As someone who has been obsessed with learning about art, technology, and business my entire life, your attitude reflects the dollar-seeking and exploitative behaviors in upper corporate America I have seen and dealt with many times. It's one of the reasons why I left it.
It's not hard to be an artist. Every human being with the ability to express themselves in some way is an artist. You are cheaply wanting to skip the steps of either developing your own skills or hiring someone else to create art for you. You are contributing to a world where artists are learning that they should not openly share their creations because it'll be taken from them, ripped into pieces, and used for profit while they get nothing. These discussions are happening right now.
Art is already accessible to the masses. It was accessible to cavemen. It's called picking up a pencil, rock, mud, paper, paint, macaroni, feathers, literally anything in your world and making something of it. Everyone has the ability to be an artist. What the AI bros are complaining about is that they want an easy and instant way to replace years and lifetimes of perfecting one's craft, while piggybacking off of and stealing said labor to profit from it.
My brother in Christ, if I steal all of your writings and art when you're not looking, chop them up, eat them, and shit them out, they are still your creations-- just now covered in shit, garbled up, and without your original thoughts and intentions put behind them. If I then sell the pile of shit to someone, I am profiting from your labor.
I would be less inclined to hate this if I got some form of royalty or even some form of compensation for the hours and hours I've spent planning, creating, editing, and studying to make my things.
If two consenting adult intelligence feral or monster characters are banging, I don't see the problem. It's weird if it's a human and one. Extra weird if they're juveniles. I find the argument over furries having too many animal characteristics a little dumb as they're animals with human traits... Some walk upright, some wear clothes, others only shirts, some are more animal-like and others are more human-like.
Simba, Robin Hood, Judy Hopps, Balto, Pinkie Pie, and the Wolf from Shrek are all furries. Some act more like wild animals. Some act more like humans with clothes and jobs. Some only wear clothes sometimes. All of them are enculturated adults and can consent with other like creatures.
I've lately seen people nitpicking these details, and at this point, it seems some people won't be pleased with NSFW furry art unless there are no animal characteristics whatsoever. So then it would be art of humans and not furries at all.
I'm picturing that one day people will need guides on how to "jailbreak" their own brains, because they want the be able to live without the constant advertising and recording. Their brains no longer belong to them but the companies
I had used Reddit for probably 11-12+ years. Which is why the slow death of the site was so sad. It was one of my favorite places on the net
They do care if you're a massive brand, to the point where you have a human point of contact to the company, but unfortunately we weren't at that size. Anything smaller than massive tends to be ignored. Not even sure if they're still doing that sort of thing, but they did when I started the job.
I'll believe it when I see it. I work with (not for) Amazon every day at my job and they are miserable e-commerce partners. One change in a code that suddenly and wrongly flags your entire international product offerings and pulls them? Good luck begging the teams of bots to "help" you.
With Amazon you don't even have the power to handle your own legitimate brand's data management -- changes to our listings go through maybe 20% of the time-- but somehow ASIN hijackers can make wild and dangerous changes to them with little issue. Not only that, but Amazon buttfucks you with fees on top of fees, like FBA fees we pay to entrust them to handle our products and returns well, but are wasted as our products are often stolen, broken, or return scammed.
If you can help it and you like not crying in the bathroom at work, avoid Amazon.
Industry is pretty dire right now. Good on them, I support 100%
There was a lot, but one thing that comes to mind is that my boss tried to tell our new employee that she would work her for an "unpaid trial period" for a week. When the new worker went off on break I let boss know that she legally had to pay the new worker. When the worker came back in my boss told her that surprise, she could actually get paid the hours she would work. Lol. Other things that come to mind:
- Some unscrupulous shipping practices
- Being told that if I find someone in our building was having a medical emergency, I was to call building management first and not emergency services (fuck that)
- Me insisting that yes, we did have to hang up the state and federal labor law posters in a visible place, and no we can't just make copies and put them in a file organizer
- Me being told "don't worry about safety" after discovering half of our office was powered by surge protectors and extension cords being daisy-chained
- Having to sign an email agreeing not to be paid owed overtime pay (this was during the pandemic, we were in crunch time and I was the only one that could fix the problems so I didn't really have a choice)
Other stuff too but I don't want to get too specific lol.
Disagree, we should ban unethical breeders. If we want to ban breeds, we should start with the ones designed for felony bloodsport before any other breeds.
I think it's fine with small communities that very few people visit and interact with. In that case, it's usually someone that likes to share about the niche hobby or fandom they enjoy learning about and spending time on. The bigger problems start happening when you get a bunch of users, or the moderators go on a power trip, or there is infighting, etc. I used to volunteer for a very small subreddit-- I wrote the CSS because I love visual design, basic rules because you don't want the like 5 visitors you get to be assholes, etc. I did it because it was a tiny community on a topic I was autistically interested in and I genuinely love learning and teaching about things I enjoy.
Life got in the way and I left, coming back a couple years later to see things had snowballed into a moderator team that staged a coup against its other half, wild infighting in the community, and people power tripping just because they could. Thank goodness I could remember the subreddit as it used to be when I built it.
But I do want to say that I believe this is a problem with any platform, Lemmy included. That's both the ugly and beautiful thing about community moderation... you can have wonderful and friendly experiences, or you can be beholden to the rule of the most abrasive dickheads you've met.
The way I see it is this search for money won't destroy the world completely, but it will probably end up with humans leading their own extinction event and taking lots of other species with us. The world will eventually heal many of its wounds... without us.
Which is kind of funny because one of the reasons Reddit got so big was because of the pornography