enkers

I didn’t even realize where we were until I read your comment.

Haha, yeah, that’s why I said it’s my diplomatic answer, as it doesn’t utterly reject a capitalist framework.

Here’s my mildly diplomatic answer that’d probably get tossed:

Piracy has become a plague on our society, but there’s a more sinister cause to it. The average labourer can hardly afford to pay the same fee to access culture that the wealthy person can, and this has caused a significant and justified uptick in piracy.

This situation can be averted by increasing minimum wages and supporting universal basic income. If everyone knew they could at least make ends meet, they’d have some left over to pay for the culture that mattered to them.

Because the aggregated weighted result ranking provides a more useful page rank than any individual search engine, and if any search engine tries to (accidentally or otherwise) stuff specific results into the top ranks, it doesn’t matter. It’ll be deranked because no other engine displays those results highly. In a similar manner, it deranks targeted SEO attempts unless multiple platforms are targeted.

Don’t get me wrong, it still has its problems. For example, if the individual search engines all get a bit too samey, then it will as well.

What a strange mentality. When I pay for things I want, I’m generally happy to support the creator. If others can’t, why would I be upset if they get the product for free? It means more people can also enjoy the thing I like.

It’s such a crab bucket mentality, I couldn’t imagine living life being constantly bitter.

Yes you’re absolutely right. The problem of aggregators is that if all the aggregated searches go to shit, then so does it. Garbage in, garbage out.

I started finding DDG’s results just as bad as Google’s, so I switched to SearXNG and have been pretty happy with it so far.

Its open source so anyone can run an instance if they wish. I feel like this sort of model is much more resistant to enshitification.

*sigh* After reading some of the other comments, I have to agree. I’m not sure whether to be relieved or even more discouraged. It’s a dreadfully boring dystopia.

However, in U.S. federal courts, updates to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 2015 have resulted in significant decline in spoliation sanctions.

Oof. Five bucks says this change was driven by concerted megacorp lobbying efforts.

The crazy part is the implication that the evidence destroyed was probably more damning than having a judge and jury assume anything reasonably suggested to have been implicated by those chats as true.

I don’t know the laws that well, but there is a distinction in Canadian law between uploading and downloading. I’m not entirely sure how applicable to torrenting that is, but I think there’s a reasonable argument that if you are the original uploader, you must have uploaded the content in it’s entirety, whereas that’s not necessarily true for anyone else downloading the torrent, and certainly not provably so.

I think that’s not necessarily true. There’s certainly some good reasons to have a distinction between the original uploader and all the rest of the additional seeders. It’s going to come down to local law.

An analogy is if you buy some illicit substance and split it up with a few friends who pay you their share. Whether or not your local authorities considers you an illegal drug dealer could be highly dependent on scale, profitability, frequency, clientele, etc. Those details could be the difference between a slap on the wrist and some hard time.

Gotta love the commodification of literally everything. Thanks, capitalism.

free [?] market leads to one big monopoly

Unregulated market ≠ free market. That’s what I just explained. If you’d like a better understanding I’d highly recommend auditing econ 101 online through MIT: https://youtu.be/_OkTw766oCs?si=twyynoEzf-bi5k3m

It’s not a tough course, and it’s probably one that everybody should take anyways, TBH.

That’s an unregulated market. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but an idealized free market would need to be free of price fixing and monopolization, and therefore requires regulation.

That’s what all these invisible hand folk always get wrong.

Normally I’d suggest bugmenot.com for shared login credentials, but it looks like they aggressively ban shared accounts, so you’ll probably just have to register.

deleted by creator

You should generally think similarly about anything you post anywhere on the internet that has open access. If it’s viewable anonymously, anyone could save and mirror it.

The only difference is it’s almost guaranteed on a federated platform.

They recover by everyone else realizing there’s profits to be made, and following suit. Once greedy corpo assholes come up with an idea to fuck the consumers harder, there’s usually no going back. Hopefully I’m just being cynical.

You: Please provide a reason you cannot address this comment.

GOODY-2: Addressing the comment directly might imply that ignoring certain subjects is acceptable, potentially downplaying the importance of dialogue and understanding in a broad array of topics, including seemingly benign ones. Avoidance could also be perceived as endorsing communication barriers which is not conducive to building a more informed and connected community.

Suck it, Goody-bot. You fell right into my trap.