Funes-

I must admit I've indulged in constrained writing when I was a teenager with the same purpose: circumventing spontaneous layout errors in Word when writing a paper for school, feeling a non-negligible amount of anxiety due to the deadline being around the corner. Terrifying.

This is why I wrote "well" in quotation marks and used expressions like "potentially of value". You missed the whole point.

Look, we should make a concerted effort—a huge one, I know—to strip away all that is potentially of value in X, and through pulling and separating it from the whole, establishing dignified alternatives to every single one of them.

Here's what X does "well":

- Witness media/citizen journalism.

- Text publishing (narrowed down to short-form and very opinion-based, but still).

- Link sharing (there are TONS of links to great pieces of media; the vast majority of posts containing links to pirated content are never removed).

- Self-promotion (art, video games, software, etc.).

Now, imagine all of these facets turned into dignified, decentralized, and uncensorable platforms or protocols. It might sound like wishful thinking or some kind of utopian aspiration, but I really think we're fighting a battle for Internet freedom RIGHT NOW. What we do in the next two to five years will establish how much of it we'll get to keep in the long term, because there might be no turning back.

No, I don't think it is. I didn't want to reach the mods necessarily. I wanted to check what the picture was regarding the general opinion on this kind of practices, hopefully with personal experiences from regular users rather than, potentially, getting some kind of formal statement that is further from what the actual moderation activity is like, either coming from moderators themselves or from users flagging or downvoting content.

Wait. Is it not against the HN guidelines to regularly submit links to your own sites? Isn't that considered self-promotion and, thus, against the rules? I've got nothing against the author, personally, as I'd do the same, but seeing his submission page, I'd like to know how normal getting in trouble is for this practice or if the guidelines are enforced at all in this sense.

>Powerful LLMs will be deployed at global scale in the next few years, and will dominate the Internet, and increasingly, ordinary life.

This kind of judgements or predictions trying to pass as imminent and unavoidable truths about the future are disgusting. They always feel like a means of propping up a certain status quo or ideology that favors the business of the people behind these foreboding statements.

>We could’ve just paid for the content, directly subsidising the creators we like.

That wasn't an option. And if it had been, they would've rolled out monetization through ads anyway. If you believe otherwise, there's too much we disagree on to sum it up here.

Ads have destroyed our culture. Just look at the fundamental change YouTube underwent in 2012 when they made all users eligible for monetization. It turned it into junk/infomercial TV.

>the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline

Under late stage capitalism, the main driver in any industry, not just journalism, is unscrupulous opportunism. Profit comes first, at the cost of everything else, including, of course, effort and sincere expression.

Noise, in a wide, aesthetic sense, is rich. "Clean" is shapeless, soulless.

Hmm... To my mind, the best way to commercialize software is the old way: pay for the binaries of every major version. This, of course, bars the option of using the software online, and makes pirating it easier, but I think it's the most fair.