I dont think it is likely to deteriorate in the same way. The mainstream service algorithms reward engagement and make no value judgments about the type of engagement. Since its easier to get engagement by spouting bombastic false claims and unsupportable opinions, that is the bulk of what you see.

Lemmy barely reward engagement, if at all, so the perverse incentive to be a jerk on purpose is simply just not there. Surely, drawing a broader audience will shift discussion toward humanity’s lowest common denominator, but it doesn’t actively encourage the bad behavior, at least.

Her face launched 1000 chips!

🏅

I think that you see these new services attract different cohorts of people based on the service they provide and their overall renown. The first group that shows up seems to almost always consist heavily of programmers and system administrators, then IT generalists, then power users and gamers, and finally the general populace with no specific demographics.

Each group seems to have certain preferences, some of which do not align. For example, the first 2 groups seem to prefer the service have a small, like-minded user base, liking it less as it grows and broadens. The later groups seem disinterested in a service unless it has at least some certain minimum, but large market share.

So, the gamers may yet come! We just need enough activity to attract their interest, which can be a “chicken or egg” problem.

Fortunately, there really is no motive to implement dark patterns in FOSS software, and its addition would promptly trigger a fork.

Lemmy cannot be part of that same cycle because it has no owner. Those other services turning to shit coincided with them getting big, but it was not the direct cause. Those sites got big because they had a desirable service and an acceptable monetization model. Once they get big, the owner invariably turns the monetization screws more and more until it triggers an exodus big enough to effectively kill the service.

Lemmy can’t do that because its just a foss self-hosted software program that a bunch of private individuals and groups are hosting and inviting us to join, with barely extant trivial barriers to migrating your account and history to another copy of Lemmy on some other guy’s server.

The quality may diminish as the lowest common denominator deteriorates, but there can’t really ever be monetization that is at all onerous or everyone will likely bail to a neighboring instance overnight.

The groups of rich investors taking hits from this are collectively richer than him. He doesn’t have to “go down” to placate them, but he’ll be “retiring to spend more time with family” very soon.

I dont believe it is that easy to tell if an IP is coming from a data center, unfortunately. To some extent you can tell its location with the geolocation database, but that is not authoritative and can be wrong or even contain intentional falsehoods. You can also see what is adjacent to it and make guesses that way, but that is often inconclusive due to common tunneling protocols like MPLS.

I believe the only remotely accurate way to tell if a connection is a bot is to use modules that detect bot behavior and redirect what it detects. Some users have even made infinitely recursive “traps” for bots that do not respect their robots.text file, which make their web page seem infinite so it scrapes forever over these fake pages that are less work to host than they are for the bot to parse through.

It is a very tough problem with few easy solutions. It will likely result in an arms race much like ads and ad blockers, hackers and firewalls, etc. It has so far, anyway.

It doesn’t seem that good of a job unless you plan on retiring in a couple weeks.

Sure doesn’t.

One can only assume that at least some of these people at least some of the time genuinely lose track of which news is objective fact and which is fabricated by their own spin machine.

I think he meant “installing” but kept going.

What will happen is that the corporation will whine all the way to the Supreme Court about free speech. Awww, it thinks its people!

Its crazy that they even have to. The laws that prohibited this exist already, but in one of the most disastrous bad faith court rulings in modern history, “artificial persons” came into being as a legal term about 100 years ago.

Sane and good faith people know there is no such thing.

I think that this inability to compete stems from a cultural aversion to reinvestment among those in the business world.

If these cars are making them those tiny or even negative margins at these prices that look like mortgages, they would benefit from evaluating themselves from top to bottom:

• Would our costs diminish over time if we invested in our build infrastructure more?
• Are we including features, amenities, and adornments that negatively impacting margins, affordability, and overall sales volume?
• Do we have institutional inefficiencies from previous mergers and acquisitions that we have never completed and reorganized even decades after they were complete?
• Are we as competitive on quality, safety, and other influential metrics as we could be?
• Are we innovating in ways people are influenced by?
• Is our executive pay reasonable for the value they bring to our company?
• Are our advertising, secondary business units, and other costly programs generating the return on the investments that we hoped for?

I believe that companies that grow to the size and influence that these have, they uniformly develop pathological behaviors and methods centered around maximizing value extraction from the business entity and dictating terms to the market they “serve”. Soul-searching questions like those above, and really any sentiment toward genuine investment and betterment at all become foreign, radical, and distasteful to them and their supporters. They then shuffle along for potentially decades after they have essentially died, persisting on critical mass alone until the market is finally disrupted enough where that alone can’t save them. BYD may be heavily subsidized, but they’re also comparatively new and young, able to innovate and respond to market demands, fundamental practices their older monopolistic competitors have long ago lost interest in doing.

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So, they’re misappropriating funds toward ends that their constituents explicitly rejected, and intentionally making an end run around organizational policy. This sounds like an open and shut case for immediate termination with cause, as well as likely grounds for a civil suit and maybe even criminal charges.

The malfeasance is not surprising, but a lack of disciplinary action and termination are, since inaction is tacit acceptance and a bad look for elected officials. I don’t think even the police union would take that “wrongful termination” case.

The domestic automakers have become hopelessly addicted to American oligopoly profit margins, and have entirely forgotten how to compete for business and win on merit.

If they went back and read one of those old boring economics textbooks, they would learn that you can successfully operate on a reasonable margin and lock in repeat business by establishing a good reputation and overall being desirable.

Competing nations subsidizing their industry is what tools like trade restrictions and tariffs are for, of course, but they are tools meant to level the playing field, not to pick winners and losers. Banning the sale of products like the Toyota Hilux and the whole BYD product line is simply naked cowardice manifested through regulatory capture.

You know what they say: “if you can’t beat 'em, pay the government to beat 'em.”