Removed by mod

Thanks for the reply! I think I understand your arguments pretty well now, Thanks for the clarification.

On the subject of “Free as in Freedom” - I don’t agree that a site is ‘not free’ if non-anonymous user membership is a requirement for adding content. Primarily because all sorts of bad actors would abuse that privilege. But that’s not the main thrust of your argument so let’s set that aside.

Your main concern, about the Wikimedia foundation “doing very little,” and concerns about fairness, doesn’t seem to hold much weight from my perspective. The entire point of the wiki project is to leverage subject matter experts from the public rather than curated work from in-house people. Not only is a comprehensive and current encyclopedia of Wikipedia’s scale impractical to produce in-house, it’s also far less valuable. The Wikimedia foundation solicits funds for additional wiki projects, site hosting, and community events. Hosting a site in the top 10 traffic list is horrifically expensive, and worth the expense. Spending their time, effort, and funding on ancillary efforts around that goal is fine with me, Even in a hypothetical situation where only 10% of the solicited funds went to site hosting and 90% went to activism around using the site, I think I’d still be fine with it, given the altruistic nature of the project.

Donations to contributors would corrupt the entire process. Contributors would have an incentive to produce content that would financially reward them. We already have plenty of sites on the internet that do that, with all of the issues with bias that come with it. We don’t need more news sites, or lemmys, or substacks. We need a free place to compile information that is driven purely by the quest for truth, not money. Punditry for profit can go anywhere else. Indeed, recently the co-founder of wikipedia recently had their admin rights pulled for falsely accusing someone of the thing you’re wishing you could do, which tells me that they take the idea of direct contributor remuneration very seriously.

Lastly, I’m very aware of the corruption with 501c nonprofits. Frankly, your comments across this post have been full of veiled accusations of corruption. If it was that apparent, you’d be posting links with factual evidence of mismanagement, instead of vague hand-waving about freedom, IP, financial mismanagement or the abuse of volunteers. This is the kind of FUD that would get you banned from editing on Wikipedia, to be honest.

Edit: From your own source you linked elsewhere, the CTO has a very detailed rebuttal to the idea that the Wikimedia foundation is squandering those dollars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1123763881#Comment_by_Selena_Deckelmann,_Wikimedia_Foundation

I agree that those big banner ads were eyesores, and the pleas for money are off-putting. But that’s marketing, not politics.

Free as in beer? It can be free, but as Heinlein said: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

The whole point of Wikipedia is that the “IP” is freely given, for the benefit of all. Keep in mind wikipedia editors are challenged to remain purely factual, so the idea that anything stated there could possibly belong to someone doesn’t exactly make sense. You can own the rights to a process, or a song, or own the right to produce something, but the composition of an object, the technology driving an innovation, or the background of music theory are facts, and statements around them are part of public discourse.

In the sense that media is present on Wikipedia, I believe I’ve never seen a commercially-licenced piece of media on the site. That’s why all the pictures of celebrities are weird public snaps.

Is the editing and content creation process messy? Sometimes corrupted? Yes. That’s humanity for you. We fuck things up. It’s up to all of us to keep us honest and continue to improve. Things can be irredeemable or fully captured by commercial interest, sure - that’s a Reddit situation and it can be abandoned. Wikipedia isn’t that, and it’s old enough to have proven it won’t be captured in that way.

I think maybe you’re confused on how nonprofits work? Plenty of nonprofits have paid employees who are working there expressly for money. Sometimes lots of money. Because living under a capitalist system involves trading your time for labor. How else would the site be maintained and kept running? Wikipedia is the 10th-most visited website on the entire internet. That it would run at all on the labor of less than 100 people is fucking incredible and something to be thrilled about! In comparison, Reddit makes the world much worse than Wikipedia and it runs on ~2,000 employees. So I would say that the Wikimedia foundation is definitely not just like reddit.

What other stuff? Blocking anonymous proxies is okay with me given the volume of bullshit posted by anonymous people everywhere else. Non-anonymised posting on a website wholly dedicated to facts and not opinions seems like a good thing.

