Arotrios

@PugJesus weren’'t you looking for a spot to perform baptisms?

It’s always wise to satisfy the requests of time squirrels. Keeps them away from one’s nuts.

“When the committee held an initial hearing on broadband permitting streamlining, including a draft of the American Broadband Deployment Act, no state or local government was invited to testify.”

If you’d like to make your feelings known on this omission and the bill in general, here are the members of that committee - clicking on a rep will give you their contact information.

Agreed again. If I wanted folks IRL to know what I post, I’d be on Facebook. Reddit’s value to posters was its anonymity. Without it, there’s no reason to use it over its centralized competitors in the social media space.

I totally hear you there and agree with you re: the business choices Spez made. Reddit lost a 20 year contributor when I walked away, and even if they rolled back all the changes, I won’t be returning.

I was more looking at applying your suggestions to a fresh publishing model, as your ideas intrigued me (having run a publishing forum in the days of the early internet). I want to have a space on the internet where content creators can keep ownership of their content and get adequately paid for publishing - I think properly run, it could become a vital hub for our cultural legacy (as Reddit was, albeit clumsily and destructively). The incoming revenue is the biggest challenge, which is why I focused on that element.

Some users will pay if you have a paywall, but only if you already have a substantial amount of content they want to access. This works for a search engine crawling pre-existing content, but not so well for a forum style site like Reddit, where most of the content creation is driven by engagement with other content. If you reduce the engagement rate (aka through a paywall), you’re actually reducing your incoming content in the long run (something we’re seeing on Reddit after the blackout).

I don’t know what the ultimate solution here is, but I really do like your payout concept with Monero. If I did build another publishing attempt, it’s something I’d try to implement if I could get the incoming revenue to support it.

Excellent points. That being said, Reddit will never pay contributors. They have never had interest in quality of the content on the platform, only it’s engagement rate - the years of publishing subs like jailbait and The_Donald speak to that. Engagement, now that they’ve got a critical mass of users and 20 years worth of content, can be maintained with bots, sockpuppet accounts, and reposts (all of which have become the course du jour for the front page and /r/all since the API revolt began)… at least until they go IPO, after which it’s not their problem anymore.

The biggest problem with online publishing is that without that critical mass of readership, it’s very difficult to become profitable enough to pay your contributors. Reddit’s never gotten to this point, even with millions of users. It’s my hope that with contributors moving off of Reddit, we’ll see new publishing models appear that utilize some of the excellent ideas you’ve outlined above. I particularly like the suggestion of using Monero as a currency to ensure anonymity.

Tying voting to currency is an interesting idea, but I think that voting should be free, as my experience running forums is that only about 10% of your viewers will care enough to vote, and maybe 10% of those choose to post actual content. Putting a paywall in front of voting will kill engagement. However, limiting the number of free votes an account gets per day, then allowing people to buy more votes with currency, and earn currency for posting content could work very well if run correctly. The trick is balancing the actual profit you make off of the contribution with the need to pay your contributors, and here it becomes a question of determining the proper margins and payouts.

The other problem is that the only real revenue source outside of the users of the site is going to be Google Adwords or a similar platform (unless you go for ancillary streams of revenue, like attaching an e-commerce store to the site). If you charge for access to the content, you’re killing your engagement. I haven’t used Adwords for awhile now, but when I did the payouts were absolutely abysmal (like less than a penny per click). They were so bad that it wasn’t even worth dedicating the visual real estate to put up the ads.

Ultimately, this is the same challenge traditional publishing has had for a long time. It’s generally unprofitable unless you have a runaway hit or ancillary streams of revenue (like syndication deals with other media types) - most of the actual content almost never makes money, which is why so much of our traditional media is paid for by advertising and subsequently controlled by corporate interests.

Great concept - thanks for creating this! Mentioned this to you in a DM on my alt, but if your users would like to use the #cinemainsomnia tag we created over on the 13th Floor (for our film series, which is pretty much pre-2000) to grab extra eyes, please feel free to do so.

This should pop up the post over here on our Microblog, as it’s one of our magazine tags.

Looking forward to seeing what you folks bring up from the archives - best of luck to you and your new community!

Ok, but if you don’t return them this time I’m sending your ass to collections.

They’re doing it because it worked in the 90s. Different companies involved, but same ballgame, same playbook.

