"Hey wanna hang out?"
"I can't sorry, a Catholic witch on the Internet was on her hands and knees crying begging me to live a tortured life and I felt bad telling her no"
Stop using Discord if you care for the internet. Seriously, Discord is the internet but privatized. It’s the precursor of the future of the internet that capitalists want. Access only available if you login. Search is useless for anything older than a week. Data not accessible to search engines, even on public servers. Need to use their bloated (web)app. Charges for basic functions. Stop 👏 using👏 Discord👏 What is wrong with good old forums.
And Twitter is going the same direction as Discord.
I'm okay with paying for Internet services if the price is right... I'm not okay with also getting milked (data mined) for profit in addition to paying.
Wasn't so long ago that someone would get laughed out of a room for taking the internet this seriously. People never planned for the inevitability of the internet being central to modern life, and, years later, here we are.
So, to whomever needs to hear it: Maybe start taking things like what this person is saying a little more seriously going forward.
Oh, dear child, you have already succumbed, you're part of the machine, and you don't even know it. 😔 "This form of the Internet" == you are a consumer, passively ingesting the content created by the few, big players who gatekeep the marketplace of ideas. This is the Internet the capitalists want; you're just grousing about the details of paying for it.
The old promise of revolutionary change on the Internet was the idea that it would be an all-to-all media, that the users would create the content, and shape the message. So if you want to fight what the Internet is becoming, stop fighting the capitalists on their own turf. They don't care if some people pirate their stuff, as long as the money rolls in from the masses.
The best the can possibly happen if you teach everybody to pirate is to destroy the funding for content creation. Then all that will be left is the propaganda, the political ads, the messages pushed by somebody for ulterior motives. Unless...
Unless we teach the children to break that paradigm altogether. A person can live a happy life without any Hulu shows, or YouTube algorithms, or AAA games. Really. Become the creators. Leave the corporate walled gardens for the open, peer-to-peer Internet.
Or don't. It's hard, I know. Just don't pretend that your Jellyfin server means you've broken free of the system.
Fuckin’ A on this one. Think about how much companies make with entirely artificial scarcity. You can only add 1 license to this, you can only watch on one TV unless you pay us $15 a month. It costs $200 to change where you are in the database table for this flight. Complete bullshit and we need to see it for what it is and stop it. I love how she says all that will be left in their wake is dull capitalists. Exactly. Stop playing their games. Play your game.
So basically "Don't pay a fee to use a product or service".
I imagine this guy advocates for sneaking onto trains without paying the fare too, and shoplifting, etc. right?
Does he think products and services are magically free just because they're provided through a computer rather than over a counter, and that business shouldn't be allowed to charge money for them?
I get that this guy would rather go back to an internet where ad sales can pay for everything, but that's just not viable for a lot of people now. Heck, many online services today didn't even exist the way they do now 20 years ago, such as Netflix, and wouldn't ever have been viable funded by ad sales alone.
Should we just stop innovating and growing as a society, stop offering new goods and services because they're not viable in an ad sales only marketplace?
Plus, I bet this guy uses an ad blocker too, as most people that talk like this do. If he's actively fighting the very financial foundation he's advocating that we should go back to, what's his end game? How does he see this actually working?
What's his plan for how we're should fund all these global businesses and products and so on? Can't charge money, can't passively fund free at point of use services using ad and anonymous marketing data.... are businesses just supposed to print their own money?
Look, I don't love how expensive a lot of these products and services are, I totally get why people pirate stuff, and I don't like how the world wide web itself is becoming more of a small selection of walled garden services vs the millions of cool web pages and forums and such it used to be. That's a deeper problem outside of this scope granted, but I think this guy longs for those days a little too, and that's part of why he's rebelling against modern online businesses.
I'm not saying every company handles charging for their products well, or that they're affordable (but what is these days), look at Adobe for example. Or look at Unity's recent crazy ideas.
I'm just saying that simply advocating for a boycott of businesses for having the audacity to charge money for a service that costs money to provide is, well, shortsighted to say the least.
These aren't local government services paid for and provided free at point of use by our tax pounds like healthcare or the fire brigade, these are businesses - often global - that need to make money to survive (and yes I know a lot of them funnel too much of those profits to those who don't deserve it rather than their staff, but that's a whole other problem).
