astraeus

Linux is a prime example of quality that isn’t paid for. No one forces you to pay for Linux, you can of course support the maintainers and donate, but it’s not a for-profit endeavor.

Advertising, by design, is intrusive. It’s fighting for space in your mind whether you want it to be there or not. We can shelve that topic because it’s a side item here.

The difference between making a big deal of nothing and being completely on-topic is that the article itself goes into the responsibilities of publishers and platforms, how they have a responsibility to make the internet a better connected, more human-friendly place. You don’t see massive sources of misinformation locking down their content, but you will definitely see potentially credible sources of information doing that. It’s counter to the premise of the article entirely.

I don’t believe it’s myopic at all to point out that it’s backwards to expect the internet to thrive when quality information isn’t readily available. Sure you can use a different search engine, seek out free content and resources, all of which require an in-depth dive to find anything worthwhile.

The topic of this post is why the internet is dying, and while I recognize people need to make money to eat I think these news media sites are more than capable of providing for their employees with or without a paywall. Megacorps like Google, Meta, and Microsoft having control over what gets the most clicks is definitely contributing to rapid enshittification. Especially when they’re sending most traffic to articles that either have a paywall or a steady feed of bullshit.

That first name is despicable, I love it

The paywalls restrict the flow of quality information, which happened before LLMs started scraping the web. If you don’t have money to spend on all of these news subscriptions you aren’t allowed to educate yourself. It’s class-based gatekeeping, plain and simple. They could tactfully include ads, but no one ever tactfully includes ads. They introduce pop-ups, fullscreen banners, interjections every 25 words, or the best is the articles that are just slide shows that take you through 30+ webpages.

Edit: I’d also like to point out that this article already has an ad at the beginning. So they are still making ad revenue even if they aren’t giving you complete access.

This is what we call a hot take

If you parse out random words from the bee movie to fill in the fields and change IPs every few minutes, gonna be tough

As long as major search platforms are also in the AI business, they have little incentive to change pace.

Laughable that as the article begins to talk about publishers the Atlantic paywall shows up. Definitely not another reason why the web is dying.

This is when we find out rent is $4000/month

I think the reason may be two-fold.

The first part, in the eyes of most older people, a man is not supposed to be emotional or give into their more “feminine” feelings. This means they don’t want their wives or children to be the ones that hear the things that concern them or probably scare them, deep down. Most of the stances of conservatives seem rooted in fear, not reason.

The second part is that you are another man, a younger man, and because they don’t know you well you are less risky to tell these things to. They can confide their fears in you because you are a young man, with a life ahead of you and you’ll give them an ear even if you don’t intend to. Really they are probably hoping someone will hear them even if they can’t really pour their hearts out.

I think my main concern is FreeIPA’s longevity. As a tool, it’s rather outdated even in its latest version. It works, but the upkeep on it is not quite robust. Its implementation of AD standards are also limited. This is why I’m looking for an alternative to FreeIPA.

Yeah, users in AD and the FreeIPA replacement essentially handles the SSH key management + middle-man the auth to Linux servers.