I often consider Kant's first formulation of the Categorical Imperative as a moral guide.
Internally I paraphrase it as: if everyone does this [action that I intend to do] will it be a good thing. I notionally insert "[everyone] who would wish to".
This situation is like the 'desire path' situation where an authority has imposed a pathway, but many pedestrians choose a different path because that is more useful. Ultimately the unpaved walking route will ride, and could cause a quagmire to form (in UK); should one then take the less practical, imposed, paved walkway?
I think the same conclusion forms for me. No. Because eventually the lack of utility in the imposed pathway will be made clear, and then the flaw will be designed around and utility will be increased.
Some might see this as shortcutting (ha!) the categorical imperative...
So yes, video sharing services need to be financed. But this doesn't mean we just roll over and accept alterations to the fundamentals of the web that make it worse.
Ultimately, my connection is that the whole system of brainwashing (advertising) people to increase consumption, or redirect consumption according to other characteristics besides thrift|utility, is detrimental to humanity (and the Earth) and needs to be done away with.
> So yes, video sharing services need to be financed.
I'm entirely unconvinced that even this is true. Today's platforms and software are built around control and centralization, which is indeed expensive. But there's an obvious alternate path. Instead of preventing users from downloading media, embrace it. Build ipfs into browsers. Link to videos on ipfs. Add a "pin" menu item right on the browser UI for videos/images so that users can easily save copies of what they like and help serve it. Make it so you can subscribe to a channel by pinning an ipns name so you automatically download and seed new videos you're interested in. Let people pin to their (paid) cloud storage too.
There's a huge design space here. Expensive centralization is a tiny fraction of what's possible.
Internally I paraphrase it as: if everyone does this [action that I intend to do] will it be a good thing. I notionally insert "[everyone] who would wish to".
This situation is like the 'desire path' situation where an authority has imposed a pathway, but many pedestrians choose a different path because that is more useful. Ultimately the unpaved walking route will ride, and could cause a quagmire to form (in UK); should one then take the less practical, imposed, paved walkway?
I think the same conclusion forms for me. No. Because eventually the lack of utility in the imposed pathway will be made clear, and then the flaw will be designed around and utility will be increased.
Some might see this as shortcutting (ha!) the categorical imperative...
So yes, video sharing services need to be financed. But this doesn't mean we just roll over and accept alterations to the fundamentals of the web that make it worse.
Ultimately, my connection is that the whole system of brainwashing (advertising) people to increase consumption, or redirect consumption according to other characteristics besides thrift|utility, is detrimental to humanity (and the Earth) and needs to be done away with.