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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   33130 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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But if you think that clickbait is bad now, imagine the incentives for producing effective clickbait on any blockchain ledger that executes access contracts instantaneously using ubiquitous crypto tokens as a medium of data exchange!

I understand how vivid this as a problem is, I have the edge case seeking programmer brain as well. But this really isn't much of a problem, trivial safeties like a difficult to skip dialogue when your browser/wallet software detects an unusually large uptick in new subscriptions and an escrow period effectively deal with this problem.

it has failed, almost completely, in its original mission to become a decentralized, anonymous digital currency. More than 90% of Bitcoin transactions are pure, unadulterated market speculation.

I'd rather not let my comment get too derailed into another crypto war front, but I'll flag I object to this framing.

Writing for a living is tough, not because we haven't figured out how to properly monetize the Internet, but because there are lots and lots of good-to-great writers who are still willing to do that for cheap-to-free. The choice is not between ubiquitous ads and paywalls; you can also just choose to not traffic in professional material--like playing a free-to-play game and never once dipping into microtransactions or gacha mechanics, fully prepared to quit the moment you hit a hard paywall, because there are other games to play.

This is easier said than done if most of the people you most want to talk to discuss are posting behind paywalls. If the money is good it doesn't take a lot of the more prolific quality posters here to become economic migrants to substackistan before the brain drain sinks us.

Stated a little differently: ad-blockers aren't Freddie's problem--I'm Freddie's problem.

My original list of beats I wanted to had this hit this point(yes the OP had actual thought put into it's content, that's how poor my ability to organize my thoughts is). I do think there is a pretty big difference between the blog and the forum that is coming out in how daBoer considers the problem and it's related to your previous point about most people doing this posting thing are making the same wage as the despised jannie for much the same inexplicable reason. If the stats I've heard to to be believed there is still another group separate from me, you and daBoer as people who passively consume our ramblings. These people are likely as much of a blind spot to me as I am to daBoer.

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