• ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Looks like a very interesting article. But the fact that it’s behind a paywall sums up the other problem with the Internet in general: everything has become hyper-monetized and gated.

    • Porto881@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I dont disagree that getting paywalled sucks (and won’t make any specific comments about The Atlantic) but the alternative is hypertargeted ads plastering every free pixel of the screen and invasive data-scraping.

      It might just be a sign of getting older and managing my finances a bit better, but at this point in my life I don’t really cry much when i see good content put behind a paywall (again, no comments about *The Atlantic).

      Paid subscription and you still shove ads at me? Fuck off.

      • naeap@sopuli.xyz
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        5 days ago

        Thing is, that there are multitudes of sites I want to read like an article or two. Paying a subscription for all of them just isn’t feasible.

        By now I even forgot the name of the project, but there was the idea to pay the actual creator for the article I’m reading.
        And I really liked the idea. But as far as I know, that project died - and messy, if I remember correctly.

        But the idea is still good imho.
        I’d have no problem chipping in a bit, when an article is written good and informative. But I don’t want to buy the cow, when I only want a sip of milk.

      • CaptSpify@lemmy.today
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        5 days ago

        Or the alternative could be to make it freely available and ask for donations. Its a system that has been proven to work for all kinds of conent

      • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 days ago

        I’m semi-ok with this tradeoff, as long as there are working ways I can get around the paywalls. Once there aren’t, it’s worse as I’m never going to go actually pay monthly for a hundred online papers I mostly don’t value the content of anyway. The main value articles have is as a shared context for discussion and common source of information, and with actually effective paywalls they would be entirely useless for that.

      • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Yeah, that’s a fair point. And I don’t begrudge content creators getting money for their work in general. I was more talking about the fact that some (not necessarily the Atlantic though) hide everything behind paywalls, even when it’s of critical importance to some people’s well-being; or just pay-walling everything without any kind of “n articles are free per month” option. That gets old. Especially for those of us who have been around since web 1.0, when monetization was not the driving force behind information distribution online.

  • chaos3361@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    I hope Reddit dies soon. It’s been a slow process happening since at least the API changes.

    Recently, Reddit seems to have underwent a major vibe shift that has sucked out the last little bits of fun and creativity that still existed there.

    • Obelix@feddit.org
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      5 days ago

      Yeah, the vibe shift is extreme. You can attribute some of it to the general vibe shift everywhere - of course the vibes are getting back when the Trump administration is starting to wreck havoc everywhere. But Reddit is taking this to the extreme - if you take a look at the standard frontpage, there is so much senseless ragebait and screenshots of Tweets of stupid, unimportant people. Videos of random idiots for you to be infuriated over. The fun really has left Reddit - I still remember a time where you could see funny memes and really interesting stuff instead of this.

  • Rolivers@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 days ago

    The APIcalypse didn’t destroy reddit so I doubt this will. Quality of posts on the popular subreddits has gone down drastically and there’s much more nazi propaganda there now though.

  • Fake4000@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Reddit really lives on old content. Loads of useful advice from real people, helpful recommendations, and questions and answers make Reddit still relevant.

    It’s a different story for new content though. Videos and images have been reposted as hell, AskReddit now just revolves around asking the same set of questions, and a lot of niche communities have slowed down.

    • GuitarSon2024@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Yeah the destruction of the niche communities plus the Big Brother style moderation is what drove me away.

      To put it in context, I was an active member of a gardening sub specific to my growing zone, and THAT got AI astroturfed to hell and back. Mods did nothing about it. So I say good riddance to the cesspool that reddit has devolved into.

      • Fake4000@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Can you tell me what happened when AI AstroTurf the subreddit?

        Which subreddit is it? Would love to see how it looks like now.

        • GuitarSon2024@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/OhioGardening/ Looks like they cleaned up a lot of the AI spam that was happening a few months ago, but they still let this one crazy guy post his fisheye lens youtube videos with updates about his garden. I’m all for it, but it was honestly annoying AF and most of his videos got downvoted. No one needs self promotion in a gardening sub.

    • purplemonkeymad@programming.dev
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      5 days ago

      I agree, specialized subs are really the only reason to use it. There are enough people on it that niche subjects have sufficient people to keep the communities going. Lemmy does not have that for all subjects (yet.)

    • Obelix@feddit.org
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      5 days ago

      Some Subreddits are really just reposts of old Twitter posts from several years ago with the same ragebait and the same answers every time.