“When the committee held an initial hearing on broadband permitting streamlining, including a draft of the American Broadband Deployment Act, no state or local government was invited to testify.”

If you’d like to make your feelings known on this omission and the bill in general, here are the members of that committee - clicking on a rep will give you their contact information.

Agreed again. If I wanted folks IRL to know what I post, I’d be on Facebook. Reddit’s value to posters was its anonymity. Without it, there’s no reason to use it over its centralized competitors in the social media space.

I totally hear you there and agree with you re: the business choices Spez made. Reddit lost a 20 year contributor when I walked away, and even if they rolled back all the changes, I won’t be returning.

I was more looking at applying your suggestions to a fresh publishing model, as your ideas intrigued me (having run a publishing forum in the days of the early internet). I want to have a space on the internet where content creators can keep ownership of their content and get adequately paid for publishing - I think properly run, it could become a vital hub for our cultural legacy (as Reddit was, albeit clumsily and destructively). The incoming revenue is the biggest challenge, which is why I focused on that element.

Some users will pay if you have a paywall, but only if you already have a substantial amount of content they want to access. This works for a search engine crawling pre-existing content, but not so well for a forum style site like Reddit, where most of the content creation is driven by engagement with other content. If you reduce the engagement rate (aka through a paywall), you’re actually reducing your incoming content in the long run (something we’re seeing on Reddit after the blackout).

I don’t know what the ultimate solution here is, but I really do like your payout concept with Monero. If I did build another publishing attempt, it’s something I’d try to implement if I could get the incoming revenue to support it.

Excellent points. That being said, Reddit will never pay contributors. They have never had interest in quality of the content on the platform, only it’s engagement rate - the years of publishing subs like jailbait and The_Donald speak to that. Engagement, now that they’ve got a critical mass of users and 20 years worth of content, can be maintained with bots, sockpuppet accounts, and reposts (all of which have become the course du jour for the front page and /r/all since the API revolt began)… at least until they go IPO, after which it’s not their problem anymore.

The biggest problem with online publishing is that without that critical mass of readership, it’s very difficult to become profitable enough to pay your contributors. Reddit’s never gotten to this point, even with millions of users. It’s my hope that with contributors moving off of Reddit, we’ll see new publishing models appear that utilize some of the excellent ideas you’ve outlined above. I particularly like the suggestion of using Monero as a currency to ensure anonymity.

Tying voting to currency is an interesting idea, but I think that voting should be free, as my experience running forums is that only about 10% of your viewers will care enough to vote, and maybe 10% of those choose to post actual content. Putting a paywall in front of voting will kill engagement. However, limiting the number of free votes an account gets per day, then allowing people to buy more votes with currency, and earn currency for posting content could work very well if run correctly. The trick is balancing the actual profit you make off of the contribution with the need to pay your contributors, and here it becomes a question of determining the proper margins and payouts.

The other problem is that the only real revenue source outside of the users of the site is going to be Google Adwords or a similar platform (unless you go for ancillary streams of revenue, like attaching an e-commerce store to the site). If you charge for access to the content, you’re killing your engagement. I haven’t used Adwords for awhile now, but when I did the payouts were absolutely abysmal (like less than a penny per click). They were so bad that it wasn’t even worth dedicating the visual real estate to put up the ads.

Ultimately, this is the same challenge traditional publishing has had for a long time. It’s generally unprofitable unless you have a runaway hit or ancillary streams of revenue (like syndication deals with other media types) - most of the actual content almost never makes money, which is why so much of our traditional media is paid for by advertising and subsequently controlled by corporate interests.

Damn, now that’s a deal. I may have to jump on this one - that’s cheaper than I’ve ever seen them on Steam, and it looks like Steam keys are included in the bundle.

They’re doing it because it worked in the 90s. Different companies involved, but same ballgame, same playbook.

