Because I am pro-capitalism, I utterly disagree with your premise. In a real contract, parties can negotiate and come to a meeting of the minds. Here's how it actually works:

* A website serves me a page with a place to put ads on it.

* I reject their offer to serve me ads.

* The site has the option of deciding not to serve me any more content, typically by showing me an anti-ad-blocker popup. If they continue to serve me, they've agreed to my proposed contract alterations.

* If they choose not to serve me, I can decide to accept their final offer (by disabling my ad-blocker) or reject it (by closing the tab).

What on earth makes you think that the negotiation ends with the initial offer? That's not how bargaining works. This isn't some Soviet-style take-it-or-leave-it scenario.

Is buying milk at your local supermarket a Soviet-style take-it-or-leave-it scenario?

If not, at what point during your milk purchase does the negotiation step that you hold to be important for capitalism take place?

I put it to you that take-it-or-leave-it-ness is orthogonal to the capitalism-socialism axis, and that the take-it-or-leave-it nature of viewing an ad-supported website is no more socialist (and no more alarming) than buying milk.

Regarding "negotiation":

> * The site has the option of deciding not to serve me any more content, typically by showing me an anti-ad-blocker popup.

Are you indeed claiming that today's ad blockers operate by explicitly rejecting a request sent from the main site as part of some standard ad negotiation protocol? Because if so, I would agree that this amounts to a negotiation with the website as you say.

But this would certainly be news to me. It must be a recent change, since for most of my life, ads have simply been hyperlinked images/objects/videos/IFrames, or sometimes inline text generated server-side or on the client using JS, and the only mechanisms available to implement ad blocking were implicit, and based on subterfuge: By preventing fetching of that content in the first place (in a variety of ways), or by fetching it but then hiding/obscuring the result in some way. None of which amount to "negotiation", obviously.

> Is buying milk at your local supermarket a Soviet-style take-it-or-leave-it scenario?

No. You can ask. They'll say no, almost surely, unless you're talking to the manager about something that's about to expire and then anything goes. But you can ask. Your idealized scenario is where the initial, and only, offer is "see this with ads or don't see it" with no room for negotiation.

> Are you indeed claiming that today's ad blockers operate by explicitly rejecting a request sent from the main site as part of some standard ad negotiation protocol?

As far as it's possible to express this arrangement in HTML, yes, of course. The page gives your client a document describing which resources it may wish to fetch, among other things. It's not expected that you'll fetch all of them. You may already have the cached data. A resource may be of a type your client doesn't know how to render. It may be in a tag your client doesn't know how to process. It may include executable code that your client might be configured to execute or not to execute. It may have several media types for scenarios that don't apply to you, such as for printing or working with a screen reader for people with visual impairments, and those media types may refer to resources that your client won't fetch because they're not relevant to you. 100% of those decisions can be made by your client. It's not obligated to execute your JavaScript, even if it has Bitcoin mining code and you lose out on the would-be cryptocurrency that my browser chooses not to mine for you. It's not obligated to use your fonts, or figure out how to display your odd graphics format, or render your PDF, or load your Java applet, etc.

And thus with ads. Your web page says "here's an image tag for you to display an ad", or more likely, "here's a ball of malware for you to execute that also displays an ad". There's no legal or moral or technical scenario where my client is obligated to choose to display or execute it, simply because your site told me how to do it if I chose to participate.

Not OP, but because I could flip a switch and get an extra $200/mo for doing nothing extra, at a time when that was important to me.

When every other site on the Internet seemed to have banner ads, the moral quandary was whether I wanted free money or not. That was an easy decision.

Not sure what kind of reply you're expecting here. I'm defintely not cheering you on for abusing users to make you $200/month. Your business model is cancer and the reason why the Internet is the kind of shithole it is today.

I will not hold my breath waiting for someone to defend him.

Say hypothetically 1000 people were having great fun using it to cyberbully 10 people. It’s impossible to say that it’s no big deal because 99% of users loved it, unless you know exactly how much the 1% hated it.

This resonates. There are certain tasks, like dealing with any government or healthcare-related web page, that I won't even bother attempting on my phone. In my case, it's because I just know in my heart of hearts that the crummy mobile website won't be feature-complete enough for me to complete my goal.

My wife is the opposite. It doesn't occur to her that the problem may be with the janky website, not with her. She'll ask me for help with a thing out of frustration and my first troubleshooting step is to reach for my laptop. This is almost inevitably followed by "hey, wait, how come you're able to press the Submit button but I wasn't able to?" "Because the dev never tested this on a phone and it's broken." "So it's not just me being incompetent to use this website?" "Nope, never was."

Also Big Beat, for me. Crystal Method's Vegas reaches into my brain and flips the time to code switch.

Also Fluke - Risotto. Similar vibes.

No laughter here, my brother in music. This is one of the few vocal groups that I could be in the zone with, except "Fernando", because one must release their inner theater kid with that one.

I’d recommend installing a Pleroma server. It speaks ActivityPub and you can use any of the nice Mastodon apps with it. I've run a Mastodon server for the last 9 years, and wouldn't recommend Pleroma over it for a large many-user instance, but it's relatively tiny and lightweight for a personal server. You can configure it not to talk to the rest of the Fediverse so that it remains your friendly, isolated silo.

Pleroma looks to be very twitter-y. I don’t feel twitter is a great model for a small tight-knit group. For a larger less familial group, it’s probably better suited.

Like, i’m thinking photo album sharing (twitter-like makes photos ephemeral, quickly disappearing on the timeline) and conversation (twitter threading has never been strong imo).

If you were going for a social-media-y experience, I'd not recommend Pleroma (or Akkoma which is the less problematic fork) because dealing with Erlang+Elixir is a massive pain in the arse. You'd want GotoSocial[0] (single binary, reasonably straightforward), snac[1] (haven't tried it but fedimeteo runs a whole bunch of instances successfully), or one of the other small servers (Takahē, bovine, etc.)

[0] https://gotosocial.org

[1] https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

GoToSocial looks interesting, i will probably spin one up to try it out! Still seems a little twitter-like, but worth a shot.

And as long as there is a docker container, i don’t really care what language it’s written in, tbh - tho that is sometimes useful as a signal of the code quality or other aspects

> as long as there is a docker container, i don’t really care what language it’s written in, tbh

That's a good point that I keep forgetting these days.

Heh, I've found this post while installing Gotosocial :D

You know, after all this time Lucas Duplan doesn't seem so bad. His hubristic sin was posing for a photo burning fake hundred dollar bills. That just seems like a random Tuesday now.

Naming his startup “Clinkle” should have been a crime, though.

That was epicly horrid.

Really? I know nothing about this other than what I've read here, but my first guess was the breakdown in trust means the allegations of fake audits.

I was half-joking, but if YC has a legal issue resulting from the alleged fraud (unclear currently), kicking out the company for the lesser infraction would make more sense.

Investors aren't on the hook for the bad behavior of companies they invest in. Quite the opposite: Defrauding investors (and acquirers, and creditors) is commonly the thing that lands people like Elizabeth Holmes in prison.

Ycombinator may have financially benefited from the scam operations since the company subsequently raised funds.

Considering they do due diligence before investment and are experts in IT and legal, how could they not know what is the business model when it was the unique selling point ?

Because Delve defrauded them.

Yeah, yeah... of course, of course... like telehealth companies prescribing GLP-1 Ozempic/Wegovy where there is one doctor for 10000 patients. Totally sounds legit.

It is very clearly the fake audits.

Hi, sorry, just new to this entire story, could you please share light on the fake audits? Trying to understand what exactly happened.

Thanks!