When you post on reddit, instagram etc. you’re giving the company your valuable data. (And it often is valuable, you put your thoughts into it and all that). Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you’d get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially. Now all that value is donated to big tech companies. (that’s the only reason why they have value at all.)
So what’s the problem with that? The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:
when i want to see content on reddit (for research) or instagram (for local community) they don’t allow me to see the data that users have contributed. Reddit claims that it blocks VPNs for “security reasons”, meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked. Instagram wants you to sign in sothat they amass more users and can take leverage of the network effect even more.
I can understand restricting who can post to limit bot activity, but reading must always be possible. After all, it’s our data. That’s exactly what happens when you give your data to big companies to “communicate with other people”: your data becomes a source of income for them, at our expense.
The only subs that kept me around for years was r/electricians and r/askelectricians, which admittedly does usually have pretty accurate answers and info, and sometimes I just like to riff about work. Wrong answers get downvoted and removed at an almost scary speed.
But finally after like years of the same exact questions from homeowners that are just like “how do I wire a smart switch? What’s a switch loop / what do you mean my white wire is not a neutral? I took apart this mess of wires and didn’t take before pics how do I put it back together?? Do I need grounds???” I could go on lol. But I just realized how much a huge waste of time it all was. I wouldn’t call any of the troubleshooting or commenting “fun” it was just a way to pass time. I guess it’s better people get real answers than trust AI because a lot of time they try that first and post some of the answers these chat bots gave them and wheeeewwww boy are they some schizo hallucinated bullshit haha
I’ve been off all social media other than Lemmy for a while now. Since it’s not as active here it’s been better for me personally. It’s easy to refresh reddit and get a new thread every few minutes. On here I notice I’m seeing the same articles a couple times in a row and that’s my cue to hop off and read manga or play chess online instead or something.
Also yeah caps can go bad lol. We had these giant 18" tall ones on the solar industrial sites I worked at. This was 10 years ago so I forget the value I just know we had dozens of them each on 6 AWG wire. Part of our maintenance was to check for leaky ones. Because they’d leak then they’d eventually fail and then without the proper filtering for the system, usually the cabinet would catch on fire.