From the (very long) NYT article that dropped today about this:

• Epstein was likely money laundering for quite some time, Bank ignored red flags because the penalties would almost certainly be less than the profits from moving that much money around. This is the big reason why he didn’t get cut loose. I’m sure JPM was taking a cut on all the transfers of non-cash deposits (securities, etc) and also making money on the balance of accounts as they moved through their system (being laundered). Getting to trade on $1B while it’s being disbursed is a lot of why these “market makers” are so powerful. Critically, they’re supposed to be reporting on large cash withdrawls - if you or I pulled out $180k in a year in physical cash the feds would be coming by to see what was going on.
• Despite the potential bad optics of bankrolling a pedophile money launderer, They continued lending & consulting him because he got them add’l whale clients, including the CEO of Google (4B+ Customer) and business with highly profitable hedge funds
• When things became untenable (tried + convicted sex offender, serving 18 months in FLA) the senior exec who had been covering for him (and profiting from his referrals and money laundering) lobbied to keep him because he, himself, had been entrapped in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation (as a customer, obv).
• Once word of one of their seniors being Epstein’s pal became public JPM cut everyone loose. This is pretty routine behavior by wall street tbh. Crime until you’re caught.

Obviously trustworthy banks don’t enable money laundering, so he should really have been dropped in the 90’s/00’s. Certainly his '11 conviction should have been the end of it. Incarcerated white-collar criminals usually lose big after the first conviction because the revenue stream has dried up and the justice-averting lawyers can’t be paid. In this case, his contacts kept the money moving because they were embroiled in the same schemes.

Not that I agree, but if you believe that the LLMs will continuously improve, then in 5-10 years you may only need 1/3rd the seniors, to oversee and prompt. Again, that’s what these CEOs are relying on.

It’s a bad day to be a Putin apologist. How’s the weather in St. Petersburg today?

None of what you said is relevant or coherent. 9/11 was an attack against civilians by terrorists. This was an attack against military targets by state actors at war. NATO exists for soft and hard power projection, and to discourage intra-state conflict within Europe. Further, the weakness of the Russian Military as contrasted by their posturing has been stark. I don’t personally believe Russia remains a superpower, with their ability to project power now restricted to digital battlefields and hard power only adjacent to their borders.

Thanks for the direct quote, I appreciate you citing a source. The letter has quite a few grievances and meanders a bit, but at it’s core it’s really all about Islamic Eschatology - hastening the final day of judgement by sparking a worldwide holy war. The targets of Al Qaeda were basically “any target of opportunity” with a preference towards the west if possible. If (obviously impossible) Israel had suddenly reconciled and left all of Palestine, imo 9/11 would still have occurred and much of the antisemitic screed in the letter would still be there.

For me personally (as a secular, non-jewish westerner), I acknowledge the genocide occurring and the evil being done, and I think the sanewashing of the genocide further reinforces the absolute moral deprivation of those persecuting it.

Can you elaborate on how 9/11 was the fault of the Jewish occupation? It seems like your claim is “Terrorists were striking back in response to a series of aggressions dating back to 1948/even earlier Jewish transgressions” then I don’t buy it. Islamic eschatology is the reason for 9/11, combined with classic power struggles and posturing within that subculture.

I do agree that the settler movement and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is why Oct. 7th happened tho, 100%. Hamas is a terror organization fueled by Israel’s racist, ethnic cleansing movement. That dynamic is never going to be solved until Israel completes its inevitable genocide of the Palestinian people.

The server I subscribe to is completely transparent about their costs and displays how much lead time they have at their current spend. Per-user server cost is about $5 per year per paying user (as in, users that pay to keep the server running put in about $5, and there are many freeloaders). The admin to my knowledge doesn’t make any money on his labor.

