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Fuck the commodification of culture.
Fuck full time content creators.
I don’t want people working full time on social networks. I don’t want to read your ad, your secret knowledge, your product placement, or sponsorship, or your oh so subtle pitch for VC funding. I’m certainly not going to give money.
I want people who do their own thing in the real world, and as a hobby and show-and-tell, submit their work freely to the Internet to hone and expand their craft and field, and gain organic enrichment altruisticly.
If you want to sell stuff and make money, make your own website and store. Not on our forum.
Don’t pollute our forum. I want to be inspired, be in awe, be entertained, be informed, and to give back in my own way that continues this cycle and fuels the forum.
We’ve fled so many greedy sites - fleeing this capitalistic parasite in hopes of finding honest discussion untainted by greed. I’m tired of fleeing.
We must monetize everything we do otherwise what are we doing? Having fun? Fuck that, gotta get on grindset my man, lambos dont purchase themselves
creating things costs money. crowdfunding platforms like patreon have already proven an incredibly powerful avenue to enable independent creators who are passionate about things to share that with an audience. entertainment is, in fact, a job, which requires resources and time, and i loathe the implication that it isn’t.
100% agree. This attitude actually ends up devaluing art and entertainment because it basically boils down the to the idea that “it’s not a real job.”
That’s not what I am saying.
In my opinion the forum is a altruistic area. Is the value I provide tailoring the posts by up voting and down voting not valuable? Is the value I provide by summarizing and or giving interpretations of the articles posted here not valuable? Or engaging in thoughtful honest discussion not valuable?
I believe they are.
Do I feel entitled to some profit because of my input on this forum? No I do not.
I give this work because I provide my value to this site voluntarily, honestly, many hours of my day, altruisticly, to build a better community and discussion. I don’t demand money because I receive a community in return.
What I am saying is that this kind of stuff will segment our community, by creating a profitable segment of the community and an unprofitable segment of community, implicitly creating a “correct” and “incorrect” way. Beyond that it will introduce people to our community who care less about furthering this forum, and more about making profit.
Remember YouTube before the partner program and video responses and how much more engaged and equal that community was? And what it is now with most every prominent channel being sponsored on top of ad breaks and product placement?
Obviously, if a person wants to dedicate their full time to some art and wants money for it, they should, and I’m excited for what they produce, but this is not where to do it.
But you don’t have vibrant thoughtful debates about world events in target, you don’t purchase microwaves at the library. You go to stores to buy stuff, you go to forums to discuss stuff.
Content creators can create their own site, their own patreon, or whatever - they can freely submit their work to our forum for feedback and an audience, and they can even link someone the link to their store if they ask - but introducing the profit angle directly to our forum and integrating it in will be the beginning of the end for this community as it is. The first crack of enshitification.
Sharing your opinion is not the same as sharing your art.
I agree that monetisation as a standard probably isn’t ideal, but I think you’re fooling yourself if you think a lot of the artists and musicians here aren’t posting with some intent to drive you to their monetised content. Social media is a great place for artists to promote their work in general.
I thought the whole point of the fedi was to encourage open social media. If you don’t want to see artists or monetised content, you can block those creators or instances. The fedi isn’t subject to your preferences or mine, after all. I’m sorry, but I don’t think you get to decide what does and doesn’t happen here.
The thing is, monetisation wouldn’t even work the same way here because there is no algorithm, so it’s not like you’d get (as) many people trying to create rage bait to game the algorithm.
Your initial post came across as if you begrudge any creators or artists making any money from what they post here. If I misinterpreted your position then my bad, and I don’t want enshitification either (although given the decentralised framework of the fedi, I’m not sure how that could even happen in the traditional sense).
(although given the decentralised framework of the fedi, I’m not sure how that could even happen in the traditional sense).
It’s possible to dominate and softly-control a decentralized network, because it can centralize. So long as the average user doesn’t really care about those ideals (perhaps they’re only here for certain content, or to avoid a certain drawback of another platform) then they may not bother to decentralize. So long as a very popular instance doesn’t do anything so bad that regular users on their instance will leave at once and lose critical mass, they can gradually enshittify and enforce conditions on instances connecting to them, or even just defederate altogether and become a central platform.
