man, as someone who used to be so into foss/privacy i refused to use anything that i couldn’t compile/host & giving out my gpg key to friends, & someone who used to always make charged, sweeping generalizations like the title of this article, reading this just made me remember why people didn’t like to talk tech with me. i was so focused on always spouting why every app/software/os everyone used was “evil” (with poorly thought out & overcharged arguments, because i was coming from a place of anger & “justice” rather than logic) that i became insufferable to have a conversation with. i’m not gonna knock the author too much because i know it comes from a place of passion & morals, but this person has really fallen into the trap of radical black & white thinking that plagues the field of foss so much.
op, if you are the author of the post (or if the author happens to be reading), my advice to you if you want to reach people better would be to avoid generalizing/judging (& any non-logical statements at all) when advocating for foss/against propietary services. always blame the companies, not the users, because most users are just uninformed. remember that software is not a political or moral issue to most people, it’s just a tool & they don’t research or know anything about it beyond that. all that headline is doing is losing the target audience - no one likes to be told they’re “morally lazy” for simply texting their friends & not knowing about issues in an app. if you are going to post sweeping judgements like this, then at least make sure the article is at least finished before you throw it out there, or else it’s gonna leave a really bad taste in people’s mouth.
on a positive note, the rest of the site is really cool; reminds me of the site i used to have up in high school. i really liked the “places” & “strong women” sections on the abyss page.
Not sure where to reply to this but at the very least this brought my attention to discord alternatives (which I hadn’t even considered). So even though the article was unfinished and unpolished at least it expanded my view, although indirectly.
My biggest gripe with Discord is with people using it for FAQs or help for their communities. Search engines cannot index it and you have to sign up to see anything there. It’s very annoying to join a server, ask a question only for someone to just type “!faq” and have a bot reply with an FAQ post. Why not just have that somewhere else?
It’s not really Discord’s fault but I also don’t see them trying to do anything to alleviate the problem (why would they, more users is good for them). Are “forum-like” tools that difficult to set up? Even Reddit allows people to create subreddits easily. That is a much better solution in my opinion. Is it just that they’re already familiar with Discord so they use that? That’s my gut feeling.
Moral and ethical implications aside, I really want Discord to die specifically for this reason. Discord servers are increasingly becoming home to things that belong on forums and/or wikis, and it’s ridiculously frustrating. Literally 90% of the servers I’m in are designed for support for some piece of software or hardware. Just make a forum, I beg.
Like some other posts say, no idea if OP wrote this, but if the author is looking here, I want to offer constructive criticism.
There are a truly uncountable number of unjust things going on right now. There are possible solutions to many if not all those problems that exist. But no one has enough time I’m their life to fight every single injustice going on.
Do you still eat eat chocolate? A lot of chocolate is still produced with what is practically or entirely slave labor. Do you eat almonds? Those are using enormous amounts of water in California, which is already facing a mega-drought. China still has horrible labor practices in manufacturing. Most Americans still have to drive cars and that’s destroying the environment. I could go on for hours.
The point is, no one can possibly fight for every cause. Even the most dedicated, well meaning person will have to (indirectly) participate in some injustice. It’s honestly better for people to pick their battles. Find something you might have the power to change and focus your energy on that injustice.
But don’t lash out at people who are already overburdened by late-stage capitalism and don’t have the knowledge or energy to fight the same fight you are.
Have you seen The Good Place? There is a part of this where they’re investigating the “points” system that is used to determine who does and doesn’t get into the eponymous Good Place. It’s a dead simple system: you do a good thing and you get some points, you do a bad thing and you lose some points, the more gooder or more badder the more points get added onto or subtracted from your total, and anyone over a certain threshold gets into the Good Place. It makes perfect sense, and it’s exactly the kind of system I think most people would design if they were the ones given the task. I know it was my first idea when I considered the problem, and it seems like that system worked well enough when it was first rolled out. On investigation, the characters find out that
spoiler
no one has gotten into the good place for centuries because the nature of trying to survive in a system as complex and interdependent as the one humans live in means that everyone has to either choose to simply go without what they need to live or participate in some form of evil. There’s even a character who understood the nature of the good place, and led every second of his life abiding by the principles that he know would allow him to gain entry. He dropped off the grid, became self-sufficient, and is self-sacrificing to the point of being personally miserable. He does everything he can to maximize the good he puts into the world, and he accumulated about half the points he would have needed under that system to get into the good place.
This is something that comes up in leftist circles from time to time as well, and a place where I break from doctrine. There’s a common phrase that popped up as a reaction to what you said above, “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”. Everything involves exploitation of the environment, or of labor, or generating waste and other externalities that you’re just not gonna deal with. You’re gonna have to do something unethical in order to create more value than you invest in something. But, on the other hand, we need to live here. We don’t have the luxury of designing a system from scratch with ethics at the forefront, our kids are hungry today. So you do your best, you keep your consumption to a comfortable minimum, you use the paper straws when you can, you try to shape policy toward decency with what little power you have and you don’t hold yourself responsible for what’s out of your hands. There are no ethical consumables, but their can be ethical people.