To make $5/user in ads per year at a CPC of $0.38 or a CPM of $6 (twitter prices, which is being pretty generous for something as small as Lemmy) would mean I’d receive 833 ads per year. An ad runs until it’s CPM is hit, which means some of those ads would drag on for weeks until enough hapless fools clicked them. You might end up with one in five posts being an ad, leading to more adblocker use, which exacerbates your problem. It could end up being a significant cost to even deliver the ad content at that load.

This is all to make like $2k in hosting costs per year - imagine if you were trying to make a living running a Lemmy server, which people definitely will - it would be a hellscape. I’m happy to not deal with that.

So, some of this would occur but I can think of two reasons why it wouldn’t be a linear tradeoff. I dunno why but I decided to write a scroll about it, even tho nobody is gonna read it.

1. “Bare Essentials” are price competitive - Basic groceries like milk, eggs, dry goods, canned goods, etc., are produced by a large arrangement of producers, and also quasi-local (big ag owns all the farms, but certain farms produce for specific regions). This means that it’s hard to corner the market on these goods. Keep in mind brand-name foods collude to push against this price competition, but only to a certain extent because grocery store “value brands” can become irresistible if they’re half the price. The price of kraft mac and cheese is tethered to within a couple bucks of the value brand next to it on the shelf.

2. The “Not Bare Essentials” products (Entertainment [incl. Tourism, Dining], durable goods, luxury items and electronics) are produced by different corporations than the bare essentials groups. Megacorps like Amazon do have some stratification across the entire goods spectrum (mostly by reselling/market tolls) but they’re also exposed because the margins on the nonessentials are better because of issue #1. So a boycott of these groups would have a significant effect on all retail and retail-adjacent companies. That’s like 12 out of the top 20 companies in the US, roughly 3.2 trillion in revenue that could take a 20% hit to their balance sheet. That’s 2% of the US GDP out of those 20 companies alone, enough to flatten the GDP curve in a given year. That kind of effect would result in a panic among global decision-makers.

However, there are major issues with the ‘buy nothing boycott’ plan:

1. the idea of getting 10% of the people in the country to buy into the plan is pretty far-fetched. Buying things basically daily is a (bad) habit of nearly all Americans and breaking that cycle will not be easy. Not eating out, not taking vacations, not buying christmas or birthday gifts, and replacing these activities with zero or near-zero cost activities will come at an enormous social cost as compared to people not boycotting. This can be mitigated by trying to enact pacts with friends and family and entering into buy-nothing local groups, as well as focusing on a barter economy that sidesteps retail and services.

2. the concept of a sustained boycott will get harder and harder in the imagined scarcity, planned obsolesce environment we live in. Cars break down, clothes wear out, everything requires upkeep, etc. Obviously this can be deferred and stretched (I’m never selling my already 10 year old car, for example) but the boycott will fray. This can be counteracted by more people joining than those exiting, via media and grassroots efforts.

Overall: If 10-20% of Americans actually bought nothing (very unlikely) for a sustained (months, even more unlikely) period of time, the outlook of the GDP would be very noticeable. If that could be sustained (by more people joining than leaving) then you’d absolutely see major changes in policy. It would start with corporate layoffs, but then graduate to price cuts, sales of production facilities, drops of industrial output, and then finally decreased energy consumption and industrial inputs. That would be a national security emergency that would force bipartisan political change, because energy and industrial potential are the two primary metrics of nation-state success for both hard and soft power.

I sincerely hope there’s less content here than Reddit, forever. I hope the UI keeps the masses out, and the technically savy are the only ones here.

I want to doomscroll less, I want to be astroturfed less. I want to interact with more humans and fewer bots, even when that means I interact less. I want fewer AI prompts, AI Art and corpo spam ads masquerading as engagement. I want less video and more text. Overall, I want to be spending less time on the internet, on my phone, and I don’t want to hear about every last toxic thing Trump did to drive me crazy. Lemmy helps me control that feed better, so I deleted my reddit account and I hope to stay here until I manage to stop opening social media at all.

Lemmy right now feels like the internet before the long september. I hope it never changes.