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  • 9 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 11th, 2023
  • reverendsteveii@beehaw.orgtoFree and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•using discord is morally lazy
    2·
    1 year ago

    Yeah, Discord is financially unsustainable

    there’s a post above yours with details but the tldr is that discord is getting pretty close to profitable already. it’s in the part of the web app lifecycle where it’s bringing in new users, new features are being developed, it’s a pretty functional product that keeps improving and it’s free for most people’s use cases. Soon it will reach the webapp event horizon where everyone has heard of it and everyone either already uses it or would never use it under any circumstances. at this point it will do what every other web app does in a system where growth must always be infinite: make itself worse and more expensive. then we will move on to something that is earlier in its lifecycle. hell, a lot of us are only here having this discussion right now because reddit reached the profitability event horizon.

  • reverendsteveii@beehaw.orgtoFree and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•using discord is morally lazy
    3·
    1 year ago

    Have you seen The Good Place? There is a part of this where they’re investigating the “points” system that is used to determine who does and doesn’t get into the eponymous Good Place. It’s a dead simple system: you do a good thing and you get some points, you do a bad thing and you lose some points, the more gooder or more badder the more points get added onto or subtracted from your total, and anyone over a certain threshold gets into the Good Place. It makes perfect sense, and it’s exactly the kind of system I think most people would design if they were the ones given the task. I know it was my first idea when I considered the problem, and it seems like that system worked well enough when it was first rolled out. On investigation, the characters find out that

    spoiler

    no one has gotten into the good place for centuries because the nature of trying to survive in a system as complex and interdependent as the one humans live in means that everyone has to either choose to simply go without what they need to live or participate in some form of evil. There’s even a character who understood the nature of the good place, and led every second of his life abiding by the principles that he know would allow him to gain entry. He dropped off the grid, became self-sufficient, and is self-sacrificing to the point of being personally miserable. He does everything he can to maximize the good he puts into the world, and he accumulated about half the points he would have needed under that system to get into the good place.

    This is something that comes up in leftist circles from time to time as well, and a place where I break from doctrine. There’s a common phrase that popped up as a reaction to what you said above, “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”. Everything involves exploitation of the environment, or of labor, or generating waste and other externalities that you’re just not gonna deal with. You’re gonna have to do something unethical in order to create more value than you invest in something. But, on the other hand, we need to live here. We don’t have the luxury of designing a system from scratch with ethics at the forefront, our kids are hungry today. So you do your best, you keep your consumption to a comfortable minimum, you use the paper straws when you can, you try to shape policy toward decency with what little power you have and you don’t hold yourself responsible for what’s out of your hands. There are no ethical consumables, but their can be ethical people.