to be fair, the most popular ad platforms like google ads use trackers, so it is something to consider. but i do agree that this kind of lumping is bad since this thinking hurts ethical ad platforms too.
i don't like the idea of excluding people who don't have the means to pay from service ("monetize it as a business"), and when i was young i had to avoid paid services. many online creations that got popular like wavetro's animations and modrinth simply couldn't keep up with costs by just donations.
i value social contracts over law, and especially for small websites, when their advertising is unintrusive i think i should help them survive and keep running. a ton of major things i use like great independent news sources and some hosters of pirated content use ads while i don't have a membership.
by analogy, maybe piracy doesn't reduce indie devs' revenues that much as it provides word-of-mouth. but that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay for them.
i'm not asking you to accept harassment, i'm not saying piracy is bad. i'm just saying that ad-blocking is one form of piracy, just like how people pirate to reject DRM. and it surprises me that so many people insist it's not.
i don't understand why i would host a solicitor or how that is comparable to ads. when you see a solicitor you don't pay them bread and jam, their company does. when you see an ad you don't pay the website money, the ad company does.
if you're arguing this, it's probably already vanishingly rare for you to be clicking on ads or looking anything more than a glance at them. and on my work device, where i didn't install adblockers as an experiment, i don't recall ever seeing ads that ship malware, and i commit quite a bit of tomfoolwery on my work device.
if by malware you mean how viewing ads slows down your machine, that what people say of Denuvo.
(not sure what you meant by the jehovah's witnesses part. are they actually starving?)
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feddit.org's Zionist bar problem: community ban(s) vote
not exactly what the expression means. rope means we wait for them to commit the offense and then ban, in this case prozionist behavior that’s instance-wide or widespread among their users’ comments on our instance
this is not at all what i'm seeing on discord, and I think it's worthy of note that the article's sample is Reddit posts in r/discordapp. Discord users who use Reddit in general have a systemic bias that's close to ours, as opposed to the majority that is young Discord users.
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feddit.org's Zionist bar problem: community ban(s) vote
banning the communities is a no-brainer (yes); we already have a ban on pro-Zionism. (I do wonder how !buyfromeu@feddit.org is involved in all this though; I found absolutely no mentions of "semit" in the federated modlog and I'm too tired to visit the original modlog rn.)
but I'm really unsure about banning the entire instance, as many here seem to suggest. you have convinced me that Emopunker is clueless at best and [REDACTED] at worst, but I would want to see more evidence that this has created a problematic user or moderation culture than some actions of one admin and one mod (plus one user ban without context performed by another mod).
three quarters of the screenshots here deal with removal reasons like saying "fuck off you piece of trash" and editing the headline that just happen to be applied to anti-Zionist content. maybe there's some context of discriminatory enforcement i can't see here, but "choice morsels" should really show the best evidence we have.
i think we should make a separate thread with said stronger evidence to decide on the instance ban.
Granted, the source code is not intuitively named, I'll give you that. I wouldn't have expected the repo links to be in https://ageverification.dev/Setup/ "Setup" either. But thanks to the fact that it is open source, anyone can check that they never send IDs to a server that requests age verification. The necessary information is scanned from the ID locally on the device.
Again, the EU age verification is not done by private companies. It's open source, the specifications are out, and it's run by the government. Companies that access the attestation only learn whether the user/shifting IP is above the age of majority. They cannot get your ID.
On what data? All age verification does is attest that an IP is over a certain age; the European solution collects no information other than the boolean "Is user over
<age>
?", the expiry date, and the issuing authority. I don't know what you can do with data simply saying that the user isn't browsing the internet "illegally", since with age gating every user on the Internet is over that age. In our present time of dynamic/private IPs, the operator behind the IP (and consequently their age) changes constantly anyways, meaning that little data is constantly invalidated.
Chat Control is "dormant". It's been amended, re-proposed, and then put back on the backburner for umpteenth times, including this time. It's definitely a threat, I agree, but nothing about it has become more eager in 2025.
to watch BBC, not mute ads, no?