this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
673 points (97.6% liked)

Technology

60116 readers
2542 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mindbleach 3 points 1 year ago

Movie piracy can be both, and it's straight-up illegal. Hosting text is nothing in comparison. Images and video snippets are barely more than that. If all a website provides is bandwidth and storage, we all have that in spades, and if a website can't let us share it, then a website is the wrong model.

Running a glorified chat server and image board in the year two thousand and fifty gigabits should not be remarkable. You are currently on a service patched together by randos hosting servers for fun. It replaces a website which, despite strenuous effort, made fuck-all revenue from a highly constructive and ordered community of millions.

I fail to understand how people got into the mindset that every website needs to make money. Some worthwhile and widely-desired things simply lose money, and that's fine. Expecting to monetize your family would be gross. Expecting to monetize community is not much better, and equally fruitless. Squeezing any blood from that stone requires some fundamental betrayals of what those relationships mean and why people seek them.

Social media sites only turned a profit when they undermined democracy. Advertising is propaganda for sale. If you think capitalism prevents us from even talking to one another without being gouged for the privilege or subjected to destabilizing abuse, then torches and pitchforks are on your left.