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Hey, same. What did you use?

I bought Cassette Beasts a few months ago but never got around to play it. I just want you to know that it was this post what made me finally play.

And all I can say is this:

No, you fuck off. "People liking something that they do not" is obviously not what prompted OP to claim astroturfing.

It probably has to do with how far this thread, and YTPremium conversations in general, are deviating from the average conversation on Lemmy. Stances on convenience, privacy, and blocking ads are harshly different in this context compared to any other thread about anything else. I mean, this is the userbase that will umpromptedly talk about the benefits of using Linux, Firefox, uBO and SearX because of privacy concerns in almost every other thread.

And this is happening in Google's favor, no less, a company that has shown time and again to not be above things like this.

In fact, why does YTPremium discourse keep coming back? Why not the other million premium subscriptions? Why do we not keep talking about Twitch Prime, which is in a similar situation? Why are the alleged lurkers so eager to stop their lurking and talk about all the benefits of YTPremium every once in a while?

There may be many reasons for this, both assuming honesty and otherwise, but one of the possibilities is certainly that an astroturf campaign may be going on at the moment. If, in addition to this, @Sheeple 's claim that many of the accounts supporting YTPremium are weeks old (tbh I don't care enough to check if this is true), then it is, with all probability, astroturfing.

Or maybe it's not, and everyone here is just sharing sincere opinions that just happen to align a little too well with YouTube's own marketing campaign. But you got to understand that, given all these factors, at the very least it's sus as fuck.

Not to be rude, but I'm struggling to believe half the comments in this thread are legit. Do you really mean to tell me that Lemmy, a platform notoriously populated almost exclusively by anti-corporate tech people that really value FOSS and privacy –hence the reason why all of us are here instead of Reddit– has this many users thinking it is a remotely acceptable idea to pay for a Premium service for one of the most invasive companies online?

I think most of us understand the many underhanded techniques used by Google to achieve an almost monopolistic control of some aspects of the internet, but when talking about YouTube, suddenly all the logic is reduced to "if you use a service, pay for it, or else let them show you ads"?? what????? Also, what's with comparing adblocking to stealing????

My own answer to the topic of this thread is that no, I won't be paying for YouTube Premium anytime soon, possibly ever. Google has betrayed my trust many times in the past, and on top of that I don't consider adverts as a legitimate source of income, so I will block any and all ads everywhere without paying an extra cent.

"But if you keep using their service, so you need to give them some form of revenue! Otherwise you just want free stuff!" I only keep using their service because Google has spent many years dumping on other platforms so that YouTube is –almost– the only platform that still exists where all the good creators are, so I will begrudgingly watch them on YouTube because there aren't any options. But I will resist Google's many insidious attempts to monetize me to the best of my ability while doing so.

That said, it's really dishonest to claim that people who block ads on YouTube just want free stuff and don't understand that services have a cost. Personally, I pay for Nebula because I do support the project and the creators involved. But YouTube won't see a cent from me, not with my consent at least.

Now imagine that you had some issue with the administration of your Lemmy instance. You still have both options above, plus a third one: migrate to another instance.

In theory, yes.

In practice, I strongly disagree with a number of decisions by the admins of my instance, but I'd rather keep ownership of the comments I have posted and would like to be notified if anyone ever replies to them in the future. Since I care more about the latter than the former, I'm not planning on moving instances at the moment. Guess I could create another account elsewhere, but I'd still have to check out the account on the old instance every once in a while. Plus I'd like to have a unified posting history. It sucks, and the technology is not quite there yet, but I hope true migrations between instances become a thing sooner than later. As far as I have been told, true migrations aren't yet a thing even on Mastodon.

I kinda don't want to engage further in this conversation, but I don't want to leave you on read so to speak.

You had me go back and check and the .world admins did provide evidence of users planning to break .world rules in each defederation announcement post. You’re free to disagree with their conclusions but you’re wrong when you say they provided no evidence

In the post about defederating Hexbear, the entire thread was in response to a post by a Hexbear admin calling for good behavior, and .world admin was rather deliberately misinterpreting and quoting them in bad faith. I read both of them, and while the Hexbear post was like "I know you all want to troll the libs, but please don't do that, it will suck for everyone and it'll get us defederated", all that the .world admin seemed to understand was "hey, time to troll the libs!". I know it was a deliberate misinterpretation rather than an honest misunderstanding because the .world post was leaving out the many parts of the Hexbear post where the admin was explicitly calling for civility.

