The bad part is four things:

• the op either deliberately or legitimately did not understand what was being said
• the vast majority of the comments just read what the op wrote and not what was said
• having this many comments out of whack with this many upvotes gives ammunition to the bigots
• this is a tech forum ??

Ok:

• list of donors that are not all left
• parent organizations that get money from above
• mozilla gets money from parents

Op latches onto one donor; pulls some other stuff out , and the crowd goes wild

The original op took some things out of context, Ford, last I checked, was not a bastion of the left. He names big donors.

Then he describes how that money trickles down; and the last I checked the not so polite description is more accurate than not.

I don’t mind people bashing bad guys here; and I’m sure this fellow has spent years raiding your hackles. But some people like me, it’s just embarrassing to read

Oh dear, here I go.

Do you have reading skills?

I understood what he said. Strip out some rude terms and it sounds accurate. The comments here sound like someone shouted “squirrel” to a pack of rabid dogs.

I also lack common sense and am posting this comment. In my feeble defense I really don’t know the guy, and suspect he likes baiting others

However true, nature abhors a vacuum, so there will be actual journalism coming from unlikely sources: and not just tech.

I study history a lot, also I’m older so I have the perspective of two or three generations now.

Things have normally been not the idealized concept of Disney princess goodness in government. Evil shits normally have been doing stuff for as long as civilization has existed. So all this is not new.

What is new, and makes this newsworthy, is the masks have fallen off. Those masks and idealized fantasy much of the population indulges in took decades, generations to build up. In many ways this is a very rude culture shock.

The other reason this is important now is the climate is rapidly collapsing while the trade systems have reached unprecedented complexity. So a group of particularly thuggish people rising to power in several nations at once, as they tend to do with regularity. May have epic and disastrous consequences! It’s a really bad time for this to happen

Smells like non technical reasons

In my campaign I used to have a cursed scroll of reading. Which provided such provoking and interesting content based on one’s feelings and desires, it trapped the person into reading it for a very very long time unless saving throw.

I can imagine how much more effective it would be if one could reply to that reading, and enter another level of entrapment.

And here we have cursed scrolls in real life. Me 30 years ago would never have guessed .

Unrelated, but this is where I stop doomscrolling for the day. So long until tomorrow, unless I make my daily saving roll

People who support the server have greater voting rights; no revenue steam. But I think it would be cool to sell pirate plushies!

Unrelated: If you code it’s not hard to insert ads in between the comments on your own lemmy instance. It would be a cool experience but probably would create significant vitriol and site wide bannings by most, if not all, major instances for trying.

The problem for most monitization is psychological only ; many ideas would be an unwinnable uphill battle. Yes, can put ads in but also be a leper with zero traffic. You could probably put in perks if have good coding skills or can hire good skills; but if public relations done wrong then you are “poison to the community”.

You could try to do awards ( Reddit gold) but may get laughed off the platform. It’s a tough crowd

My home instance is starting to do some of this, it’s talked about a lot in https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/div0

Yet here we are, it and the plugins handle too much of my daily traffic. It’s easy to dismiss the piss poor coding, but is done at our peril.

Everyone of us has personal data stored in those God awful plugins, in their thousands of basic security holes

Word press code, and plugins, do not sanitize out of the box. You have to call an additional function, each time, that is not provided automatically. Many home made plugins miss that; many popular plugins used to be home made ones

Legacy systems still handle more traffic than modern ones, I’d wager

No real leaders to rally about, anywhere, that I know about. Just a slow decline into increased corruption

we only gave the Republicans a three vote margin in the House and the Senate

Many USA states have the vote counting operated by oligarchs with no oversight, using tools that have no transparency or double checking, and the results fail exit polls.

This has been talked about for decades except not by the liberals in the USA. The Democratic Party has sidelined paper ballot progress, stomping down on criticisms of unfair ballot counts, while losing influence in large areas due to ballot manipulation.

The result after 30 years of this is that most American liberals scoff at human witnessed ballot counting, resist talking about it, and have no clue .

Nobody competent can cite voting results across all 50 states without using air quotes or cracking a joke

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They are welcome to snoop around my small town infrastructure, which, checks notes, is hooked up by Chinese routers the last few years

There is no way I am equating using apps with nationalism. And I have yet to understand how the worst of the big business Chinese apps are worse for me than the oligarch’s here.

If anything, while both will sell my data hundreds of times, it may be safer to use the bastards that are not under the control of the collapsing government here

Many will believe that forever