yeah it’s still a sort of new frontier but the patreon model I think really should be the way going forward assuming it’s possible. everybody gets the content for free, but those who can afford to contribute do so. and to be honest, if you live in a 1st world country throwing a couple bucks here and there isn’t that much to ask. for the same price of a lunch at mcdonalds you can give $3 a month for nearly half a year to Wikipedia for example

but it’s not really viable for the internet as a whole right? Hoping for some spare change from a tiny fraction of your visitors

Why not? It works for kbin/lemmy instances. It works for Wikipedia. It works for Lichess.

Sure, some things like video hosting are going to require a lot more bandwidth / server storage so perhaps those need to be subscription based but I think large swathes of the internet could be turned into a donation/subscription model. it just isn’t done that way because it’s less profitable.

look at which video games are the most profitable - it’s always the free ones. fortnite, league of legends, etc.

Users don’t use adblockers because they don’t want to see ads at all; they they use adblockers because getting a usable web experience requires it.

Users don’t block advertisements; they block annoying advertisements. They block trackers. They block malware. They block privacy invasion.

I block advertisements because I don’t want to see any advertisements. They are poison for the mind and I want to eliminate any form of advertisement I can control. Obviously you can’t avoid a lot of it - but I can definitely avoid it in my web browser.

I would prefer a subscription based model or a donation based model. For example Wikipedia or Lichess I’ve donated to because I believe they provide a good service and show no ads. Or for example Kagi which is a search engine that charges a monthly fee.

excellent post and something I think people aren’t fully considering

there’s an argument that it’s better to know rather than not know. i understand the ideological stand against Meta and everything it stands for, but it’s easy to judge from the outside looking in. we don’t know what he knows

you reduced my comment and favorited your own. lol

look - nobody has given me a concrete mechanism by which they could do damage. neither on here nor on mastodon where I’ve had similar conversations. @thesanewriter was the only one who attempted to give some sort of method - and his was that Meta’s platform could become so popular it steals users. That to me isn’t really unique to the fediverse

I’m not gonna hop over to Meta’s platform just because it’s nice and shiny.

But look at the potential benefits of Meta investing heavily into the fediverse… we’re talking millions and millions of dollars in development. i say milk meta for all they are worth, they’re a failing company anyway, this is a desperate attempt on their part

ok i’m not saying they won’t but i’ve asked this before and nobody seems to be able to provide some mechanism by which they would destroy it

is the system not federated? if meta starts acting up, can’t everyone just defederate them? this is what i’m not getting

if someone can explain to me what exactly is dangerous, i would appreciate

It doesn’t need to be said that Meta is purely driven by profit - that is any corporation. But Meta is incompetent and failing - yet still a behemoth. If they want to pour millions of dollars into the fediverse, then we don’t we let them? They would presumably just be another site on the fediverse.

I totally support them joining on assuming it doesn’t change the fundamental structure of the system.

I want to get back into gaming. I want to feel the magic again.

this amuses me because it sounds like something a drug addict would say. you have that initial magic and then over time you’re not using to feel the magic but just not to feel sick

my advice, OP? stop playing video games if you’re not getting enjoyment out of it. it’s your brain trying to tell you something. do something else with your time and go back to gaming in the future and it will be fun again.

of course, but they wanted to kill 3rd party apps without explicitly saying “we’re killing 3rd party apps”

this way they can (or at least they thought they could have) had plausible deniability saying stuff like “we tried to work with them” and this is essentially what they tried in the first couple of days

You can pull much more data much quicker through the API than some sort of HTML scraper. These LLMs need a lot of data and reddit is a big site.

i don’t think they were trying to make money off of the API changes. like others are saying, it has to do with AI and they figured they might as well take the chance and knock out 3rd party in the same swoop so that they can funnel more people onto the official app

they can data harvest much better that way