If it helps, I know a few people who grew up in a similar situation and every single one of them has gone on to build a better life, on their own terms, filled with people who gave them everything their family never did.

I don’t know, nor am I speculating. The person I was replying to said they didn’t see a browser check in the code, which isn’t enough to dismiss it.

They don’t need to put incriminating “if Firefox” statements in their code – the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.

Was she? Any posts about “why isn’t X banned too?” were buried under an avalanche of reactionary tantrums about losing their platform to discuss hitting children. For the overwhelming majority of users, it was “this goes too far”, not “this doesn’t go far enough”.

Which means that realistically, she never got past the low hanging fruit. These were the days when a lot of these places still had plausible deniability so it was easy to pull in wider support.

My baseless guess is that she came in as CEO and noticed they were handing over some very predictable post histories every time there was a mass shooting but couldn’t come out and say “check out all these domestic terrorists” because it would damage the brand.

And looking back, she was absolutely in the right clearing out those communities.

Honestly don’t mean this as an insult, but you might want to consider being more concise, so that your point comes across better.

I’m cool with ranting. I enjoy the act of writing, blogs are long dead and it’s important to articulate why so many things in the world are fucking shit.

If we all work together, it’s been proven that it does turn things around

When?

The ones making Society horrible definitely win when no one pushes back.

They also win when people do push back, because thats how the game has been rigged. The extent of the public’s power is making them win slightly less.

The only way to stop companies doing unethical things is strict regulations, ruthlessly enforced. The only times “consumer advocacy” ever works is when the government steps in, which is why the ultra wealthy go to so much effort to ensure they never do.

One good person in politics, with power, is worth a million people boycotting.

Partly, this is because “the free market will solve it” is just a neoliberal lie. Sometimes, there’s simply no other choice as corporations race each other to the bottom.

So this streaming service might have gotten shitty, espensive or unethical, but you can move to another right? Oh no, looks like they’re shitty and unethical too, just slightly differently.

Then in six months time, they’ve each absorbed one another’s shitty, greedy practises anyway, ensuring consumers are fully exploited with nowhere else to go.

But the true power of neoliberalism lies in its giant book of premade excuses, so neoliberals (or neoliberals in disguise) will of course read from the next page:

“Oh that’s just because there isn’t enough competition. We just need to deregulate heavily and allow companies to do whatever the streaming equivalent of dumping toxic by-products in the river is!”

But of course, that won’t ever come true either. The companies that already exist will grow more profitable polluting the river and new entries into the market will be either stamped out, bought and stripped for parts or enshittified by the same greed over time.

Following the flowchart taught at exclusive, expensive schools the world over, the next excuse is to blame the consumers.

“Oh if people really cared, they’d simply stop buying things entirely. But they don’t, because these companies continue to bring in record profits. So secretly, consumers actually love their chocolate being picked by child slaves”.

While they do fight back with boycotts, public outcry and (in this case) things like password sharing and piracy, it’s nothing companies can’t crush if it looks like it might actually dent their profits.

At some point, consumers need to pick their misery and the choices are bleak but obvious.

They can accept the minor misery of advertising, even as they pay a subscription, just like the corporation knew they would.

They can escalate their own misery further by boycotting the entire platform or industry.

But the moral high ground doesn’t make spending your few hours of personal time each day staring at the wall suddenly as entertaining as whatever content you’re no longer watching.

Also, the company doesn’t care. That was part of their calculations and they’re still making even more money.

Or finally, they could maximise their misery and actually do something, like busting out the guillotines or becoming a politician that opposes neoliberalism yet is somehow allowed power.

So anyway, people are tired. The fight never ends and some people have fought it for 50 years already. Encourage them to take the third option by all means, but don’t shame them for taking the first option.

They might already be miserable enough.

Don’t worry, it’s AI generated.

FYI: You’ve now escalated to making knowingly-false accusations about a specific person.

Only dark, lewd fantasies about the sexual assualt of their kids right?

Quality play. That’ll absolutely convince people that you’re the good guy if they somehow find themselves at the bottom of this thread without having read your wet mouthed defense of the sharing of photorealistic images of children being raped.

Awful pearl-clutchy for someone advocating for increased community support for photorealistic images of children being raped.

Which do you think is more acceptable to Lemmy in general? Someone saying “fuck”, or communities dedicated to photorealistic images of children being raped?

Maybe I’m not the one who should be changing their behavior.

I have no problem saying that writing stories about two children having gay sex is pretty fucked in the head, along with anyone who forms a community around sharing and creating it.

But it’s also not inherently abuse, nor is it indistinguishable from reality.

You’re advocating that people just be cool with photo-realistic images of children, of any age, being raped, by any number of people, in any possible way, with no assurances that the images are genuinely “fake” or that pedophiles won’t be driven to make it a reality, despite other pedophiles cheering them on.

I was a teenage contrarian psuedo-intellectual once upon a time too, but I never sold out other peoples children for something to jerk off too.

If you want us to believe its harmless, prove it.

And are you able to offer any evidence to reassure us that simulated child pornography doesn’t increase the risk to real children as pedophiles become normalised to the content and escalate (you know, like what already routinely happens with regular pornography)?

Or are we just supposed to sacrifice children to your gut feeling?