Of course there's more to this than "corpo bad", it's the economic system that drives these businesses to focus on profit over the quality of the user experience--but I think that's the core to all the "corpo bad" arguments when you really boil them down. These websites and services have become so ubiquitous for two reasons:

The first reason, is that people tend towards simplification, if you can give them a centralized location where they can have all their needs met, they prefer it to the effort it takes to use multiple locations/services. A great example is the popularity and convenience of stores like Walmart or Costco where you can do all of your shopping in one quick go. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and even YouTube to a lesser degree all offer these one-stop-shop kind-of models by allowing you to connect with a vast amount of people, discuss a large number of topics, and view multiple forms of media. So, unless they have a good reason to remain diversified, people tend towards simplification.

The second reason is also psychological in nature. These companies, (whom we will refer to as FaRT), have designed and redesigned their entire systems to drive up refresh rates, click-through rates, and otherwise increase advertising visibility. In addition to hacking the addiction mechanisms, and the desire for people to feel important, they take it even further using deception and "dark UI". Even when you utilize many of the adblocking systems, for example, FaRT inject advertising content directly into the same stream of other user content(the best example is direct corpo sponsorship of big name YouTube content creators, but at-least that money goes directly to the creators). Plus, advertisers are getting much, much better at disguising this content so that you are less likely to skip it before seeing it.

So it's a two-sided coin, a major part of the problem is that "corpo bad", and now that they're taking it to a degree of harming the public experience for profits (which is why cable television died), it's our responsibility to step out of our comfort zones and show them that we are willing to inconvenience ourselves a little for a better UX.

A much better method is to make a post explaining and encouraging how to contributing to the fediverse. That was what got me posting, someone said something to the effect of "if you really want to see the fediverse thrive, then start adding content to the fediverse!"

Here's the biggest factor in all of Spez's deceit, Apollo is an afterthought. 3PAs are smaller businesses, and I'm betting that he didn't want to outright make enemies of industrial giants like Microsoft and Google (that would be incredibly stupid), so my guess is that Spez is running with the whole claim that he doesn't want to subsidize the profits of 3PAs to avoid pissing off the people who could ruin him. However, in no unclear terms, he wants to convert his biggest API users, the ones who demand dedicated server pools, into income streams. He wants to sell our content, as his own:

Huffman said Reddit's back-end infrastructure includes separate server pools solely dedicated to handling the scraping that Google and Microsoft do from Reddit every day.

"Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things," Huffman said. "We are not in the business of giving that away for free."

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/15/1182457366/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-its-time-we-grow-up-and-behave-like-an-adult-company

Yeah, I currently do something similar to this. I'm actually thinking of getting a pair of physical hardware keys/authenticators. That way I can toss one in a safe deposit box, if I should randomly end up dead while climbing a mountain pass.

Yeah, especially since he's not trying to stop AI-related scraping from using API calls, he's just trying to turn them into an additional revenue stream. That's my content he's selling...

For today's pop-quiz, please derive the airspeed velocity of an unladen projectile buncat when the velocity is perpendicular to the gravitational force. I would like your answers on my desk in 15 minutes or you will be disallowed from the shrubbery room and therefore disqualified from the Knights Who Say "Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing" for the rest of the semester.

Right? While it is just one case, I think the reason this occurred was due to the clinical nature of the experience, likely a prior (subconscious) disposition, and a willingness to acquire therapy. But that's the thing, assuming we were able to identify the correct conditions, MDMA is a powerful drug in the sense that it has been observed in creating vastly transformative experiences. In the right hands, it could be a huge step towards treating disorders that plague the deepest, darkest depths of society. The effectiveness would likely also depend on whether or not the patient has had prior experience with the substance. Either way, it warrants more research.

I'm all for civil disobedience, but there's a fine line between refusing to comply and intentionally doing harm. Reopening a sub and only allowing posts of something silly? That's chill, Reopening a sub and intentionally posting illegal and disturbing content? Just ask yourself, how would an impartial jury evaluate your actions, and go from there.

I just wish there were a way for me to write a short bio listing my username on other servers/platforms in-case they get defederated for one reason or another--but such is beta life...

If nothing else it would spin-up their servers something awful, they'd probably need to implement something like cloudflare to stop the API calls by whatever bot service was used to delete everything--which would just advance their plan. They could just close the API early, and blame it on "bot abuse by angry mods".

You had cheddar bet it would be!