We need more paid stuff. Making everything advertising funded has given advertisers too much power over society. We don't see real human opinion anymore, we see advertising friendly opinions.
Ads have many more perverse effects than wasting your time or being ugly, and you can't fix all of those with an ad blocker. They're a constant pressure to make everything retain your attention for the longest time possible, or to editorialize out content that would detract from clicking them.
You also end up paying for all this advertising indirectly, in the price of everything you buy. So you might think you get free content, but you're really not. And let's not even mention the insanity of constantly pushing everyone to consume more trash in a world that really doesn't need it.
Google is also getting pretty aggressive about blocking people with ad blockers from YouTube. I think it is great. I ad-block everywhere, but if people don’t want me around for that reason, that’s their right. If I wanted to watch short videos, I’d actually have to become a paying customer somewhere!
As people have said in this very thread, people are using Ublock Origin Lite, which blocks display ads and youtube ads. Which is all 99% of users care about.
It's not easy when the purchasing power of the working class has been falling steadily for the last 45 years. We have now blown past Gilded Age-levels of economic inequality and there's no signs of stopping.
This is a very, very Western-centered take. It's been growing in most other areas of the world, although from a much lower starting point. I'd say it's been "reverting to the mean".
Even if you had managed to come up with a point by selectively quoting the post, that would still be bad. The good-faith way to engage with somebody’s post is to reply to the meaning of the overall post. It might be necessary to cut some parts out for logical flow, but that shouldn’t change the meaning of what you are replying to.
Sure, but not just by contradicting arbitrary sub-sentence snippets of text devoid of context. An attack against a supporting point should be related to the way that it supports the overall argument.
Signal personal should continue being free. Signal needs to develop a business line for enabling authenticated, private communications to individuals on Signal.
There's at the very least an entire area of secure healthcare messaging which is full of terrible bespoke systems, or just goes over SMS, which would more effectively and with better user experience go over signal (i.e. the ability to send longer messages, encrypted attachments etc.)
Hard agree. I pay for monthly hosting like FreshRSS, Wallabag, etc and support the devs who make those projects. Privacy and developer support. And it's not that much.
Definitely interested in making Firefox, Thunderbird, etc sustainable too.
Welcome to the world of MacOS X, where there is a very healthy ecosystem of pay-once apps made by everything from giant corporations, to boutique software shops to individual developers.
I have found that whatever software I need or want, I can always find the best-in-class option to buy for a very reasonable price.
The best part: If you experience a bug or a problem, it's usually fixed within a few days at most after you report it.
