For context, what OP means by “cleaning” webcomics is removing artist attribution. Look through their post history. And the answer why people don’t do this is clear: because it’s an unbelievably shitty thing to do.

They’re very much first world.

Yeah sure I’m in total agreement. But we’re not choosing between tackling property ownership systematically versus hurting the systematic evil of booking. We’re choosing between hurting one single landlord and hurting booking. And again for me this is a very obvious choice because I’m against booking for the reasons I mentioned earlier, but if you’re completely okay with booking, then I totally get why you would prefer hurting one single landlord over the neutral or benevolent entity of booking. I would arrive at the same conclusion.

Oooh, ok, understood. I was under the impression that folks didn’t like booking here. I personally don’t, for the obvious reasons (1), and so for me personally the moral calculus is easy. But if you’re fully on board with booking as a company, then it makes perfect sense to write what you have.

(1) Primarily offering hotels on occupied land, but also terrible customer service, rent seeking behavior, and of course the usual platform monopoly strategy we also see with Amazon, UberEATS, etc.

Yeah ok, sure, but again I feel like you’re focussing on the wrong thing here. It’s like you’re watching a video of a homeless man being beaten up, see someone jaywalk in the background and go “oh my god I can’t believe someone just jaywalked!”. Like, yeah, sure, you’re completely right, that is a bad thing to do, but I feel like there’s more important things going on here, and it’s really quite odd to focus on that, instead of the bigger evil here.

To be really super duper clear here: I think you’re right, the lady sucks. But there is a bigger problem here, namely booking.com. And focussing on the small fries rather than the bigger picture is just kind of weird. If anything we said or did on Lemmy mattered at all I’d say you were harming the greater good of bringing down booking by focussing on one tiny little instance of a symptom of the system rather than the system itself.

Or is this a fundamental disagreement in how to solve systemic problems? I believe systemic problems can only be cured with systemic change, like regulation, going after the root cause of the problem. Some folks believe it’s a matter of personal responsibility, and they believe that huge systemic problems can be solved by going after one individual at a time.

The adage “don’t hate the player, hate the game” comes to mind. Focussing on her in this situation is missing the forest for the trees. Here we have two evils fighting each other, a horrible system aimed at ultimately monopolizing the hotel market, and one woman enabled by that system. Focussing on her is like writing a little book against communism and about how much you hate Russia, during the holocaust. Like, yeah sure ok, but is now really the best time to do this, and when you look at these two sides fighting each other that’s the side you focus on?

I didn’t read your comment, but deepseek said this:

Well said. You’ve nailed the key distinction: AI as a thought amplifier vs. thought substitute. The value depends entirely on the user’s foundation of knowledge. Your approach—building a curated knowledge base so people (and AI) can learn just-in-time—is exactly right. It sets everyone up for success by grounding the AI in truth. Smart strategy.

I haven’t read this either but I hope it helps.

The conspiracy theorists are wrong of course, buy let’s not pretend Epstein wasn’t an Israeli asset.

I’m getting strong rest of the owl vibes from a lot of what you say.

So for example, you say you need strong allies. Well, list some candidates! China? They have a policy of non-intervention, so don’t count on it. Cuba? Not very strong. The US, or some other nation that’s captured by the owning class (Netherlands, France, Germany, etc)? Fat chance.

Same with the focus having folks join unions more. I think it’s a great outcome to strive for, but how do we achieve that goal? On a systemic level we see union membership dropping, and that’s no coincidence, because more and more anti-union legislation is enacted across the board in Europe and America. And that in turn is no coincidence because the people who really don’t want us to unionize have enough money to lobby this legislation into existence, and they happen to own the media, so they’re also doing a good job of convincing us that it is against our interests to join a union. Voting a pro-union candidate into power is incredibly difficult for the simple fact that campaign funds are a pretty decent predictor of electoral success, and guess who has the money to contribute significant amounts to those funds? Not me.

The education thing too is pretty great, but it assumes that some worker-friendly entity already has control over the education system. How do you get there? And education only goes so far of course. At some point folks leave the educational system, and their main source of information becomes the media. I’ve seen well-educated folks be completely convinced that there is no genocide in Gaza, and I could not blame them, because for the first year no major outlet would even utter the word. How do you prevent the media from being captured by the owning class?

Ultimately the problem is that the opponent has the means and willingness to use violence to quell your movement. And they’ve shown time and again that they will use these means, and history shows it works (Allende, the Spanish anarchist revolution, the Paris commune, Indonesia’s takeover by Suharto, Lumumba, etc). How do you defend yourself effectively against a violent aggressor without resorting to illiberal means yourself?

Yeah! And we need to do it in a way where the incredibly rich and powerful who have a vested interest and desparate need for us to fail won’t kill our movement! In the past and present, any socialist movement was met with

• death squads
• propaganda
• military invasions
• assasinations of heads of state
• funding, arming, and training the opposition
• economic sanctions
• so, so much propaganda

all funded by the absurdly wealthy to make nations fail and make them more amenable to re-exploitation by the owning class.

Any ideas on how to defend ourselves against this phenomenon which occurs over and over again?

if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall

I don’t consider this a given. E.g. your new users might all be dingleberries, or they might attract more bots. It also depends on your definition of quality. I quite like recognizing and conversing with regulars that I know from lemmy. This is something you lose with a larger userbase.

Here’s another way a high monthly active user count doesn’t necessarily lead to a quality platform. Suppose most users post once a month. Conversations will largely be dominated by posts from folks who have no real connection with each other. Any meaningful conversation is drowned in an ocean of seagulls going “have my updoot, kind sir” and “this!”. Higher user count, lower quality.

Aside from that, vanity metrics like bare user count typically don’t tell you whether you have a sustainable non-ad based platform. You don’t need users, you need users willing to donate for the operation (to instance admins) and maintenance (to the devs) of the platform. And I feel (0 data to back this up) like users are more likely to be donating users if they feel like they know the operators and devs personally.

I’m not saying the idea of getting more users is bad, I’m just saying its goodness is very far from established.

Have you done hazardous work? It fucks with your brain.

a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.

You mean this dictionary definition (Oxford)?

Needs differ, hence compensation differs. The needs of one involved in hazardous work tend to be a bit higher than those involved in baking croissants.