Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it's actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that's really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Fuck ALL advertisements. Yes, even "unobtrusive" ones, especially yours. If I want your shit, I will find you. If I appreciate your shit, I'll pay you for your time. If you want to connect, I'm all ears. Otherwise, fuck off capitalists, fuck off advertisers, and fuck off useful idiots who want to waste my finite lifespan in this miserable universe showing me ads.
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I literally just came from another post that was talking about this.
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but without ads get ready to start paying for things. You go to a news website, sorry you need to login and hand over your credit card to access anything. Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can't sell you data to advertisers anymore.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
I brought this up the last time I talked about this, but to be clear, if we must choose between advertisements and paywall, then we should choose advertisements as the lesser evil. However, we must never accept the fallacy that advertising or paywalls are the only possible choices! More generally, we must never accept the fallacy that a market is the only acceptable way to distribute goods, a corollary of which is the idea that any acceptable solution needs to compete on equal terms with existing products in a market.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
Well the first part at least would be a welcome change. The issue in my view is the very fact that poor people are treated as second-class citizens in information access or any other field of endeavor.
Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can't sell you data to advertisers anymore.
I very genuinely want those sites to fucking die so I don't have to coexist in a world where they dominate the internet. I would be literally thrilled to join a group of like-minded people who have to reimplement the conveniences of the modern web from scratch for free.
Why on earth is a paywall an evil and worse than ads? This idea that everything on the Internet needs to be free-as-in-beer is the toxicity that has resulted in our entire world corrupted with ads. A News organization needs money to pay journalists and to send them to where news is happening. A video service like YouTube needs to pay for massive amounts of storage and servers. If you want quality professional content, and not just fake blogging thinly disguising advertising, you need to pay writers.
The alternative is that is it all corrupted with ads, or by the "rich uncle" of the day like a musk or a zuckerberg or whatever with an ulterior motive.
If you want the provider of a service or product to be beholden and at all responsive to you, as a user, rather than someone else, you need to be a customer, a paying customer. That's your only real leverage. If someone else is the real source of their revenue stream then their every act is geared to please them and not you. That's what we have now.
If you want to socialize it all instead, like a PBS, I'm fine with that, but good luck.
Unfortunately there's a lot of products that most people don't even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I've been doing things the hard way for so long.
OTOH, fuck all the advertisers who use shady tactics to make sales, and especially fuck all the people who pray on the naivety of others to steal their money. I was just showing a customer an email I got the other day stating her domain hosting was past due and required immediate payment, and she asked how I knew it was a scam. Uh, hello, because ---I--- am hosting your domain and website (and this is exactly why I share this kind of stuff with people, to make them think before they blindly write a check).
I would argue that if there's a product that nobody knows exist that's not necessarily because we need to allow constant intrusive ads, and more indicative that people don't actually need the product.
I want to say that in any given day, 60% of the ads I see are from big, well known companies who don't need me to see them to know they exist. Shit like Liberty Mutual (I swear I see more of their ads than anyone else and THEY ARE ALREADY MY INSURANCE PROVIDER), Coke, Pepsi, etc. 39.9% of the remaining 40% are advertisements for shit that I just don't care about. I don't care about the newest tech toys. I don't care about the newest car mods, or random shit I can put on my desk, or stupid extra kitchen gadgets. Fully 40% of the ads I see are trying to convince me that I should buy a product that I straight up don't need because the ad looked cool. Why should those ads be allowed to exist? Why should I be constantly bombarded with ads for services that I either already know plenty about or for things that are trying to manufacture a reason for their existence?
Only about 0.5% of the ads I see are actually for things I did know know about and that seem useful to me, or like something I would like. Probably even less than that, I'm drunk rn and estimating.
I keep throwing away ads from Comcast trying to sell me on the virtues of their business internet packages. Guys, I left you because your lame-ass shit was expensive as hell, slow as hell, and you couldn't even be counted on to meet a single appointment in 6 months to bury your damn line you left laying across my yard.
I agree with you, there's a lot of companies that just need to be silenced. You're allowed to send me ONE ad, and you better make it good because I don't ever want to hear from you again.
Unfortunately there's a lot of products that most people don't even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I've been doing things the hard way for so long.