For a relevant but obviously different case study: before the reddit API exodus, there was a troll who would post shock images every day to try and attack lemmy.ml. Whenever an account was banned, they would simply register a new one on an instance which didn’t require accounts to be approved, and continue trolling with barely any effort. Because of this, lemmy.ml began to defederate with any instance which didn’t have a registration approval system, telling them they would be re-added once a signup test was enabled.
lemmy.ml was one of the core instances, only rivaled in size by lemmygrad.ml and wolfballs (wolfballs was defederated by most other instance, and lemmygrad.ml by many other big instances), so if an instance wasn’t able to federate with lemmy.ml, at the time, it would miss out on most of the activity. So, lemmy.ml effectively pressured a policy change on other instances, albeit an overall beneficial change to make trolling harder, and in their own self-defence. One could imagine how a malevolent large instance could do something similar, if they grew to dominate the network. And this is the kind of EEE fears many here have over Threads and other attempts at moving large (anti-)social networks into the Fediverse.
Almost all of my creations which I share (mostly code and visual art) are entirely volunteer work. Community culture doesn’t cost money. Entertainment does not need to be a job, even if it must take time and work.
Of course industrial large feature films cost full-time money. But I don’t come to online communities for that.
And still there are other people than you who want to do that full-time - and in doing so provide, at least for me, more value than the 6ooth marvel billion dollar movie.
There are educators and entertainers out there who chose this as a job and are good at it. If they could live off of it by going the patreon route instead of the shitty YouTube ad spam one I’d be all for it.
Fediverse is all about inclusivity. You want to create your own community? Sure. You don’t like creators? Just block them.
It’s not about commodification of culture, but realizing that all illustrator, comic artist, writer, and designer are in the end still have to make money for their living.
Even Lemmy, Mastodon, or any FOSS software still need funding to make it works.
It’s possible to make creators on fediverse feels like their home without all corporate greed. Even right now, a lot of comic artist and writers are making their way here, posting their creativity on various instance.
I just wish your perspective was the norm. As these platforms catch on, that toxicity you mention becomes inevitable. Also tired of fleeing. I sincerely hope we don’t have to find a way to tie financial incentive into this relatively untainted community.
As far as I’m concerned, whatever they’re selling here in OP’s article ain’t it. And perhaps my ideas (above) of a future decentralized fediverse are misguided too.
I will say this: I don’t WANT to find a way to monetize this stuff. People are just increasingly more desperate for money. As the world gets worse, people are going to get increasingly more desperate to find a unique niche to fill to make a living.
Consider a universal basic income as a means to reduced the profit motive when authors create/share media.
Also consider not having an economy where our jobs dominate our lives.
There’s plenty of studies, videos and anecdotes discussing how despite technology becoming more and more efficient, we work more hours a day in the Industrial era. Most of the older culture we consider traditional didn’t come from the media industries we see today, they came from families and communities having enough time to spend together that they can create and share art and other media relevant to their own lives.
Yes yes yes yes yes!
Sounds like Patreon with extra steps.
I think having a way for something like liberapay to be more closely coupled with your fediverse account so people can easily see one can accept donations would be good, but adding sub-only posts is a step too far I think.
Are we so hive-minded here on Lemmy that we have been brainwashed into hating crypto so much that we, a DECENTRALIZED community, have decided to start a centralized service to pay posters rather than use the trustless, decentralized systems literally DESIGNED for that purpose that already exist?
All crypto isn’t a scam, people. Stop scoring own-goals against the big banksters and do your part against crypto scams by thoroughly vetting crypto projects before you put your trust in them rather than blindly believing that they’re ALL out to scam you.
This idea should obviously be implemented with cryptocurrency but of course it isn’t because of our unfounded vilification of an entire industry that is clearly more philosophically aligned with the principles of the fediverse than centralized, legacy systems that we’ve been duped into continuing to support.
🤦
I disagree. The fediverse just proves you can have successful decentralisation without any whiff of blockchain. You call them legacy systems, but they are in fact still current systems aren’t they… we’re still using them.
You don’t want decentralization? Your argument against crypto is that we still use centralized systems? We will do that until we don’t. That’s like way back before cars were ubiquitous, seeing a car and saying, “we use the horse and buggy.” Yes we do. The car replaces the horse and buggy in many important ways. It takes a while to catch on, though. In the same way, IMO technology should always be guided toward further decentralization unless we WANT the powers that be to be the gatekeepers of information.
Honestly, even without crypto attached to it, I’d say the next version of the internet WILL be more servers running by independent operators and less centralization in data centers. It is inevitable regardless of anything I wrote here. Centralization is bad for so many reasons…the most damning of which is censorship.
