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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • xor@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAny tips for a new user?
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    8 days ago

    As a more serious aside to the above, it is generally worth paying a bit of attention to which instance other users you interact with. There’s obviously no blanket statement you can make about the users of particular instances, but there are definitely certain instances that are more appealing to… certain groups of users.

    lemmy.ml in particular has a bit of a reputation for having tankies on it, but there’s lots of very interesting and reasonable people there (or here, I suppose, given this is an ml community), also.


  • I think 3) is a really interesting point, and probably the primary reason why a model like that may be less viable for e.g. the Guardian. I think having that parasocial relationship is key to having people take interest enough to be willing to pay for the extra content around the main news output. My concern is that a model like that might incentivise being intentionally divisive and/or making the main content be more like entertainment than information.



  • Sure, personalised ads can be seen as a form of an invasion of privacy, and everybody has a right to not engage with any organisation for any reason they like. But ads are an imperfect solution to the fact that it’s impossible to run a news organisation at that scale on voluntary donations and un-personalised ads alone, and it’s definitely preferable (in my view, at least) to having a total paywall.

    Unless you have an innovative alternative income source to propose, I’m not sure I see what alternative there is.


  • Respectfully, your argument seems to simultaneously be that they:

    a) need a better source of income, because ads and subscriptions aren’t raising enough revenue

    b) are acting unreasonably by asking you to allow them to use one of those revenue sources

    “Would you rather pay for this service, or have ads on it?” Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable ask, frankly. Especially given that it can be trivially avoided with an ad blocker, anyway, and will not prohibit you from reading the article if you do so (this, to me, is the key difference compared to other outlets that have similar requirements).

    As far as I can tell, their statement was that they will always make the content available for free. Serving that content with some ads alongside it doesn’t violate that policy.

    Edit: as an aside, having “my one news source” is a bad way to engage with the media. Every source will have their own priority, biases, errors and blind spots that will change over time; you should have a diverse set of sources, ideally with different mediums.

    Per the above, here’s some of the sources in my media diet, in no particular order: The Guardian, Byline Times, TLDR News, BBC News (digital & radio), Al Jazeera, Le Monde, the UN, Novara Media, PoliticsJOE, New York Times, Reuters, AP, Financial Times, Bellingcat

    Edit: wrt “Centralist [sic] bore me”, yeah, sometimes a reasonable take on the news is boring, but important nonetheless. Sorry 🤷





  • I’ll be the guy who suggests the unusual options, then:

    • a steam controller; they take some getting used to, but they have some really nice quality of life features that nothing else has (mouse control via the joystick pads, and the paddles on the back!) and are ideal for bigger hands as it’s nice and chunky. They’re built specifically for PC use, so the support is as good as it gets. I think they don’t feel as “premium” as they’re quite lightweight plastic as opposed to the heavy metal of e.g. Xbox elite

    • the Nintendo Switch Pro controller; this one wins on the durability front imo, all Nintendo’s stuff is built to survive children, so they do a lot of drop testing, pouring drinks over it, basically all those fun things kids like to do to your expensive toys







  • Let’s go look at your comment history and check, shall we?

    Defending yourself and launching invasions or orchestrating soldiers are two different things

    It’s not defending yourself if you have an army! What a great take 👍

    it sounds like the government is giving out plans and commanding the army. The government of ukraine and people from ukraine are two different things. When people ask what’s the alternative to send billions to the ukrainian government what they need to understand is that people can defend themself even without an authority on top of them playing war games with soldiers and possibly forcing conscript to go on missions

    Oh, why did Ukraine never consider magically winning the war by sheer willpower instead of this “having an army” nonsense, smart!

    I’m not twisting anything. Context matters, and the context of your post was you throwing a tantrum after around 10 different Lemmy users calling out your bad takes.

    If you believe not being drafted blah blah blah

    That’s not what I said at all, mere moments after you accused me of “twisting” what you said. What I said, louder for the people in the back is BEING UNABLE TO FIGHT BACK IN THE ENEMY’S TERRITORY, BEING DISALLOWED TO RECEIVE FOREIGN AID AND BEING DISALLOWED TO FORM AN ACTUAL ARMY is the equivalent of rolling over and dying.


  • The issue, from what I can tell, is that the question you’ve asked here doesn’t match the argument you just had in comments of a post about about the Ukraine war. The argument you were trying to make is not “war bad”, but specifically that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is bad. You were additionally arguing that it is morally reprehensible for other countries to provide economic support to Ukraine rather than leaving them to “defend themselves”.

    There’s a few important details that such an argument (intentionally) ignores.

    • This invasion was not a choice between war or no war. It was simply a decision between locations that battles take place. It is entirely legitimate for Ukraine to pursue a counteroffensive strategy into russian territory if it believes it to be a more effective military strategy than defensive attritional warfare within their own borders.
    • The fact that combat is taking place in Russian territory doesn’t change the fact that the war itself is a defensive war against an aggressor with overtly territorial/imperialist goals.
    • As far as I am aware, the units involved in the counteroffensive are exclusively non-drafted volunteer units.
    • Cessation of funding to Ukraine would lead to their imminent loss. The fact that they have been able to innovate cheaper strategies like domestic drone usage doesn’t change the fact that war is extremely expensive and technology dependent, and their economy is dwarfed by that of Russia’s.

    The combination of your proposals that Ukraine should not proactively fight back, and that they should lose access to the resources that would allow them to continue to defend their territory end us meaning that Ukraine would not be able to effectively defend itself.

    From reading your comments alongside this post, it seems that the title should actually be “how do you make someone understand that rolling over and dying is good”, to which the answer is “oh fuck off mate”