Libertarians are mostly just neoliberals who are upset they’re not allowed to be more psycopathic.

Their new utopia will tear itself apart with greed, drugs and sex abuse just like all the old ones.

Exploding head syndrome only a beep? Brains do weird shit.

Then either make your comment and eat the downvotes or just don’t make the comment at all. You’re functionally complaining that a Facebook anti-vax group isn’t listening to your science.

Regardless, there is an important distinction.

You can argue all you like that political systems like communism and socialism may have lead to things like corruption, famine, wars and genocide but ultimately, the people who support those systems are seeking a fairer way to run society for all people and believe in it despite its history.

Head over to the far-right and the genocide is the point. They want “undesirables” to be killed, enslaved or completely repressed.

I don’t know, nor am I speculating. The person I was replying to said they didn’t see a browser check in the code, which isn’t enough to dismiss it.

They don’t need to put incriminating “if Firefox” statements in their code – the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.

To block AI from hoovering up all our data, without paying them.

That’s not how greed works, nor how reddit works.

The only time they’ll do something that reduces profits is when they’re confident it will mean more profits in the near future (and they can’t figure out a way to have both).

That’s why they were happy to platform mask off neo-nazis, the dangerously stupid and communities dedicated to getting as close to child pornography as possible without technically breaking any laws and why they waited until the last possible moment to pull the plug on them.

They’re not uninformed, they’re lying.

They are fully aware that if a politician tried to introduce gun laws that were an exact copy of Switzerland’s, they would be staunchly opposed by the pro-gun community, Republicans and the gun lobby that owns them.

They just want to muddy the waters and drag out the conversation forever. The Switzerland excuse is just as bad-faith as when they blamed video games, music or too many doors.

Edit: also, might make the government think twice about fucking with democracy or stepping over the common man.

That’s just a marketing campaign from gun manufacturers. If it actually worked, it would have worked in America.

Instead, they get to choose between a neoliberal and a fascist every few years (if they haven’t been disenfranchised or gerrymandered into irrelevance), which decides whose rich friends and donors get to pocket the most public funds.

That’s incompatible with corporate greed. They will look at a billion transactions for $0.05 and start thinking “What if each of those was $0.50? Or $5.00? Or $50.00?”.

Without a regulating force (such as laws or consumer power that isn’t just neoliberal lies) , it will always grow to absorb every available dollar it can.

And realistically, charging people 0.045€ for the service they actually use won’t make them nearly as rich as charging people $50 each month for the $3 dollars they use.

They’ve already done the maths to prove it. It’s why it’s never happened.

There’s demonstrably millions of people who are absolutely fine with being assholes, especially if it’s profitable. It doesn’t matter to them in the slightest.

With any change on the site formerly known as Twitter, there are 3 lenses to examine it through:

1. Reducing the massive financial loss that Musk will almost certainly take
2. Amplifying the voice of the far-right
3. Stroking the ego of the man child who owns it

This is probably mostly 1. He’s looked at the number of users and said “what if they were dollars?”.

But like you say, there’s probably a bit of 2. Reactionaries are more likely to hand over a dollar for a Truth Social with outside their choir to abuse.

It probably won’t dissuade bots and astro-turfing, but it will make it pay-to-play, with the richest welding the most influence. That’s definitely 3 since by any other metric besides money, Elon is average.

I can only approve of people paying for services they use. It isn’t free to run. But there are several things to consider:

I don’t mind paying for services, but I now have 20 different services. Each one is trying to extract the maximum amount of money out of me while giving me a minimum in return.

I also accept that those services are not free to run, but realistically, these companies aren’t just trying to cover their operating costs, they’re trying to further line the pockets of executives and shareholders.

And its never enough for them. I could give Twitter $100 a month and they’d still sell my data for a few extra pennies. I could give YouTube an unlimited supply of servers and bandwidth and they’d still show just as many ads.

We will never get the cost living under control until this corporate greed is addressed because no matter how much money we pay people, there’s an army of psychopaths ready to milk them of every cent.

So fuck em. They can have an extra dollar when they can prove it will actually end up in the pocket of an employee. Otherwise, the richest man in the world can fund his own little reactionary pet project.

Would it change anything besides their technique?

