There’s a lot of empirical claims surrounding this topic, and I’m unaware who really has good evidence for them. The Substack guy e.g. is claiming that banning or demonetising would not “solve the problem” – how do we really know? At the very least, you’d think that demonetising helps to some extent, because if it’s not profitable to spread certain racist ideas, that’s simply less of an incentive. On the other hand, plenty of people on this thread are suggesting it does help address the problem, pointing to Reddit and other cases – but I don’t think anyone really has a grip on the empirical relationship between banning/demonetising, shifting ideologues to darker corners of the internet and what impact their ideas ultimately have. And you’d think the relationship wouldn’t be straightforward either – there might be some general patterns but it could vary according to so many contingent and contextual factors.

now i’m comfortable with openboard, and keeping an eye on florisboard

Sadly, the swiping options on these ones are useless or nonexistent. I find only gboard tolerable for this form of text input now, which is really crap. Swype was king. Long live Swype.

It’s like people standing in line at the supermarket instead of using the scan-it-yourself-and-self-checkout app. Why???

Some people like the human connection. Some are lonely. Some find the machines stressful.

Look, I’m a consummate checkout-machine-user and always go for that option, much as I always swipe my keyboard, but still, I get it. I actually think it’s a shame that ordinary parts of our human experience that used to be mediated by humans are increasingly dwindling.

The real issue here is that people in the US are tied to using SMS for real-time chat groups when so many better (and private, and well known) alternatives exist. Thankfully, in Europe, nobody so far as I know ever really uses SMS anymore – whether for single or group chats.

Thanks for that, interesting stuff.

I see. But in the limit case where just everybody decided BTC is nonsense and stopped transacting entirely, while mining could continue, eventually it would die out, right?

So in a sense, do transactions not drive the need for mining? If that’s the case, the connection isn’t directly casual so much as one of complicity. Does that make sense or am I still barking up the wrong tree with this way of thinking?

Thanks for clarifying that!

However, the amount of mining is not dependent on the amount of transactions.

Entertain my ignorance on this for a second, but isn’t there some sort of dependence here? Like not a strictly casual dependence, but if transactions were, say, to magically halve for a few days, would that not affect the mining required and thus the total energy expenditure of the mining?

(Obviously the limit case would show this to be true, in that in the absence of any transactions at all, mining would cease. But I’m after something a bit more clearly casually related, somewhat like supply and demand in the marketplace – consumption of beef driving more supply and more methane, e.g.)

It’s a strange post in general. Someone’s substack, written in some generic faux-journalist style, with one source for the main claim (“a Redditor”), who isn’t linked to. Don’t know why it’s being shared here.

This is my problem with every keyboard (FOSS or otherwise) since Swype finished. Gboard is the best of the bunch now but I’m loath to use it. I have tried Floris and Open (a fork of it which has swiping) and others, and they are all painful on this front.

Somewhat stretching the analogy there

Your analogy is looking a bit leggy at this point.

But I suppose if you’re buying Apple you’re probably going to buy a new device every year anyway. Never understood the mentality personally.

My cousin gets the new iPhone every single year, and he was up for it at midnight as well, I don’t understand why because it’s not better in any noticeable sense then it was last year, it’s got a good screen and a nice camera but so did the model 3 years ago. Apple customers are just weird.

I think you’re basing your general estimation of the Apple customer on the iPhone customer a bit too heavily. E.g., I have never had an iPhone and wouldn’t ever consider buying one, considering how locked down and overpriced it is, and how competitive Android is as an alternative OS.

Meanwhile, I’ve been on MacOS for something like 7 or so years and cannot look back, for everyday computing needs. I have to use Windows occasionally on work machines and I cannot emphasise enough how much of an absolute chore it is. Endless errors, inconsistent UX, slow (even on good hardware), etc. It is by contrast just a painful experience at this point.

And one of the reasons people buy MacBooks, myself included, is to have longevity, not to refresh it after a year (that’s insane). It’s a false economy buying a Windows laptop for most people, because you absolutely do need to upgrade sooner rather than later. My partner has a MacBook bought in 2014 and it still handles everyday tasks very well.

