the advertisers, they’re going to come for you at night?

we have ads because services paid for with attention are more accessible and get more traffic than services paid for with a monthly subscription … we could probably subsidize a lot of websites or make them community efforts (like Wikipedia), but because there is a desire to profit from websites, we have this aggressive push for ads and monetization in every corner of the web.

Commercialization, though, is the problem more than advertising itself is. Monetization through “native ads” or affiliate link marketing is just as insidious and toxic, and pervasive. Just like people hate loot boxes and games that have mechanics where skill is less important than paying cash for in-game content to gain an advantage, the root problem is commercialization.

This is just capitalism, and cyberpunk as a genre is meant to be critical of capitalism and its rotten fruits.

I think it misses the mark to interpret the war as a war between humanity and advertisers when it’s a war between the powerful and wealthy and the 99%.

👀

I don’t tend to post news or politics, I think those posts are rather saturated on Lemmy.

It’s pretty ironic my most recent post is a political post, and here’s another political news article post I made … So to say I’ve “never made a single news or politics post” I think is factually wrong.

Either way, I was hoping to appeal to your conscience here.

I’m not sure I understand your moral argument - you say that there are moral problems with every news source, and if we held moral standards to the sources we used, no posts would be permitted on Lemmy, but … you know, there are better and worse places to drive traffic, better and worse places to use as a source. It’s not all or nothing, you have to know this right?

So, reading between the lines, what I’m hearing from you is that it’s not a deal-breaker for you to drive traffic to a website that perpetuates conspiracy theories and seeks to deny people like me healthcare, that these are morally tolerable positions.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since reading this article on free speech about how often people will side with “free speech” until it’s a topic they don’t actually tolerate - e.g. very few “free speech” advocates continued to defend Milo Yiannopoulos after he started to advocate for pedophilia.

Here’s the salient point I think the article makes:

The truth of the matter is that there are two types of speech or expression: those that we (either as individuals, or as a society) are willing to tolerate, and those that we do not. (This is explained compellingly here.) You may cherish a particular word, idea, expression, or identity. But if enough people collectively refuse to tolerate it, well . . . you can shout “free speech!” at the top of your lungs all you want, but it isn’t going to protect you.

In the end, what I’m hearing is you are willing to tolerate a news source that peddles far-right conspiracy theories that aim to strip people of their rights and manipulate people into rejecting science, that these ultimately are tolerable views, ones you are willing to indirectly support by continuing to link to Newsweek and drive traffic there.

Maybe you would not feel the same about linking to a neo-Nazi website directly, or to a Holocaust denial website, or maybe a website that hosts child pornography or advocates for pedophilia - I assume these are views you probably wouldn’t tolerate and wouldn’t want to be associated with or support even indirectly.

It’s OK if my attempt to appeal to your conscience failed - I assumed from the start that we were more likely to be on the same page on this, but I guess I was wrong. Sorry for wasting your time.

In November 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Newsweek had “taken a marked radical right turn by buoying extremists and promoting authoritarian leaders” since it hired conservative political activist Josh Hammer as editor-at-large. It noted the magazine’s elevation of conspiracy theorists, publication of conspiracy theories about COVID-19, views such as support for a ban on all legal immigration to the United States and denying adults access to trans-affirming medical care, and failure to disclose potential conflicts of interest in the content published on Hammer’s opinion section and podcast.

Newsweek in particular is vile and horrible, and you are driving traffic to them. The argument that there are other news sites with problems is whataboutism, it doesn’t address that this news source has a serious problem.

Besides, here’s an easy alternative and less problematic source: https://www.axios.com/local/tampa-bay/2025/03/25/florida-child-labor-bill-migrant-workers

(it’s not that hard)

newsweek is a conspiracy peddling right-wing rag, please stop driving traffic to them

fun fact: mulberry trees have edible leaves, they’re not amazing but it’s something you can enjoy in addition to the berries!

classic fruit tree story, lol

he has been obsessed recently with explaining how “beautiful little girls” can just live with fewer dolls :-/

lemmy did not get Reddit’s best and brightest 😭

you dropped this: e

are you a computer?

yes!! I’m a fan of 24-hour time, though we should honestly switch to metric time, I think we’re at least a second French revolution away from that happening 😅

What did Trump want / get out of it?

or put them at the end of the year, that would fix it for me 😅 July can be the 11th month and August the 12th month!

The English word comes from Latin, septem = 7, membris or mens = month (like menstruation).

In the Roman calendar the months are:

1. March
2. February
3. May
4. June
5. July
6. August
7. September
8. October
9. November
10. December

So the order of the months was more logical, and a Roman would naturally understand that September, October, November, and December read as literally the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth month respectively.

I basically constantly have to manually correct myself over and over that for example September is the 9th month, to look for the number 9 even though when I read “September” I am reading “seventh month” and my brain automatically wants to look for 7.

I think most people would not relate to my experience of the months let alone how upsetting this is to me, hence I consider it a “small hill” to die on, lol. But it’s a very big hill in my world!

oof

I mean, it might have just been an empty liner / cover for a comforter - those are essentially sheets that are sewn together so you can fit a comforter between them, so you can take the comforter out and wash the sheet cover occasionally and keep the comforter clean.

So maybe google “duvet cover” or “quilt cover” and see if that matches?

All dates should be formatted according to ISO 8601 standard (YYYY-MM-DD).

Months should be adjusted so September, October, November, and December are the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th month respectively (so the literally meaning of the names accords with their actual meaning).

Not cleaning your kitchen knife after sharpening is trashy and contaminates your food with metal shavings.

One billboard said:

Avoid student debt, learn a trade.

or something like that. It jives with the general opinion. I do live in a very conservative place, so maybe like you’re saying it’s a matter of where in the South you are. I’m sure in a major city like Atlanta that’s not a common attitude, for example.