This is a disturbing trend. Apparently a lot of these major streaming services are discovering that they can make more from ads than people paying for the service. At least when calculated with the subscriber counts they currently have. It seems they don't anticipate people leaving their services over this.

Personally there is no way I would ever pay for a service that has ads. I'm not going to pay for a service even if its paid service doesn't have ads if it has a free or cheaper service with ads as that would just be rewarding them for implementing ads.

For example with Amazon's plan here. If you pay this $3.00 to remove ads then you are paying Amazon $3.00 because they added ads. This only increases the amount of ads that will be added to things.

Depends for how long. Buying a used NAS with a single 1TB drive is probably cheaper over a 10 year period than subscribing to some cloud service for the same duration.

Yea. The question is completely absurd. There is no such thing as "reasonable ads". It is also completely against the philosophy of the project and the developers would never agree to it.

You may as well just browse Reddit at that point.

I get the impression that one of the main goals of Lemmy World admins is simply to assert control over its users. Whether they realize this or not and are just doing habitually. There was a post awhile back about the feature of users being able to do instance blocking themselves and they were pretty against the idea of an instance that federates with everything in order for users to do their own moderation. As this would obviously take away their ability to control users.

In my opinion they are just bullies who have convinced themselves they are in the right.

If adblocking becomes illegal I'm done using the internet.

I want to see a website that links to whatever is the least viewed Wikipedia article at any given time until all Wikipedia articles basically have the same number of views.

I wish the whole project was a little bit more clever with its names. Matrix and Element are not unique enough names and can cause a lot of confusion.

I like the project though and still hope it continues to succeed.

Isn't it more like a request? They don't have to oblige.

Well they banned me for saying I don't like ads and called it harassment. They have no idea what they are doing and are not fit to be admins of anything.

Probably a lot of them. Definitely food distribution though.

Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.

So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.

It just pulled in the first frame of the video on the website. The reason Bill Gates is in this video is because of a famous anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft that can be thought of as an equivalent of this one against Google.

Free and open source schematics. The schematics being free to build your own.

Might as well disallow all NSFW content if naked anime girls is going to be considered CSAM. Relating these two things is making light of a real problem.

Lengths such as inches, feet and miles they are all unrelated to one another so here is my proposal.

Instead of the kilobyte range we would have a bet. This is the size of the extended ascii table off 255 ascii characters that are 7 bits each or 1785 bytes. The bet comes from alphabet.

Instead of megabytes we have the img which is based off the average size of a photo at 1.44mb which is only coincidentally the same size of a floppy disk.

Instead of a gigabyte we have the bloat which is derived from total install size of Windows XP at around 2.4gb.

The grift that keeps on grifting.

No, this is rewarding the implementation of ads and can't be thought of as donating anymore. You are paying to remove ads thus giving them money for having added ads to the site.

Great work. Thank you for the update Nutomic.

By the traditional definition they are kind of wrong. I don't agree at all with Googles relentless data harvesting and ads, but the software isn't going to make copies to hide itself on your phone and make it difficult to remove. You would be able to uninstall it like any other app without it leaving anything behind.

So it is more like adware than a virus.

Sometimes I buy physical copies of books I've read digitally.

I'd love to see the last 3 books of The Expanse series made into a trilogy of movies.

Maybe they should try doing that then instead of changing things for no reason that aren't broken.

I don't believe this functionality currently exists. It would be cool if moderators of any two communities could agree to link them together so they are effectively merged as one community, but with multiple entry URLs.

I'm not convinced it is as intelligent as people are making it out to be. What most people in the media are referring to as AI are actually complex language models. This technology seems incredible to me, but I am wary of using it in anything that is of critical importance. At least not without being thoroughly reviewed by a human. For example I would never get into a car that is being driven autonomously by an AI.

Also this is just a random personal opinion I have, but I wish people would stop referring to AI unless they are referring to AGI. We should go back to calling it machine learning or more specifically large language models.

That does seem like an exaggeration, but there is truth in the power of defaults for the mainstream audience.

Wow, $80. I haven't looked into these devices since the first one, but I thought the point of them was to be very cheap. I do wonder what these new more powerful ones are capable of. Perhaps the performance justifies the price.

Where did I go?

Somehow? Paying to remove ads is rewarding ads thus causing more ads in the world. It's not mysterious at all.

There are plenty of ways to not make it an all or nothing service, but that is at least the most straight forward. You could potentially give some of it away and then have to pay for the rest. Or have some stuff for free and more premium content is paid for. Or perhaps based on bandwidth with video quality / resolution.

Anything that is not ads is going to be an improvement.

I believe airlines do something similar and I agree it feels very scammy. They will do almost anything to and get someone to pay the maximum they are willing to pay for the same product. I imagine they do this the same way major tech companies like Google provide targeted ads and that is extensive data harvesting and of building a profile around you.

You can possibly protect yourself by using VPNs when making online purchases.

What is considered a high bitrate? There isn't much reason to go higher than 320 kb/s on an mp3.

I assume by baths you also mean showers. I think almost everyone I've ever met including myself would limit to once per day unless they specifically get dirty or sweaty from exercise.

Watch Star Trek in bed. Or more realistically listen to Star Trek as my eyes will be closed.

It's a wonder that there is anyone still buying Tesla cars.

I played it originally upon release and my biggest problem with the game was that none of the RPG elements mattered. It also felt more like a linear campaign with various irrelevant side missions.

Is it still pretty much the same in that regard?

I think the answer is potatoes. Other root vegetables might be equally reliable.

It would be a pretty useful feature to have polls built in.

There are no ads I want to see. If I am looking to make a purchase I will specifically seek it out. There is no advertising for anything I want that is acceptable.

Implementing ads is more against the philosophy of free and open source software than it is with Lemmy or any piece of FOSS software specifically. As for Lemmy we just won't see any ads on Lemmy.ml in particular which is run by the Lemmy developers. It's also not entirely true that there is nothing to lose by just cutting off the Lemmy instance that starts implementing ads if people start getting to attached to specific communities or user accounts of theirs. It would be nice if Lemmy had some kind of community and user migration to mitigate this risk.

I think this abides by the idea of this post, but I would standardize language across the world. Whether it is an existing language or a new language doesn't really matter or maybe a mix of the biggest existing languages.

I remember reading a book where in the future everyone spoke a combination of English and Chinese. They seem pretty incompatible though.

The Swordfish from Cowboy Bebop. I recently bought a rather expensive model of it. Totally worth it though.

This is exactly what I experienced when I was part of their top moderator and ban discussion discord channels. They would regularly ban people for little to no reason and then laugh about it and then realize they need to come up with reasons after the fact. This is also how they deal with defederation. They had defederated an instance more than once prior to having any concrete reasons to do so. They operate on gut feeling and disregard their own rules and ToS on the regular.

Not even Reddit is so unprofessional.