As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make things cheap

  • 18 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 8th, 2024

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  • I find the disagreement between Cohn and Stewart towards the end to be fascinating. I find it hard to agree or disagree with either. Cohn is looking out for places like the Fediverse - she knows that if the platforms are subjected to regulation that is impossible to live up to for small actors, this will only serve the capitalists. In the US the law would for sure end up serving this purpose because it would be designed by the billionaires themselves, and they would design them in a way that monopolizes the internet even more as they discuss earlier on.

    On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.

    I think the EU has reached a reasonable compromise. They regulate very large online platforms - platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU - separately from smaller platforms. So your obligations increase with your number of users. Furthermore, EU regulation has exceptions for open source not-for-profit development, to avoid regulation aimed at big tech from hurting free software.

    Interesting enough I keep seeing people on the Fediverse attacking the Digital Services Act as though it’s gonna mean the end of the Fediverse, even though the Commission is actively posting about it on their own Mastodon instance and the EU is actively supporting the development of the Fediverse through NLnet. It seems to me that even in these spaces people fall for big tech propaganda.















  • I’m European and I only went to the US this year (first and last time), and it’s true I was weirded out by the amount of billboards. But still, the same billboard usually stays within your line of vision for a little while.

    And if they really count it in such a crazy way by knowing what’s in everyones field of vision all the time, that’s a crazy approximation from their side.

    I think it’s likely they instead measure how mamy ads come through the web to your device, which is different from how many you actually see. Like an ad at the bottom of a website you don’t scroll through and stuff like that.


  • Take radio ads - if they last 10 seconds each and you listen to the radio non-stop all day, 2/3rd of the content on the radio would have to be ads. If they play 2 minutes of pop music for every 30 seconds of ads you just can’t reach these numbers.

    It’s true that you can get several ads all at once online, I just still find it hard to believe one could reach 10 000 in a day without basically making an effort. At least in terms of visible ads - trackers is another thing.

    But maybe I’m just out of touch. Recently I generally forget to install ad blockers because I have pretty much stopped using the majority of the web.


  • I did the math myself assuming seven hours of sleep and the higher estimate of 10 000 ads - yup, one every 6.12 seconds.

    If an add lasts more than six seconds you would start lagging behind. Then again, I guess some people consume multiple adds at once.

    With seven hours of sleep and 4000 every day we’re down to one ad every 15 seconds. Still seems wild even by American standards.

    I suspect Google have been manipulating data in order to convinse buyers of the efficiency of their ad selling business, and this is the result of flipping these data back to society.



  • I think the communication between the different platforms in itself is also something new and exciting that is brought to the table. Like when a comment on Lemmy suddenly starts making the rounds on Mastodon because it works well as a stand-alone toot.

    I also like the potential for services to evolve more naturally. I honestly don’t think Mastodon is all that similar to Twitter, or PieFed all that similar to Reddit. Sure, they started out as similar concepts, but they develop in pretty different directions.