I don’t know how important this is to users of Vivaldi, and I don’t know how good Vivaldi can make their blocker by middle of next year, but this may force me to Firefox. Or maybe someone makes a local proxy like in the old days to do ad blocking Idk.

I mean, not so much to me. You need to pay for something somehow, either via ads or money.

I can’t see why you’d pay for a service that still had ads? It’s why I’ve never gotten cable - if I’m paying, I don’t want ads.

I’m not sure that you’re not underestimating the cost for these sorts of services. The only long running sort of social media (BBS) I know of that is and has been for decades straight pay for access is The WELL. And they need to charge $15 a month.

https://www.well.com/join/pricing/

Of course, they’re not anywhere near the scale of Facebook, but they are similar to a mid sized fediverse server from what I can tell. I honestly think the actual thing going on is most people find value in a free service, but don’t find enough value to pay what it’d cost to make it a straightforward pay for service business.

I think this is showing both how much your data is worth, and what it costs to actually run / use these services. People don’t want to pay, but I’ve always thought pay for a service was a potentially much less shitty business model. However, instead what we often get now is both pay for a service and still privacy invasion / selling our data. And who’s going to trust Facebook here?

Yea, except doesn’t Facebook etc often make it pretty easy - no demand, just pay us some fee and we’ll give you data? I mean, Google and Facebook are just selling the data. From what I recall hearing, the phone companies give away location data pretty similarly too. It’s not a constitutional issue if you “voluntarily” give data to a third party and they’re just willingly selling that - whether it’s to another company, individual or the government.

The problem in the US is that the mail is kind of special, I just wish it wasn’t. If our government paid a company, it’d just be the same as us paying a company, and we’d still get ads, just Facebook or whoever would also get a huge government check. Not what I’d say a success or improvement.

Of course, that just says more about how bad the government is really. I just think charity (donations) is a horrible and unreliable way to run any sort of “needed service” (for a given definition of needed).

I wouldn’t want a government agency running social media for obvious reasons but a government giving out grants or the equivalent of a crown corp.

It just seems kind of weird to me the instinctive distrust of government for social media but complete acceptance of them for roads, physical mail, and other public services. Or maybe I’m just missing something. I mean, it’s not like the companies are showing amazing efficiency and results here.

This happened with our ambulance service - the volunteers dried up, and so we had to put it in our taxes. There was a donation push to get us to the next tax year, but then it’s something we all pay for to have an ambulance available.

with the power to identify and criminally sanction users.

I think in so far as people are in the jurisdiction of a given government, they generally can identify social media users already, and if they choose criminally sanction these people. In the US I’d argue the government would be far more bound by First Ammendment issues than any corporation. And you have far more redress against the government when they screw up than the current “you agree to binding arbitration” from companies. Which… honestly… says something crappy about our tort law and T&Cs allowed. My main point is that I don’t actually think social media or discussion boards are a public good. I think it should be federated like e-mail (and the fediverse) but otherwise you can choose the provider you like. This seems like the best option IMO.

If it’s a public good the government should run it, but I seriously doubt most people think of it like roads. We don’t even think of internet access as a utility.

I honestly think the only way this could work is like email. So you either take the gmail like privacy destruction and ads, or you pay for a service. Back in the day it was bundled by the ISP, but now I think it’s way more likely to end up being some bundled ‘online service’ company that for a monthly fee provided a swath of federated content and services. But that it hasn’t sprung up implies that it’s not a workable model.

Next problem, there’s a good reason we all chose cloud. Even huge corps realized it would save them a ton of money to switch from their expensive private datacenters and staff. They were already paying money to some bomb shelter style server host, now they are just doing it virtually. And your engineers no longer have to drive out to wipe drives or replug wires, it’s all perfectly managed

This part is just not true. Many companies are moving things back in house because of the cloud costs, along with how poorly the cloud actually turns out to be managed (at least the Microsoft one that most companies used for e-mail and collaboration). And the cloud never got easy enough to not need specialized employees, and in many cases, they’re more expensive than “on prem” employees were because it was the hot new buzzword for a while.

I can go into lots of technical details, but it’s worth pointing out that many huge corps are doing hybrid and using the cloud strictly for burst usage because the constant state costs are way way way cheaper if you own the servers. Which kind of makes sense - if you need a car for 2 days a year, you rent, but if you use it for hours a day, you buy.

You might think this, and I bought into it. Then I saw the recent Azure and M365 issues and responses to cloud security and nation state hacking of gov cloud stuff with consumer outlook accounts. I realized the cloud providers have all the incentive to sell that they hire better people because of economies of scale and do more things than you might locally, but in reality to outsource everything to the cheapest bidder in a different low cost of living country.

Businesses who have a clue and a budget actually also have a need for local data control IMHO. Look at the hacking case with M365. And there’s decent local collaboration software too - wikis, things like syncthing, some of the newer 0 trust stuff.

Let’s face it, the thing the cloud is good for is serving up completely public websites.

But there’s the rub. Right now the “principle” here is basically being a luddite to me. I don’t see a big moral quandary - I see a contract dispute between 2 well funded groups regarding voluntary employment. And a demonstration of why Unions might be good for workers.

Isn’t animated content the precursor for this? Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse ‘live forever’. We might also take a little from recast characters over time like James Bond, The Doctor, Captain Kirk, Superman…

I guess if we mean actors separate from characters it’s a little different. Though I think wr still might take something from Bugs Bunny who’s been in various shows, movies etc. And the famous part is the character, you have to be a big Bugs Bunny nerd to know or car about who is doing the voice or animation or writing really. So that might well be where we go - the character is tied to the brand / company that owns it but no particular person.

I don’t think there’s gonna be a big backlash really. This may make actual actors in movies like the etsy handcrafted stuff vs the knock off brand on Amazon, but both have a market. The “more expensive” real market might well shrink a lot and if you want to be an actor you’re back to actual stage performance.

I also think the kind if real-estate might just change. Instead of buying lunch every day and maybe drinks after, people might try a few times a year working from a resort or the like for a week and pay for that. You get half a vacation (weekends and nights) and work during the dat either in the businesses center or in the suite.

Yea, it’s clearly not about just money, because they could have fed ads via the API, or made it part of reddit premium for the user to keep using the API ad free. I can’t say how many people would have rage quite anyway, but the way they’re doing it doesn’t give anyone who likes other apps any reason to pay reddit money, that’s for sure. And does inspire people to leave.

I hesitate to say I have all these ideas that would have worked better because I haven’t seen their research on their existing premium paid product or expected conversion rates for API access (at per user monthly subs), so maybe the research says they’ve got ALL the paying members they’ll ever get and they need to force ever more ads instead for money - but given they’ve had years and years to think about this and have tried almost nothing makes me think they’re either very unimaginative or just are bad at innovation or even just trying stuff other people already have except for tunnel vision on ads.

I would imagine the same laws that apply to email servers or voip services or any other existing federated service like usenet…

I mean it’s also true that they could just have read the web pages, but the API actually cost reddit less than rendering the full web page for all the data.