• 1 Post
  • 165 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 5th, 2023

help-circle




  • Steve@communick.newstoFediverse@lemmy.worldWe have to solve the money problem!
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    23
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    11 days ago

    The only real option is to charge people.
    Hosting isn’t free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn’t come from advertisers, it must come from users.

    There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It’s only fair.


  • Of course if one truly can’t afford it, paying for search can seem a luxury.

    However I would argue as a counterpoint; If there’s any online service one would consider paying for, it should be search. Search is most literally our “front page to the internet”. It’s our first stop in any quest for information. Even the founders of Google knew early on, that putting adds in search creates a perverse incentive against the best results, favoring instead worse results, so people perform more searches, creating more opportunities to show people adds.

    $5 a month isn’t much to know your query will give the results you want, instead of the results advertisers want.









  • On one hand the Judge is right. On the other hand the lawyer is right. Then on two more hands, they’re both wrong.

    Yes, it’s bad to legislate by moral panic. Yes, kids are addicted to social media. Those are both facts.

    The reason age gating is a bad idea isn’t because of moral panic, or “the children”. It’s because we’re ALL addicted to social media. It isn’t just the kids, it’s adults as well. The problem is the intentionally addicting algorithms, meticulously engendered to keep us scrolling. I’m telling you in 50 years, we’ll know how all the social media companies were hiding and lying, about the addictive harmful nature of their business; Just like we know about tobacco and oil companies today.

    The best solution I can think of, is to revisit Section 230. You can’t hold these companies responsible for what people post to their sites, but we can and must hold them accountable, for what they recommend! If you have a simple easily definable sorting or ranking system of what people choose to follow? You’re fine, no accountability for something bad showing up. If you have some black box algorithm of infinite scrolling, based on a complex criteria that nobody can really break down and explain exactly why a specific post was shown to a specific individual? Now you’re on the hook for what they see.