In September, the Liberal party of Canada introduced a bill meant to raise the portion of capital gains on which companies pay tax to two-thirds from one-half. The policy would also apply to individuals with capital gains earnings above $250,000.
This was met by obvious pushback from the Canadian tech industry as it makes it even less enticing to start a business or give venture funding within Canada.
Despite the current prorogation, the finance department says the CRA will go ahead and enact this change despite the bill ever going through parliament.
It's pretty scary that the government can implement new laws like this without it ever going through the democratic process of parliament.
Does anyone know the numbers in layman's terms regarding the demand for compute and what our systems/chips are able to reasonably process with this new tech?
I'm curious if the technology is now vastly out preforming the demand here or if the demand for compute is outpacing the tech.
I think the issue with Patreon, and a lot of similar services is that they are too focused on the "creator > consumer" relationship. I think the biggest value that a content creator is creating is acting as a beacon that people can rally behind regarding a specific niche and facilitating "consumer > consumer". Their biggest value add is as a curator. It's often difficult, especially for smaller niches to find a dedicated community around it if not for a content creator creating content and promoting it. In many cases, a content creator becomes synonymous with the niche.
I've been working on a platform called Sociables (https://www.sociables.com/) that gives content creators a place to offer their community as a part of their product offering. The difference between Patreon is it is much more focused on allowing creators to set up a place for their community to interact with each other instead of the more para-social style relationship seen on Patreon.
Part of the reason Discord falls short as a social platform is that each community is siloed off from the rest. There is no continuity bridging the overarching platform and userbase. I feel like for a social platform to work, the platform itself should be a community and the users should be able to carve out their own slice within that.
I've been working on a platform that blends social features from Discord with the discoverability of Reddit. What we're building is intentionally not just another Reddit or Discord clone. We're trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts/chat messages.
I think what's equally as important as the archiving is the aggregating of the information. It's one thing to have a story, or piece of content documented somewhere, but at the end of the day, people still need ways to find it.
I think that's where social, discussion based platforms come in. I'm a huge hip-hop fan and have been running a page dedicated to giving people a space to discuss and share all things hip-hop.
This law is a link tax. It means the government wants Meta and Google to pay every single time a link to a Canadian news source is shared on their platform (from what I understand, including even in private messages to friends). As far as I'm aware, it will also apply to Google in that they will also need to pay to index/show links to Canadian news in their search results like you described.
People in support of this need to consider how this type of legislation affects the integrity of the internet.
This bill is not about supporting independent media like they claim. This is first and foremost a link tax, and the result of it is damaging to free press. Independent media sources depend on traffic from social media platforms to function. They themselves are often the ones sharing the links to their own content to drive traffic and readership from in which they monetize through ads. Furthermore, many of these local publishers leverage their social media following to share content on behalf of other local businesses through sponsored articles and posts. The Canadian government playing strong man here when repeatedly warned of the outcome is putting independent media companies in serious jeopardy of remaining solvent.
Meta and Google are in the right here, and I hope they continue to stand their ground. If they cave on this issue, it sets a terrible precedent that jeopardizes the health of the internet as we know it. Companies should not have to pay the source whenever a link is shared on their platforms. It's just backwards.
If you are talking about situations where they are scraping and displaying the contents of an article, that is a different issue, and seemingly not one that is the primary target of this bill.
I'm not sure the wedge created between many of the communities and the platform is repairable at this stage without extended displays of good will from Reddit's side.
Lots of communities have started the process of migrating to different platforms. The federated alternatives like Lemmy have had recent success although I question the complexity of it in terms of getting mass adoption. Most of the alternatives seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost the community aspect of Reddit is what makes it appealing.
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just another Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts.
> In fact, some of the communities that closed down in response to the API changes explicitly shifted to Discord.
While Discord does some things right in the community platform space, I don't think its a suitable replacement for Reddit. One of the biggest issues with Discord is how the content posted into a community is lost into the abyss. The discoverability of content on the platform is basically non existent.
Lots of the Reddit alternatives, including Discord, seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost it's the community aspect of Reddit that makes it appealing.
I've been working on a community platform called Sociables that combines the feature set of Discord with the discussion boards and discoverability of Reddit. It's like a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid where the posts are search engine indexable. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform as it feels like the people curating the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.
Reddit's disregard for the stewards and curators from which it derives its value from was strange to see. It doesn't seem wise for them to go to war with the people creating and managing the communities that provide the very backbone for which their entire platform is based on. The recent sequence of events has opened the door for allowing alternative platforms to surface.
Shameless plug, but I've been working on a platform called Sociables that focuses on providing a place for people to create communities instead of just posts. It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them under one umbrella. One key aspect is we have optional non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owner.
It's certainly our intention to make the platform work with relying on outside funding as little as possible. Ideally we will be able to get the platform to being profitable without needing much. The economics of our platform start to play out at scale, so it does take some money for us to get there. Ideally if we can land a few larger content creators with communities active in supporting them we will be able to fund a lot of that early development through that
As I mentioned in the attached article, we actually do have a monetization strategy in place outside of relying on advertisements and VC funding.
We take a cut of each transaction that occurs on the platform to help fund the development. Some examples of such transactions include:
1. Giving communities the ability to offer tiered monthly membership plans. Users will also be able to purchase memberships for other users similar to the system on Twitch. Communities can also chose to gate entire communities behind a membership.
2. We are also adding the ability for users to pay to bump posts and buy comment awards which the revenue is all shared with the community owner.
3. Adding a platform wide subscription fee that would give users some additional benefits however we haven't fully fleshed this out yet.
See this section of the attached article for more on that:
> My ideal situation would be that mods and content creators get paid from the reddit awards
I've been working on a community platform/Reddit alternative that has a business model exactly like this.
It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them under one umbrella. One key aspect is we have non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owners. The monetization stuff is completely optional and disabled by default, however it feels like the people curating the communities should have the option to be rewarded for the work that they do.
I'm not sure the wedge created between the communities and the platform is repairable at this stage without extended displays of good will from Reddit's side.
Lots of communities have started the process of migrating to different platforms. The federated alternatives like Lemmy have had recent success although I question the complexity of it in terms of getting mass adoption. Most of the alternatives seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost the community aspect of Reddit is what makes it appealing.
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just another Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts.
> Reddit uses 100% volunteer work and the entirety of the Reddit content moderation structure is Volunteer
Perhaps this is a fundamental flaw with the platform. I see no reason why the people hosting and curating the communities shouldn't have a share of the money generated from them.
I've been working on a platform called Sociables to help address this problem. On the platform, people who create and run the communties have optional means of renumeration baked into the platform such as offering monthly membership plans, selling "awards" that can be assigned to comments and posts, donations, and more.
While it's not a fit for every type of community, I think aligning the incentives of the platform provider with the sources of where the the value is created (the communities) is crucial for fostering a healthy environment and avoiding this situation where the platform goes to war against itself.
This was met by obvious pushback from the Canadian tech industry as it makes it even less enticing to start a business or give venture funding within Canada.
Despite the current prorogation, the finance department says the CRA will go ahead and enact this change despite the bill ever going through parliament.
It's pretty scary that the government can implement new laws like this without it ever going through the democratic process of parliament.