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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 14th, 2024

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  • Now, can there be a different system of ads, which would not enshittify it all? I think there can be, maybe it isnt yet created.

    Not in the context of for profit business. Ads for free (mostly funded through taxes) services like libraries, sure. But they aren’t selling anything, they are purely for awareness. Once money is involved the incentive to become worse over time is part of advertising.

    The fediverse already exists without ads. It is built to grow by increasing the number of instances. Advertising would encourage fewer instances through competition.

    honourable advertising

    Fucking LO L

    FYI enshittification means becoming shitty in the pursuit of squeezing any bit of money at the user’s expense. It was a specific form of this originally, but it still means becoming shitty because of capitalist motivations. Abandoned open source software is shitty, but it is not enshittification. It can also be forked and continued by someone else.



  • The federal oversight has a lot of opinions and there are hundreds of write ups about it if you don’t like the easily accessible article I linked. The fact that voter fraud has been proven to not be an issue in US elections has a lot of write ups too.

    Saying “we don’t know” ignores the fact that ee do know and is just a talking point based on nothing from the people that want to suppress the vote. You know, Republicans.


  • The fediverse was intended to be the opposite of the ad infested enshittified internet. Inserting ads would turn it into the same shit.

    Wanting to receive ‘relevant’ ads is wanting to have personal information harvested, since that is the only way to make that work. That necessity is what led to google goong from a useful, minimal search engine into the enshittified mess that it is now.

    Wanting users to actively engage in ads is even worse. Just wanting to get fucked over by corporate interests, just begging for the whole thing lean into sponsored content pushing out any user created content and eventually requiring draconian moderation and centralization to appease corporate interests because that is what always happens. There are no ethical and relevant ads. Relevant ads cannot be ethical

    Your opinion is what led streaming services to change from affordable and easy fo access in netflix to ad infested, shittily designed and poorly run streaming sevices. Wanting ads to be added to a free community supported network of instances means you want the whole thing to turn to shit. There is no other possible outcome.




  • “These people had no blueprints to work with, nor, as far as we know, any previous experience at building something like this,” says study co-author Leonardo García Sanjuán, an archaeologist at the University of Seville in Spain. “And yet, they understood how to fit together huge blocks of stone” with “a precision that would keep the monument intact for nearly 6,000 years”.

    They absolutely would have had prior experience if fhe process is complex. Humans tend to have bursts of developing new techniques sprinkled around, but a complex structure would be rhe result of combining existing knowledge in a new way with a few new techniques. They wouldn’t figure a bunch of things out at the same time and build something to last thousands of years. They probably built similar structures that didn’t hold up as well first and learned from it.


  • The ‘age of 38’ thing isn’t even due to infection ir disease, or even a thing at all. 38 was the average between the high number of infant deaths and the normal lifespan of someone who didn’t.

    Ok, women giving birth skewed it a bit too. Men didn’t die in battle as much as people think, since most battles were decided when a small portion of the losing side died and the rest fled.



  • Yes, voting ID requirements in the US are discriminatory.

    https://www.lwv.org/blog/whats-so-bad-about-voter-id-laws

    Restrictive voting measures are designed to maintain the power structures that benefit those in control — largely white legislators — and their legacy is still felt today.

    For example, Texas didn’t even sleep on it — they moved to introduce a strict voter ID law at midnight after the Supreme Court decision was handed down in 2013. That law resulted in the ineligibility of an estimated 608,470 registered voters in Texas, representing a total of about 4.5% of registered voters in the state at the time.

    Other countries with universal and easily obtained IDs might not have the same outcomes, but in the US the ID requirement for voting only exists to suppress minority voting. You can find a lot of sources on how it works, but keep in mind that at the same time states added the ID requirement they also made it harder to obtain an ID.