The Hexbear post went off in a tangent I didn't really understand where they talked about a few of their political views, and .world took that as a weird example of extremism that I also didn't quite get, claiming that stuff such as opposing NATO is extremist. Admitedly, I haven't gone back to that post, so I'm saying this from memory. Feel free to correct me. But sure, in that case, they did at least point to something as an excuse for defederation, even if wildly misinterpreted.

But when I said that they weren't providing evidence for hate speech I was talking about the Lemmygrad defederation announcement specifically, where they claimed that the reason for defederation was hate speech rather than trolling, bad behavior etc. In there, they did claim hate speech multiple times, but not once did they provide an example of that. Which is what I was talking about.

Besides that, you sound like you’re sitting on the fence on whether or not they are hateful

I'm not. They're not hateful. Calling for direct action in the form of violence towards the wealthy and towards genocidal governments such as Israel does not qualify as hate speech, because they are not considered protected groups. You are free to argue that they are misguided, or even dangerous, and it would be a legitimate disagreement, but hate speech is a concept with a rather strict legal definition. You cannot just consider stuff such as "eat the rich" or "death to israel" as hate speech.

I have receipts of the admins cheering on the Tiananmen Square massacre because it was a western plot or painting the CCP’s treatment of Uighur’s as a simple necessary anti-terrorism action rather than ethnic cleansing. Please don’t willfully look the other way because they don’t outright yell “gas the Jews”.

Irrelevant. My point in this argument isn't that they don't do this, it's that the .world admins should have cited specific instances of this happening in the sticky post they made about defeding Lemmygrad. That said, a lot of the time people claim to have seen this, either the context is a lot more nuanced than that, or they are circlejerking and roleplaying the "tankie" stereotype. Specifically with the Tiananmen Square thing, it's more likely the latter. My own experience lurking Lemmygrad is that people in there actually don't like China much either, so I'm a bit surprised that .worlders keep saying that they do.

I also question why a “circlejerk” community pointing out the ridiculous shit said by leadership and regular posters on the instances isn’t valid

Circlejerk communities are by design unfair. They crop stuff out of context to laugh at it. It's funny, but it's not at all rigorous and may not be cited setiously. A lot of the time it's screenshots of posts that have either been removed, downvoted, or there is a reply calling bullshit that has been cropped out of the image, and these are outliers to the community that are treated as the average opinion. Other times, the context is all there and the funny bit is just the disagreement between the circlejerk community and the source material, but circlejerk posts are ALWAYS presented misleadingly. The point is to laugh at it, not to do some rigorous examination of the line of reasoning.

Anecdotal, but a few days ago I saw a .world user claimed they had met someone on Lemmygrad that stated that being gay was imperialistic, and they actually did link to it. The link was pointing to a c/tankiejerk thread with a screenshot about a post that did actually say that. Granted, the post itself was bullshit. However, as shown in the screenshot itself, the post was downvoted, and the submitter was... someone with the @lemmy.world suffix. It's okay that this post was screenshot and uploaded to c/tankiejerk to laugh at it, but it's not valid to extrapolate that post's content to the entirety of Lemmygrad when it was already downvoted and posted by a .world user in the first place. This is the kind of bad faith I'm referring to that revolves around these defederations IMO.

Just to clarify- I didn't claim that they aren't hateful instances, deliberately so to avoid starting an argument. I mean, I will say that they aren't if you want, but the point I was making was that .world admins did not provide any example in the thread where they announced this. You could be the worst criminal on Earth, and the judge sentencing you must still be expected to provide proof before taking further action. Likewise, no matter how "obvious" it seems that Hexbear etc are "hateful" instances, responsible admins are still expected to provide concrete reasons for defederation.

This isn't just semantics. This is important because when you get into the specifics, when you force people to provide examples of Lemmygraders or Hexbears supposedly cheering on the murder of Israelis or denying genocides like Holodomor, no one is able to quote anything that can be remotely interpreted as that without engaging in really bad faith, other than maybe using sources such as circlejerk communities making fun of them (such as Meanwhileongrad).

Anyway, it's honestly not that easy to find, because Hexbear and Lemmygrad themselves are circlejerks most of the time, so I'm not bothered by regular users not having proof or anything when stating that they dislike these instances. But when it's the whole admin of a large instance, I expect more seriousness.

