A strange game. Only winning move is not to play.

Ok - so while I’m not ‘boycotting’ America, because I don’t really think that’s going to change anything, I’d much rather spend my energy focusing on my local community. But having said that, I don’t either understand or subscribe to certain U.S American cultural tropes such as:

• Driving oversized gas guzzling cars everywhere and believing it’s freedom.
• Nuclear family values.
• Rampant exceptionalism (granted, I live in Sweden and we have our own flavor of it - hate it here as well)
• Zealous Christianity. Religions should be abolished.
• Out of control late-stage capitalism backed by military. But I’m a anarco-syndicalist so pretty much every country sucks.
• The American Dream. Connected to the above. It’s not going to trickle down. Ever.
• Shitty polyarchical political system designed for the ‘elite’ and ‘weath of the nation’ (but again, I’m an anarchist, so everywhere sucks)
• Obesity and fast food culture.
• Everyday racism. The U.S is supposed to be the New World melting pot of cultures, showing us old world Europeans how it’s done. Seems that didn’t work.
• Enshittification of the Internet. Lack of anti-trust, lack of trade union power and lack of worker agency have all but destroyed the promise of early Internet. We have surveillance capitalism instead.

There’s not much I can do about them though. Except to act in my local community, and to tell my kids and anyone listening: There are better ways to live and better ideals to aim for.

And you’re right, of course. The original American culture is very much worth preserving.

Lemmy is the software. There are many servers with different moderation policies. There are some leftwing servers and there are some rightwing ones. Join a community that fits your personal preference

What is even “American culture” apart from mash-up of worlds immigrant cultures?

You are correct about the awareness part. Sometimes I forget that people make tech choices a big part of their identities (like being an “Apple user”) and fixing problems becomes a social cost, more than a technical or privacy choice.

While I always love a good privacy tantrum and throwing your toys out of the pram, I don’t really get why there has to be a public announcement of ”switching”.

But I guess it’s his blog, so whatever. Wish him the best of luck with the new HP 2-in-1. Hope he remembered to turn off all the tracking features in his Ubuntu.

I can’t see how you can get that far ahead without screwing over someone else, or leaving someone you should have brought along behind.

Like I said, I don’t know him so I really don’t know the circumstances and I don’t know the details of his deal - but he, or his investors have employed 40 people to work with the channel. I’d assume they are all salaried and some of them seem to be straight from school - so apart from capital exhange (which, as I pointed out, is ideological differenre)I don’t really see the abuse like you do. But again, I don’t know the circumstances.

And I hate when those in positions to resist it, become part of the problem instead.

So this is more of the key for me, or more interesting talking point anyway. Being on YouTube is part of the problem, because YouTube is monopolistic surveilance platform driven by advertising money. But many science communicators choose YouTube over, say community owned Nebula, because of business reasons (CGP Gray and Kurzgesagt were part of the founding members, but left in favor of YouTube). And the amount of people who choose fedi alternatives PeerTube are not even comparable - without robust ad-networks fueling creators, there doesn’t seem to be very many alternative options.

That’s a problem.

Sure. It just depends on which lens you view it through. You’re obviously looking through a very anti-capitalist lens that puts employees and community in center. That’s fine. It’s probably hard to see the “success” in that. Some other people might view it the ultra-capitalist, “traditional American way” - making the dream, looking out for number one and someone cashing out after years of hard work is exactly the measure of success they’re looking for.

I’m not saying your view is wrong. In fact, I’m well on your side of it.

But I can’t say he made a wrong call. He’s an individual and I don’t know him. I’ve enjoyed his videos, but he doesn’t owe me anything. It’s his company, his channel, his call.
He sold out. Probably made a shit ton of cash and is laughing all the way to the bank. Good for him. I wish him the best.

But as I said in my first post, I am constantly amazed how advertising money runs the Internet. And THAT, my anti-capitalist friend, is something that I really, really HATE.

Three years ago, yeah. That what the ”he should enjoy his success” part meant.

And he goes through all of this in the video.

It’s a fool’s errand unfortunately. Users stay in spaces because their friends and social circles are there. It doesn’t really matter how shitty the platform becomes. The social cost of moving is just too high.

The solution is interoperability and some regulation. Unfortunately we have neither. All you can do is inform your mom about the dangers and teach her to recognise propaganda and abuse.

Would recommend reading Cory Doctorow’s book ”Enshittification”

It was just a general observation of how the Internet is completely financed by advertising. When it comes to Derek and his channel, I’m happy he has success, it’s one of the best channels on the whole platform.

i’m always amazed by the amount of money that Youtube produces, but good for Derek, he should enjoy his success.

I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements.

I think lot of that is embedded in the privacy communities/movement, so it gets easily overlooked as a separate part, even though most of the time it actually is the cause of the disease. Many times it’s just easier to treat the symptoms (“just install adblocker, bro”) because the real cure is to topple the entire system and challenge our late stage capitalism. That tends to be a bit too much for a “normie” who doesn’t necessarily even see the constant flow of ads as a problem and even if they do, installing a browser plugin tends to be “lol, too much work”

I tend to agree. We won’t have any “content creators” because it’s so hard to monetize fedi - and that’s a good thing! Instead we have people who post stuff they like and are interested in. It’s far better system. No ads, no “influencing”.

However, it would be great if we could create a better model for sharing hosting costs somehow - bandwidth and servers are not cheap when serving video. Donations work to an extent, but it’s always a shaky system based on kindness of select few.

I know. I meant it as a potential model for income (a platform owned by creators collective), it was just an example

Surely the ability to pay for things exists already in many forms/platforms.

But one thing that’s missing is central financing from the platform itself. The “big tech” is running wild with advertising money and this is what fuels the rapid growth.

Things like Nebula seem to work (creator owned business that offers paid subscriptions), but I’m not sure how many Nebula-exclusive creators there are, I have a feeling most of them publish stuff on YouTube as well.

Mastodon and Lemmy communities work on donations, but most of them just trundle along barely covering hosting costs.

I guess, in theory, it would be possible to create a PeerTube/Loops server that monetizes everything with ads, but I’m a bit skeptical of that unless you have very deep start-up VC money behind you to get you off the ground.

We’ve had micropayment/-donation sites like Flattr, but it never took off for real.

I think the core problem is trying to make people to pay for the content/service/membership. Most don’t. I don’t think that would change even if the option was integrated into platforms.

Evolution of Homo Sapiens was inevitable which means destruction of the entire habitat and all species in it is also unavoidable.

Fuck yeah Samurai, I’m awake, let’s go!

It’s not a question of belief