Here’s some relevant info from a Reddit post 6 years ago from Bruce Kushnick, well known for his activism and writing on the topic:

I’ve been tracking the telco deployments of fiber optics since 1991 when they were announced as something called the Information Superhighway. The plan was to have America be the first fiber optic country – and each phone company went to their state commissions and legislatures and got tax breaks and rate increases to fund these ‘utility’ network upgrades that were supposed to replace the existing copper wires with fiber optics – starting in 1992. And it was all a con. As a former senior telecom analyst (and the telcos my clients) i realized that they had submitted fraudulent cost models, and fabricated the deployment plans. The first book, 1998, laid out some of the history “The Unauthorized Bio” with foreword by Dr. Bob Metcalfe (co-inventor of Ethernet networking). I then released “$200 Billion Broadband Scandal” in 2005, which gave the details as by then more than 1/2 of America should have been completed – but wasn’t. And the mergers to make the companies larger were also supposed to bring broadband-- but didn’t. I updated the book in 2015 “The Book of Broken Promises $400 Billion broadband Scandal and Free the Net”, but realized that there were other scams along side this – like manipulating the accounting.

We paid about 9 times for upgrades to fiber for home or schools and we got nothing to show for it – about $4000-7000 per household (though it varies by state and telco). By 2017 it’s over 1/2 trillion.

Finally, I note. These are not “ISPs”; they are state utility telecommunications companies that were able to take over the other businesses (like ISPs) thanks to the FCC under Mike Powell, now the head of the cable association. They got away with it because they could create a fake history that reporters and politicians kept repeating. No state has ever done a full audit of the monies collected in the name of broadband; no state ever went back and reduced rates or held the companies accountable. And no company ever ‘outed’ the other companies-- i.e., Verizon NJ never said that AT&T California didn’t do the upgrades. --that’s because they all did it, more or less. I do note that Verizon at least rolled out some fiber. AT&T pulled a bait and switch and deployed U-Verse over the aging copper wires (with a ‘fiber node’ within 1/2 mile from the location).

Here’s a direct link to the PDF of his book,The Book of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal & Free the Net that he still provides for free from his website, www.irregulators.org.

For reference sake, here’s the link to his post on the bad place. Note I usually try to use better sourcing than Reddit, but Google’s search on this topic is either flailing or details on how this went down have undergone an active scrubbing attempt.

Old school upvote and boost for the Angband and Hack links.

JFC that’s frightening. It blew that red at about 30mph, didn’t even really slow down except for the curve.

Satan. With energy prices going up, and a whole lot of new faces for the fires, he had to make up the difference somehow.

Let’s start a sewing club together, so we can SEW YOUR DAMN MOUTH SHUT

Lmao. Great to see the IP looking so good, and the gameplay looks really fun. Armored Core remains my favorite mech IP - it hits that sweet spot between Mechwarrior and Robotech style mechs, merging the heavy impact feel of the former with the speed and grace of the latter, and the mech crafting has been best in class since the PS2 days. Can’t wait to see multiplayer in action.

Nah, not intimidated. More that I ran a sizeable forum in the past and I know what what a pain in the ass this kind of content can be to deal with. That’s why I was asking about automated tools to deal with it. The forum I ran got targeted by a bunch of Turkish hackers, and their one of their attack techniques involved a wave of spambot accounts trying to post crap content. I wasn’t intimidated (fought them for about two years straight), but by the end of it I was exhausted to the point where it just wasn’t worth it anymore. An automated CSAM filter would have made a huge difference, but this was over a decade ago and those tools weren’t around.

Thanks -that’s the detail I was looking for. Definitely food for thought.

Thanks for the comment - I wasn’t aware of a cloudflare controversy in play, and went through your links and the associated wikipedia page. It’s interesting to me, as someone who previously ran a public forum, to see them struggle with the same issues surrounding hate speech I did on a larger scale.

I agree with your thoughts on a centralized service having that much power, although Cloudfare does have a number of competitors, so I’m not quite seeing the risk here, save for the fact that Cloudfare appears to be the only one offering CSAM filtering (will have to dig in further to confirm). The ActivityPub blocking for particular instances is concerning, but I don’t see a source on that - do you have more detail?

However, I disagree with your statement on handling non-solicited content - from personal experience, I can confidently state that there are some things that get submitted that you just shouldn’t subject another human too, even if it’s only to determine whether or not it should be deleted. CSAM falls under this category in my book. Having a system in place that keeps you and your moderators from having to deal with it is invaluable to a small instance owner.

