A wide portion of the Internet is not ad supported. Consider a user searching for product support: the company benefits from the user self-solving the issue without having a ticket filed.
This, may, however be to the detrimental of discussion platforms, but if that drives people to self hosted discussion platforms instead of relying on reddit, then it is a net positive.
Discourse's most recent blog delves into this and is an interesting read, I will submit that I think.
I've signed up for or seen the contracts for several payment processors across several companies. Rack rate for ACH debit starts at $0.25/trx and goes down to sub-penny at scale. Returns can be high though ($2 per, going down as well).
Edited to add: that's not a defense, I *loathe* ACH. It's a negative-reporting system which is such a pain to deal with.
My understanding is that sameday ACH does not cost extra (from a network perspective) than regular ACH, it's just that some shitty banks apparently like to charge extra for it.
Outside the AI summaries, I couldn’t easily find the sources. But a couple of different sources say same-day ACH is 5.2 cents per outgoing item while overnight is 0.35 cents.
What I can say is the Fed has draconian rules for pricing its services. The services cannot be subsidized but must be priced to recover costs, including a return on capital similar to what a private payment system (ie from the Clearinghouse) would expect.
I read it as the sending institution pays 5.2 cents to the receiving institution per item, on top of the 0.35c/item + 0.1c/item same-day surcharge for a maximum of 5.65 cents/item before volume discounts.
Contract law fundamentally assumes two parties of equivalent bargaining strength. The system was intended for large, powerful entities dealing with one another hundreds of years ago and wasn't designed for how it's used often used today where one party has zero bargaining strength.
A contract is unenforceable if presented on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
I learned something like this in business school. It didn’t seem like it corresponded to the world I knew and if it was ever true it doesn’t seem to be so today.
Legally you're right contract law does not assume that. But realistically your average Joe does not have the resources or time and is not willing to take the risk to sue a megacorp. Contracts only work when lawsuits can happen.
300 years ago average Joes were routinely signing tenant contracts for renting a plot of land from the local aristocrat, the imbalance of power was similar.
The trope of a mortal man making contracts with the devil is quite old. The popular message seems to be to not do it under any circumstances cause you can't outsmart him, even if you're on nominally equal terms.
Yes, unquestionably. The question is not whether it is happening; the real issue is what does anyone think we can we do about it.
The bigger problem is that’s also exactly how the government works: I never opted into any of the laws to which I am subjected, and I have zero bargaining power. The entire premise of our civilization is effectively based on such bad faith. Good faith would be more akin to referendums rhat give the public the chance to affirm or strike any or all existing laws on the books.
Which is why I now endorse violent revolution. Reform is not a realistic option. Those in power demonstrate every single day the kind of bad faith that deserves a firing squad. I would rather endure the terror of anarchy than suffer this tyranny for much longer. Things are not going to get better any other way.
Do you believe that after a revolution a new and more benign organization would arise? Wouldn't it be a democracy? What could type of organization could it be? Anarchies with millions of members don't exist, some kind of organization arises with systems at that scale.
If people don't analyze in detail what the politicians that they vote plan to do, why would they act wisely at referendums? Depending on how a certain idea is framed by the media, the same idea may be seen as good or bad. And it's not possible to make a referendum for every one of the thousands of laws we have. The democracy with representatives was created in part because of practical reasons regarding the labor of studying the laws.
The biggest change that needs to happen is the dissolution of nation states. All of them. They are top-down authoritarian regimes (every last one of them, don’t pretend otherwise) and have no place in the modern world that espouses democratic ideals.
Instead, I want to see local governments become the first-class line of order. County/provincial/regional government would be nothing more than an emergent property of local governments banding together, pooling resources from the bottom up. The current top-down model of federal taxation and trickle-down funding is completely backwards.
Anarchy is a necessary part of the transition, because the existing power structures or not going to peaceably dismantle themselves and transfer power to “lesser” powers that previously would have been groveling at their feet for scraps.
You believe that from anarchy, benign local governments would arise. And that a benign emerging regional government would emerge from that.
I may be mistaken, but I don't see any reason for that situation to happen. We humans started with groups, then they organized as tribes, then as regional governments, and then national states. And the bigger entities had power to assimilate either by force or by diplomacy smaller entities. Why would it occur differently this time?
Global instantaneous communication?
Because we all should know better by now?
But, really, I don’t expect things to go any differently. Tyranny is here, and it is here to stay. It is unacceptably bad now, and it will only get worse. This is what I believe will happen, which is fully independent from what I would like to see happen
Expect more domestic terrorism everywhere. From both the people in protest and from the governments in response. Already, I see the government committing acts of terrorism (shielded under the cloak of “authority”) on a daily basis, and I hope some people will at least finally have enough and stop bending over to take it without a fight.
