Basically, title, here is a link to the Reddit thread for people curious: https://archive.ph/6mObB
I’m quite surprised with the neutral to positive reactions, which also show that some people will probably never leave Reddit.
In a few years it will be 9.99$, then 19.99$, 32.99$ ect. Congratulations to those who power capitalism
As a conservative (by Danish standards, in the US I would probably be centrist and probably vote for the Democrats) I would say that capitalism doesn’t work well for every case in a society. In the olden days, people would meet in the town square and use the village posters.
Those local communities has largely been replaced by the internet today, and whereas the old communities was run by itself with its people taking ownership and responsibility for it with the incentive to make the community as good as possible, today the communities are largely owned by companies with a profit drive. In these new communities the incentive for the owner (the company) is not to create the best possible community, but to extract the most money from it.
I would say that pure capitalism would be to the detriment to a society. Capitalism is more a product of liberalism (where I am not using the definition of liberalism that most Americans would, but the “correct” definition) than it is a product of conservatism.
I think there’s nothing liberal about this. I can decide not to attend a community anymore but the alternatives (as here) will always be shadowed by these capitals, advertising, bot factories, which make it difficult, if not impossible, to have a valid alternative, this is monopolization, that, forced by individuals, becomes fascism.
What I am arguing is that capitalism and (classic) liberalism goes more hand in hand than capitalism and classic conservatism. Also, liberalism does not guarantee nor guarantee the lack of monopolies. Monopolies are the result of economics and the industry’s fixed and variable costs.
That being said, I do agree that monopolism is generally bad for society, as it reduces economic welfare (look it up) by generally reducing consumer surplus while increasing monopolist profit by a lower amount, thus creating a dead weight gap.
As a last point, somewhat unrelated, I think that it is an insult to the victims of fascism to call anything you don’t like fascism. I know you are not alone with the comparison, but I wish people would stop sorting people as either people they like or fascists. I think that people sometimes forget that the world isn’t inhabited entirely by saints and fascists.
I hope you have a great Sunday evening though :)
In the olden days, it would have been the church and the local nobles calling the shots on the local community forum, staging a witch-hunt or a public hanging event to keep the topics within desired boundaries and squeezing money, engagement and thus community power towards certain projects and not others.
I agree with the idea of your post commenting on today’s situation in capitalism, but disagree with the imo romanticised idea of how a community forum in the past would have functioned more independent and self-organising
It’s not about the money, though. If it was, they would have just said “third-party API access now requires Reddit Gold”, and a bunch of us would still have stayed there, giving them more money (and content) than they are making now.
Instead, it’s about fundamentally remaking the site to actively drive conversations toward things people pay to hype, and not have those conversations spring up organically. Steering traffic is much harder to do when it can be accessed through third parties.
They don’t want users creating content around what interests them. They want to charge users to interact with content that advertisers pay to host.
I was a very heavy Apollo user. I was ALREADY paying monthly for it and if Reddit would have released a reasonable API charge structure and worked with devs, I’d have been happy to pay more for it because I used it every day.
They shot themselves in the foot trying to create a walled garden, now it’s just bots complementing each other in weirdly verbose comments back and forth.
so if there was an oxygen tax, would you be happy to pay for that? i think this is the problem, the reason why those who can keep the system for the balls (Pay me ten cents for this comment).
This is an odd take.
I don’t mind paying for services that I use that give me information and fun, especially one that I used daily (I pay $10/mo for streaming services I use maybe once or twice weekly).
I DO mind when they decide to gouge and disrespect the user base. IMO, THAT’S the issue in today’s market - profits above all else, including your customers.
Services aren’t free. Servers cost money. I get it. If I am a heavy user, I don’t mind paying a reasonable price for it (that reasonable price being close to the 2-5 a month I was already giving to the developer at the time.)
Narwhal just recently released Narwhal2, basically a revamped version of their app with some Apollo features. They are also going to be moving to a subscription service and will have 3 tiers based on api usage
I got shouted down pretty intensely when relay announced they’d be doing this, and I mentioned it’d been a good run but I was jumping ship, especially vitriolic against the mention of lemmy lol
i’d used relay for a decade, was a bit sad
