Silicone caulk, lithium batteries, sharkbite fittings, laminate flooring, etc. I remember watching my father struggling with diy house projects and a lot of that is clearly easier now because of various advances.

A better analogy would be a ban on posts that are just a link to a Steam page or a ticket sale page. In which case, yeah, makes sense, that’s spam.

Even in a bookbclub, the library won’t have 15 copies of the same book, some people will have to buy it, unless your book club comprises 2 people.

IME this is not so much a problem because people are using ebooks and you can digitally check out books from other libraries than the one closest to you. If there is a lack of copies, that could be grounds for going with a different book.

So we shouldn’t have communities around videogames (or board games), professional sports, traveling, food, clothes, most hobbies, or anything else, because it costs money?

This is not at all what I’m saying. Does wanting to ban paywall links equate to wanting journalism to die? No, but it makes sense to do, and if it making sense to do conflicts with the business model, that’s not a moral problem because people aren’t obligated to help companies make their (imo stupid and harmful in this case) decisions work out for them.

If my primary interest in something is talking to people about it, then gatekeeping destroys its value to me. If my interest in a game is its multiplayer, but nobody plays it anymore, then yeah not only would I not pay for it I also would not spend the harddrive space to install it even if it were free.

Imagine you’re organizing a book club. Wouldn’t it make sense to require that prospective books to read are available through the library system? The nature of a book club is that you’ll have to read things you might not be interested in on your own, but it’s worth the effort because of the opportunity to share and gain perspectives of the other people there. Reading by itself is already an investment of time and effort, getting people to organize enough to have a discussion about something is already difficult, so the endeavor has a clear interest in avoiding the presence of an additional, financial, barrier to a successful discourse.

“You get what you pay for” doesn’t make sense here. The paywall makes it worthless for the given purpose whether or not you pay, which is why it would make sense for people administering link aggregator/discussion sites like this one to ban paywalled links.

One solution could be to use Kiwi Browser, can be installed from the Play Store and lets you use arbitrary Chrome extensions without hassle, I tested it and it can install BPC

certain stories are very expensive to research and cover

Well a majority of the ones I see seem to rather be lazy garbage editorializing a single quote or study that would be more informative presented by itself.

As many things in life, you get what you pay for.

What I want is to talk about things with people who have also read the relevant context, news site paywall subscriptions prevent that even if you pay because everybody else will have only read the headline. Or they would, if they weren’t so easy to pirate.

Why is that the problem of online discussion spaces? News sites can paywall their content, but that doesn’t mean anyone else has to allow paywalled links.

Before I had the internet at home, I would use the school library to print out walkthroughs to videogames (at that time zelda.com was not about the nintendo game). I spent several weeks downloading a 100 megabyte demo of a star wars racing game, because at my download speeds it took 18 hours, but normally the connection would drop midway through and there was no way to resume the download without restarting it, so the only thing to do was keep trying and hope to get lucky.

The main rule I try to adhere to:

If I think someone who responded to my comment did not read the whole thing, I should not reply.

Well one reason is probably that signing your article content to help it be verified when it is repackaged elsewhere is kind of the opposite of what news sources are trying to do with their paywalls.

imo it conflicts too much with freedom of information. In general, if I know something then I shouldn’t be barred from continuing to know it and expressing it, even if that knowledge involves someone who would rather I couldn’t. There can be exceptions in extreme situations, but things like a “right to be forgotten” and “copyright” very broadly violate freedom of information.

I think people don’t even realize the scale of the removals, because when it isn’t banning you the platform goes out of its way to hide it from you when your comments are removed, it looks like it is still there while you are logged in but no one else can see it, I only even find out by using the reveddit extension, and I’ve been banned from subreddits just for mentioning that there’s a way to do this. It’s usually a totally innocuous comment that gets removed, assuming they just have a keyword that triggered a bot or a mod just didn’t like what I said and clicked delete. What they’re doing can hardly be termed ‘moderation’ anymore.

Every time I try to convert a PDF to epub or something, or OCR one that doesn’t actually have selectable text, it turns out shit. I assume the real reason people would want to get LLMs involved is that there is actually a lot of ambiguity in what a correct conversion would be, and there are a lot of PDFs out there.

Unfortunately, if you go to a protest and use your phone to communicate, even with Signal, the phone’s connectivity might expose your location.

I wonder if there’s a way to use some sort of mesh network to get around this and avoid most people needing to transmit to cell towers