There are lots of arguments against crypto, but the main one is that it is inferior to the current system in every conceivable way.
-It’s slower -It’s harder to use -It’s full of scams -It’s backed by nothing -There is no consumer protection -It amplifies the existing problems of the financial system instead of solving them (money laundering/scams/financial inequality) -It’s dominated by the same rich cunts you’re trying to escape, but they’re even worse in crypto -All networks generally need L2s because they’re so shit and slow
Those are just some off the top of my head.
Additionally, it’s been around for a long time now. Everyone in crypto is so involved in solving the problems that are unique to crypto and Blockchain that they’ve missed the fact that no one gives a shit because it literally offers nothing we don’t already have that works better.
The only reason anyone has ever cared about crypto is because it potentially offered a way to get rich quickly and ‘easily’ and get out of the grind.
It’s a casino. That’s fine, you might make money. But that’s all it is.
I’m not saying the current system is ideal, or even good, but crypto is nothing like a viable alternative.
I’m all for decentralisation, but you do realise that all systems end up centralising to some extent over time because it’s just more efficient, right? Maybe we can find a good balance and make sure accountability actually means something in our systems, whatever industry they’re in, but the answer isn’t crypto from what I’ve seen.
Interesting you talk about gatekeeping information when you’re literally parroting crypto echo chamber rhetoric because if you dare suggest anything other than crypto is the future you will instantly get shut down. It’s a cult, basically.
It’s slower
and virtually impossible to hack
It’s harder to use
and virtually impossible to hack
It’s full of scams
people are idiots. I have literally never been scammed. If it’s not open source and a small group of insiders have massive bags of it, don’t invest, dumbass. Invest in cryptocurrencies that are TRULY decentralized by actually using your brain and reading.
It’s backed by nothing
It has intrinsic value. Gold is only worth something because someone says it has value.
There is no consumer protection
It easily could if regulators weren’t intentionally wishy washy about whether it is legal or not. Regulation will come. Sounds like you’re REALLY chomping at the bit to have the inevitable alternative: revocable central bank digital currencies.
It amplifies the existing problems of the financial system instead of solving them (money laundering/scams/financial inequality)
Not really. It is FAR more auditable than legacy systems. People are dumb. AI magnified how dumb companies are and so did crypto. People that understand it and AI will use it well. Those that villainize it (just like AI) do so because they are brainwashed by polarized viewpoints (just like AI). The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
It’s dominated by the same rich cunts you’re trying to escape, but they’re even worse in crypto
That’s not true. Look at the financial holdings of billionaires in fiat vs. crypto. It’s FAR more egalitarian than fiat. You have to be talking about some fairly shitty cryptocurrencies for that to be true. Ethereum and Bitcoin have massive institutional investment. Their money is as green as anyone else’s.
All networks generally need L2s because they’re so shit and slow
It’s called architecture. Do you also not see the need for GPU’s and dedicated modules on a motherboard? Should the CPU do everything. Multithreading is bad I guess? Are you aware of what decentralization and parallelism can accomplish in technological spaces? Do you actually know what an L2 is? Seems like you don’t understand it.
Interesting you talk about gatekeeping information when you’re literally parroting crypto echo chamber rhetoric because if you dare suggest anything other than crypto is the future you will instantly get shut down. It’s a cult, basically.
Interesting that you don’t even have enough self-awareness or knowledge of the problem domains you claim to understand to see that you’re doing the EXACT same thing.
You parroted partially true (cherry picked) all the way down to completely untrue things about the properties of this technology. If you understood the technology in the first place, you’d recognize that. There are so many different permutations of it and you paint it with the broadest brush possible.
Tell me, do you know about proof of stake? Do you know what proof of work is? Do you understand the concept of an oracle?
Of course it doesn’t solve every problem (it won’t ever be used to stream video…of course…did anyone ever say it would?)…but the ones it DOES solve (that you pretend it hasn’t) are not achievable with any as of yet known technology.
Here’s just one that I’d love to see you pretend could exist on any other technology: Digital Identity and Land Deeds in war-torn (or even no longer existing) countries. Let’s say bombs destroy any paper deeds or even deeds on the servers all around a country. A person fleeing the country might return to the country and be homeless because they couldn’t prove that they owned that land. On a decentralized public blockchain, those deeds can be minted and henceforth can never be erased. Even if the official body that authorized them to be minted goes under or out of power, they are, in fact, IMPOSSIBLE TO ERASE SINCE THEY ARE ON A DECENTRALIZED BLOCKCHAIN and would be very hard if not impossible to discredit. The person would be legally able to get their house back.
