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Been playing some Xonotic recently. Good times with FOSS.

I learned that just now.

This is wonderful, I’ve been struggling with piped for some time now, it’s always asking me to sign in to confirm that I’m not a bot. Also it’s showing me videos in very low quality and often it stops loading halfway through the video. With this I get to see good quality videos once more, without unwanted pauses and without financing yt in any way. Great!

But ads are not functioning, they are destructive. They are by no means cheap either, people are paying through being manipulated and we are paying collectively for the damage it’s doing to our world. We’d be much better of if we had only direct payments. Direct artist payments will always be the more effective and efficient financing structure because then we pay just for the creative output, not all the unrelated economic parasitic activities.

The solution is very simple and there is nothing that inflation can do about it: we don’t watch ads, we pay creators that we want to support, and if from these donations a creator doesn’t earn enough money he has two options: 1. One has an intrinsic drive to create and publish so he does so through other means, for instance by working a part time job. If this sounds unreasonable then let us not forget that already most of all human creativity is financed exactly like this, it is only the exception that is financially lucrative. 2. One chooses not to create (or in a less costly manner). You could think of this as a sad outcome, but you’d be better off concluding that this creative output wasn’t so important to anyone, not to the creator nor to the public. This means we’d be left with the better and more intrinsically motivated creative content.

So let’s not justify ads, but let’s reject them in the most radical ways we can.

Ads exist because people want to make money. So these bad actors go out and look for places where people like to spend their time, and they poison these places with their money-hungry practices. In the process they destroy the innocence of all these manifestations of human creativity, and manipulate people into buying shit they don’t actually need, effectively destroying the planet through overconsumption. That’s not even mentioning that ad-companies put us on a path towards a mass-surveillance society, just because big-data leads to more effective ads. I can’t help but see ads as a destructive force of evil in our world. I like human creativity in it’s many forms, and I’m all in favor of rewarding creators to a certain extent, but using ads seems to be the worst possible method of doing so.

(not intending to criticize your comments, just spreading the anti-ad gospel ;-)

That makes sense. But what about big ongoing projects/ Couldn’t they easily migrate to a FOSS service? I’d imagine people will look out for them specifically no matter where they’re hosted.

ListenBrainz gives me a weekly playlist and a weekly exploration playlist. But I guess this isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, I’m hoping the project will develop more into this direction.

I’m not a developer so I’m not very familiar with this world. But it kind of amazes me that the code for so many open source projects are hosted by Microsoft. Isn’t there a FOSS alternative? edit: seems Gitlab is an alternative. Then the question is, why are people using microsoft products?