Opting Out (@electronics)

Good (?) to know, Andrew? Good (-ish) for me, that is, but lousy news for a lot of good users who deserved better. It's OK for me, more or less, because it pushes me in a direction I kept meaning to go in, and kept letting myself get dragged away from. I kept meaning to put my presence on Gab on hold, because more and more, I could see that any attempt to do much of what I had intended to do here would have been futile. Any attempt to teach people anything about Electrical Engineering (or Mathematics or Physics) would almost certainly have been doomed to failure on a site where so many of the people present took such pride in their own lack of any real education. I only had to watch the flerfers gather around any sort of Astronomy post to see what lay in store for me, and yet I lingered. Why? That would be a good question, and maybe I need to spend a good, long time thinking about that one, because I do waste a lot of my time on people and places that I should give up on. But, bless your soul, 'Drew, you just made it a lot easier, because while I have trouble bringing myself to give up on an entire community, I have even more trouble bringing myself to create something that I know will have to suck. If you take media out of the picture, as you tell me that you're about to do, then the one-dimensional collage that I've been making my profile into (by decorating it) is going to suck. A column of plain text is an eyesore. To go on making posts without media, then, would be to deface something that I've put some measure of time and love into creating. Not only is that something that I should not do, that's something that I couldn't bring myself to do, so I almost have to thank you. Where my strength of will had been failing, leading me to squander time for which I had many better uses, I suddenly found that the easier course of action would be to finally do what I meant to do, and should have been doing sooner. At this point, I can't even be tempted by the thought of talking about my main intended subject matter, anyway, because without illustrations (and without the use of special symbols), these are difficult subjects to write about in an understandable way, anyway. I almost have to thank you, but I really shouldn't, because while you helped me get past my own personal mistake, you pulled a lousy trick on a lot of other people, including most (if not all) of my followers, and then gave a weak excuse, one that had been debunked long before Gab ever existed. You acted like the free users were the recipients, rather than the givers of charity. This is wrong for a simple reason: because barter is a form of economic transaction. The free user, who is compensated in no way for his content, is given space for his content in exchange you granting Gab the right to stick ads on that content, ads that you (and not we) see a profit from. He donates his content, you see a profit, and what does he get in return? The traditional techbro condescension, as we've just seen. In effect, you've denied that the creation of content is work, and that the creator of that content deserves any respect. Even though you would not have a business model without our content, you act as if our content is of no value. In that attitude, I think you will find there will be something of a self-fulfilling prophesy, one which has come true on a long line of sites before this one. By giving Gab the logic of a vanity press, in the end you're going to leave it with the sort of contributions seen by such a press - work so horrible and of so little interest to almost anybody, that the self-deluded authors will agree to pay to have it published. With that kind of user base writing your content, you're going to end up with a site so unreadably bad, that practically nobody is going to visit. This isn't just a speculation on my part, either, Drew, because I've seen sites go into exactly that kind of death spiral, in exactly that kind of way, before. So, even if I could look at Gab and think "yeah, this would be a good place to find an audience today," I'd still have to refuse the offer you're making, because that audience would end up evaporating as a result of the policy you're setting. There's a perfectly sensible, money making alternative to what you're about to do, and Tumblr was doing something like it, before it backed down in the face of a wave of crybullying: you could let users set some of their posts as premium content, available only to those who purchased paid subscriptions, and taken a percentage of the subscription payments. But instead of taking money from those who consume content, you're stubbornly determined to collect it from those who produce, not only not paying them for their work, but in fact expecting them to pay for the privilege of working. To say "no" to a request like that is a matter of simple self-respect. To do so without hesitation as the mild weather approaches will be particularly easy. But do as you wish.