I will switch if something better comes along that is decentralized.
The profit motive poisons everything and turns it to shit. I won’t join a social again if it can be purchased to turn me into another metric on a spreadsheet for someone to sell.
I wasn’t planning on doing any banking through Lemmy.
Really?
The same reason Reddit fucked everyone over, the same reason for mass tent cities in supposedly prosperous nations, the same reason we’re terraforming the planet to be hostile to human life: metastasizing capitalism that entire societies now subsist to stoke the growth of, to its own slow, painful destruction.
An economy is supposed to be a tool to facilitate the distribution of goods and services for the benefit of society. Yet we allow millions to suffer to protect the beloved economy. We were tricked into doing it ass backwards to benefit a few assholes at everyone else’s expense. That’s why data caps, microtransactions, regulatory/governmental capture, our decrepit K-12 system in literal ruin, sub living wages, etc are still a thing. You name a major problem here in the US, and I’ll show you something our hyper capitalist economy either causes, exacerbates, or stokes to keep the peasants at eachother’s throats to stop them from looking up and uniting against the problem.
Capitalism can be heavily, heavily, heavily regulated to be of service to a society. The Nordic nations do it, western Europe did until they caught the US’s insatiable greed disease. But without putting capitalism into a straight jacket, having a maximum income tied to a multiplier of the median wage, making corporations fund the society that provided the infrastructure for their success, and putting the needs of societal systems (utilities, education, social safetynet, etc) above the desires of the business community with the force of law, capitalism is a societal cancer that turns citizens against one another and gluts humanity’s worst impulses exclusively.
And since the American oligarch capitalists captured their regulators completely under Reagan almost a half century ago, the FCC either won’t indicate publically traded ISP greed, or won’t do anything about it. Greed won, and we all lost even though many are deluded into being grateful little capital batteries for their owners.
It’s a numbers thing and it’s why empathy tends to diminish as population swells.
Here it feels like community, like one’s opinion is appreciated. Reddit became a place to hope you get acknowledged at all, where swaths of the community came solely waiting to shout others down and win a fight.
Unfortunately, for all of Reddit’s faults, that wasn’t a reddit thing, that was just a glaring, crippling defect inherent to humanity. As numbers increase here, that old familiar reddit apathy and antagonism will return. Just play the game of what would you be willing to do, not just rhetoric, for a random person in your circle of friends vs someone from your town/city vs the world. Psychologists call it psychic numbing.