I’ve often looked out of a 20th story window at pedestrians and thought, “They have no idea someone is looking at them right now,” and then I always wonder how many times that has happened to me.
That must happen to people all the time who visit that church.
First of all, I’ve put painstaking effort into a lot of contributions. It hurts to delete them. Second of all, I don’t need to be a contributor to be impacted by people deleting valuable comments, but I still support the deletion.
Reddit had become the “go-to” place for finding trustworthy user reviews, and it’s been shoring up weaknesses in Google’s search engine for a few years now. They don’t deserve the reputation of being that platform because they regularly abuse and alienate good-faith contributors, and the CEO of the company has been caught multiple times in lies and completely unprofessional and untrustworthy behavior.
Fortunately, there are backups of Reddit and archive systems. It’s time for users who care about contributing to bring their value elsewhere, where we can build new ecosystems of user-powered value and knowledge sharing.
It’s not about spite. It’s about not wanting your past work and creativity to continue to help an individual and a company who are bad for society, and who are destroying a platform many people loved.
I think jumping straight to calling Spez a Nazi is ridiculous.
On the other hand, Reddit has repeatedly aggressively looked the other way when it came to communities that blatantly violated the rules such as The Donald, jailbait, etc, while cracking down on and banning far milder users and communities.
Look, I found your original point interesting, but if there was a major upset in the microwave industry, then that would belong in the technology section of a news site too.
I think the fundamental question is, as the Fediverse gets more popular, then how will servers get paid for? Here are some possibilities I see for how Fediverse hosting could work at scale:
Surviving off donations alone: Possible but in my estimation unlikely, and it could veer into the territory of big donors having a controlling stake or exerting their interests.
Instances limiting number of users to what they can afford: This would require the network of instances process to really work well.
Big instances selling advertisements: Without oversight or moral commitment, this could easily go towards creepy personal data collection.
Crowdsourcing the costs: This would require transparency and fundraising or some other model
Hosts financing the operation in other ways: This could also easily get into creepy data collection practices or other dark patterns.
I hope we come up with some process or plan for avoiding the pitfalls and forging an honest and community-integrating way forward.