I’m really liking this, thank you for the suggestion.

@[email protected] has whored his karma already, he isn’t answering these additional questions which call into question his false assumptions.

Yes, we could have an internet without businesses. See here.

This sounds like the kind of thing a Zoomer who has no memory of life before the Internet – or the Internet of the '90s before the advertisers got a hold of it, for that matter – would write.

To clear that up, I’m coming up on 40. We got our first family computer with a 56k modem in 1995. I’m not saying ads are a good thing, I’m telling you that 99% of websites are ad-powered.

Back then companies had websites as a novelty, or way to find information about their company. All the newspapers that had websites were simply putting their major articles on the internet as a bonus, and as a business strategy to push subscriptions for their physical paper. Most everyone still purchased a subscription to their physical newspapers and magazines. Now, basically nobody has a newspaper or magazine subscription unless it’s online, but most people still don’t… The tech savvy use archive.ph and similar, and the old and non tech-savvy use their 3-article limit and might buy a month subscription to read an article they really have to read, or maybe even a year like the old days, but most don’t pay for a subscription at all, and that’s where the ads come in.

However, since social media has become the dominant news-spreading mechanism, many or most don’t even read articles. They read headlines and talk shit or ask questions in the comments section, of things which were answered in the article. In the 90s those people would be reading the articles as something to do, and to stay somewhat informed. Today, their smartphone would ding or buzz before they finished the first article.

P.S. I’m Degoogled and use Graphene without GSF on my main profile so I use Aurora, Neo Store, and F-Droid. Currently using Boost installed with Aurora. What’s a good recommendation for a good, fast, FOSS Lemmy client that doesn’t show ads that I can get with F-Droid?

Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated person (or group of people) donate their time and energy to produce.

Wikipedia has their semi-annual donation drives and many (not most, but enough worth mentioning) FOSS devs are salaried by companies like Google and Microsoft and are allowed to work on patches to out-of-scope projects on company time provided they’re still fulfilling their main roles. There are also Liberapay, Open Collective, Ko-fi and such but for the majority of FOSS devs not funded by large corps, just developing a large and widely-used program because they want to, donations rarely ever cover as much as they would make at a 9-5. There are also nonprofits that distribute donations to FOSS devs. For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.

These are not businesses.

What are your suggestions besides ads and subscriptions, professor?

That’s a nice thought.

Then you suddenly realize no one knows up from down or down from up. Society would shift on such a massive scale people would probably just stick their smartphones in a drawer and only use them to message people they already know personally and check them a few times a day like an answering machine.

Then suddenly you realize you haven’t heard about Ukraine, Russia, Israel or Palestine in months. It’s November 28th and you heard someone mention a ‘new president’ but you didn’t even vote. Shit, you forgot to vote. There were no social media or news websites reminding you about the election and you didn’t have it on your new wall calendar yet! Ah that’s what all those “Vote Now!!!” yard signs were about, fuck…

It’s a nice thought, but the internet is powered by ads. (Almost?) Every subscription-supported website is also ad-supported. The internet would basically go under. AFAIK all the Lemmy apps have ads too. It’d be a nice change to get back to get a force shove back to the early-mid 90’s. Maybe we’d do things differently. People would certainly be outside talking to each other a lot more.

Hitman denies being hitman and you believe him, that’s your angle? I know you’re being intentionally obtuse, but it’s clear I was talking about the teenagers, not the woman trying not to be arrested.

Notice how it says it was consensual and they were at the age of consent?

Boy A and Boy B are now the most popular kids in school.

Kid was 2 years older? Totally legal and the top category on every porn site.

For me it’s the high-horse holier than thou attitude most of them seem to carry in online conversations. I know a fee vegans and they are mostly fine in person after the first few months of radicalization, but I imagine they just suppress it in person to maintain the acquaintanceship and then bitch in their vegan echo chambers about how “my co-worker who knows I’m vegan had the audacity to order a hamburger and eat it in front of me knowing I’m vegan, does he know he’s destroying the world with that Burger… AITA?”

If you’re looking for scientific answers, good luck they, Inrhjnjbmost people stop worrying about micromanaging people after a few years of academia.

I noticed my main VPN and backup VPN failing to connect the other day, but that was 3-4 days ago. Haven’t tried since, because I switched to Pop!_OS in that time.

At the time I thought it was just my ISP being my ISP.

E: Both with Wireguard and OpenVPN, across multiple servers.

Ah I should have taken into account that I am grandfathered in from the AT&T takeover. That makes more sense.

T-Mobile prepaid. Mint mobile is also very cheap, but I think there is one cheaper now.

85 per phone? did you get suckered into a contract+new “free” iPhone or something? I pay 40/mo for unlimited everything in the States but could be paying 25-30 if I wanted to switch providers.

SMS message costs are a scam, always have been. It takes like 1-2 seconds worth of talk time for the same amount of sending a text.

Every wild dog will chase and eat prey and their own poop, and attack any dog that challenges them or their pack.

Every wild cat will chase and catch their prey, and then play with it while keeping it alive for a while until it ultimately dies.

Humans are basically dogs or cats that have 1000’s of societal incentives not to chase and play with prey, drilled into most of us from the beginning, but everyone still has that innate ability that will come out under the right circumstances. If civilization ended today, who you think you are, and what you think you are not capable of today, ends today.

you never had any dark thoughts? Never did anything bad?

Yes, you might not be doing this particular bad thing.

You: Yeah sure, but I never did this particular bad thing.

Welcome to the species, bud. We’re all a little mad here.

Please tell me you work in tech. I want my daily lmfaoizzle.

Current mental help methods for pedophiles include acceptance of their desires as normal, just not something to act on IRL.

I am not aware of the research in this area although I have a minor psych background so that’s interesting and makes sense in hindsight. My understanding is that a large part of the compulsion is driven by guilt, shame, feelings of worthlessness, prior victimizations of themselves, etc. Essentially trying to gain a sense of power by taking it from those more vulnerable than them, like an abuser beating their spouse because someone at work put them down. So it makes sense to encourage a sense of power and lessen any sense of guilt and shame.

On a side note, I can’t imagine having their name plastered everywhere does anything but trigger the compulsion to re-offend. Maybe when we advance more as a society, we can separate individuals into categories of has-offended and child-attracted, with the former being on a public danger list and the latter having frequent discreet visits by social workers and mandatory counselors, etc. To lessen the chance of offense and possibly start helping them before they get to the offense stage (those that were ever going to offend.)

you can’t easily add it to any picture you want (if it’s implemented well

Edit for the downvoters: StackExchange - How do I add exif data to an image?

Going to need you to elaborate on this. EXIF data is just bytes in a file, like any of the other bytes in the file. It can be changed and is often changed without the users consent. Are you proposing we create a new type of hardware, something akin to Secure Enclave, and then mass-produce and add it to every consumer CPU to ensure some specific types of exif data isn’t tampered with?