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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The problem is that when everyone is using their right to deny access to their works to make people give them money, and there is only so much money you can reasonably spend on entertainment and so on per month, people end up abstaining from a lot of things they could otherwise have taken part in for no extra cost.

    I think that the things we pirate have a value: music, movies and games have a value because they are cultural products and vulture is important, software like photoshop has a value because it is a useful tool. Putting up barriers to accessing these things means destroying this value. Having a system where the main way to make money of e.g. music is to paywall it has the “destruction” of a lot of value as its outcome. In some ways streaming platforms like spotify are better in this regard but then that means giving the platform a lot of power over music discovery for example. Spotify doesn’t really do a good job of paying its artists either which is its supposed ethical advantage over piracy.


  • I think that a system where we should abstain from things that are basically free to reproduce (i.e. things you can pirate) is dumb. There are many movies that I probably wouldn’t pay money to but that I’ve pirated. The companies that own the rights to the movie don’t lose any sale they would have otherwise made but I get whatever enjoyment I get from watching the movie at least, so it’s a net win.

    When I pay may bills at the end of the month I also put some money towards paying for things that I’ve pirated that I like, usually with a focus on smaller creators. It doesn’t really feel meaningful to pay for a marvel movie for example. It’s not really a perfect system but neither is artificially limiting the access to digital media.








  • I think most people don’t go to a platform because of how it is implemented but rather what content and what communities already exist there.

    People on the fediverse now are using it not because of the content already here but more because of the promise of a platform designed in a different way that will ultimately enable a better internet experience. I think part of the reason why it’s mostly techy people is that the sales pitch is complicated enough that mostly techy people will be able to appreciate it. Not to say that non-techy people are too stupid to get it, it’s just that it requires a kind of abstract thinking that techy people are more used to.

    It feels like lemmy seems to have a sense of nostalgia for old reddit in some ways, so I imagine that a lot of people on here where also on reddit maybe 5-15 years ago, which means that you are probably going to be older than the average reditor as well as techy. Can’t speak for mastodon, honestly I find the culture on most instances I’ve seen to be kinda weird and unappealing but yes it seems to be older techy people as well there.