I love that paranoia and xenophobia. As if a corrupt domestic company is somehow magically better than a corrupt international company.

It’s been quite obvious over the past few years that yes there’s potentially some risk of foreign countries trying to install spy code, but actually that doesn’t seem to happen very often, and what’s much more damaging to our society are large corporations that use their power to screw over the general public, and most of these large corporations are domestic.

That’s generally false. But even if it’s true, all the boss has to do is argue that medium-term profits will be generated by whatever policy they want to adopt. Since nobody knows the future, they might be right, and they’re legally rock solid.

In other words, the duty to increase value produces unfalsifiable policy claims. So it is meaningless.

The Pirate Bay will always be with us.

Nintendo has been a dominant company in the video game industry for decades. It should come as no surprise that they’ve made some amazing games.

The article did mention a fundamental obstacle. It said quite clearly that we would run out of resources before we had enough computing power. I suppose you could counter that by arguing that we could discover magic, or magical technology, or a lot of new resources through space exploration.

Of course things get more efficient. But in the past few decades they’ve gotten efficient in predictable, and mostly predicted, ways. It’s certainly possible that totally unexpected things can happen. I could win the lottery next week. Is that the standard? Are you pushing the stance that says AGI is somewhat less likely than winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning, but by golly it’s more than zero, how dare you suggest that it’s anywhere close to zero?

Tell that to Amazon. If you can build a monopoly, you win in the medium run.

Challenge presented. Who has courage to accept? We shall see.

Are there books in libraries? Yes, and the publishers don’t have to do a thing. And it is good for society. Similarly, can you fix an old car, even if the manufacturer went bankrupt? Of course you can.

We have precedent, my friend.

There are two different problems. One is easier to solve.

Your counterexample, “purchase a subscription”, actually undercuts the point you’re trying to make. The goal is honesty here. If you are renting or subscribing, you want to know that up front, in big text, using the simplest possible word. That word is “RENT”.

The issue about the lease business model being bad for society and consumers is also important, but it’s complicated and different from basic truth in advertising.

What are you talking about.

The garbage is taking itself out

Prosody claims to support Message Archive Management and HTTP file sharing, sounds like the feature you want, or at least it is close.

I like to think of it from a different standpoint. Propaganda and fake news has existed for hundreds of years, if not millennia. It’s just that in the past it was mostly created by wealthy folks, and now anyone can create their own.

Whether it’s really a loss in revenue is not the relevant question to the people making decisions at Reddit. They’re looking for sources of new revenue, and if they think they can monetize the feeds, then you know they will try.

Also, there is a slight cost to maintaining them.

Obviously the details matter, and many things happened all at once.

For example, the original policy was going to force out all free open source clients, and that was later retracted, but the damage to the company’s reputation was already done.

For example, clients for the visually impaired could have been set aside as a special case immediately, and they weren’t, and as I understand it they still aren’t.

For example, third-party clients that don’t show ads could have been blocked without restricting third party clients that assist mods.

For example, the result of the blackout could have been some sort of sympathetic statement, but instead it was the hammer getting laid down, leading to even worse results.

So you’re a question is whether the outcome would have been different if the administrators had acted differently, and of course the answer is yes. That being said, what we’ve learned is that the administrators do not value the mods or the end user. All of the above issues simply don’t matter to them because they don’t care.

You talked about capitalism as if it’s inevitable, but you’re wrong. The decision to try to make a lot of money was made, many other online services have made other decisions, and you don’t get to excuse the actions of anyone in the administration on the grounds that it’s just the natural consequence of capitalism.