Which shoudn’t be that surprising, this was the norm in many places until relatively recently. Women, people of color and poor people were never really meant to participate in the “democratic process” (at least as far as conservatives are concerned). The only reason why they were eventually allowed was because they fought for it and eventually, people in power got too scared not to give in a little bit until we are where we are today.

Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but to me, it’s surprising that there aren’t more conservatives with this view. Because the conservatives who support (basic) women’s rights are essentially saying “you violent lefties were right and correct in the past for fighting what you believe was right, but whatever you are doing right now goes too far for some reason”…

Shock sites always had trouble with the law, which is why most of them have shut down by now and most social media sites remove it. Watching/consuming it is one thing, publicly and openly sharing/promoting it without effectively restricting access to minors will always bring legal issues and legal attacks… And even when the legal charges are fought successfully, it’s still a major pain in the ass most people don’t want to deal with… And then you also have to find ISP’s and hosters who are willing to host this kind of material.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten.com#Legal_disputes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestgore.com#Corruption_of_morals_charge

https://www.dw.com/de/gewaltvideos-im-netz-was-strafrechtlich-erlaubt-ist/a-49871305

https://www.skppsc.ch/de/gewaltvideos-und-illegale-pornografie-auf-smartphones/

And let’s say I wanted to use it, I’m going to install this and instruct my kids how to use crackpipe?

I mean I get your point, but if you instruct your kids how to use a tool for managing pirated games, they are probably going to see a lot harsher stuff than the word “crack pipe”…

Before last month, lemmy was very very small and comparatively inactive. Lemmy admins are hobbyists who run the server in their spare time, most did/do not want to deal with pornographic content on their server as with it come a lot of potental moderational and legal challanges.

Lemmy isn’t going to “die” anytime soon, it has already been around for about 4 years now, it’s not going anywhere…

Maybe activity will significantly slow down, maybe it will go back to being a super small community, but I don’t see it completely getting killed anytime soon.

What exactly is the reason? That Nazis are not allowed? You seriously think not allowing Nazis on the platform will kill it?

Spreading Nazi propaganda is illegal in some countries… The amount of moderation necessary would be unsustainable. And Nazis tend to propagate violence anyway, which is illegal in most places.

And why is it so important to allow Nazis to “share their views” on your platform anyway? What possible benefit could this bring to a platform?

Why would we want to do that instead of just dealing with them one by one when needed or just individually blocking communities/users?

Who would be “dealing with them one by one”? People seem to keep forgetting that lemmy, both the code and the infraatructure, is developed and maintained by hobbyists, not by a company.

I’m extremely uncomfortable with an authority deciding for me what I may see in my feed and what not.

You should really think about this, in my opinion, entiteled attitude… You are not the one paying for the server, you are not the one running the server you are certainly not the one who will have to deal with potential legal actions if illegal shit is going on on your instance…

You are not entiteled to any of this… You don’t have to pay in any way for any of it and lemmy admins don’t earn any money from you…

Imagine not only getting into trouble for a hobby, but have random people complain about “authority” because you don’t want to/can’t deal with potentially illegal shit on your server…

If you are so concerned about “authority” and about “what you see on your feed”, start your own server and federate with whoever you want, or start a server that is collectively owned and controlled by it’s users or something like that… You can very very easily do that…

They’ve also made a lot of shitty decisions.

That’s the thing with tech companies. They are fast to rise, but also fast to fall, so they are always on the lookout for the next big thing. Blockchain tech was supposed to be the next big thing. Crypto currency was at the time already kinda the big thing in the tech industry’s eyes. And of course when that happens, everyone wants to be early bird for the next big thing and caution is pushed to the side.

VR and AR are the same. It was and still is supposed to be the next big thing. Another one would be language models and “A.I.”. But because all those “new things” tend to be massively over hyped by people who often don’t really understand it and just have dollar signs in their eyes, they inevitably support the wrong thing every once in a while.

Many tech companies were overvalued for a long time. Everyone was happy to invest and pump money into those companies because “those platforms are going to be the future and I want to be part of it when they are starting to make a ton of money”. It didn’t matter that many of those companies were not profitable because they always promised to make up for that in the future.

This classic idea is starting to break down a bit. Many Tech companies have become profitable in the meantime, but many of them also have various troubles like moderation.

So why are so many media companies making “shitty decisions”? Well, because from a business perspective, they aren’t necessarily “shitty decisions”, they are kinda smart decisions. Reddit makes money by gathering data and by showing ads. They cannot show ads on apps they don’t control. So they have to handle a lot of traffic for which they get nothing back. That’s why they are trying to push as many people to use their app as possible. They know that the hardcore oldschool community won’t like that, but they are probably pretty sure that enough will switch to the app to make it worthwhile for them.

Meta is fighting to stay relevant as well. Facebook was the foundation of social media for a long time, but in the digital space, this can change very quickly, so they constantly have to try new things.

And if we look at games like the Sims, the game who really escalated the whole DLC thing, it’s a similar story. From a consumer perspective, what they are doing is bad. From a business perspective, it’s smart. And that’s what it ultimately comes down to.

Companies’ main goal isn’t to satisfy their customers, it’s making money. If fucking over customers makes them more money, they do it in a heartbeat.