Lells

@DarkFox That’s good to hear, it wasn’t shitty enough as it was.

@Powderhorn @StenSaksTapir

Ad companies can’t handle the idea that people don’t want to be hit with ads every 5 minutes. “Well, it’s just BAD ads”… no, it’s having my experience constantly interrupted.

The ones who stay probably do see themselves as powerless, which is a pretty self-fulfilling prophecy.

…but most people with any shred of empathy would be pushing for that in his shoes.

Empathy? In late-stage capitalism? 😏

I mean, so… I’m a software engineer who used to specialize in automation. I ended up having a crisis of conscience decades back, realizing that I was putting people out of work. “Hey, good job on that project, our client can afford to let 30 people go now!” never really felt like great praise to me. It actually felt really really shitty knowing the work I was doing was making it possible for the “nobility” to further gain back control of the “serfs”.

I figured that the only way this could ever benefit society as a whole instead of shareholders and owners would be if we moved more to a society with things like UBI, with perhaps the people who end up getting something extra being the ones who actually DO the dirty jobs and provide actual worth to society, instead of becoming obscenely wealthy at the expense of empathy and good human spirit. Unfortunately, at least here in the states, anything that smacks of “socialism” automatically equals dictatorship (glossing over that capitalism offers just as many examples of being abused by the “ruling” class). So there’s the whole zeitgeist to battle against before the comfortable and less-informed majority will even listen to anything that’s in their best interest.

As you say, interesting times indeed. I’m not hopeful that we’ll see that sort of shift in my lifetime however, sigh…

Comments are heavily focused on the title of the article and the opening paragraphs. I’m more interested in peoples’ takes on the second half of the article, that highlights how the goals companies are touting are at odds with the most likely consequences of this trend.

Democracies work when the voting populace is educated and informed. Unfortunately, humanity willfully avoids being either in favor of opinion and bias.

Yeah, I can’t help but feel like, given his activism, he’d be right here with us.

If that happens, a lot of quality people leave the site, content suffers, more people leave, death spiral, you’re picked up by somebody at a dirt cheap valuation and they gut you for the nostalgia of what your brand used to mean, an expensive trophy because billionaires have the kind of money to play that petty. Meanwhile, new sites take your place and rinse, repeat, basically the history of the internet.