Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Fuck ALL advertisements. Yes, even “unobtrusive” ones, especially yours. If I want your shit, I will find you. If I appreciate your shit, I’ll pay you for your time. If you want to connect, I’m all ears. Otherwise, fuck off capitalists, fuck off advertisers, and fuck off useful idiots who want to waste my finite lifespan in this miserable universe showing me ads.
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but without ads get ready to start paying for things. You go to a news website, sorry you need to login and hand over your credit card to access anything. Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can’t sell you data to advertisers anymore.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
And who is to be blamed for setting up this system ?
I brought this up the last time I talked about this, but to be clear, if we must choose between advertisements and paywall, then we should choose advertisements as the lesser evil. However, we must never accept the fallacy that advertising or paywalls are the only possible choices! More generally, we must never accept the fallacy that a market is the only acceptable way to distribute goods, a corollary of which is the idea that any acceptable solution needs to compete on equal terms with existing products in a market.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
Well the first part at least would be a welcome change. The issue in my view is the very fact that poor people are treated as second-class citizens in information access or any other field of endeavor.
Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can’t sell you data to advertisers anymore.
I very genuinely want those sites to fucking die so I don’t have to coexist in a world where they dominate the internet. I would be literally thrilled to join a group of like-minded people who have to reimplement the conveniences of the modern web from scratch for free.
Still end of the day the server bill has got to be paid.
Why on earth is a paywall an evil and worse than ads? This idea that everything on the Internet needs to be free-as-in-beer is the toxicity that has resulted in our entire world corrupted with ads. A News organization needs money to pay journalists and to send them to where news is happening. A video service like YouTube needs to pay for massive amounts of storage and servers. If you want quality professional content, and not just fake blogging thinly disguising advertising, you need to pay writers.
The alternative is that is it all corrupted with ads, or by the “rich uncle” of the day like a musk or a zuckerberg or whatever with an ulterior motive.
If you want the provider of a service or product to be beholden and at all responsive to you, as a user, rather than someone else, you need to be a customer, a paying customer. That’s your only real leverage. If someone else is the real source of their revenue stream then their every act is geared to please them and not you. That’s what we have now.
If you want to socialize it all instead, like a PBS, I’m fine with that, but good luck.
I literally just came from another post that was talking about this.
Basically what happened to the Internet as a whole.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of products that most people don’t even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I’ve been doing things the hard way for so long.
OTOH, fuck all the advertisers who use shady tactics to make sales, and especially fuck all the people who pray on the naivety of others to steal their money. I was just showing a customer an email I got the other day stating her domain hosting was past due and required immediate payment, and she asked how I knew it was a scam. Uh, hello, because —I— am hosting your domain and website (and this is exactly why I share this kind of stuff with people, to make them think before they blindly write a check).
I would argue that if there’s a product that nobody knows exist that’s not necessarily because we need to allow constant intrusive ads, and more indicative that people don’t actually need the product.
I want to say that in any given day, 60% of the ads I see are from big, well known companies who don’t need me to see them to know they exist. Shit like Liberty Mutual (I swear I see more of their ads than anyone else and THEY ARE ALREADY MY INSURANCE PROVIDER), Coke, Pepsi, etc. 39.9% of the remaining 40% are advertisements for shit that I just don’t care about. I don’t care about the newest tech toys. I don’t care about the newest car mods, or random shit I can put on my desk, or stupid extra kitchen gadgets. Fully 40% of the ads I see are trying to convince me that I should buy a product that I straight up don’t need because the ad looked cool. Why should those ads be allowed to exist? Why should I be constantly bombarded with ads for services that I either already know plenty about or for things that are trying to manufacture a reason for their existence?
Only about 0.5% of the ads I see are actually for things I did know know about and that seem useful to me, or like something I would like. Probably even less than that, I’m drunk rn and estimating.
I keep throwing away ads from Comcast trying to sell me on the virtues of their business internet packages. Guys, I left you because your lame-ass shit was expensive as hell, slow as hell, and you couldn’t even be counted on to meet a single appointment in 6 months to bury your damn line you left laying across my yard.
