You see, according to Cocteau’s plan I’m the enemy, 'cause I like to think; I like to read. I’m into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I’m the kind of guy likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder - “Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?” I WANT high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, okay? I want to smoke Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green jello all over my body reading playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal? I’ve SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It’s a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing “I’m an Oscar Meyer Wiener”.

Agreed. I’d also like to add that intelligence != wisdom != experience, and you need all three to achieve real understanding.

It is on Kbin. Lemmy doesn’t have that capacity yet as far as I know. It’s one of the main reasons I recommend the former - Kbin bridges the gap between Mastodon and Lemmy, and includes functionality from both types of instances. Following users increases your feed content here exponentially.

Great username. Worth a follow.

"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Spezymandias, Admin of Kings;
Look on my Reddit, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The news here is that, contrary to popular belief, 5% of NFTs actually still hold some value.

Why looky there - love to see a post get legs… have a boost and an upvote, matey!

Silently hoists the Jolly Roger…

Woot Kbin Gang! Holds the best parties by far. You get lemmings and mastodons all rocking out as Reddit burns. This occasionally gets messy (mastodons get pregnant, lemmings get flat), but damn is it fun.

Being able to follow other users makes a huge difference to content discovery - there’s a lot of immediate content you’re missing out on if you’re only on Lemmy, and Mastodon users miss out on most of the long form content and discussions.

Infected Mushroom

Zircon

Eskimo

Working fine on my end - sounds like ISP filtering or possibly a firewall setting. With an ad blocker to handle popups, you could also try g o k u dot s x - not quite the same server collection, but you might find what you’re looking for.

“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.

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.

Y’all are beginning to crack me up. You know each time you drop a reply, you’re increasing the exposure of this particular theoretical site right? I didn’t say they had perfect plausible deniability, just an extra layer of it, and whatever action taken against it won’t stop the servers they’re aggregating from, which are accessed by a lot of other apps that do exactly the same thing. Nuking this theoretical aggregator is like plucking a dandelion and thinking you’re done with weeding the lawn - it’s really just not worth the time unless they go after the servers themselves.

Possibly true, but what you’re theoretically looking at isn’t hosting pirated content. It’s a link aggregator that finds an available file to stream to you from servers that already have the full file, which may or may not have been assembled from a legitimate source or torrent. Legally, this gives them a layer of plausible deniability - disclaimer IANAL.

So if this one goes down, as it probably will, someone else will just build another streaming link aggregator that does the exact same thing - there’s more than few out there. This is just basically round 238,592,394,321 of internet whack-a-mole.

For all the Redditors now breathing a sigh of relief, grab a beer, take a load off, and remember, remember, the 5th of November.

Oh man. The Bigfoot hunters are gonna go nuts over this tech. Cryptozoologists too - there’s some recent supposed sightings of the Tasmanian Tiger that have been getting a lot of attention.