It’s clear that they made an end run around the rules, laws and agreements they made.
I hope some judge throws the book in their face for it and forces them to pay out of their profits to the artists at the rate they agreed was fair before they began selling audiobooks.
Spotify is predatory and isn’t paying artists enough for their content but a lot of anti spotify news anymore is envious and just as predatory music companies trying to take a bite out of them.
Spotify is no worse than anyone else except very lesser known artists can put their music on here and actually have a chance at exposure that other platforms don’t offer.
Overall 6/10. I’ve tried other music streaming platforms and methods and in my opinion Spotify has what I want. Everyone will price gouge if they could. But I especially will never use YT music.
Bluesky hasn’t been hyper-commoditized yet. I don’t see ads everywhere. I don’t have bots jamming ׺°”˜”°º× 🎀 𝒫𝓊𝓈𝓈𝓎 𝐼𝓃 𝐵𝒾♡ 🎀 ׺°”˜”°º× into my feed. I’m not being spammed with “We noticed you haven’t joined our premium service yet, but for $8/mo we’ll stop showing you this message!” annoyance marketing.
But I’ve got no doubt its coming. It just hasn’t hit that Twitter-level critical mass of users, such that enshittification turns a profit rather than curbing adoption.
Between threads mastadon and bluesky, which one do you think will be the biggest in the next year? Or are they gonna all keep living in the shadow of Twitter
Given the inertia of moving social platforms and the spoiler effect of fragmentation, I assume ex-Twitter will remain the leading platform for a while still unless Musk manages to run it into the ground at record speed.
I don’t have any hard numbers on the rest, unfortunately. I personally favour Mastodon, and I believe some national governments have officially adopted it and are running their own instances, which might tip the scales a little if people see that as endorsement.
Bluesky overall seems to have the advantage in terms of marketing (probably because they have the advantage of money too). I have no idea about Threads, but being from the same company as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp may give them an advantage in terms of existing users for those services. I would expect they try to intermesh these services at one point or another.
It’s hard to predict, given that many people might just follow whatever their favourite personalities choose, and once enough users have gone there, other popular people may choose that platform too for its larger userbase, drawing more people in… It can snowball either way.
There’s also the ongoing debate about interfacing the other options with Mastodon. I’m not going to take a stance on that here, but it might be a solution to the split “some of my favourite people have gone here, the others there, but I want to keep up with both in a single app”. I think there would have to be a user-level option in Mastodon to block entire instances to allow people to choose not to get shown content from those services.
As an aside, I think that would be a good idea anyway, for Lemmy too. If I want to be able to browse All without seeing specific instances, I don’t want to have to look for an instance with that exact list of defeds.
He’s been saying it since the 90s. His “X App” is just the latest iteration of his want to create an all-encompassing “X” platform for everything from dating to banking.
A smart TV app from the guy who pulled Disney channels from the Tesla app due to a bruised ego over a Twitter argument? I can’t wait for this to crash and burn.
I guess there is going to be a split on this in terms of what people think. Obviously ride share drivers would love this, and since the only time I’m in Minneapolis is when I’m on business, it’s my company footing the bill, not me.
However - if it was me footing the bill, I’m sure I’d be much less inclined to take a Lyft/Uber. However, ending ops over this is stupid, because there will be people that will pay for it, business or personal. Let the market decide what’s palatable.
Everyone’s wallet is shrinking due to the rampant inflation over the past several years, and if you’re a full time ride share driver, it’s hard to cut even with the rising costs all around. Even before the inflation was hard. Vehicles don’t run on hopes and dreams and need maintenance.
This is the beauty of self employment. As I said in a previous comment, I’m a driver and one of the apps I work along with my own service give me the ability and freedom to raise my own rates when I feel the need. Truth is though, as it stands, most uber and lyft drivers could make more than enough if the companies were forced to pass on a percentage instead of low balling offers. Very rough math says they could pass on a fixed 80% and charge the rider whatever they feel like at any point in time. This would give them more enough profit along with covering all costs. They won’t do this because they are greedy and states/cities won’t make them do it because they are stuck in the hourly mindset when most IC work is not hourly. This job is all about miles. Watch dead and wasted time of course but it’s not all about the hourly.
But it’s a tactic, right? They could still make money, if a bit less, by operating in Minneapolis. But they can put pressure on residents to try and get it repealed by stopping, and try to send a message to other cities.
As a whole, yeah, but top-line losses don’t mean each ride makes them less profitable. My understanding was their margins are slim enough they need a lot of rides to subsidize their fixed costs, so fewer rides means less profit, not less loss.
If Uber is actually profitable, stopping operations in Minneapolis really should make them less so. If this isn’t them taking a small loss now because they believe they’ll avoid a bigger loss later, I can’t make sense of it.
Yes, they could make a very tiny profit from a decently sized city, but then it might encourage other cities to follow suit.
The costs are not all fixed, covering another city means paying more support agents, having people signing up local drivers, etc. so after this change it might not even be profitable after all
If costs like support agents that scale with rides make the rides unprofitable, their business model is upside down. Especially for Uber, I’m counting costs that scale with rides with costs per ride, vs infrastructure and truly fixed costs. Maybe they’re so close to breaking even per ride that raising costs depresses demand enough to make them unprofitable, but it seems a lot more likely they’re doing this to send a message first and foremost.
Uber is making way more money than they let on. They got caught stashing millions over seas. They and lyft both take over half of the transaction on average and have reduced their support teams to mostly bots and people who can barely read.
I’m a driver in another state/city but if I lived in Minneapolis I’d be loving this.
Why?
I drive uber, empower (a service launched in my market) and I’m building my own service. Getting uber and lyft kicked out of town will do amazing things for the industry and the drivers and riders. Regional services will pop up and this will help filter out the drivers who know how to run a business and act professionally and those who shouldn’t be self employed and customer facing.
I’m on track to pull 6 figures in the next year or two. I’m currently in the process of upgrading to an EV, later this year we will be buying my wife a phev mini van for her to main and I’ll use it for business if needed as well as for road trips.
Slander isn’t the same thing as being insulting. I couldn’t take you to court for calling me Stevie or telling everyone to call me Stevie.
I think twitter is stupid. I think the policy is stupid. I don’t think bullying people on any platform just to bully should be tolerated. Still though, that’s a whole different idea there.
So when you say “let people say what they want,” you mean, “privately-owned companies should be forced to allow people to say whatever they want unless it’s slanderous.”
Agreed. The hypocrites here are perfectly fine unjustifiably calling people they disagree with fascists, nazies, pedophiles etc. but then lose their shit when someone misgenders somebody. Some people are assholes - deal with it or block them.
Listen to yourself. You don’t even know the difference between plain old name calling and actual bigotry.
“Nazi” or even “pedophile” is not the same as calling a trans woman a man for the same reason that it’s not the same as calling a gay man a f- or a black man a n-. When you insult someone for an innate quality about themselves that harms no one, you’re a bigot. It’s really that simple and it’s sad that you don’t understand that.
The key qualification in the comment you’re busting is the word “unjustifiably.” It is pretty easy to justify calling people fascists or Nazis based on the subject’s own behavior. You can’t justify bigotry with anything but hatred.
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