theinspectorst

I’m one of them! I didn’t even know about r/selfhosted when I was on Reddit but I found this place when I joined kbin. I’ve been thinking on-and-off over the last year about self hosting so subscribed. I still occasionally look at Reddit in view-only mode though (largely for legacy content) so I also subscribed to r/selfhosted over there too last time I checked it.

It’s not subscriber numbers that matter though, it’s active users and quality new posts - people who go to the sub regularly, upvote, comment, and create content that causes other people in turn to look at the sub. I’m still a subscriber to a tonne of Reddit subs that I used to post and comment regularly on, and now don’t. If every active Reddit user became a passive user then Reddit would grind to a halt overnight, regardless of how many users they notionally have.

You’re comparing the collective influence of lobbyists, donors and pressure groups with the individual influence of a single voter - no shit the former looks bigger.

The collective influence of voters in choosing (say) Trump over Clinton, or Biden over Trump, or Macron over Le Pen, or voting for Brexit, has influenced the direction of these Western democracies in recent years dramatically more than any group of lobbyists could dream of.

You’re telling yourself a comforting fairytale that society is directed by some powerful secret cabals pulling the strings so you as an individual are absolved from having to do your bit with how you spend your money and how you vote. If everyone thinks like you, nothing will improve. So fucking irresponsible.

Consumers are also voters. Corporations are not. Whether through the products we purchase at the shops or the politicians we elect at the ballot box, it will be the behaviour of individuals that creates the incentive set within which corporations profit-maximise.

Telling ourselves that this is a corporate problem and our individual behaviour doesn’t matter is a comforting fairy tale but it will accomplish little.

A corporate problem and a societal problem are two sides of the same coin. Corporations don’t make money in isolation, they make money because they sell things that (directly or ultimately) are bought by consumers.

You could choose to imagine a scenario where the CEOs of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, etc just voluntarily decide to stop extracting oil overnight, and think that would be more impactful than billions of individual consumers slashing their demand for carbon-intensive products and fuels. But if the consumers don’t change their behaviour and continue to demand this stuff, other companies would just step in to fill the gap, takeover the old oil fields, etc.

The sustainable way to change corporate behaviour is through changing their end-consumers’ behaviour - i.e. if end-consumers stop directly buying carbon-intensive products and stop buying from carbon-intensive companies.