True by the letter but not really by practice. PC is synonymous with a computer running Windows, or Linux at a push. I don’t know whether that’s because of Microsoft’s early market dominance or because Apple enjoys marketing itself as a totally different entity, or some combination of the two. But yeah, usage determines meaning more than what the individual words mean in a more literal sense.

Not the method of a narcissist or manipulator at all, that.

This is snobbish and elitist. The evidence of this thread alone is that people who interact with this instance or use Lemmy generally also use Whatsapp. For many, it is convenient, relatively secure and private, and free. It engrained itself as the default communications platform in many countries, and Meta ownership doesn’t have any tangible impact on its use for anybody, so far as I can tell. The “people are stupid” line is just ignorant bollocks.

Inb4: so you just think all content should be free huh.

Considering they said almost all, that’s not the gotcha you think it is.

I’m being completely serious and I’m interested to understand more about what you mean.

It doesn’t strike me that way when you also write things like this:

you’re equating it to something like healthcare and education.

“equating” sets up a straw man. Such a tactic gives me the impression you think of this as some sort of battle that you want to win rather than a good-faith discussion.

What I had written was not an equating – and I think you should have or indeed did see that – only a comparison to show that something’s being describable as a product or service “in some sense” does not mean it is the sort of thing we pay for in a traditional way. This contradicts the central inference of your argument.

The answer to how I would actually characterise the “service” of YouTube is already in the first comment, so I’ll just quote it again:

For one thing, the “service” here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it’s a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access [to] what is going on in society. So it’s not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.

I stand by that; YouTube has a near monopoly over that media form, and if you require access to information and essentially a key plank of the online public square, then you need to go through it. I regard it as a (positive rather than negative) right that we do all have – not to use YouTube specifically but for information, opinion, discourse, politics and more to be available to us all. As it happens, YouTube is a key platform for the arrangement of all these things. Twitter also is/was, which is why Musk’s buyout was in principle concerning, and then in practice very shit once he created a two tier system of access to and impact on that public space.

So mediums with advertising should not be allowed to seek monetary payment? Only mediums without advertising should do so?

Not quite sure how you got to the point you did there. There are different ways to advertise – billboards and TV/radio adverts, e.g., while often odious, are something you can more easily divert your attention from and which are not tracking devices or the product of turning you personally into an item for sale. I dislike them and would prefer a world without them but I don’t think their being attached to organisations in and of itself ought to deprive those organisations of income.

I’m not understanding your logic here.

That is apparent.

For me it’s pretty simple. There is a product - would you like to pay for it?

This is called “begging the question” as a response to me – I’ve called into question exactly both your premise and conclusion, for reasons you’ve not actually engaged with, and then you’ve re-asserted them. You have assumed what you’ve set out to prove.

(1) it is not simply a product (or service – you’ve changed tune there), for the reasons I’ve already outlined. Its use and availability is not analogous to something you can pick off the shelf or pay a tradesperson to do for you. (2) therefore, the question of paying for it (and how) demands different kinds of answer. In the country I’m from, e.g., healthcare is a right and not paid for, neither is early-years education up to 18, and so on. Both are “products” or “services” in some sense of the term, but to speak of payment here is complex and the answer doesn’t simply carry over from thinking about normal products/services.

I feel that all the scary words you can add to a paragraph about advertising based revenue for digital mediums is just your tool to justify your behavior of sticking it to the man.

This can only be a disingenuous response, surely? Rather than engage with the criticism of the nature of modern internet advertising and how corporations use it to affect people, you’ll just summarise it as “scary words”.

in the end, you’re leeching off a service you enjoy.

I don’t think that’s a fair or true statement.

For one thing, the “service” here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it’s a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access of what is going on in society. So it’s not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.

For another, blocking ads is not merely refusal to pay a fee of some kind. Advertisements are cognitively intrusive, designed to affect your willpower and decision-making, used to track and control your behaviour, compromise your digital safety, and turn you into a product for companies to whom you do not give your consent for the opportunity to be exploited. Blocking that system of “payment” is not simply prudent but right, and the choice between paying a monetary fee or being so exploited is not a fair choice at all.