been going on for a while.

Absolutely. So much of the right wing media space is inhabited by, funded by, and glorifies grifters that they’ve created a constant chunk of their audience that is vulnerable to their tactics. Values or policy prescriptions don’t even really need to come into it, if you are a grifter it’s just a smart business decision to start drifting to the right. It opens up those audiences to you because you are “one of them”.

There’s also just no creativity. I’m pretty sure I saw a new “let’s go Brandon” sign out and about recently. By this point that is very nearly a three year old meme. Like, I’m not really surprised that they can’t do better, but it’s a little telling that they come up with one thing they think is “good” and stuck with it basically though Biden’s entire presidency. “Creatively bankrupt” does not even begin to describe it.

A little off topic but I’m kinda new to Linux myself, why do you dislike Gnome?

This… this is news to people?

That’s not a dumb question. Of the ones you listed I’ve only ever used Obsidian and Notepad++. I’m not sure notepad++ can do that, but Obsidian can I think. Obsidian has a core plugin (expansions made and supported by the developers that ship with the program by default) that allows for audio recording and embedding in your notes. I think that by default you have to go and turn it on in settings, but once you’ve done that you should be good to go.

This is why they’re losing advertisers left right and center.

Fixed that for you.

I’m already planning to. I run Windows 10 and as soon as that stops receiveing security support (or really as soon as I have the time) I’m gonna be swapping over to Linux for good.

Think that’s where it started actually.

Eh, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. As people have said above the infinite free money is drying up. That’s a fact that all these corporations have to contend with. The only difference between Twitter and Facebook or Unity and Google is that Twitter and Unity have made their dumb decisions already. Facebook, Google, and others have navigated this fairly well so far. But they are feeling the same pressures that Reddit and Unity did and eventually they will bend to them too.

Obviously not a lawyer, but I’m not 100% certain that the billing terms would stand up to legal scrutiny. It’s been kinda hard to keep up with this story so my apologies if any of this is wrong, but I believe that they said they were wanting to use an “aggregate proprietary model” to determine downloads. What that basically means (I think) is “we’ll tell you how much you have to pay us but we can’t independently justify any individual charge”.

Again, I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know of anything off the top of my head that’d make that illegal, but it also doesn’t really feel like it’d square with how things work. I mean if companies could just make up a number and say you owe them that much without being able to say why or whether or not that number comports in any way with reality, then what’s stopping every company from doing that? What’s stopping a magazine for example from coming back to you and saying “Yes, you paid us for the magazine. But our proprietary aggregate model that totally reflects reality promise tm suggests that you might have shown that magazine to two or three other people after you purchased it from us. So that means you have to pay us three instances of the review licence fee.”?

I don’t know. Obviously this is all scuzzy and morally wrong. It’s just that even factoring in that this is a subscription service and that they are a corporation with an army of lawyers who’ll likely win any challenge to it, I can’t really shake the feeling that there’s something fundamentally legally wrong about that aspect of it in particular that wouldn’t hold up in court. Even for them.

There’s a part of me that legitimately wonders how far Twitter could go as an influncer bubble. Granted this is unlikely to happen but if everyone who’s not an influencer just left for Mastodon and Twitter just became a hollow shell of influencers trying to sell products to customers who just aren’t there, how far would Twitter’s inerta carry it before anyone realized?

Honestly the FTC should be handing out antitrust suits like candy. Late stage capitalism has created a bit of a target rich environment, if only the FTC could take advantage.

It’s like Elon has read every book with an evil corporation in it and decided to make it his whole ascetic. X corp, sounds like the big bad that some plucky band of YA book protagonists have to team up to take down.

Ok so this is just desperate right? Like chasing 3rd party devs off could theoretically force more people to use their app, the reddit gold thing could be them paving the way to put in something more abusive. But this? Hoping to annoy your users to the point that they’ll pay you a ransom to make you stop? How is this anything other than embarrassingly desperate?

I also feel like Reddit skewed slightly more towards this demographic then a lot of other social media sites did. Like that’s not to say that you didn’t have this demographic on Facebook or Twitter, but Reddit always felt (to me at least) like it more aligned with the sensibilities of this crowd in part because of some of the same factors mentioned above. So I think a lot of the folks who ended up here tended to be the techier edge of the already preexisting techie bias that existed on Reddit.