this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
1312 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59490 readers
4161 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have genuinely asked myself this, and can't help but find it strange that the only comments in this thread and other almost identical threads are effectively complaining about corporate greed, and never go into any kind of depth about underlying causes and contributing factors.
Why instead is the same old empty rhetoric repeated and upvoted time and time again? This platform seems to be an echo chamber for ignorance.
sure, if you don't agree with what is being replied to you, then these are shallow comments. Your replies here were the deep analysis. Good job
Whether or not the insights are deep or shallow, Lemmy would be an inclusive place where discourse is welcomed and civil interactions are commonplace.
Instead, any comment that invites conversation to go more in depth is downvoted with ad hominem attacks, further adding toxicity to the cesspool that is the comment section behind effectively any post on this community.
downvotes is just a way to show that you disagree with something. It is not there to punish you. People choose some topics to engage actively by participating in the comments while in some other topics they prefer to express their opinion just by agree/disagree (upvote/downvote). Now you call a whole community toxic just because not everyone agrees with you..
This really gets to the heart of the issue: downvoting a comment that one doesn't agree with is precisely what creates a toxic community. Having opposing opinions is indeed exactly what makes conversation insightful. Imagine listening to a debate where one side has their microphone muted; that would be very dull and quite literally an echo chamber.
I personally welcome opposing views and often find myself upvoting entire threads full of constructive conversation, regardless of which side I lean to, because the discourse invites the conversation. Having this additional dimension behind a submitted post is what I came to Lemmy for. Unfortunately, the sentiment on the platform further and further shifts towards a mentality that a comment that doesn't immediately reinforce a comment I agree with must be downvoted.
you're overthinking it. There is not even a "global" karma like reddit. Your up/down-votes are not counting towards your "internet points". They are in a per-comment basis and they're a quick way to interact with opinions. Would you prefer everyone commenting "agree"/"disagree" ?
I'm not sure how some measure of internet karma weighs into the point I'm trying to make. The point rating of a comment determines its positioning in a thread, sometimes even altogether hiding it in some Lemmy clients when it falls below some threshold.
By this measure, the visibility of comments is determined by their individual score, and to reuse my analogy from before, effectively determines the volume at which voices are heard. What I often see here on Lemmy, is that like-minded and reinforcing comments are amplified, drowning out insightful ones.
No, I don't think people should make comments like you've suggested, much in the same way that votes shouldn't be used to achieve the same. Should I be downvoting your comment because I disagree with it? Or upvoting it because this is an interesting point of debate? I choose for the latter.
I get your point. For me (and I suppose for some other people) works a bit different. When I'm not actively participating in a conversation, up/down vote is a quick way to show agreement/disagreement. I cannot upvote something that I complete disagree. However, in cases that I'm actively engaging, I don't use it as a punishment tool so I just abstain. Like here, I weren't downvoting you because it was an active ongoing conversation and I expressed myself by comments. You were actively engaging in good faith (I suppose) so it was fine. But at the same time I could not upvote either the comments in which I was finding myself disagreeing (I think I upvoted 1-2 at the end). However people are "passing-by" and up/downvote to show their view. Don't take it as your punishment. But also you cannot "demand" that since you wrote something that you believe contributes to a discussion everyone should also believe that your points were so well made that should be upvoted even though they disagree. By this logic we should upvote everything that is longer that 5 words.
Certainly, generally I completely agree. Honestly I think it takes a solid dose of critical thinking to cultivate an environment where dissenting opinions are valued to encourage healthy discourse. I personally don't care at all about the score of comments; what irks me is that communities here trend toward bubbling up poor quality interactions.
Somewhat tangential, I find it strange that there would be anything in my specific comments here that can be disagreed with; I think it's a very nuanced stance to suggest that price changes aren't solely driven by corporate greed, but to some (at least small) degree, also affected by other factors.
Perhaps Lemmy just isn't the right platform for me, but it pains me because honestly I believe there's an opportunity for it to be something better: a place where readers can learn more behind an article. I know that's what I often seek in the comments.
do you seriously believe that the CEO of netflix was struggling to survive, was living on a month-by-month paycheck, and was having any cut in their "wage" ?
Some people tend to forget that behind a corporation that presents numbers that are falling behind, there are humans who make profits regardless.
No, I don't believe that, what would lead you to think that's my position? In fact, I appreciate that there is market conformity in compensation, and lowering wages of everybody from chair people down to entry level engineers is not so simple. It is exceedingly difficult to on one hand try to reduce expenses through wage reduction, while on the other continue to develop a competitive platform with industry experts.
I'm not saying there's no middle ground, because there certainly is. Indeed tech companies have been slashing jobs and perks to reduce costs. A recent example of that is with Disney, which included layoffs in Disney+. I'm not quite sure who in particular you're referring to in your last statement and surely I've misinterpreted what you mean with it, but to be clear, I personally don't think it would be fair towards employees to slash their income and expect them to work without making ends meet so that the rest of us to enjoy a recreational service.
That being said, I'm certainly not one to defend executive compensation. At the same time, we should appreciate that this is only a part of a much more complex issue than share price, dividends or executive pay. After all, even if the CEO received no compensation at all, it would make a negligible difference to the balance sheet and, by extension, our monthly service fee.
I want to reiterate that I don't disagree with you: corporate profits are certainly part of the problem. I just want to clarify that there are many more compounding external factors.
what are you even talking about? I never said employees' income should be slashed or expect them to work without making ends meet. I just said, that in such big corps, even though that in the papers they may saw declined numbers or even be below zero, there are still a few people (see executive board) who still make tremendous amounts of money. A CEO will always walk out with millions in their pockets because, well, that was their salary and the company's debts are not their own debts, so, well, capitalism. Ok, the company failed, there is no money to pay off debts and employees, but the money they made from the company is now theirs and cannot be asked back to pay off company debt. Because that's the legal system, the company was different entity. There is nobody liable for it in terms of personal liability.
It is always the lower level employees who take the hit.
I was afraid I had misinterpreted that part of your comment, so apologies. I was thrown off a bit by "humans who make profits," and in particular who you are referring to.
In my opinion, executive compensation is completely out of whack and perhaps the single most outright cause of wealth inequality. It would be unfair, however, not to acknowledge that when a public company is doing poorly, it does affect executive pay through the valuation of their stock, payout of their dividend or other equity based compensation. In principle, I think tying executive compensation with company performance isn't a bad idea, but in reality overall comp is, well, just completely disproportionate.
That being said, even if the compensation was a fraction is what it is today and that cost reduction immediately went towards a lower monthly service fee, it would be nearly negligible. Operational costs of services like these are astronomical, where the majority share remains in content assets; in the case of Netflix this constitutes production, licensing and delivery.
You misunderstand me. Your posts are the old empty rhetoric, your ideas are not new, and you come off like a parrot. After your long-winded explanation, I get the idea that you're just young, which personally makes me want to interact with you less.
I did not find any post here on Lemmy that discussed any of the reasons why subscription services are struggling (at least not the past 60 days that I browsed submissions and comments), which is why I chimed in to the conversation with context. If you did not find that insightful, that's fine.
At least we can agree that we don't enjoy interacting with one another, no less because you are being a jerk.