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Debian donation for Peertube development

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81–90 of 128 posts

Re: Debian donation for Peertube development

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hidden and not labeled as a tax because it tricks people into believing you're paying less taxes than you actually do. That's some conspiracy bullshit. The first Google hit for "arbetsgivaravgift" gives the site of the Swedish IRS-equivalent, where it's both clearly marked as a tax and the exact percentage is given.

But the employee does not see it on their pay slip, unlike the regular taxes and pension. So when people (aka employees) talk about taxes it is rarely mentioned. In that regard it is a hidden tax. My boss told me he when thinking about our pay he considers the expense to the company to be about 2x what we get paid (pre-tax). So that's the "arbetsgivaravgift" (we got the same thing here in Norway) and pensions on top…

2x is a good ball park figure that's also true for Germany. Of course it's not strictly taxes, but material, hardware, rent... if you as an employee have a gross sum of 50k, the employer should calculate with up to 100k. If it's less, even better.

Re: Debian donation for Peertube development

#82
post #27

This is so heart warming. Thanks to Debian and wow - Framasoft (who I'd never heard of) has a page that is so on point!! Amazing. Someone doing something to stop the book burning (comment deletion in the billions) and censorship at youtube. I wish there was more of this.

> Someone doing something to stop the book burning (comment deletion in the billions) and censorship at youtube. What kind of content is getting "censored" on YouTube?

It's not strict censorship per say, but more repression, but there are a lot of oddball youtube channels that are very popular that constantly get demonetized based on a somewhat arbitrary definitions of what is and isn't appropriate.

This is important, because a lot of these people are trying to make their livings creating videos on youtube, and start trying to avoid otherwise interesting topics so they don't get demonitized.

Some examples: StyroPyro (almost got banned for going replicating stuff from a turn of the century chemistry book), Cody's Lab, William Osman, the list goes on and on and on.

https://twitter.com/crabsandscience/status/10421364471872798... https://www.tubefilter.com/2017/11/06/codys-lab-content-stri... https://www.patreon.com/posts/sad-day-for-my-15167435

Re: Debian donation for Peertube development

#83
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone doing something to stop the book burning (comment deletion in the billions) and censorship at youtube. What kind of content is getting "censored" on YouTube?

It's not strict censorship per say, but more repression, but there are a lot of oddball youtube channels that are very popular that constantly get demonetized based on a somewhat arbitrary definitions of what is and isn't appropriate. This is important, because a lot of these people are trying to make their livings creating videos on youtube, and start trying to avoid otherwise interesting topics so they don't get de…

It seems the problem here isn't Youtube, though -- it's the ad networks.

As great and beneficial as shifting to a p2p distribution model outside of Google is, I'm not sure how it defeats this "censorship", as you go from "Advertisers don't want to pay for ad placements on x/y/z controversial topic and Google won't promote me!" to simply having no revenue model and no promotion.

You would need to start finding third party sponsors and ad networks, and some sort of promotion/content discovery platform, where I suspect you'd run into the same problems -- the people with the money (ad networks) aren't going to want to sponsor certain kinds of content.

I suspect the best way "around" this is to find sponsors and leverage models like Patreon and paypal donations to finance "untouchable" content. I think it encourages better content than adsense financed videos on top of that.

Re: Debian donation for Peertube development

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the employee does not see it on their pay slip, unlike the regular taxes and pension. So when people (aka employees) talk about taxes it is rarely mentioned. In that regard it is a hidden tax. My boss told me he when thinking about our pay he considers the expense to the company to be about 2x what we get paid (pre-tax). So that's the "arbetsgivaravgift" (we got the same thing here in Norway) and pensions on top…

It's not paid by the worker, it's paid by the employer. There no more need to have it on the pay slip than any other per-employee expenses.

Let's say I'm the king of Sweden, and I take back the power from that annoying parliament. I want to appease my people and show that I will rule in favor of the average Joe and against the big evil corporation. So I cut the personal income tax rate by 10%, and I raise the arbetsgivaravgift rate by 10%.

Unless I also forbid renegotiating salaries, don't you think that after a short amount of time "gross" salaries (effectively salaries net of arbetsgivaravgift) will have adjusted and everything will be the same?

Re: Debian donation for Peertube development

#85
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centralised platforms have utterly failed us though, and have become a way to manage information centrally - someone decides what you can or can't see/read/know about. Decentralised is really the only option for an informed humanity. In the long run, this has to be the answer.

Even in the best case scenario where everyone starts using different instances of Peertube, won't it end like 2012 Reddit full of racist and paedophile instances? You need a minimum amount of moderation to remove the least desirable groups of people from posting content.

What is the evidence that a small group of companies has the superiority wisdom to determine who aught to be allowed to speak to the masses?

We elect government democratically, and through that create laws and police. If the internet is full of criminals flaunting laws then the problem is right there in the lack of laws and police, not in the lack of control from a small group of companies.