I agree with you, there’s a lot of companies that just need to be silenced. You’re allowed to send me ONE ad, and you better make it good because I don’t ever want to hear from you again.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of products that most people don’t even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I’ve been doing things the hard way for so long.
For sure. I’m not against promotion in the large, but the constant and intrusive advertisements within other tasks, such as web ads that take up valuable screen real estate, or TV/YouTube commercials that keep me from the programs I want to watch.
Like my username is literally PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S. I have no problem getting PM’ed or emailed stuff. For example, I’m subscribed to a number of mailing lists from sites I ordered from. Guitar Center can send me all the emails they want [1], sell me all the crap they want, because I can opt out at any time, and I have a work email so I can put them aside for later.
[1] To the specific email I gave them, which I do check.
I’m down voting you because I agree lol
How do you reach people with a new product that didn’t exist before? Or a Service? Do you want monopolys that never change because smaller business cant advertise with their stuff.
I don’t like 99% of advertising either, especially online, but there are some exceptions.
How do you reach people with a new product that didn’t exist before? Or a Service?
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
—Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, New International Version
EDIT: I’m not a Christian and I’m not trying to convert anyone to my faith (or lack thereof), I just think it’s a neat quote.
My point really is that you can generally talk about your products in some existing forum with reference to existing things. For example, if I wanted people to listen to my music, which
I have deluded myself into thinkingis a unique, previously unheard-of blend of genres, I would post links onto music forums and groups who are interested in recommendations of music adjacent to the type I produce. And that is how I actually spread my music on Reddit (although not as PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S) back when it was fresh. No ads, no wasting people’s time and internet. I only reached people who already expressed their interest to receive music like mine. I got a very small following, but I achieved my goal.Nothing is so unique that it belongs in no forum or is of interest to no existing community, yet simultaneously needs to be broadcast to the entire world. I have no problem with people sending me stuff they believe in to my email or other inbox, blow it up for all I care, but what I do take issue with is shoving that stuff into my web browsing experience or even sandwiched into the content I’m trying to watch.
How is you posting about your music on a forum not an ad? You saying you only reach people who might already be interested is just saying that you target your ads.
Do you consider it different because you’re an individual doing it manually?
—Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, New International Version
You’re quoting the fantasy book of a group of Bronze Age goatherders as an argument? Really?
Chill out, I’m an atheist. I just think it’s a pretty good quote. The argument is what follows.
It’s not really a very good quote. Advanced electronics, genetic engineering, quantum computing… there are a lot of things that are actually new.
Pansexual, polysexual, and omnisexual are all microlabels and are all subsets of bisexual. You don’t need more labels than gay, straight, and bi.
Edit: I forgot about asexuals. But I specifically only care about bi subsets. They’re dumb, and you only need bi
Lemmy.world holding such a prevalent place in the Lemmy/Kbin part of the Fediverse makes it a major single point of failure.
They should still be the newcomers instance, but communities and users should migrate to other instances to increase the resilience of the Fediverse.
We have blown the concept of ownership way out of proportion. No one should be able to own things they have absolutely no connection to, like investment firms owning companies they don’t work for, houses they don’t live in or land they’ve never been to.
AI is to computer science what black magic is to science.
Seriously, what do you get after you’ve spent days and days to train a model? An inscrutable blob that may as well be proprietary software written for an alien CPU; studying it is damn near impossible, understanding how it works would require several lifespans, and yet it works, and we trust these models and use them to get solutions to problems that would normally be impossible to handle by computers using “real” computer science. And one day, this trust will bite us in the ass, not in the form of an “AI rebellion” but with every system that uses AI becoming unreliable because of situations outside its training.
Religion is nothing more then social engineering on a grand scale.
Dogs were hardwired by selective breeding to worship their owners. Not long ago they at least were loyal companions. You got one off the streets, fed it leftovers, washed it with a hose, it lived in the yard, and it was VERY happy and proud of doing its job. Some breeds now were bred into painful disabling deformities just to look “cute”, and they became hysterical neurotic yapping fashion accessories. Useless high maintenance toys people store in small cages (“oh, but my child loves his cage”) when they don’t need hardwired unconditional lopsided “love” to feed their narcissism.
