The issue is that I often don’t want to comment and engage with some of the psychos that show up on the internet. Downvotes are a passive way to help move hateful/ignorant comments to the bottom of the thread. Having downvotes publicly accessible is giving these psychos a way to directly engage back with you.

Wikipedia mainly survives on wealthy benefactors. Amazon donated a million or so recently, for example.

I’ve been harassed across subreddits before by one person because I disagreed with them on something. You can block them but all the sudden they pop up on another account. Some people are just crazy.

I think the issue is just that having votes publicly accessible can lead to harassment. Sometimes I want to downvote bigots or idiots and not want the possibility of them engaging with me.

It sucks because journalists do need to make money to continue reporting. Spamming sites with ads is bad for the reader’s experience too. Not totally sure what the solution is.

Making a website to host AMAs would be an enormous amount of work. Even if they retained their userbase, the costs of hosting a site that wouldn’t crash would be significant. If they don’t retain their userbase, it ruins the entire reason who many notable people do AMAs which is to advertise whatever they’re doing. To make a profit, they would need to monetize it too somehow.

The issue with Yang is that he’s proposing cutting other social safety nets and replacing them with UBI which would put a lot of people in worse situations. UBI would be great but we also need robust social programs.

I’m honestly just over reddit. Even if all the apps came back for free I’d probably try sticking with lemmy. Not a fan of a company that clearly doesn’t give a shit about their userbase. Good for the third party devs who are making it work with subscriptions but I’m not willing to pay a subscription to go straight into reddit’s pocket.