Here’s some relevant info from a Reddit post 6 years ago from Bruce Kushnick, well known for his activism and writing on the topic:

I’ve been tracking the telco deployments of fiber optics since 1991 when they were announced as something called the Information Superhighway. The plan was to have America be the first fiber optic country – and each phone company went to their state commissions and legislatures and got tax breaks and rate increases to fund these ‘utility’ network upgrades that were supposed to replace the existing copper wires with fiber optics – starting in 1992. And it was all a con. As a former senior telecom analyst (and the telcos my clients) i realized that they had submitted fraudulent cost models, and fabricated the deployment plans. The first book, 1998, laid out some of the history “The Unauthorized Bio” with foreword by Dr. Bob Metcalfe (co-inventor of Ethernet networking). I then released “$200 Billion Broadband Scandal” in 2005, which gave the details as by then more than 1/2 of America should have been completed – but wasn’t. And the mergers to make the companies larger were also supposed to bring broadband-- but didn’t. I updated the book in 2015 “The Book of Broken Promises $400 Billion broadband Scandal and Free the Net”, but realized that there were other scams along side this – like manipulating the accounting.

We paid about 9 times for upgrades to fiber for home or schools and we got nothing to show for it – about $4000-7000 per household (though it varies by state and telco). By 2017 it’s over 1/2 trillion.

Finally, I note. These are not “ISPs”; they are state utility telecommunications companies that were able to take over the other businesses (like ISPs) thanks to the FCC under Mike Powell, now the head of the cable association. They got away with it because they could create a fake history that reporters and politicians kept repeating. No state has ever done a full audit of the monies collected in the name of broadband; no state ever went back and reduced rates or held the companies accountable. And no company ever ‘outed’ the other companies-- i.e., Verizon NJ never said that AT&T California didn’t do the upgrades. --that’s because they all did it, more or less. I do note that Verizon at least rolled out some fiber. AT&T pulled a bait and switch and deployed U-Verse over the aging copper wires (with a ‘fiber node’ within 1/2 mile from the location).

Here’s a direct link to the PDF of his book,The Book of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal & Free the Net that he still provides for free from his website, www.irregulators.org.

For reference sake, here’s the link to his post on the bad place. Note I usually try to use better sourcing than Reddit, but Google’s search on this topic is either flailing or details on how this went down have undergone an active scrubbing attempt.

The first rule about no Github club is that we don’t talk about no Github club

JFC that’s frightening. It blew that red at about 30mph, didn’t even really slow down except for the curve.

This is one of the reasons I’m hesitant to start my own instance - the moderation load expands exponentially as you scale, and without some sort of automated tool to keep CSAM content from being posted in the first place, I can only see the problem increasing. I’m curious to see if anyone knows of lemmy or mastodon moderation tools that could help here.

That being said, it’s worth noting that the same Standford research team reviewed Twitter and found the same dynamic in play, so this isn’t a problem unique to Mastodon. The ugly thing is that Twitter has (or had) a team to deal with this, and yet:

“The investigation discovered problems with Twitter’s CSAM detection mechanisms and we reported this issue to NCMEC in April, but the problem continued,” says the team. “Having no remaining Trust and Safety contacts at Twitter, we approached a third-party intermediary to arrange a briefing. Twitter was informed of the problem, and the issue appears to have been resolved as of May 20.”

Research such as this is about to become far harder—or at any rate far more expensive—following Elon Musk’s decision to start charging $42,000 per month for its previously free API. The Stanford Internet Observatory, indeed, has recently been forced to stop using the enterprise-level of the tool; the free version is said to provide read-only access, and there are concerns that researchers will be forced to delete data that was previously collected under agreement.

So going forward, such comparisons will be impossible because Twitter has locked down its API. So yes, the Fediverse has a problem, the same one Twitter has, but Twitter is actively ignoring it while reducing transparency into future moderation.

A fine namesake, passed down through the generations, a mark of greatness none could have foretold, for his would be the seed that gave birth to a dynasty, and in 40054, Lord Syntax, Emperor of the Error, takes arms as Twelfth Commander of the Line against the Googlish heretics and their daemonic servers.

chainsword revs

I hereby name all of the instances…

…drum roll please…

-–THE—

…I said drum roll you motherfuckers…

FEDIVERSE!

So, what do I win?

Now do CGI.

Please. I worked with it for five years and I still don’t understand it.

I wasn’t gonna cry until I saw the drawings on the walls - that’s a piece of animation history right there, and something you just can’t recreate in a new space. If you framed some of that sheet rock and saved it for a generation or two, the cash from the collectors auction you’d get for it would probably pay enough to bring back Space Ghost.

A product’s name should reflect what it does, not what you were smoking when you came up with the idea.