If they’re putting ads on their site then it’s clear they want to make money. You’re imposing your views onto other people when they’ve clearly indicated they don’t think they way you want them to.

Yeah it’s really lame… seems like the ban is permanent, so I went ahead and blocked lemmy.ml. No point in seeing content from communities that some self-righteous admin decided I shouldn’t be allowed to interact with.

It is what it is. I already left reddit because of their bullshit owners. There’s still way better communities on reddit than on lemmy.ml, and as bullshit as the owners of reddit are, they’re still not as bad as the owners of lemmy.ml. So if it were really an issue to me I’d just go back to reddit. But it’s fun to discuss things in smaller communities so I’ll stick with lemmy, just not lemmy.ml.

There’s http response code 402 (payment required) which comes before even 404 (page not found). Indicates to me that people were thinking about using the web for commerce even before they thought about people putting in a wrong URL.

I did in the past. But now my internet connection involves co-ax cable. So please send all replies in an analog video form, since that’s what that cable was designed for.

lemmy.ml tends to have an immature userbase with immature mods. It’s a weird bubble of insane extremists that are all about ideological purity tests. They aren’t really interested in discussion and will ban anyone that doesn’t conform to their extremism. And their extremists are constantly edging towards stochastic terrorism.

So needless to say, I’m banned from lemmy.ml, and I feel like that’s a badge of honour. But that does mean I won’t be engaging with any community that’s hosted on lemmy.ml.

So if you want to have discussion that’s not about how super awesome the violent overthrow of the government of your country would be, I’d recommend not hosting your community on lemmy.ml.

If you want people to use your website,

Why do you assume that’s the end goal? Pretty sure their goal is to get paid. The website is a means to deliver content to people. If we’re talking about news sites, then I think they’d prefer people buy a newspaper. But since they have to have a website they need to figure out a way to make some money or they’re going to get laid off.

Sucks for them.

Well if we’re all having this attitude, then why should anyone care about your preferences for no ads? You’ve taken the low ground and anyone can now say “Sucks for you” if you don’t like seeing ads.

holds up spork

Mine love it out there.

The trick is to bring them inside before it gets cold.

Most people aren’t all that well informed and don’t do a lot of crtical thinking about their political positions on things. Many people are only guided by their emotions.

If your Church says that life begins at conception, then abortion is killing babies. So you’d be angry about abortions happening.

If you hear a horrible crime, you’re angry about that and might want the person that did that crime to be executed. If you never hear about or think about innocent people being execute, never consider the ethical problems with a government killing people, never consider the costs of it, and all the other arguments against the death penalty, then you can go through life thinking there’s no problem with it.

And even if you hear the rational arguments, they get overpowered by emotion the next time someone says “abortion is murder” or you hear about a horrible crime happening that might qualify for the death penalty.

Is your point that technology should never be used for anything other than what it was originally designed for? If that’s the case then please stop using TCP/IP for anything other than advancing US military weapons research.

Have you ever bitten into a road apple?

People come up with funny names for things sometimes.

Isn’t this just the system working as intended? You gain benefit from the content of a website and the people who make the content get compensated via ad revenue. If you choose to not provide them with ad revenue, you don’t get the benefit of the content. It’s basically the same as walking into a store and choosing not to buy a product on the shelf. You’re not “getting yours” by not buying something, you’re getting nothing and paying nothing, zero benefit for zero cost.

They’d mix in laughter from earlier takes into later takes. Obviously people are going to laugh more the first time they hear a joke than on the second or third time hearing it. So that seems reasonable to me.

Saying “actual audience laughter” wouldn’t mean it isn’t a laugh track, ie. actual audience laughter recorded from something else. In the end it’s all recorded laughter no matter what they did. So “filmed before a live studio audience” would be the best way to describe it.

Yeah the “they’re ruining the integrity of video game journalism” argument was insane to me. What integrity? Companies routinely paid for good reviews and everyone knew it. It’s a really corrupt industry, but people only got upset because of some shenanigans by women? I think? I never actually looked into what it was about because the whole thing seemed nonsense to me.

S and a dot is just for when you want to abbreviate the S by adding an additional character.

Yeah Trump fucked them over, because he’s a dishonourable coward. Good thing he’ll never be President again, right?

Kurdish villagers… interesting choice. The people that Saddam Hussein dropped chemical weapons on. Those warplanes helped free them from Hussein’s oppression. That lasted until ISIS took over. Then those waprlanes helped the Kurds in fighting off ISIS.

I think the comic is trying to make a point but completely failing at it because the writer doesn’t know anything about history… even recent history.

Well it’s similar to what Churchill said about democracy… it’s a bad system but it’s better than all the others.

If you can put ideology aside and think in terms of economics, in many industries capitalism offers an efficient way of determining the an optimal price and quantity to produce considering the costs and value something brings. And it’s something that allows for industries to function without an excessive amount of centralized planning which will often get things wrong.

But it’s like a machine in a many ways. And like any machine it requires maintenance. Things like trust-busting, progessive taxation, regulations, and occasional stimulus are necessary to keep it running smoothly.

But once you bring ideology into it, it all becomes a shitshow. Some will argue capitalism is a perfect machine and any kind of maintenance on the machine will ruin it’s perfection. Others take any kind of maintenance on the machine as a sign the machine will inevitably fail and needs to be replaced entirely. But then we go back to the beginning where other systems have been tried and they’re worse. Charlatans, grifters, ideologues abound pushing people in every direct except for simply taking reasonable measures to keep the machine running smoothly. There’s an almost religious devotion towards arguing the either the machine is perfect or the machine is doomed to failure and not only should be replaced they should accelerate the failure so it can be replaced sooner.

Zealots from all sides demonize the mechanics that are simply keeping things running. A lot of emotional nonsense about this thing. But to an economist, it’s just a machine with both strengths and weaknesses. The functioning of the machine is well understood, and the other machines that have been tried didn’t really work.

You’re not offering any alternatives.

But your personal experience probably doesn’t give you a representative cross section of Americans.

Neither does yours. The fact is that there are Democrats pushing legislation pushing to move towards Ranked Choice Voting. It’s only your personal experience that leads you to believe that it’s all for show.

There’s also, like, some pretty big rifts in the right, between the old school establishment and the MAGA crowd.

Yeah but they didn’t form a new party did they? And I don’t think the Dems want to be dependent on the GOP running another unpopular candidate in 2028. They have campaign workers that actually talk to a lot of voters so they’d know better than either of us about the cross section of Americans.

Most people don’t know about legislation that has passed, forget about proposed legislation being a thing that will influence voters. So why would they bother proposing legislation they don’t really want in an effort to bamboozle people who don’t even know about it?