Owning a second home should be illegal.
Most people shouldn’t be parents.
People who are strongly against nuclear power are ignorant of the actual safety statistics and are harming our ability to sustainably transition off fossil fuels and into renewables.
Being fat is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against big people.
I used to be fat (250ish lbs (110ish kg) at 5’8"ish (172ish cm)), and as much as I would like to blame my shit on anything else, the person feeding me, the person sitting at the computer for hours, the person actively avoiding all physical activity was me and no one else. After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.
I’m aware of my bias, and I make every active effort to counter it in my actual dealings with bigger people. Especially because there are certain circumstances, however rarely, where it may not actually be their fault. But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”
Edit: Added metric units
I am against a law allowing LGBTQ couples to adopt children in my country (Poland). I am not in any way against it as a general idea, but Polish society is full of full-on bigots and these kids would be subject to so much bullying, it’s really against their best interest.
The argument a lot of people raise “if we start doing it then people will get used to it” doesn’t work for me, because why should these children be victims of war that is not even theirs to fight? The whole thing makes me sick.
I’ve been downvoted for this opinion by both sides on Reddit.
We should build an A.I. overlord so that it replaces our current leadership like politicians and the entire market bussines specially the top, so that it can exploit resources in a reneuable way that is already possible right now but you know… lobying and fucking oil companies, and redistribute them to the population in a just way incluiding but not limited to food (nice food not rations), housing, medical services, psichological support (but the real one not the human resources bullshit), entertainment and internet access, and eventually be able to make custom orders like custom furniture, video game capable aparatus, modifing your house, travel and even swimmimg pools and ice cream. Besides i think our survival hinges on us making something about our leadership since there is at least one major problem that we need fixed that our current leadership is not gonna solve i.e. golbal warming, since they rather sell their souls and their people to the oil companies, and replacing them (even with a coup) is just gonna put more corruptible people that are gonna get bought out by some other straigth up cartoonishly evil entity, or they themselves turning into it or being overtrown by it, and destroying the entity would require a massive effort and thats not happening without mass destruction and even if it is destroyed another one will rise up from the chaos caused by the anti corporate war. So the sollution would be a singularity level A.I.
My unpopular opinion is that too many people give way, waaaaaayyy too much attention to “correct use of gender pronouns” and they should all just stfu.
I understand why that is a big deal for trans people, because they make their gender the defining aspect of their character. Something I consider a mistake, nobody’s main defining characteristic should be their gender.
make their gender the defining aspect of their character
The vast majority of cishet people (if not all) make their gender the defining aspect of their character - so why should trans people be any different?
The vast majority of cishet people (if not all) make their gender the defining aspect of their character
I already said it
Something I consider a mistake, nobody’s main defining characteristic should be their gender.
But it already is, isn’t it?
So if this…
nobody’s main defining characteristic should be their gender.
…is what you really want you need to start with cis people and not transgender ones, correct?
But it already is, isn’t it?
Is it what?
…is what you really want you need to start with cis people and not transgender ones, correct?
Dunno about you, but nobody I deal with in RL ever implied something among the lines of "refer to me as ". There was only one case of an ex-boss of mine who always liked to “joke”: “you can mistake my name, but never mistake my gender!”, but he was the exception
nobody I deal with in RL ever implied something among the lines of "refer to me as ".
Most likely because they’d never experienced someone referring to them by the wrong gender. You can be pretty sure that if someone started doing so, they’d have something to say about it.
Which is what the other commenter was trying to communicate to you. Gender is already a key component of most cis people’s personality - the way they think about themselves, the framework they use to make choices, and the way they want people to relate to them - but it’s not noticed as such, because it’s “normal”, so no-one comments on it and they don’t have to act to assert it.
We don’t need more pronouns. We need less of them.
In my native language there is no even he/she pronouns. The word is “hän” and it’s gender neutral. You can be male, female, FTM, MTF, non-binary or what ever and you’re still called “hän”. You can identify as anything you like and “hän” already includes you.