this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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creating things costs money. crowdfunding platforms like patreon have already proven an incredibly powerful avenue to enable independent creators who are passionate about things to share that with an audience. entertainment is, in fact, a job, which requires resources and time, and i loathe the implication that it isn't.
100% agree. This attitude actually ends up devaluing art and entertainment because it basically boils down the to the idea that "it's not a real job."
That's not what I am saying.
In my opinion the forum is a altruistic area. Is the value I provide tailoring the posts by up voting and down voting not valuable? Is the value I provide by summarizing and or giving interpretations of the articles posted here not valuable? Or engaging in thoughtful honest discussion not valuable?
I believe they are.
Do I feel entitled to some profit because of my input on this forum? No I do not.
I give this work because I provide my value to this site voluntarily, honestly, many hours of my day, altruisticly, to build a better community and discussion. I don't demand money because I receive a community in return.
What I am saying is that this kind of stuff will segment our community, by creating a profitable segment of the community and an unprofitable segment of community, implicitly creating a "correct" and "incorrect" way. Beyond that it will introduce people to our community who care less about furthering this forum, and more about making profit.
Remember YouTube before the partner program and video responses and how much more engaged and equal that community was? And what it is now with most every prominent channel being sponsored on top of ad breaks and product placement?
Obviously, if a person wants to dedicate their full time to some art and wants money for it, they should, and I'm excited for what they produce, but this is not where to do it.
But you don't have vibrant thoughtful debates about world events in target, you don't purchase microwaves at the library. You go to stores to buy stuff, you go to forums to discuss stuff.
Content creators can create their own site, their own patreon, or whatever - they can freely submit their work to our forum for feedback and an audience, and they can even link someone the link to their store if they ask - but introducing the profit angle directly to our forum and integrating it in will be the beginning of the end for this community as it is. The first crack of enshitification.
Sharing your opinion is not the same as sharing your art.
I agree that monetisation as a standard probably isn't ideal, but I think you're fooling yourself if you think a lot of the artists and musicians here aren't posting with some intent to drive you to their monetised content. Social media is a great place for artists to promote their work in general.
I thought the whole point of the fedi was to encourage open social media. If you don't want to see artists or monetised content, you can block those creators or instances. The fedi isn't subject to your preferences or mine, after all. I'm sorry, but I don't think you get to decide what does and doesn't happen here.
The thing is, monetisation wouldn't even work the same way here because there is no algorithm, so it's not like you'd get (as) many people trying to create rage bait to game the algorithm.
Your initial post came across as if you begrudge any creators or artists making any money from what they post here. If I misinterpreted your position then my bad, and I don't want enshitification either (although given the decentralised framework of the fedi, I'm not sure how that could even happen in the traditional sense).
It's possible to dominate and softly-control a decentralized network, because it can centralize. So long as the average user doesn't really care about those ideals (perhaps they're only here for certain content, or to avoid a certain drawback of another platform) then they may not bother to decentralize. So long as a very popular instance doesn't do anything so bad that regular users on their instance will leave at once and lose critical mass, they can gradually enshittify and enforce conditions on instances connecting to them, or even just defederate altogether and become a central platform.
For a relevant but obviously different case study: before the reddit API exodus, there was a troll who would post shock images every day to try and attack lemmy.ml. Whenever an account was banned, they would simply register a new one on an instance which didn't require accounts to be approved, and continue trolling with barely any effort. Because of this, lemmy.ml began to defederate with any instance which didn't have a registration approval system, telling them they would be re-added once a signup test was enabled.
lemmy.ml was one of the core instances, only rivaled in size by lemmygrad.ml and wolfballs (wolfballs was defederated by most other instance, and lemmygrad.ml by many other big instances), so if an instance wasn't able to federate with lemmy.ml, at the time, it would miss out on most of the activity. So, lemmy.ml effectively pressured a policy change on other instances, albeit an overall beneficial change to make trolling harder, and in their own self-defence. One could imagine how a malevolent large instance could do something similar, if they grew to dominate the network. And this is the kind of EEE fears many here have over Threads and other attempts at moving large (anti-)social networks into the Fediverse.