• 0 Posts
  • 192 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • The point, in one sentence:

    If you are the product, not the paying customer, then not only is there no incentive to cater to your needs, there exists incentive to make the product worse for you if it means the paying customer extracts more from you.

    Users of freemium software are basically nothing more than willing cattle. Housed and fed for free only to be slaughtered.

    Maybe people just can’t help themselves? I fear we can’t have a fair and free market if people are so easily manipulated.


  • I broadly agree with your sentiment, in particular computing equipment that I purchase and ongoing trends in tech (like smart TVs) that are abusive to consumers.

    However, I find this argument not terribly persuasive in this particular case. The content of a website isn’t an extension of your property. It is not even public property. Visiting a site is voluntary. You clearly didn’t pay for accessing the site, nor was it subsidized through a social program. So exactly how should content (regardless of how trashy it is) be funded? Statements like “rights” (i.e. temporary government-granted privileges) suggest you are espousing libertarian views, but at the same time, you are not expressing willingness to pay for a service privately?

    I dunno, it just comes across as demanding a handout. Meanwhile, not visiting websites that don’t meet your vision for how funding content should be done seems like a perfectly simple and reasonable approach to have for this problem.








  • Considering the vast majority of people that walk around naked in the public locker room without an ounce of shame are people over 50 or over 60, I find this comment has got it backwards. There seems to be a universal constant that the older you get, the less you care about what other people think. I know I have experienced this myself, and most older people I ask tend to agree vehemently. It also explains why so many young people are embarrassed by their parents.

    My advice to teens and people in their early twenties: don’t worry what other people think of you. No one else is thinking about you much at all.





  • Are they? As the article OP shares suggests, these films quietly make us compare our lives to what is portrayed on screen. This is advertisement 101: display people in enviable positions to portray a sense of longing for a lifestyle that one would not normally seek. A food commercial isn’t selling you a product, it’s trying to make you hungry.

    If all you wanted out of these rom coms is the portrayal of a carefree life, you could just watch pharmaceutical, banking, or insurance ads.