For sure. I'm not against promotion in the large, but the constant and intrusive advertisements within other tasks, such as web ads that take up valuable screen real estate, or TV/YouTube commercials that keep me from the programs I want to watch.
Like my username is literally PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S. I have no problem getting PM'ed or emailed stuff. For example, I'm subscribed to a number of mailing lists from sites I ordered from. Guitar Center can send me all the emails they want [1], sell me all the crap they want, because I can opt out at any time, and I have a work email so I can put them aside for later.
[1] To the specific email I gave them, which I do check.
Pansexual, polysexual, and omnisexual are all microlabels and are all subsets of bisexual. You don't need more labels than gay, straight, and bi.
Edit: I forgot about asexuals. But I specifically only care about bi subsets. They're dumb, and you only need bi
I agree. All the little bitty addages don't make sense. You can be bi and still have preferences. Just keep it simple gosh dangit.
I think there’s value for folks in the community to have the hyper-specific labels. I’m saying this as a bi person who agrees that pan, Omni, etc are sub categories of bi.
People who are strongly against nuclear power are ignorant of the actual safety statistics and are harming our ability to sustainably transition off fossil fuels and into renewables.
Most conservatives, however deeply red, are not intentionally hateful and are usually open to rational discussion. People just don't know how to have rational discussions nowadays and the few times they do, they don't know how to think like somebody else and put things in a way they can understand.
People nowadays think because a point convinced them, it should convince everybody else and anybody who's not convinced by it is just being willfully ignorant. The truth is we all process things differently and some people need to hear totally different arguments to understand, often put in ways that wouldn't convince you if you heard it.
It's hard to understand other people and I feel like the majority of people have given up trying in favor of assuming everybody who disagrees with you knows their wrong and refuses to admit it.
If it wasn't for their response to the pandemic, I might be inclined to agree with you.
After an entity reaches an annual cap (say $5m profit), 95c of every dollar should be taxed
Assisted suicide is good for society and if legalised would help fix my countries broken healthcare system
Not having kids because of climate change is stupid. You are leaving the world in the hands of people who care less than you.
But the leading cause of climate change is overpopulation.
There were 3 billion humans on this planet in 1960. There are 8 billion humans right now. And all those humans are producing waste, using energy, etc.
Even if we reduce the per-capita ecological footprint, we’re outbreeding the gains we make.
Euthanasia should be available for anyone at any age. You don't choose to be born, life has no inherent value, suffering is strictly personal. Suicide is a terrible option with lots of drama, an extremely high failure rate and lifelong treatments or medication that are seen as the solution by society is a conservative convulsion of keeping people alive under any circumstances.
We could set up three sessions with a therapist, to keep people from losing loved ones too fast. But honestly, to me that would feel patronizing. That other people find it important someone stays alive is their problem. If it hurts them too much they can do the same.
There is joy in life and that's beautiful, but on a scale suffering has the possibility to be more intense. Let people die without drama, let them say goodbye if they want with a ceremony, let them choose.
That's the next step in the mentality of a modern civilization. It will fix the drama of wars, hunger and pain as you always have a simple painless solution if the suffering gets too heavy. Just end it, peacefully, whenever you want.
I find it insane that the same people who are anti-fossil fuel and want only green energy is also anti-nuclear power. I also want fossil fuels gone, but nuclear is the only way we are able to get to where we need to.
Corporations should only be allowed to exist as long as they're doing more good for society than the damage they do. Businesses should either be a net positive or run by people who are individually and jointly liable.
I don't want mass-adoption of Lemmy by more Reddit users (said a former Reddit lurker who likes it here and actually participates because it's awesome at this stage).
Lemmy.world holding such a prevalent place in the Lemmy/Kbin part of the Fediverse makes it a major single point of failure.
They should still be the newcomers instance, but communities and users should migrate to other instances to increase the resilience of the Fediverse.
in a weird way it's good that it's failing, I've seen an uptick in signups as people search for other instances
The uptime on lemmy.world is terrible. https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io currently shows 95% uptime, but it has been "down" from a UX perspective more than half the time I attempted to use it. The uptime reporting is simply not picking up when something is off as much as it should. And they recently added an archive.org proxy for when it goes down... what the heck? I understand that it is run by volunteers and all, but what a buzzkill.
