Source? All the ones I can find say they're still losing money. 800M in revenue but 940M in expenses for 2023. https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/reddits-ipo-raises-questions-about-profitability-heres-how-it-makes-money-01f73f04

The fediverse just needs time to grow. It's still a very new thing. Growth will take a long time, but the fediverse needs to be an alternative to corporate social media, not integrated with and dependent on it.

It will be more difficult and damaging to defederate later when Meta starts throwing its weight around, because people will become accustomed to a much larger community. The fact that threads has many more users will give Meta disproportionate power over the fediverse, but unlike other open source/free projects, their only goals are to profit and gain more influence over society.

It's best to never federate with them, even if that means losing growth opportunities in the short term.

Facebook has been losing users for years though.

I don't disagree at all but I can kind of understand why a lemmy instance would block piracy communities. Reddit has many millions of dollars and a squad of lawyers to back them up, lemmy admins don't.

For big corps and California based tech companies sure. For most other companies there's very little data. Though I realize that isn't necessarily their fault.

Knowingly manipulating people into suicide is a crime and people have already been found guilty of doing it.

So the answer is obvious. If you knowingly encourage a vulnerable person to commit suicide, and your intent can be proved, you can and should be held accountable for manslaughter.

That's what social media companies are doing. They aren't loaning you extremist ideas to help you. That's a terrible analogy. They're intentionally serving extreme content to drive you into more and more upsetting spaces, while pretending that there aren't any consequences for doing so.

The article is about lawsuits. Where are you getting this idea that anyone suggested criminalizing people? Stop putting words in other people's mouths. The most that's been suggested in this thread is regulating social media algorithms, not locking people up.

Drop the melodrama and paranoia. It's getting difficult to take you seriously when you keep making shit up about other people's positions.

Literally no one suggested that end users should be arrested for jokes on the internet. Fuck off with your attempts at trying to distract from the real issue.

I agree, but I want to clarify. It's not about making this material harder to access. It's about not deliberately serving that material to people who weren't looking it up in the first place in order to get more clicks.

There's a huge difference between a user looking up extreme content on purpose and social media serving extreme content to unsuspecting people because the company knows it will upset them.

There's nothing ambiguous about this. Give me a break. We're demanding that social media companies stop deliberately driving negativity and extremism to get clicks. This has fuck all to do with free speech. What they're doing isn't "free speech", it's mass manipulation, and it's very deliberate. And it isn't disclosed to users at any point, which also makes it fraudulent.

It's incredibly ironic that you're accusing people of an effort to control expression when that's literally what social media has been doing since the beginning. They're the ones trying to turn the world into a dystopia, not the other way around.

Bullshit. There's no slippery slope here. You act like these social media companies just stumbled onto algorithms. They didn't, they designed these intentionally to drive engagement up.

Demanding that they change their algorithms to stop intentionally driving negativity and extremism isn't dystopian at all, and it's very frustrating that you think it is. If you choose to do nothing about this issue I promise you we'll be living in a fascist nation within 10 years, and it won't be an accident.

Reddit is the same thing. They intentionally enable and cultivate hostility and bullying there to drive up engagement.

I don't think you understand the issue. I'm very disappointed to see that this is the top comment. This wasn't an accident. These social media companies deliberately feed people the most upsetting and extreme material they can. They're intentionally radicalizing people to make money from engagement.

They're absolutely responsible for what they've done, and it isn't "by proxy", it's extremely direct and deliberate. It's long past time that courts held them liable. What they're doing is criminal.

The issue is that Meta's intention is to extinguish the fediverse, not to add to it. I can't believe people are still falling for this tactic.

I don't get these people. They knowingly chose to work for Meta after everything that company's done. You don't get to pretend you're the good guy anymore. They're by far the most evil big tech company on the planet and that says a fucking lot when you're up against MS, Oracle, Google and Apple

Being open has nothing to do with Unix. It was a proprietary OS and most of its descendants are still proprietary.

Oh so just more anti-science bullshit so they can choke down bribes from the meat industry.

None of this matters when low income people have been getting screwed for 30 years. 3 years of growth means almost nothing when you put it in proper context. It's just a way for the upper class to gaslight people.

There are people out there still getting paid $9 an hour which wasn't liveable 15 years ago when that was my wage. If this trend continues, calling it wage slavery won't be hyperbole anymore.

Plus none of these articles talk about the middle 80% who have not seen their pay keep up with inflation over the last 5 years, or the fact that the price of many goods has exceeded inflation on top of that. Not to mention the housing crisis.

It's not hard to figure out why people think the economy sucks.

Nah. After getting a laser jet I'll never go back to an inkjet printer. For the cost of an eco tank you can get a solid laser printer with zero maintenance and it will last much longer.

I've had mine for seven years and only changed the ink twice.

Yeah because lemmy world never circlejerks about anything. Meanwhile you're literally in one now.