BraveSirZaphod

Who is ‘they’?

You’re acting like there exists some single high council of concerned people who have unilaterally decided to pin all childhood woes on the phones, when this is a single article primarily about a particular group of UK parents who’ve focused on this issue and who presumably were never in contact with this American psychologist.

How do you know that these parents haven’t also considered helicopter parenting and free play? Do you know them?

Well, on the plus side, now you know to actually read contracts before you choose to sign them.

In the meantime, enjoy your iPhone.

If the cost of not voluntarily choosing to get myself into bad contracts is being a smug asshole, so be it.

If the phone costs $500, they simply increase your monthly bill by $500 / 24 months = $20 a month.

It’s a bit more complicated than this, and they’ll likely have some interest built in as well, but functionally, it’s no different than being given a loan to buy the phone and then paying the loan off over the two years. That’s why carriers often require a credit check before doing this.

I’ve personally clicked on Instagram ads and made purchases from them. This has pretty much always been for various events, and I don’t really have any regrets there. I’ve seen some cool plays and gone to parties that I’d never have known about otherwise.

I can’t imagine what would ever drive someone to click on a random banner ad though.

So Verizon gave you a phone for no upfront cost, and they’re shitty for making you pay for it if you decide to dash away early?

Fascinating threshold for shitty behavior you have.

I’m gonna take a wild guess that most Lemmy people use Android, and the suggestion that someone might prefer an iPhone is triggering to someone whose sense of superiority comes from their choice of operating system for some reason.

Everybody said they’d cancel Netflix over it

What’s probably more likely is that the “everybody” that you heard from was an incredibly unrepresentative sample of people from a bubble of nerdy tech enthusiasts.

It’s not that genuine passion and altruism isn’t acknowledged; the entire open source software world is a testament to that.

You asked for an explanation as to why Free modern hardware hasn’t been developed yet. The simple answer is that passion and altruism has not yet been a strong enough incentive to motivate anyone to do it. He’s not accusing you of being lazy or hypocritical. The reason why you haven’t done it yet is the exact same reason why anyone else who could do it also hasn’t done it yet. It’s very very hard, and passion doesn’t pay the bills or feed you. Limited to a hobby, it’s simply more work than most people could ever hope to achieve in their spare time.

It’s more complicated than sheer greed.

The fact of the matter is that actually producing any modern technology takes a massive amount of work, and up til this point, no one has gathered enough motivation and free time to do it all for any modern hardware just out of pure altruism. There’s a reason why companies have to pay hundreds of engineers a huge amount of money to get anything developed; those people are not going to do this incredibly difficult work just for fun and moral satisfaction. It’s easy to point the finger at corporate greed for some things being locked down, and to be clear, there’s plenty of valid criticism to go around, but it has to be at least considered that most of this stuff would never have been developed in the first place if it wasn’t for those same companies. Your average person is not going to assemble a motherboard from parts and schematics.

Wouldn’t anyone just be curious to figure out how stuff works?

To this point, quite frankly, no. Average people simply do not care about this very much. They want to just turn on their magic internet box, get their work done, play their games, consume their media, and move on without any further fuss. The fact of the matter is that most people have no clue what a BIOS is, could not care less if it was proprietary or not, and have zero interest in learning about flashing them or why they would ever want to do that.

I think the entire point was actually that no single party can unilaterally make that decision. People who want to interact with Meta can, and those who don’t can simply not.

If you don’t wanna deal with them, be on a server that doesn’t federate with them.

They - and literally anyone else - can already do that. Mastodon data is totally public.

I know corporate America doesn’t really deserve any meaningful amount of good faith, but for whatever truth is worth, “sustainable” in a business context has essentially always meant financials. A platform like Twitch is generally going to have really high operational costs between infrastructure, network traffic, engineers, and revenue sharing with streamers, and given that Amazon doesn’t operate Twitch for charity any more than you do your job for free, they need to make sure that they actually have sufficient revenue to be able to make the finances sustainable. I won’t pretend to know how profitable it is, if it even is yet, but cutting employees is obviously a pretty easy lever to pull to reduce costs if your operations can get away with it.

I mean, that’s the entire point, yes. Some financial transactions, at some level of scale, should not be private.

For instance, if you abolish KYC, you’ve just fully legalized all insider trading. Perhaps you can see that there are some conflicts of interest there. On the crypto side, KYC allows the IRS to go after traders for capital gains tax. Without it, crypto would be an easy way for the ultra-wealthy to just completely bypass taxes, since you couldn’t prove that it belonged to them.

I’m not saying that the terms can’t be more transparent, because they absolutely can be.

But if you have become aware of this practice and you continue to participate, you have de facto agreed to it. You can of course agree to the terms and continue to criticize them, but you don’t get to sign up for a soccer game and then claim that the rules against using your hands don’t actually apply to you. If you don’t want to face the consequences of how distributed services like this fundamentally work, don’t use them.

I mean, yes?

If you do not agree to the terms of a service, do not use the service. This is the case for essentially every system ever. You can go complain about it on Reddit or something if you like.

Yes, of course it has Neo-Nazis, because it has hundreds of millions of people and essentially every niche community has representation there. The doesn’t mean it’s remotely accurate to say that Instagram is “only Nazis and pedos”.

The most followed user is Kim Kardashian, if I remember right, and she’s targeting the most normie women possible. Nazis and pedos aren’t exactly good for advertising.

This isn’t to say that Instagram doesn’t have moderation issues, but that isn’t contradictory to the fact that Instagram is not solely composed of those kinds of users.

Have you gone on Instagram ever?

It’s normies and wine moms.

The point is that it’s portraying not blocking as an inherently negative thing, which isn’t universally agreed upon at all. Plenty of people would say that they don’t need any attention at all. It’s not presenting objective in a neutral way, but rather labeling a group as bad.

Of course, it’s probably fair to assume that the author has no intention of being neutral, but it’s still valid grounds to criticize it as a data visualization.

I quite liked it, personally.

I imagine saying that is going to be treated as an admission of heresy here though.