jprete

I think you're arguing in good faith, so my response is that I think the legal-piracy world would make it very easy to download things, on par with going to YouTube, something anyone could and would do. I don't think Netflix would be the same in that world. They might well have been the premiere free movie distributors!

Not that Trump is directly trying to solve it, but TSMC being in Taiwan has been a geopolitical problem for a long time. It's even more of a problem in a situation where China catches up on fabbing, which feels less like an "if" and more like a "when, if not already".

I was talking about a world where piracy is legal, which this one is not.

China doesn't care about climate change either.

Cancel culture was systematically supported and promoted by the most powerful people in our society.

If it were legal to download movies and music, Netflix and Spotify would absolutely not exist.

Steam is an unusual case, because games are running software and can't be trivially reproduced in their unencoded form. The publishers can include copy protection, network connection requirements, or even run essential parts of game logic on their own servers. So free downloads became a much worse experience over time.

None of those services could exist today if copyright didn't exist, because streaming services wouldn't be able to compete with free downloads. I think Patreon and Kickstarter are how creative work is funded in that world.

If you're looking for that kind of content, you could remove the minus sign?

Your comment about looky-loos got me thinking about real-world socialization. People who hang around the edge of a group in the real world, looking like they're trying not to be noticed, get pegged as creepy - it looks like predator behavior in the wild! The group then has a reason to either invite them to participate or keep them out - otherwise they're making the space feel unsafe.

The edge-hangers have two good choices: They can be very visibly present and then join the conversation when an opportunity presents itself, or they can leave.

Social-media edge-hangers don't have to do anything, they can just hang there forever without clearly joining or leaving the group.

A little off-topic, but have you found spam or fake content to be a problem in the last year or two?