They almost certainly already have vote manipulation tools for reddit that work via browser automation, because someone offered me money to build one 10 years ago.

Those tools and a handful of accounts+vpns would already be borderline undetectable without the access needed to see that 25 accounts always voted the same way.

At least on Lemmy, you have that access. Reddit not only makes zero effort to prevent it, they actively obfuscate the information needed to spot it.

I think initially, he just wanted to do his duty as a right-wing reactionary and use his influence to shame Twitter for deplatforming white supremacists, likely having heard that Truth Social was eying up a plot next to every other dead social network that pandered to fascists.

But like every other figurehead of that crowd, below the bluster and bravado lies a very tiny dick and his preferred method of wearing shorts in the shower is spending millions of dollars in an effort to convince everyone he is the smartest man in the world.

So pretentious screeds about “free speech absolutism” quickly turned into self-aggrandizing posts about how he could do it better and before he even got a chance to call someone a pedo, he’d accidentally made some comments about buying Twitter that he was legally obligated to follow through on.

He tried to squirm out of it for a while, muttering about bots and whatnots, but it seems his lawyers informed him that yes, he had also bragged away his opportunity to back out and he was going to have to follow through.

And so a couple of months later, he walked into a mostly empty office with 4 goals in mind.

First, he needed to get far-right propaganda back on track. Too many people had started to see through the “we’re not neo-nazis we just have the opinions, goals and pundits”, plausible deniability schtick and the far-right funnel just wasn’t flowing how it used to before all the domestic terrorism.

That kicked off a flurry of actions like unbanning mentally ill hip-hop artists, internationally embarrassing politicians and pseudo-intellectuals who’d spent decades striving to achieve mediocrity before they said something bigoted and were immediately placed on a pedestal.

Second, he needed to self-soothe after doing something so stupid in front of so many people. $44 billion dollars down the drain! That’s not what the smartest man in the world would do! Especially not if money was the only thing that made him noteworthy in the first place.

So he marched around unplugging things and pretending he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t just lifting key phrases from more intelligent people like a celebrity parrot.

It was an unconvincing show for anyone in the industry who quickly realised he barely had a junior-level understanding of a single moving part, let alone the hundreds that keep a site like Twitter online.

Third, he needed to claw back every penny he could, carefully balancing things like “gleefully firing all the heartbroken staff” with other important business like “indulging his teenage edgelord”.

But each new idea is even more dogshit than the last. He bought a sinking ship and he’s trying to bail out the water with every piece of cutlery in the kitchen. It’s only a matter of time before the office supplies turn up on ebay.

And fourth and, probably most importantly: “Are there any women in this place worth manipulating into prostitution? I need everybody back in the office tomorrow for a face to face”

Was she? Any posts about “why isn’t X banned too?” were buried under an avalanche of reactionary tantrums about losing their platform to discuss hitting children. For the overwhelming majority of users, it was “this goes too far”, not “this doesn’t go far enough”.

Which means that realistically, she never got past the low hanging fruit. These were the days when a lot of these places still had plausible deniability so it was easy to pull in wider support.

My baseless guess is that she came in as CEO and noticed they were handing over some very predictable post histories every time there was a mass shooting but couldn’t come out and say “check out all these domestic terrorists” because it would damage the brand.

And looking back, she was absolutely in the right clearing out those communities.

From my own experience, “not bothering” is definitely the better business practice since chances are you won’t make back the development costs.

Maybe Steam Deck and that porting library have improved things but a decade ago it would have been better business to just give Linux users $20 to not play your game.

I understand why people would hesitate to pay the price. Realistically, the Fairphone could have put in higher quality parts but that would have just blown their costs out further.

But exploitative wages – for both foreign and domestic workers – are at the core of many problems and I hate to see customers blamed.

The one in a hundred restaurant might be full of empty tables, but where would people eat if you doubled their wages? If there were two chocolate bars with identical taste, being offered at an identical price, except one of them used child slaves (and said so on the packaging), how many people “wouldn’t care” then?

Ethical choices shouldn’t be a luxury, unethical choices just shouldn’t be an option. If that means people can’t afford chocolate, they can take it up with the executives who have been pocketing their payrises.