Also, I think big and powerful government would implement very strong surveillance and stop any kind of revolution, even stop every nascent seed of revolution and control every communication medium. The acts of terrorism would be sufficient justification for an increase in control and surveillance.
So, as a summary, I think that it's a better idea to try to improve the system from within and peacefully, and that observing what happened in Serbia may be helpful.
Yeah, let’s see how it plays out in Serbia. Never has there ever been a state level transition that did not lead back to tyranny.
The problem is that all politicians on a national stage are utter sociopaths, just like the C-level executives of every large corporation. These institutions cannot be managed by people with real emotions and empathy; the scale of their operations make it literally impossible. We simply need to make it illegal for such institutions to exist in the first place, except ephemerally through collective action.
Douglas Adams had it right: anyone that wants to hold an office of power should under no circumstances be elected to such a position.
If you make national states illegal, a large national state that arises in another part of the world where they don't follow your preferred rules and allow big states, may conquer the smaller states.
To impose a rule like "no national states" you need a world scale big and powerful organization. And somebody would govern it.
I wonder, would it be possible to filter sociopaths from politics?
> And the bigger entities had power to assimilate either by force or by diplomacy smaller entities. Why would it occur differently this time?
maybe the final form is one giant super-state, made up of smaller nation-states, itself containing multiple city-states, surrounded and cooperating with neighboring estates
League of Nations -> UN -> ???
hope it doesnt take a third WW to clear that up :(
What I've never understood about this perspective is, surely you agree that the revolution isn't going to happen until you convince at least a substantial plurality to agree with you? At which point why not just convince them to vote with you?
> I never opted into any of the laws to which I am subjected, and I have zero bargaining power.
the balance seemed to lie with the body of the citizen of the state: if someone didnt agree with their leader/laws, they simply laid down their arms when a benevolent invader / reformer arrives
Best example I can think of is when they shipped an update that they knew would cause corruption on ZFS disks and didn't warn people sufficiently to not update if they were using ZFS. (A warning was buried in the release notes, but such a serious issue should have held back release. Most normal people don't read fifty pages of docs before each update.)
I don't hate Ubuntu at all, but that incident showed a level of blithe carelessness to user data that is unacceptable and reduced my confidence in them.
Facebook is one of the worst places to build a community. You now have to pay to post more than two links a month, even.
And you might be impressed how far forums have come. Open source Discourse forum now has built-in Discord like voice and video chat, along with real time text posts. (It also powers some extremely large communities with millions of users.)
Oh I agree in general, I don't have FB. And discourse forum is probably what I would have tried too, but can it really scale to millions of active users? The largest I know are some linux forums, but they are way smaller.
It's difficult to believe Discord's intent is to make the client great when the recent updates have been to shove Best Buy ads into it. Even to the point of surfacing ads as friend dm notifications! In fairness, I'm jaded since I lost my account due to a sudden ultimatum to share my phone number -- extortion for my PII. So it is impossible for me to believe Discord operates in good faith.
In fairness these are probably distinct teams at discord. A team of engineers focused on performance probably _genuinely_ cares about that.
But there’s other teams and forces at play as well. So I agree with your overall sentiment but the SDEs who worked on this are perhaps not the ones shovelling adware into our faces.
This is a fair point, but it's basically being proud of making the monstrous privacy-destroying ad machine go 10% faster. With how they pressure people to doxx themselves to them (phone number verification) or be completely locked out of their accounts, there is enough predatory tactics in that company that no one should feel proud of working there.
I don't work at Discord, but I know of very few companies that don't have "malicious" tactics in one sense or another. Ultimately they are trying to improve their own bottom line and that _rarely_ aligns with what's best for people.
I like matrix, its like the new IRC for almost real time developer chat, I also do this via Discord but I'd prefer an open alternative. If you have experience running a matrix server do you find the data storage an issue? It sounded like if you federate and join the bigger channels you can balloon your storage pretty fast.
I mostly host for myself and a couple friends, so data storage hasn't been an issue. I'm sure at some point I may need to prune the attachment store, but I put it on a spinning HDD so capacity isn't an issue. (You can rent a storage VPS and those tend to have oodles of disk space.)
I am having pretty good success with DeepSeek 0731 locally. I have vibe coded some small things like an orchestrator. For a production product with real users, I will let it do first passes on code which I then review and polish up. I'm not oneshotting, but it's still a workflow benefit.
I agree, but we need a balance here where I can pay for a sub and it gives me an all access pass to a variety of news sources.
The whole world has sub fatigue. I can't sub to everything.
Segway: make the internet itself a paid subscription and then have a profit sharing model for all content generators. Ban ads. Shit, make it something covered through taxes that governments around the world support and have billionaires subsidize it more heavily.
This, may, however be to the detrimental of discussion platforms, but if that drives people to self hosted discussion platforms instead of relying on reddit, then it is a net positive.
Discourse's most recent blog delves into this and is an interesting read, I will submit that I think.
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