Another one is voting. Electronic voting on a PUBLIC DECENTRALIZED blockchain would be literally the ONLY way to achieve a fully-open, auditable election. Furthermore, if you’re proposing that a similar centralized government solution (equal in all other ways other than one being truly decentralized and the other not) is even remotely similar in its robustness and trustworthiness, you’re SURELY being disingenuous.
There are TONS more but I don’t feel like wasting my time writing a term paper for someone that is clearly being disingenuous, parroting some world bank wage-slave neoliberal nonsense in the first place.
Thanks for proving my point by responding with the classic go to ‘rebuttal’ when anyone challenges crypto: “you don’t understand the tech!”
Cool. Let’s save both of our time then. All the best.
No problem.
Thanks for proving mine as well.
I even ended up writing you a stupid term paper but you just couldn’t hang I guess.
I’m not complaining about it being crypto - I prefer crypto over credit card payments for online stuff. On the other hand, any monetisation of online communities leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I came to Lemmy years ago to get a step further away from for-profit internet treating me like a customer. Root of all evil, and all that.
I couldn’t agree more. When I was proposing crypto tie-in for votes, someone mentioned the Cobra Effect and I honestly had no answer to prevent it. I think it is wise to proceed under the assumption that it is somewhat inevitable that we see some sort of monetization as the user base grows and it becomes prohibitively expensive to run an instance. Personally, I think it is important that we really get deep into these discussion now so we can find a good consensus (with the least tradeoffs) before it’s too late and people just start forcfeeding users the classic “enshittification” modus operandi. I think the method detailed in this article is straight up enshitification incarnate; Patreon with more steps.
All (capitalistic) money is a scam.
We’re just forced to use a currency because governments say so.
So yes, your crypto is still a scam. Because money still vanishes into thin air when line goes down.
Let me ask you this then: How do you think servers will continue to run? Do they run for free on fairy magic?
I don’t live in a communist country. So, I fail to see your point about money being a scam. Yes. Of course. But I can’t tell my landlord that money is a scam. He will want money for me to continue not being homeless.
3rd generation cryptocurrencies are an attempt to decentralize and democratize computation. If you have a better way to pay people for use of their servers, I’d be happy to hear it but right now you are literally using a server that runs because someone decided to do so for free. It won’t always be that way when this technology scales beyond one server operator’s practical limit. We will need ways to pay people for the use of their electricity and hardware. If you can think of a better way that ISN’T fraught with corruption, centralization, and loss of anonymity, I’d love to read it.
Im not entirely sure i understood everything but is donation the solution you’re looking for?
I’m looking for viable alternatives to the one I mentioned. I can see the cons to the method I mentioned (stake pools that also run instances and collect fees from transaction they process to cover the costs that running an instance incurs) so I am honestly just hoping to see some fresh new ideas. I sympathize with people’s disdain for the ills of crypto but I see some purity in crypto when executed properly (in an open and decentralized manner with 100% public inital token allocation for example).
Can you see how “there’s not a better solution” isn’t addressing the problem that crypto is fundamentally a scam?
Also, you can’t pay your rent with crypto either….
EDIT: if you want crypto to pass my sniff test, you have to explain where value comes from.
Fiat currency is valuable because I can pay my taxes with it. (This is really the only reason it has value).
So what underpins crypto value beyond “it’s the future”
I mean, I don’t need to do anything. As you implied, it’s similar to any currency. If no one holds it or accepts it, it doesn’t have value. The only reason the US dollar has any value is the military force behind it.
Thankfully, crypto is able to offer something back in exchange for leveraging the greater fool fallacy as a system of security. It actually DOES something that will be valuable to society someday (and let’s be real that day is not today since not one DApp has really gone mainstream…but when they do, you might not even know it).
It serves as a world computer that cannot be censored, stopped, or bent to the will of any one nation or world power and all people need to do is buy into that greater fool fallacy to sustain that illusion. It’s strange and I get your point. But luckily I don’t need to convince you. There are already enough fools greater than I to sustain this thing ad infinitum.