Yes, I long for a post scarcity, money free, star trek style society where everybody works for free just because they're passionate about what they do and want to create and share cool things, without actually needing to work to survive or thrive. I would LOVE that. But that civilisation doesn't exist for us yet, and we can't expect one portion of it - the Internet - to become that all on its own in a vacuum.
this post is 100% right, anyway stop buying phones, you don't need them.
I wish to go even further.
If you can't pirate it, it's not worth the money to rent it
I only disagree when it comes to paying creators for their content. I pay for a single streaming service, and that's just because it directly supports the people running the service and making the content.
I'm more than happy to pay creators more or less directly for content, but I'm definitely not supporting shit services like Hulu and Netflix.
lesbian-moon-gf is a goddess of curmudgeonry and I am now her high priestess
I recently setup magnetico and tuned its crawling to not be super disruptive to my network (ISP's shitty router doesn't have enough RAM to maintain a stateful firewall for NAT for all the sockets magnetico likes to open).
And slowly, I've been accumulating torrent hashes. In a couple of months, I'm up to 118k+. I've considered trying to merge in other people's magnetico databases. The point is to maintain my own search for torrents to avoid the the whack-a-mole that stupid governments play with torrent search sites.
A buddy of mine swears by usenet and uses a pretty cheap option for access.
All of that said about piracy: Support creators in your life. Cut off parasites.
Wish I could get my dad to get this. I tell him I use an adblocker, he says why? He's never been bothered by it. His generation grew up in a technologically inconvenient time that he now glorifies today's streaming services, not seeing how they are enshittified. It's sad and I wish I could get him to understand.
Not being able to use every server emoji on Discord is actually a good safeguard for NSFW spamming, because when trolls have to pay to be obnoxious, they usually stop doing it.
I agree on the premise as a whole, though. Our entire lives are getting enshittified with subscription models, designed to prey on those who forget to cancel or otherwise don't have the means or knowledge to get rid of it
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Self host on your desktop or laptop. Freedom is yours in FOSS.
Fun fact, waterfox or other GECKO browsers let you open YT in browser mode which cannot detect if your phone screen is on or not.
Inspiring plead
For every person with the discipline to ignore subscription based services there are hundreds who go "but I don't get ads if I do"
We need more texts like these. Different people respond to different kinds of content/appeals. I personally very much agree with this but I think some people would reject the entire idea because they might draw their line at piracy; which can be shifted, and I think that's why we need way more of these messages
This post has a !unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org feel to it.
Amen!
The issue is that some countries punish torrenting copyrighted material harshly. Like from fines to prison sentence, harshly. Because its a P2P connection, you're not only a consumer but also a distributor. And your ISP is fully obligated to give up your traffic data to the authorities, if asked. Almost everybody I know, knows a guy who had to pay +$3000 fines for downloading songs or movies trough torrent. The alternatives are hosting sites. But let's be honest, a 1080p fully length movie is upwards of 2GB, and most hosting sites either limit you to 500MB per day or give you a download speed of 100KB/s. Of course you could pay for a premium account, but A, this will leave a paper trail, and B, there are more hosting sites than streaming services, and the prices are somewhat the same. So for people in these countries it is not viable to just pirate everything.
Maybe this is a hot take, but this post is very entitled. Custom server emojis and using a video platform for audio only while your phone is sleeping as basic features? You can be annoyed that these are the features they chose to be premium or you can be annoyed by how much premium costs, but you are hardly missing out on the standard experience without them. Frankly, there are better choices to complain about being premium, but compared to the past the amount of stuff we can get from the internet for free at great convenience is incredible.
Also, piracy is easy. If you use the platform a lot and don't want to pay you can often get a premium or better experience with a bit of time invested for some setup. I use xManager for Spotify and ReVanced for Youtube. Both give me an ad-free experience for free and are more customizable than the legit application. ReVanced especially allows me to get rid of a lot of the UI I don't use, change input actions, skip sponsor/intro/afk segments, and a lot more. There might be something for Tiktok too now but I haven't looked.
Tiktok being able to display videos on desktop but not images is simultaneously hilarious and sad. It's baffling. Like why? How?
I pat for discord nitro so that I can stream netflix in 1080p to my friends who don't have it
Great summary and the guideline of my online life...