Re: Debian donation for Peertube development

#86
post #64
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when you consider that no one is "forcing" people to watch content that they don't like, they simply ignore it Throwing something into the recommendation algorithm over periods of time or showing you ads will likely have an influence on you even if you wouldn't usually look at the content or search for it. Facebook itself already experimented with that in the early days of social media: https://www.theatlantic.com/…

One can block the channels on a per-user basis. And you can "personalize" recommendations to users to exclude channels or videos that are similar to ones they've previously blocked/excluded. Heck you can have curated block-lists that people can subscribe to. You can allow users to disable any non-subscription feed mechanisms so that the only way to find content is through search or other discovery mechanisms that may…

Blocklists don't solve the problem of dishonest or scammy ads. If they did we would have solved the spam problem by now. Someone still has to review all that stuff manually.

Re: Debian donation for Peertube development

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In short, if I challenge my mother to "Go to PeerTube and watch the video of a Panda falling over", she would not be able to do it.

Google "peertube", click the first link, put "panda falling over" in the search field - how is that different from YouTube? (Including the first step - lots of older people Google YouTube to go to YouTube) The problem is the next step because there is no video of a panda falling over, but that's not related to the peertube implementation or UX.

I did that, and the "first link" is "join peer tube", with no search field.

Even when I eventually find peertube.ch (Which I guess is right, because there are a ton of links on joinpeertube to other "instances") there's no videos with pandas at all there, though I don't actually know if this example was intended to be possible.

I do not think my parents would pass this test, even if the video existed.

Re: Debian donation for Peertube development

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden, what you get paid isn't really your full salary. Sweden has a hidden tax system called "arbetsgivaravgift" which only the employer can see. It's hidden and not labeled as a tax because it tricks people into believing you're paying less taxes than you actually do. So when you think you're paying ~32% income tax, in reality it's closer to 50%.

> It's hidden and not labeled as a tax because it tricks people into believing you're paying less taxes than you actually do. That's some conspiracy bullshit. The first Google hit for "arbetsgivaravgift" gives the site of the Swedish IRS-equivalent, where it's both clearly marked as a tax and the exact percentage is given.

> That's some conspiracy bullshit.

It's not a conspiracy at all. The US does it too with the employer portion of FICA. This is 15.3% for most employees.

Hiding this tax that directly impacts what your cash paycheck will be is certainly political. But conspiracy? Not at all. It's like any other social nudging - keeping it out of sight and out of mind is absolutely on purpose and not really arguable. What is arguable is if it's justified.

Re: Debian donation for Peertube development

#89
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the best case scenario where everyone starts using different instances of Peertube, won't it end like 2012 Reddit full of racist and paedophile instances? You need a minimum amount of moderation to remove the least desirable groups of people from posting content.

This is a difficult question - which is why this line is always provided as a justification for greater authoritarianism. I would ask, where is the crime here? Is it that you saw something terrible, or that something terrible occurred? Should we be focused on the prevention of immoral acts, or the representation of those immoral acts on video? Does your not knowing about certain immoral acts make it better or worse i…

Make no mistake, all these alternative platforms do is optimize for a certain type of content and bury/hide some other kind of content. This will always be the case as long as there is an algorithmic feed and search—users will manipulate the system to try to get at the top.

Yes, technically it's not illegal to allow those kind of fringe statements but by doing so you implicitly allow that content to rise to the top and it can make your site unsafe for racial minorities and children.

Re: Debian donation for Peertube development

#90
A couple observations:

1. Peertube and other fediverse software are examples of living AGPL projects. In recent weeks there was some discussion on this license, and people claiming "no one would want to contribute".

My thinking is that AGPL today is where GPL was, I dunno, 20 years ago in terms of attitude of the industry (not friendly) and significance to the user (actual suppression of user-hostile behavior... of course as much as this software is practically usable). I'm no free software fundamentalist myself, but I recognize this. The shift is related to the changes in how software is distributed.

2. Many discussions of PeerTube viability seem to assume the "content creator" system created, to a large extent intentionally, by YouTube. This system changed over the years, but relies on people pumping out similarly-formatted videos in regular intervals. The people are driven by hope of accomplishing scale where they can support themselves with Patreon and maybe YT ads (though I hear these are less lucrative and important nowadays).

On PeerTube there is no scale as of now, so the realistic model of usage, I imagine, would be more like early YouTube. Funny and interesting videos (not quasi-TV shows), one-off tutorials, archiving, short animation etc., without hoping for making it a full-time job.

3. Lately YouTube have begun constantly pestering (at least when you have some cookie-deleting scheme?) to accept their all-Google terms, and to log in, every every time. I think it started in the late summer, used to be way more lenient. I'm assuming at least the terms thing is related to GDPR: to that extent I'm okay with reminding me what I'm doing to myself by exposing myself to Google. This may be a nudge to start using PeerTube in some capacity, certainly pushed me to peruse archive.org more.

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