And they inevitably turn every service into an ad delivery service. Thus, enshitification. Subscription services directly convert the utility of the application into revenue. It will always make a better platform, but it might not scale as well.
The problem with all of these devices is that there is a lot of noise power in the world. A jet engine is loud because the acoustic energy it produces displaces large volumes of air very quickly. To cancel that energy, you also have to move huge volumes of air. Headphones are good at this, in part, because they attenuate so much energy in the first place with an over ear headphone, or well sealing IEM, and place the speaker very close to your ear. A source of acoustic energy which is D meters from your ear has to produce at least D^3 more joules than a speaker right next to your ear, to cancel the same amount of noise. It’s possible, kind of, with very big speakers, but a handheld device just won’t cut it.
It’s pretty obvious that reddit has never really spent much money on engineering.
I stopped using 4chan when the probability of getting goddamn CP snuff videos in the browser cache because of a /b/ raid got beyond trivial, so like pretty fucking early on.
Honestly, if spez hadn’t already sold the site to white supremacists, I’d be a lot quicker to defend this.
Lemmy.ml keeps banning my accounts for basic participation, which has been extremely frustrating since they have a lot of the most active communities.
The major ml communities have a pretty established track record of arbitrary rule enforcement. Eg, letting hexbears post thier pig shit memes, but then ml mods having a hair trigger on the ban hammer for everyone else.
I consider myself a leftist. A democratic socialist. I have studied political science and am genuinely comfortable discussing the academic principles thereof. Even so, I’ve caught bans for “genocide denial” for discussing the mass abduction of children, and more recently for pointing out that the US revolution generally avoided mass murder. At this point I basically have a soft ban, and anything even slightly against the grain get me another 30 days. The admins seem quite comfortable with some pretty rigid ideological protectionism, at best.
You can check my history and the modlog. I can be sarcastic and confrontational, but I am generally participating in good faith. It sure as hell feels like my ml accounts, and a few on other instances have been flagged for stepping out of line.