I read the article, and while it touches on a common issue, I don't think it goes far enough. When looking at these problematic incentives that are mentioned, notably the author doesn't really address the incentives like for example where does the money come from.
When you talk about venture capitalists, you often are referring to a bank associated with a venture capitalist. Everything in business after all, incentive wise, trickles down from the banking system.
We can't change the way we do business when the incentives are fixed, and banking in general is only marginally overseen by government; most of the regulation and praxis is done by the Fed which is not government; but a private institution.
Community makes reddit work. Many communities while still open are moving off the platform. Some have just said they are doing post freeze such as AskHistorians.
This is digg all over again. It didn't happen overnight. Worse, reddit is now undeleting deleted posts, if you didn't overwrite each individual post despite your wish that what you said be taken down they are keeping it up.
Some mods did have a tantrum, other mods are being smart and implementing contingency, they just don't feel the need to broadcast because that would undercut what they are doing and cause an alerting response.
More specific than that. You could describe blackmail like that.
The key characteristic of astroturfing is that it attempts to influence public opinion by presenting a false picture of the current public opinion. It's both of those things together that make something astroturfing.
GDP was never really an accurate calculation and interest rates greatly affect whatever the natural baseline is at any time. Calling productivity down with greater Remote Work is a red herring because there's less overall economic output because the cost of money has risen so steeply and will continue to do so at least two more times. Unfortunately, they've printed about as much as they've offset in interest rates so it looks more like its engineered to kill off any normal to mid-size business. The only people getting the easy money are the people on the gravy train.
> GDP was never really an accurate calculation and interest rates greatly affect whatever the natural baseline is at any time.
GDP (GNP back then) was just a simple, interim suggestion of Simon Kuznets' while walking with FDR and talking about the depression back in the early 1930s. It wasn't meant to be an authoritative or be-all-and-end-all for the state of the economy.
Like the Charles Dow's indexes, GNP was something that could relatively easily be calculated (Dow could do it with a pencil and paper; GNP needed the simple statistical bureaucracy of the time to collect the raw data). Also like the Dow, once reported you didn't want to stop because it was the longest time series data available. Also like the Dow it was readjusted via judgement from time to time.
They are likely planning on eliminating external apps from using their API. Upon doing that, it no longer becomes feasible to delete your content. They get to keep it forever since they make it so hard to go post by post and delete it.
You also won't have any new features that you actually want, because they haven't listened from the get go and have never been responsive because you are the product not the client.
These things are fairly simple to game out, I've got some money on reddit surviving but not without taking damage. That being said, I don't agree with it, but as people are well aware there is no good alternative.
The game-plan as I've found, (dons being Reddit mask, and I'm not associated with them in any way).
Was always, we own this data (not the community) we bought this when we bought out the founders in 2015/2016, we need to monetize it before interest rates cause an IPO to evaporate, we're going to do this no matter what. We don't want people being able to delete their content (Shredder App), and we can charge for access to this valuable corpus data, and we have all the control because we control the infrastructure. That's where they are coming from.
Now, If you look at which protests were successful in history, and which protests were not, you see that it really comes down to whether at the end of the day the authority making the decisions is responsive to the people demanding change.
Reddit has never been responsive in any of their actions towards external non-employees requesting changes. They've only ever provided illusory promises, or things they were already going to do (but didn't announce), and they had to fake the first communities until they could get enough people interested.
So, they'll let the protest occur for two days because it was planned, and if you crush it you look bad, and you can just ignore it because it doesn't affect the bottom line, people will grow tired and if it lasts longer they would have an automated way to replace the mods.
People will whine in their corners when that happens, and the people that didn't see what was happening, or didn't have an easy alternative will go back to their habits using reddit and supporting their overall decisions mindlessly because its habit. Click-whirr, fixed action pattern, no change happens. Its repeated over and over and over.
From what I've seen, None of the mods actually gamed out how this would go down and took pre-emptive measures to have a fallback and move their communities off the hostile platform. Some are scrambling to get Lemmy to do that, but Lemmy has been tested by who? I hadn't even heard of it until earlier this week so I doubt its a big project, let alone one that can scale to tens of thousands or above.
> As for the rest of your arguments, I believe you are simply wrong.
Just coming across this comment, I would disagree with your assessment.
Most distros use systemd, systemd has a dependency on d-bus and to do many of the features their userbase expects, it relies on d-bus activation which reparent's processes under the systemd user in most cases via the dbus-helper which suid's. This process also breaks common admin utilities like tops and ps (they don't show up except under very specific views, like tree view). Importantly, these distros often do not have MAC configured with a safe baseline if at all.
To put it mildly auditing d-bus and activations of this sort is ridiculously obtuse from an administrative perspective. Then there's all the dated software which no one touches or views such as gsd-* that cause a fail-whale when disabled.
The way exploits work most times is by using a chain of exploits. You chain 1 piece to the next, to the next, until you get to a bug that gets you what you want and the attacker then hits paydirt. This is basic cyber-sec 101, I don't see why you would discount exploits just because you don't know how they can get to that point to use it. We work with a porous attack surface everyday.
Most distro's have system defaults which don't even include a basic endpoint stateful firewall. I would hardly call these distros secure (which is most of them). End users are not expected to have specialties in Cybersec, Information Technology or System's Engineering just to set up a out of box system that's secure by default, this is the responsibility of the distro publisher.
When you talk about venture capitalists, you often are referring to a bank associated with a venture capitalist. Everything in business after all, incentive wise, trickles down from the banking system.
We can't change the way we do business when the incentives are fixed, and banking in general is only marginally overseen by government; most of the regulation and praxis is done by the Fed which is not government; but a private institution.