dskrepps · HackerTrans

hace 3 añosdiscuss

I've wondered for a while. Lots of people seem to think a Carrington Event will simply fry all small electronics and make everything stop working, but from my understanding all it'll actually do is cause power surges in long transmission lines and disrupt wireless signals. Apparently telegraph lines sparked and shocked people. So what effect will that actually have now? Will a massive power surge go through my house and destroy everything plugged in, and thus indirectly my desktop computer? Will every house on the grid catch fire, destroying all modern cities? Or will substations and transformers be destroyed but shield homes themselves from catastrophic damage? Will wildfires destroy every forest anywhere near modern infrastructure?

dskrepps

hace 3 añosdiscuss

I want to recommend things everyone benefits from, not myself. Consequently, I don't want to support anything that doesn't trend the community toward my ideals.

For instance, the Mastodon project and mastodon.social are run by a non-profit. They have their own mastodon account which discusses updates, advertises merchandise to support them, and could ask for sponsors or donations if needed. Users can subscribe to their feed if they want, and support them should they need help, while users who don't want advertisements won't be affected. I'm confident in the stability of this model for them so I chose to make my Mastodon account on their instance so I can trust I won't have to transfer to another someday should one shut down.

I'm hoping the digital space evolves in this direction and that we approach a post-advertisement economy.

Otherwise, enshittification keeps ruining things and we can't rely on the long-term stability of anything. Just look at Google.

dskrepps

hace 3 añosdiscuss

I'm very discouraged when I click their Blog page and see headlines like "Our best apps are now paid" and "Trial period." These apps have popups asking for support, which 100% are advertisements contrary to the thread title. Their apps which previously were free and received updates no longer get those updates and have been replaced with paid ones. This is a warning sign of enshittification and degradation of reliability. There are a multitude of ways they could someday stop updates to these apps too to replace them with another monetization scheme.

dskrepps

hace 3 añosdiscuss

I personally don't consider what my direct experience will be, but instead the total sum of the collective experience all users will have. I want to support something everyone benefits from, not myself. Consequently, I don't want to support anything that doesn't trend the community toward my ideals.

As an example, the Mastodon project and mastodon.social are run by a non-profit. They have their own mastodon account which discusses updates, advertises merchandise to support them, and could ask for sponsors or donations if needed. Users can subscribe to their feed if they want, and support them should they need help, while users who don't want advertisements won't be affected. I'm confident in the stability of this model for them so I chose to make my Mastodon account on their instance so I can trust I won't have to transfer to another someday should one shut down.

I'm hoping the digital space evolves in this direction and we approach a post-advertisement economy.

Otherwise, enshittification keeps ruining things and we can't rely on the long-term stability of anything. Just look at Google.

dskrepps

hace 3 añosdiscuss

I think our best bet to make a difference is to cause network effects to drive other users to take the same steps we do. In the long run that will help shrink their monopoly, and/or bring a tipping point closer to reality.

Similar to voting. Yeah, I could vote for a third party candidate, but the real power I have is in how many other people I can convince to vote for someone.

dskrepps

hace 3 añosdiscuss

If you're mass-producing low-quality sites you would do that on day 1 with each of them. So it likely doesn't weigh positively as much as we would hope.

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