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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • That’s a misquote: it’s “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism”. It’s basically saying that you, as a consumer, cannot legitimately make ethical decisions when buying, because the entire system is built on being exploitative, and thus any decision you make cannot be ethical because the choices you have are already the result of exploitation by the time you’re making the decision.

    A good example is the “going green” fad: it does not matter which consumption choices you make, because your choices are effectively irrelevant. You spend a little bit more money for the “green” product, and that money will go directly to megacorporations that are exploiting and polluting on a scale that so outstrips your ability to combat it. Thus, your “more ethical” choice did absolutely nothing but fund the exact same polluters and environmental exploiters as if you had not made the “green” choice in the first place.













  • I think that’s likely to cover common uses outside of just ‘for the lulz’.

    The for the lulz resonates a lot with me - though I know that a decade of dealing with a lot of these types assuredly biases me to at least some degree - because it’s easy enough to do what they’re doing now AFTER you figure out how you’re going to monetize it and signups this aggressive and so widespread doesn’t really make sense to me.

    In my experience with content moderation/fraud/abuse work, I found that you’d often have a very slow trickle of accounts sign up over weeks/months/and, in one situation, years, and THEN they’d all break bad and you’d have entire servers and instances all light on fire at once and result in a mess that’ll take a very long time to clean up.

    If you have 5,000 users that signed up all at once you can literally just delete all those rows from the database and probably not impact too many real people vs. if you have 5,000 users sign up over 6 months then you have the data dispersed in good data and now have much more of an involved spelunking expedition to embark on. I also found that it was typically done in waves as well, so you can’t do a single clean and go ‘well all the accounts that weren’t doing thing must be okay’ because eh, maybe not.

    And, also, there’s a lot of hand-wringing about developer and instance politics from various blog posts, “news” sources, the fediverse, traditional social media and so on from all sides of the spectrum, and while I’d never claim to be a centrist or even remotely moderate, the more embedded in one extreme or another you find yourself you can start justifying doing all sorts of stupid shit, and a DDoS (which, quelle surprise is ongoing right now) is SO trivial to do when there’s not a whole lot of preventative measures in place that don’t require a bunch of squabbling internet humans to cooperate and work together to block signups, clean up the mess that’s already there, and work with each other on mitigation tools that do things everyone agrees with.