Yeah exactly. Run respectful ads and don't track and I'll consider it. But if turning off ublock means another few megabytes of dense JS script that's sending network packets every time my mouse moves, fuck that and fuck you.

If you have to walk through trex territory to get food/water then it's much harder....

I'm not sure I agree on the longevity. Trex is no crocodile that can sit there with essentially zero energy expenditure for hours/days/weeks; Trex stands upright and has to walk which requires a lot of muscle output.

Also what about water? Are you saying it wouldn't die of dehydration either?

This is easy.

We're locked in the arena. I'm safe in my indestructible hut. I also get food. So all I have to do is sit there and wait for the t-rex to starve to death and/or die of dehydration.

With literally zero expenditure of effort I'll make the $500mm in like two weeks.

Seems to me the issue here is overall strategy.

The overall strategy seemed to have been foster discussion, then sell that content to AI scrapers and search engines while also collecting ad revenue.

Problem is, if the AI search engine scrapes the answer out of the discussion, they'll often answer the user's question and thus you won't get the ad revenue from the click. And if you need to log in to see the discussion you'll lose the ad revenue from search referrals.

In short- 'we created a business letting others cannibalize the value out of our database and now we're shocked there's less value in our database'.

The only ones who really care about time of birth are astrologists, because within astrology apparently the time you were born makes a difference.

Mom is assuming that the only thing that would make OP care about when he was born is a girl who was into astrology, so she's just skipping to the end of the conversation.

Aka- need to be able to screen out advertiser unfortunately content.

Give it a few years and Redditors will also be speeing brainrot like 'he's gonna unalive himself with a pewpew'.

Nope. Nobody's bothered to build it.

See https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5110

“We’re making the change because it’s better for user experience, better for our ads business, is more in line with safety regulations, and more protective of Reddit data,” he explained.

According to Huffman, Reddit has grown to the point where personalization is increasingly necessary to help users find relevant communities and discussions.

In short- we can't datamine you if you're not logged in, we can't build a behavioral profile on people without accounts, we lick the boots of governments that'll demand ID checks age verification, and it makes it harder for AI bots to scrape the site without paying us. Really there's no downside to anyone at all, it's a win-win. Oh it's bad for users and bad for the Internet? Is that important? Those groups don't pay us, right?

Network effect. The communities and discussions are still there. Lemmy has the infrastructure, mostly, but not the users and not the discussions at least not in anywhere near the same volume.

There's also a few seriously missing features with Lemmy, for example modmail.

I have also found, overall, as stupid and crazy as this may be, when discussing anything involving politics users on Lemmy can be almost militantly closed-minded. I find more intelligent discussions on Lemmy, but I also find more of the 'you either agree with me or you're everything that's wrong with the world' type.

Nice catch. Fixed

This reminds me of a quote from Star Trek Insurrection- "We Believe that when you build a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man."

When I first saw the film, I rejected that. Seemed like backwards thinking, ignorant Luddite ideology ignoring the reality that when the machine does the man's work, you free up the man to do other things. When a man doesn't have to plow the field, he can focus on art and science and philosophy and music and poetry and otherwise taking his mind to the next level. At least that sounded good in my head.

Then I look at what we have now. We have built machines to create art and science and music and poetry, so the man is left to keep taking out the garbage. This is not an improvement. The Baku may not have been totally wrong.