Sweet - thanks - that’s a brilliant tool. Bookmarked.

This is one of the reasons I’m hesitant to start my own instance - the moderation load expands exponentially as you scale, and without some sort of automated tool to keep CSAM content from being posted in the first place, I can only see the problem increasing. I’m curious to see if anyone knows of lemmy or mastodon moderation tools that could help here.

That being said, it’s worth noting that the same Standford research team reviewed Twitter and found the same dynamic in play, so this isn’t a problem unique to Mastodon. The ugly thing is that Twitter has (or had) a team to deal with this, and yet:

“The investigation discovered problems with Twitter’s CSAM detection mechanisms and we reported this issue to NCMEC in April, but the problem continued,” says the team. “Having no remaining Trust and Safety contacts at Twitter, we approached a third-party intermediary to arrange a briefing. Twitter was informed of the problem, and the issue appears to have been resolved as of May 20.”

Research such as this is about to become far harder—or at any rate far more expensive—following Elon Musk’s decision to start charging $42,000 per month for its previously free API. The Stanford Internet Observatory, indeed, has recently been forced to stop using the enterprise-level of the tool; the free version is said to provide read-only access, and there are concerns that researchers will be forced to delete data that was previously collected under agreement.

So going forward, such comparisons will be impossible because Twitter has locked down its API. So yes, the Fediverse has a problem, the same one Twitter has, but Twitter is actively ignoring it while reducing transparency into future moderation.

Darktide.

It’s bad and I should feel bad for playing it, but once you get past the absurdly long load times, janky cutscenes, regular crashes and absolute lack of any story or plotline, it’s got remarkably addictive gameplay, and it’s the only game that actively encourages your inner fanatic to pick up their boltgun and chainsword and KILL THE HERETICS.

It’s like finding a kilo of PCP laced weed at the bottom of the dumpster behind the 7-11. I shouldn’t like it, and it will probably kill me, but for some reason I can’t stop smoking it.

Oh no.

Anyways, how’s Paladins doing?

I just did via http://chat.petals.ml/ - was interesting enough to transcribe and post the results, although it did crash once I got deeper into the analysis due to rate limiting. It definitely has potential.

Too little, too late.

As a content creator who posted to Reddit since it began, the API blackout did more than drive me away from Reddit - it led me to discover the Fediverse. And it’s just so… much… better. No concerns about power tripping mods, endless pun threads, shadowbanning or obtuse rules. You interact with real people interested in what you post, not just bots and karma whores - even in the most popular threads. If a community turns sour, you just block them, and then follow the same themed community on another instance.

Reddit relied the thrill of contributing to a large audience to drive the desire to participate. This worked as long as it was the only and best game in town. Now they’ve broken that thrill by making it clear that any community that doesn’t contribute to Spez’s wallet isn’t welcome on Reddit. If this program had been in place, it might have blunted the exodus of content creators from Reddit, but trying to implement it now smacks of desperation.

Besides, Reddit isn’t profitable when their mods and contributors work for free. Expecting a power-tripping broke motherfucker to possibly pay me in the future for work I previously did for free for them is like expecting the rapture - it’s a nice thought in theory, but even if it does happen, you’re probably not gonna like how it turns out.

Holy crap he looks old now. The last picture I saw of him he had a full head of hair.

This is article is pretty much clickbait, as it doesn’t count Gamepass players. However, I absolutely agree that the game had core issues which were completely bungled at launch, and prevented it from maintaining its player base. Chief amongst these were horrible desynch and the choice to remove collision, which made melee combat a game of whackamole - you’d literally smash a player with a hammer, and as you’re smashing, they’d pass through you and hit you from behind. Trying to play competitively was an exercise in frustration, compounded by the lack of customization and microtransactions.

It’s a pity, because it’s a beautiful game and the PVE open world was excellent (although limited in scope). If they ever reinstate collision and fix the desynch issues, I might play again, but after beating the campaign there was no reason to keep playing while the PVP was in such a poor state.