For example, how long do you think people are going to keep paying Fanduel and Draftkings their undeserving cut when a crypto-based alternative that is equal or even superior in every way pops up? It’s only a matter of time. In that particular case: The only technology preventing it right now is an oracle that feeds the data from sports to a smart contract. This technology is in its infancy.
You have, perhaps, developed too strong an opinion too soon and will need time when it does pop up in mainstream use around you.
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It grows the brand, Leels. It grows the brand.
I don’t understand the down votes
=> I always read up and down votes as a tool to flag valuable posts. It feels like down vote on this one is about agreement with the news?My guess: A lot of people are fed up with late-stage capitalism reaching its tendrils into everything good and turning it into dystopian garbage, and are justifiably wary of monetization taking root in one of the few online spaces that they still enjoy.
It’s not a valuable post, a service like Club Sub will add nothing good to the Fediverse. My downvote should be seen as a deterrence for potential wannabe fulltime content creators. Stay on your YouTube, your Twitter, Insta, Reddit, Patreon and X.
Stay away from my Fediverse!
Also, it’s an article on The Verge. Which is by default low quality.
Creators like illustrator, comic artist, cosplayer, or blogger needs money to sustain their works.
Fediverse is not anti creators. There are a lot of attempt (especially Japanese fediverse community) to embrace this demography.
It’s possible to create pro-creator service without making fediverse succumb to corporate greed.
After all, fediverse should be all about inclusivity. If you don’t like creators, just block them.
creators are welcome to post in the fediverse and tag their paid platform so long as they respect the rules of whatever community they post in. everyone has to eat. turning the fediverse into a tansactional platform is just coporate social media with extra steps. the articles getting downvoted because its one step shy of a linkedin ad disguised as a post. if i wanted to read posts about the beauty of the grind or some other nonsese, i’d be on fucking twitter or facebook. this place exists specifically to not be those places.
Again, fediverse is not monolith of culture.
I’m not talking about the article itself, but there’s just too many people on Westwrn fediverse right now expecting everything to be free.
A lot of fediverse instance in East Asian are more welcoming author, even if they post subscriber-only creation.
the article ends on a pitch for an ai bot making your paid posts. it’s trash. the article itself is the kind of lazy trash you get when you start leaning into monitization. you’re right, the fediverse isnt a monolith, not even inside distinct cultural regions.
for me at least. the answer to more media like this article appearing. so we grow an have more content and grow more. will be finding somewhere else to be. thats just the social media cycle. something cool gets made. a community starts forming. someone says “look at those idiots. dont they know how money works? a few of them could be making so much of it. i’ll show them how and make some myself too”. the rough edges of the space get smoothed out because if you want to make the site sucessful it should look more like how the sucessful spaces look. and a bunch of people move on to make something new again while bots have arguments with bots.
It’s being downvoted because the entire tone is that the fediverse needs monetization, despite the fact that every single one of the pressures that resulted in the fediverse existing and being relevant resulted from money having undue influence on the experience to the detriment of users and usability.
Wow, so many downvotes probably from people hating the news, this is not what the downvote button is for.
It’s about if a post or comment contributes or triggers interesting and engaging discussions.
Specifically for news articles, I find it important to upvote if I’m glad the article was posted at all, since it helps raise awareness about an issue etc, or if I probably wouldn’t have found the article posted on another platform, so maybe I wouldn’t have learned about it at all.
Even if it’s fake news, it’s better for me to be aware that misinformation in being spread about the issue, with people in the comments explaining why it’s fake with sources etc.
The upvote/downvote button is not a change.org petition for making a problem go away by disagreeing with it.
The upvote/downvote button is not a [] petition for making a problem go away by disagreeing with it.
Unfortunately, in a material way, it is. Downvoting a post is a way of lowering its visibility on the platform.
But that is my point: downvoting the news will not keep people from using it; the people who will want to use it will find it anyway.
In any case, people still want to be aware about it, especially the people who disagree and downvoted it, so they should have upvoted instead, in order to have a proper discussion about the issue they supposedly care about.
Trying to bury it in downvotes to make it disappear from “Hot” does the exact opposite.
I’m not even reading that article because, no. But I’m all for an award system here on lemmy. All money goes to the instance hoster and the user gets badges, maybe a highlighted name. The most gilded users get entered into a giveaway every month or so for something like a T-shirt.
That’s allows for the instances to sustain themselves and gives users more incentive to post, without stupid subscriptions and promoting content farming.
