Manticore

I still have a photo on my phone of a Countdown sign saying 'you cam help us reduce platic' next to an entire bin of countdown-branded plastic punnets of tomatoes

...found the pic it actually says plastic bags I remembered it wrong but still

And while I'm at it, here's the filters to add to your uBlock Origin's MY FILTERS settings to block YT's blocker:

youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)

youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)

youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])

youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

The more ad-riddled they make the platform to try and monetise users, the more they make adblocks necessary to even be usable.

I didn't use to both with adblockers. I didn't like ads, but they didn't affect me enough for me to go through any effort blocking them.

Now I use blockers everywhere, on every platform. Even for creators I like, because I know how little they actually make for ads - so how bout instead of watching 12 hours of ads so they can get 2c, I just send them a dollar or buy their merch every once in a while to not watch ads at all? Etc.

Ads could have had a place. There are ads that serve a purpose, that have minimal disruption but still give businesses a way to develop awareness for those who might want to use them.

Movie trailers (including when they stopped trailing movies and started leading them) are examples of 'acceptable ads' to me. When I purchase something from a store and they include a printed card from their sponsor. When sports teams have logos for being sponsored. A work van with the business logo parked while out on call. Etc.

But the internet's online ads? Email spam? Telemarketing? These are forms of advertising that are actively hostile, and they've become the default. So now a user that wants to be on the internet at all is best served by block all ads, including the ones that would've otherwise been reasonable.

Google will never make me feel guilty for blocking ads when they're already making their search engine unusable, too.

I'm hoping kbin will be more popular and improve at it gains users. I like the microblogging feature, because it 'tiers' the content we'd share, and makes different users/communities easier to discover.

But it's a very new platform, so it will be a while before it sees fruition; it also has almost all users on a single instance kbin.social; so other instances lack content (it doesn't federate as cleanly as Lemmy) and makes users over-reliant on the admins of that instance, undermining the point of federation.

Unfortunately few platforms design with accessibility in mind; they consider it a 'nice to have', not a 'need to have'. As platforms get bigger they'll gain the interest of coders that consider accessibility to be as much a 'need to have' as the rest of the front-end. After all, Reddit itself was never accessible - 3rd party devs made it so, and they will again.

Transport in my area is so shit it would take me an hour just to get to a place I could spend cash; I would buy nothing.

Except maybe a therapist out of my own pocket to deal with something dangling financial stability in front of me.

Because of all the 'um actually' corrections from people whenever they'd say "Tom and me bought drinks." And not just to the point one starts thinking it's always "Tom and I" - I've had people 'correct' my 'to Tom and me', as well, because they think "Tom and me" is always incorrect.

This is also why I don't make a big deal about correcting others' grammar; it's often a tool people use to feel smarter (and thus superior) to other people. Language is a communication tool; if I know what you mean and there's limited ambiguity then I don't much care if you said 'would of' instead of 'would've'; and certainly not enough to interrupt a conversation to correct it.

Besides, between autocorrect, typos, and the brain's weird word-association tricks, a linguistics professor is capable of making significant grammar mistakes and not even notice, even if they'd know they were wrong if pointed out. So swooping in to tell them "hey you did this thing slightly wrong" in lieu of engaging with their intended point is not meaningful contribution.

I think it's probably a good idea.

Did you know the Neanderthals were arguably more cultured, social, and collaborative than our Human ancestors? Yes the Neanderthals aren't our direct ancestors; they were another competing hominid. Humans killed them - but they also outbred them, including by breeding with them.

Humans are social creatures; the largest federated instances grow far faster than the smaller ones. Not just in absolute number, but in percentages. And Capitalism doesn't want competition in a free market; it wants a monopoly as quickly as possible. Any time a platform represents a threat to Meta's user-share, it buys it (Instagram, WhatsApp), and if it can't, it copies it (TikTok > Reels).

If a known name of a private umbrella like Meta/Facebook, Alphabet/Google, or Microsoft enters the fediverse, the following is likely to happen:

1. The fediverse gains notoriety, desirability and attention as private platforms enshittify.
2. It grows until this represents a threat to private platforms losing users to the fediverse.
3. [Meta]'s private users enter the fediverse via [Meta]'s instances; they're sponsored, accessible, visible or incentivised; they appear to have the lowest barrier for entry; they may integrate with the platforms they're still using.
4. New users in the fediverse in general likely join [Meta]'s instances; they're large, and where their families and friends are; they promise to be stable and have legal oversight; less likely to blackout from server error or admin corruption.
5. [Meta] slowly collects the majority of users in the fediverse.
6. [Meta] reaches a point of having >80% of the fediverse users anyway, and ceases the funding and technical support for federation and gateways, defederating and becoming a high-walled garden.
7. Other fediverse members are pressured by their colleagues, family/friends etc to make a [Meta] account so they can maintain contact. They won't leave [Meta] because they'd lose contact with anybody staying.
8. Other fediverse instances are forgotten as their users are pressured back onto private platforms.
9. [Meta] has successfully gained an effective monopoly over the fediverse.
10. [Meta]'s fediverse enshittifies.

TLDR: I think the Fedipact (or something like it) is necessary for the fediverse to ever become what we hope it one day can be. To allow self-interested private entities to stack territory in it will eventually see it consumed.

They said capitalism bred innovation too but all it actually bred was profit. Innovation is work. Why improve a bad product when you can cripple or buy out the competing ones?

I'm reminded of how the English tried to lower the cobra population during their occupation of India, offering a bounty for each snake head that was turned in. The locals started breeding cobras into a profitable enterprise. When the colonials realised what was happening, they cancelled the bounty; all the breeding stock was then simply released. Yet more cobras.

The metric by which a system is measured will determine how that system is optimised, not the system's original intention.

Schools measure grades, not learning. The English measured snake heads, not population. Capitalism measures capital, not innovation.