People who are interested in geography, geometry, cartography, political science, geopolitics, culture, cognitive biases, ethnocentrism

I maintain that none of those people are the ones interested in this movement, and if you believe they are, you haven’t spent any time thinking about it. Again, I’m looking for any actual legitimate argument in support of it. A condescending argument from hypothetical authority isn’t going to cut it.

CMV: this movement only matters to stupid people, and does not qualify as something “I should know”.

That’s true, but you see why you can use that argument to take every single post from any other political community, slap “YSK” in front of it, and post it here, right? That’s not really the point of YSK. At least not why I’m here.

What about people who have a habit of hitting dogs?

In theory the US Federal govt should be split into branches so that it has power, but the checks and balances between branches prevent any single branch from dominating. Which sucks when all 3 branches collude to hand all the power to the executive branch, which then wields the Federal govt to dominate the states.

For the record, a similar system where the states remain separate with a centralized governing body, but with less power than a Federalist one is called a Confederacy…so yeah, we tried that in the US once too. On the flip side, Switzerland’s Confederation seems to be working out pretty great for them.

What your describing is called a Republic. There are several benefits to such a model.

The most relevant was well summarized in MIB as “a person is smart, people are stupid”. A simple direct democracy is great until you are relying on an uninformed population to make a time-critical decision that requires expertise. If we instead elect people who are then expected to use tax dollars to consult experts, and then represent our interests by voting accordingly, we can theoretically avoid problems (such as the tragedy of the commons).

The downside happens when the representative takes advantage of the public’s ignorance, fosters it, and wields it for personal/oligarchic gain. Ideally the people are just smart enough to see that happening and vote them out before it becomes a systemic issue…

Yeah, i couldn’t find anywhere on their site that indicated I would be able to download tracks I own. That would change the equation I think. Then maybe they only charge for streaming and track download bandwidth. I could behind something like that. Then it feels like a better version of Bandcamp.

Currently I use Tidal to supplement my self-hosted library, but that’s primarily due to music selection and artist compensation. If they didn’t have random tracks I want to play, I would use something else.

Even if we assume there’s an achievable rate of growth that can consistently outpace owned plays at any given time, as with every business, there will come a day when growth slows. And at that point, they’ll be forced to solve the problem.

And then there’s all the questions of, can I download my tracks to play offline? What if they go out of business? How many artists/labels are even going to agree to this? What about tracks I buy outside of their platform? And what does “own” actually mean given that you never “own” music you buy physical media for, you don’t have any copyright, you can’t play that media for profit, you just have a license to listen to that copy personally. By default the artist “owns” their art. But do they have to give that ownership up to the co-op?

It’s going to be tough to convince people who don’t care to switch away from spotify, and there’s no reason for someone who can self-host to use it unless it’s somehow more effective at funding musicians than just buying their tracks directly.

I wish them luck making the idea work, but I think they have their work cut out for them.

That’s fair, just…for this to scale, it needs to be competitive with existing streaming services. And if the experience for a listener is the same whether a democratic panel raises prices, or greedy enshittification raises prices, there’s not going to be an upside.

To me, the potential upside is identifying the problems with their revenue stream now out in the open, and addressing it now, rather than trying to build a captive audience now and pivot to something more sustainable later (as is the strategy for capitalist startups).

I would need to buy a lot of CDs at this point and I’m not doing that anymore.

This is how the music industry is screwing artists.

Think about it. Hollywood is union, which ensures money and jobs make it down to every blue collar worker involved in every Netflix-funded project. But music isn’t union, there’s just a bunch of random bands, and middlemen who will gladly take everything. The record labels and streaming services turn a profit, pay their execs, and get away with sending fractions of a cent per play to the artists. Most artists don’t post to streaming services for the money, they do it just for the convenience of fans.

Giving money directly to an artist in exchange for their tracks or merch (CDs, Vinyls, etc) is the best way to fund an artist. Bandcamp is another middleman that enables this, but at least they have Bandcamp Fridays periodically, which is where they waive their cut and give the bulk of your payment directly to the artist.

IMO buying tracks on Bandcamp Friday + self-hosting Plex/Jellyfin + using Plexamp/Finamp on mobile is the best way to support music right now, and also future proofs your library.

This is an interesting idea, but I would assume that over time, the number of “owned” streams would dominate the number of “new” streams, and thus eventually their operating costs would reach a point where they don’t have the revenue to cover it…

Looking for Group. As someone else said, the ability to click “queue for dungeon”, be dropped into an instance with a bunch of random, and proceed to faceroll the dungeon without any thought or patience required.

The fun part of old school MMOs was the journey, not the destination. Modern MMOs have all optimized the journey out by making everything doable without ever being dependent on another player.

I know exactly what you’re feeling, and I totally get it. Still, if executed well, I’m at least impressed that they pulled it off. I would have sworn such an experience wasn’t possible.

But yeah, I’m not interested in having artificial multiplayer interactions.

As someone who believes LFG was the beginning of the end of MMOs, I can’t tell if I despise this or if I’m impressed.

It said it was going to explain why enshittification wouldn’t happen to them, but didn’t.

I agree that would be more environmentally friendly, but now you also need to train and employ how many nuclear experts to keep thousands of ships running safely? And this tech has existed for a while. If this was cheaper to do, I expect they would have already done it.

For the record, the current technology we have to capture renewable energy is not capable of supporting the civilization we have built compared to how efficient oil and natural gas are as energy-dense molecules. Only very recently has battery technology come far enough to make it worth it to move a semi-truck any reasonable distance, but cargo ships are still going to be difficult to replace and account for a huge amount of pollution, as well as commerce we depend on. So it’s not a “slightly better profit margin”, as it would range from a literal decimation of society to straight up impossible to cut out all fossil fuels today.

But we should have started a global, methodical transition over 40 years ago, and the free market control over government and media has systematically prevented that. And THAT is unacceptable.

Letting perfection be the enemy of the good is why we can’t have nice things.

I mean…not that curious. It’s his entire livelihood at the moment.

To discuss the video in a comments section associated with it.