Privacy concerns are a very popular and valid talking point on Lemmy, so I would like to gather your thoughts and opinions on this. (Apologies if it’s already been discussed!)
Would you support this? Would it work or even be viable? (If it could somehow overcome the rabid resistance from these big companies). What are your thoughts?
Personally, I’m getting more and more agitated at the state of this late stage global capitalism, where companies have the gall to ask you to pay or subscribe to their products, while they already make money from you for selling your data. It’s been an issue for a long time now, but seems to really be ramping up.
Yup
Like. a lot of us have grievances with reddit. But the third party apps were actively preventing corporate reddit from monetizing the site (and were often taking the money people might otherwise have paid as a subscription). reddit chose the route of disabling third party apps and changing nothing else which… was a choice
But other sites realize that you can use user data instead of ads. Rather than sell products to the user, they sell users to the products. And most people have zero issue with this because they never see an ad… at that site.
Its why I REALLY dislike the piped bot or whatever it is that automatically replies to every youtube link with “And if you don’t want to give them any money, click me”. That is just begging for google to go stupider with youtube (and they already are, at the “free” tier).
And it is why, for decades now, so many of us have been discouraging the use of adblockers by default. Use blocklists, not permit lists. Because if a site is responsibly serving up curated ads, let them. And if a site is not serving up ads in a way that you like… do you care about the site enough to visit it? But, people didn’t and now even the “good” websites are shilling dick pills and massively invasive tracking cookies because it was that or shut down.
All of which is why The Fediverse is gonna get REAL interesting over the next few months. Mastodon and Lemmy have had massive surges of users… which means storage and traffic costs. And it is going to be REAL interesting to see how the instance admins justify monetizing even while having bots that run around actively demonetizing other content (like the summary bot). Considering past experiences: There are gonna be some really pissed off and “betrayed” users