BraveSirZaphod

You’re never going to get an honest answer to this question, but props for asking it anyway.

Maybe you can run the servers and pay the engineers with good vibes or praxis?

It’s not that genuine passion and altruism isn’t acknowledged; the entire open source software world is a testament to that.

You asked for an explanation as to why Free modern hardware hasn’t been developed yet. The simple answer is that passion and altruism has not yet been a strong enough incentive to motivate anyone to do it. He’s not accusing you of being lazy or hypocritical. The reason why you haven’t done it yet is the exact same reason why anyone else who could do it also hasn’t done it yet. It’s very very hard, and passion doesn’t pay the bills or feed you. Limited to a hobby, it’s simply more work than most people could ever hope to achieve in their spare time.

It’s more complicated than sheer greed.

The fact of the matter is that actually producing any modern technology takes a massive amount of work, and up til this point, no one has gathered enough motivation and free time to do it all for any modern hardware just out of pure altruism. There’s a reason why companies have to pay hundreds of engineers a huge amount of money to get anything developed; those people are not going to do this incredibly difficult work just for fun and moral satisfaction. It’s easy to point the finger at corporate greed for some things being locked down, and to be clear, there’s plenty of valid criticism to go around, but it has to be at least considered that most of this stuff would never have been developed in the first place if it wasn’t for those same companies. Your average person is not going to assemble a motherboard from parts and schematics.

Wouldn’t anyone just be curious to figure out how stuff works?

To this point, quite frankly, no. Average people simply do not care about this very much. They want to just turn on their magic internet box, get their work done, play their games, consume their media, and move on without any further fuss. The fact of the matter is that most people have no clue what a BIOS is, could not care less if it was proprietary or not, and have zero interest in learning about flashing them or why they would ever want to do that.

Info that is publically broadcast, that technically must be publically broadcast, that isn’t necessarily personally identifiable, and is only linked to a user-chosen pseudonym probably isn’t going to be found to have much of a right to privacy.

The writers almost certainly do get a cut. Musixmatch does not own the copyright to any of the lyrics, and as such, negotiated with the copyright holders in order to be allowed to store, display, and sell access to the lyrics. This almost certainly involved some amount of money changing hands.

Spotify is paying money for access to the lyrics and using that as a feature in their product. A chunk of that money is almost certainly going back to the actual writers.

For the median American that works full-time, who earns around $56,000, the cost of Spotify is 0.2% of their income.

Obviously everyone is in their own financial situation and for some people that will still be a burden. But for sake of comparison, in 1989, the average cost of cable TV was $18, and that’s of course in 1989 dollars. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that $11 for unlimited access to basically all music at any time is a pretty good value for the money.

That said, if it is still onerous to someone, they’re obviously not in ideal circumstances and I’m really not gonna fault them for just pirating.

Spotify is not profitable right now; their current revenue doesn’t come anywhere close to covering their costs. The only reason they’re able to survive is investors holding on to the belief that, some day, it’ll be possible to actually make the numbers work.

I don’t get why anyone would use the free tier - not being able to choose songs would actually drive me insane, let alone the ads - but $11 monthly for essentially all the music anyone could ever want, plus solid playlists and recommendations, is a perfectly good value for me. Admittedly, I listen to music all the time and it’s a pretty big part of my life, so it’s an easy sell.

I guess the free tier is still an improvement over radio, but regardless, producing and distributing music has costs, and I’m more than happy to pay for it. Given that Spotify isn’t even profitable, having lost about a billion dollars last year, I’m not sure how long this situation will last, but for the time being, I really don’t mind it.

Hence it being extremely profitable.

Sure. But the question you asked was “Do people not just download music anymore?”, and the answer to that question, which you seemed unaware of, is “Not really, no”.

Do enjoy your highly refined and elevated desires, O noble one.

Vinyl has gotten so big at this point (and is also extremely profitable relative to streaming), that it’s not in any danger at all.

Respectfully, I think you may be drastically overestimating how much average people care about that.

I’m 26, and don’t know anyone, myself included, who purchases and downloads music to any significant degree. Essentially everyone I know just uses streaming platforms.

Yep, calling for people’s deaths is definitely a thing that is happening to a meaningful degree here; very true!

Personally, I started disliking Elon when he randomly accused that diver that made him look bad of being a pedophile. I hope that’s a rational enough reason to dislike someone for you, but if you need more, I can gladly provide them - and I won’t even insinuate that you deserve to be murdered!

For sure, and to be clear, I do agree with you. Ultimately, we’ve all got our own priorities, and I can absolutely understand why someone might be reluctant to throw money at Microsoft; I’m certainly one of those people myself (obligatory “I use Arch”). My only point is that some people may simply think the devices are good and don’t have any qualms about supporting Microsoft, as is their right too.

Perhaps you think the device is good?

How is this supposed to end?

It ends with the recognition that truth is a thing that exists, facts are real, and while there is plenty of room for debate, some things fall outside of that. That the Holocaust happened is not something we get to have an Opinion™ on. And while we can absolutely have a conversation about where that line should be, most people recognize that there should be a line, and if the goal is to create a generally pleasant online space, the line should probably be higher than “literally criminal”.

I often see this idea pushed that, because some topics are controversial and politics is messy, it is impossible to actually label anything as true and all opinions are thus equally valid and should be respected. This is, quite simply, wrong. “I think you’re the real Nazi” is only a plausible response if you pretend that Nazi is a genetical word for “person I disagree with” rather than a real term with actual meaning that either does or does not describe something.

At the very beginning, yes. The tricky thing with having fun pretending to be bigots is that you eventually find yourself surrounded by actual bigots who very much missed the fact that you were joking.