The controversy you are referring to is regarding specifically .world defederating Hexbear "preemptively" before the latter could federate with anyone, out of fear that the "annoying tankies" may overrun everyone else. Since Hexbear is a relatively small platform run by volunteers like .world is, and the basis on which the defederation was justified was shaky at best, a lot of users raised an eyebrow. There was a similar move by .world later on where they defederated from Lemmygrad, another "tankie" instance, due to alleged hate speech of which the admins failed to provide a single example, and it was clear as day that .world admins just wanted some excuse to defederate away "the evil communists".

In this case, the situation is different, because it involves a lot more than just .world. A large, for-profit instance Threads, run by Meta, is opening up to ActivityPub, and people are afraid of the reasonable possibility that Meta is attempting to either destroy or absorb the Fediverse as a whole. Besides the shitty corporate attempts in the past, Threads is also overrun by a lot of algorithm induced hate speech and far-right extremism, and there is a legitimate concern that this will spread to instances that federate with Threads.

Hexbear (and others like Lemmygrad) are different in that they are still part of the Fediverse, they are run by volunteers like most instances, and remain federated with other large instances such as lemm.ee. But the fact that hate speech is rampant in Threads yet .world admins want to "wait and see" make the Lemmygrad defederation even clearer and funnier in retrospect, lol. I complained back in the day when Hexbear was defederated that I'd rather let users choose for themselves whether they wanted that or not, and I got told to go to another instance. Now that we are federating with Threads anyway, might as well do that.

Edit: Typos

When a double standard is used to claim that other countries such as China are literally hell on Earth for reasons that also apply to the US, and that double standard gets called out, people complain about whataboutism.

But the minute someone says "Hey, maybe US foreign politics are imperialistic" people immediately jump to say "OH but PUTIN!". Funny how that works.

Russia sucks, China sucks, but this post is about the US, which also sucks.

Is the kanji the name of the period the year belongs to or something? That looks interesting. Where can I find out more?

It's possible that it eventually ends capitalism, or at the very least forces it to reform significantly.

Consider that the most basic way a company can obtain profit is by extracting as much surplus value as they possibly can, i.e spending less and earning more. Extracting high surplus value from human workers is easy, because a salary doesn't really depend on the intrinsic value of the service a worker is providing, but rather it's tied to the price of that job position in the market. Theoretically, employers can all agree and offer lower salaries for the same jobs if the situation demands it. You can always "negotiate" a lower salary with a human worker, and they will accept because any amount of money is better than no money. Machines are different. They don't need a salary, but they do carry a maintenance cost, and you cannot negotiate with that. If you don't cover the maintenance costs, the machine will outright not do its job, and no amount of threats will change that. You can always optimize a machine, replace it with a better one, etc. but the rate at which machines get optimized is slower than the rate at which salaries can decrease or even become stagnant in the face of inflation. So it's a lot harder to extract surplus value from machines than it is from human workers.

Historically, machines helped cement a wealth gap. If there was a job that required some specialization and therefore had a somewhat solid salary, machines would split it into a "lesser" job that many more people can do (i.e just ensuring the machine is doing its job), driving down salaries and therefore their purchasing power, and a specialized job (i.e creating or maintaining the machine), which much less people can access, whose salaries have remained high.

So far, machines haven't really replaced human workforce, but they have helped cement an underclass with little purchasing power. This time, the whole schtick with AI is that it will be able to, supposedly, eventually replace specialist jobs. If AI does deliver on that promise, we'll get stuck with a wealth distribution where a majority of the working class has little purchasing power to do anything. Since working class is also the majority of the population, companies won't really be able to sell anything because no one will be able to buy anything. You cannot sustain an economic model that impoverishes the same demography it leeches off of.

But there is a catch: All companies have an incentive to pursue that perfect AI which can replace specialist jobs. Having those would give them a huge advantage for them in the market. AI doesn't demand good working conditions, they don't undermine other employees' loyalty by unionizing, they are generally cheaper and more reliable than human workers, etc. which sounds all fine and dandy until you realize that it's also those human workers the ones buying your products and services. AI has, by definition, a null purchasing power. So, companies individually have an incentive to pursue that perfect AI, but when all companies have access to it... no company will be sustainable anymore.

Of course, it's all contingent on AI ever getting that far, which at the moment I'm not sure it's even possible, but tech nerds sure love to promise it is. Personally, I'm hopeful that we will eventually organize society in a way where machines are doing the dirty work while I get to lead a meaningful life and engage in jobs I'm actively interested in, rather than just to get by. This is one of the possible paths to that society. Unfortunately, it also means that, for the working class, it will get worse before it gets better.