• BigNote@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think anyone’s arguing that the US is a good example of a well balanced economy.

    • dartos@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      Yeah but capitalism also made reddit great, before making it terrible.

      There’s a balance in there somewhere. What we got ain’t it tho.

      • ProxyTheAwesome [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Reddit was never great lmaoo

        It was a pedo networking tool reknowned worldwide for it’s jailbate and non-consensual creepshots. These moderators received awards from admins. Then it got too much attention and got a PR workover, burning a woman CEO at the stake to satiate the gamer-fascists before becoming a bland Atlanticist CIA sockpuppet front of bland corporate posts.

        At no point during this entire thing did it ever approach anything comparable to greatness

      • Bobby_DROP_TABLES [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        There is no balance though, the shit-ification that happened to Reddit is a necessary function of capitalism. What we saw as Reddit at its best was, from a capitalist’s perspective, Reddit at its worst. I’m sure you’ve noticed a similar process taking place in lots of other areas as well.

        • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          What we saw as Reddit at its best was, from a capitalist’s perspective, Reddit at its worst.

          And capitalists will allow this “at its worst” phase in order to capture the market, before squeezing it. This pattern is consistent in many industries.

        • dartos@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          I may be wrong, but I don’t see socialism and capitalism as hard opposites.

          I see capitalism and communism are like hard opposites with socialism somewhere in between.

          • ThereRisesARedStar [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Okay, well, I’ve studied everything from all sorts of marxist tendencies to syndicalism to anarchism, to classical economics, and I think you’re either using terms wrong or have the wrong idea. Can you define your terms or rephrase what you mean?

            I apologize if this is too blunt.

            • dartos@reddthat.com
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              1 year ago

              So I understand total capitalism as an entirely market driven economy with no government influence

              And total communism as an entirely planned and government prescribed economy

              And socialism as some of the economy is market driven and some government planned.

              • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                Viewing it entirely in economics is incorrect. All of the above can be done under capitalism. The key difference is not what form of economics are employed but which class controls power and puts the resources of the state to use.

                The capitalist state is a state where capital owners hold power and use that power to exploit more capital.

                The socialist state is a transitionary state in which the workers have seized power and use the state to repress the bourgeoisie and put resources to their own use.

                The communist state is what occurs when capitalism is entirely defeated, all nations are socialist, conflict is eliminated and material abundance is achieved, at which point states start to stop existing as the resources within them that are put towards repressing the bourgeoisie through violence are put towards other things when there is only 1 class in society.

          • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Capitalism is the state controlled by the capital owners with the workers repressed.

            Socialism is the state controlled by the workers with the capital owners repressed.

            They are literally hard opposites. One is a bourgeoise-state and the other is a proletarian-state.

            • dartos@reddthat.com
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              1 year ago

              I learned that “capitalism” is an economic system, not a system of government.

              So you could have a socialist state that funds essentials like healthcare and transportation through taxes with a market (capitalist) economy.

              • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                That’s not a socialist state. It’s a capitalist state with welfare. If the political structure of the state itself has not been reworked to put the workers in power what you’re describing is just a state where the bourgeoisie (who control power) have decided to do welfare, usually for their own benefit such as reducing revolutionary energy by providing the workers with concessions (the welfare state). That is social democracy.

                You do not have socialism without overthrowing the hierarchy that places the bourgeoisie as the ruling class:

                Capitalism = Capitalists in power. Proles repressed.

                Socialism = Proletariat in power. Capitalists repressed.

                Communism = No more classes, only 1 class because the bourgeoisie have been completely phased out.

                • wewbull@feddit.uk
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                  1 year ago

                  All of this sounds at odds with representative democracy. What political system would you see working with socialism as you describe it?

                  • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    Representative “democracy” alienates the common man from the political process while maintaining a semblance of democracy. For this reason it is the ideal political form for capitalism, an economic system which alienates power from the masses and concentrates it in the hands of a few.

                    Class interests are the primary axis on which all political activity turns. Getting the working class to vote does not help them, it helps those in power.

            • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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              1 year ago

              Capitalism is where everything is owned by an individual

              Socialism is where only the means of production are owned by the state, but the individual still has private properties

              Communism is where everything is owned by the state

              • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago
                You are impressingly wrong

                Socialism is when the government does stuff, and the more stuff the government does, the more socialist it is. If it does a whole lotta stuff it’s communism <- This is you, but unironically. Educate yourself on the subject of which you claim knowledge.

              • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                This is not correct, I encourage you to do some more reading about how coats are made if you’d like to understand this better.

      • space_comrade [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Yeah but capitalism also made reddit great

        Engineers and designers made it great. Reddit could very well exist without capitalism (see Lemmy). What fucked up Reddit was explicitly capitalist incentives.

        • dartos@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          Lemmy would not have existed without Reddit. Lemmy is a clone of reddit!

          Plus reddit put all the work intro attracting users and communities in the first place, before driving them to places like lemmy.

          • captcha [any]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            You should probably read up on the original author of reddit, Aaron Schwartz, before claiming capitalism made it.

            • dartos@reddthat.com
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              1 year ago

              I know about Aaron Schwartz. His beliefs didn’t change the fact that Reddit had major VC backing and wouldn’t have existed without it.

              It’s really not a hard concept to grasp.

                • dartos@reddthat.com
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                  1 year ago

                  Bruh, reddit was created in search of capital. It grew and attracted communities in search of capital.

                  Reddit wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

                  • captcha [any]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    Aaron Schwartz did not author reddit in search of capital. He created it because he thought it would facilitate internet communication. Ohanian thought he could profit off of it.

      • space_comrade [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Yes because people never communicated over the Internet before Glorious Visionary Entrepreneurs from the Great Private Sector took hold of it and gave us all these Valuable Products, they just sat on their ass wondering what to do with such technology like complete idiots.

        I swear free market ideology is the dumbest shit you can possibly believe in, I’d sooner become a fucking Mormon.

        • Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          How would you have communicated without someone owning a server and paying for it? Reddit and other centralized platforms emerged for some reason… You would have to literally make that illegal, i.e. make it illegal to host your own server and let users use it.

          You can’t just imagine some fantasy utopia, and compare that to the current system.

          • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            How would you have communicated without someone owning a server and paying for it?

            I’d probably have posted on one of the many voluntarily run forums that existed before reddit swallowed everything.
            How would you have communicated without the telemasts installed and maintained by the state, which are now privatized and slowly falling apart?

          • space_comrade [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            How would you have communicated without someone owning a server and paying for it?

            You do realize the Internet first started being used by universities and the military, not the private sector, right? I see literally no reason why Internet infrastructure couldn’t be publicly owned. It could function pretty much like any other public utility.

            • Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de
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              1 year ago

              And would it have grown into more than that? Into something that everyone, and not just military and scientists can use?

              • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                It did though? I don’t know what point you think you’re making but the internet did in fact grow from a technology limited to universities and the armed forces to a publicly accessible network, mostly off the back of publicly funded researchers and various techies that started their own neighborhood ISPs.

              • space_comrade [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                Why not?

                Sorry I just don’t buy into the ideology that the free market has this kind of “magic sauce” that makes everything innovative and better.

                The early Internet was filled of people doing all kinds of cool things for free just because it was interesting to do, the only thing the private sector did is provide the base infrastructure, this is something the state can easily do too. All kinds of communities, FOSS software and media popped up and none of them had VC funding or expected any money out of it.

                It was only in mid-late 2000 that capital really sank its teeth into the Internet properly.

    • Kidplayer_666@lemm.eeOP
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      1 year ago

      I left Reddit because of short term decisions to squeeze money out of consumers to look good in an IPO, instead of having an actual long term thought.

      • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        That’s capitalists doing things because they exist in a capitalist society. You’re describing capitalism congratulations

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        You left reddit because of capitalism. What is an IPO? It is the launch of a business onto the public capital markets to release equity and to enrich its existing owners. What do all businesses on the markets operate on? Short term growth for the next financial quarter optimised to enrich their investors (shareholders) in the shortest amount of time possible.

        Capitalism consistently destroys everything you enjoy and yet you defend it relentlessly while asking for long term thinking, which is not a feature of capitalism. When you wake up to this reality you might actually start to question “maybe the socialists are right about a few things” and spend some time with us learning what we actually believe.

        • Kidplayer_666@lemm.eeOP
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          1 year ago

          But you know what happened after Reddit turned to crap? Because no one actually has to use Reddit, because Reddit is just a bunch of bored nerds and Reddit is just a bunch of forums, eventually someone realised: “wait a minute, I can code this in a few weeks and make it way less crappy than most social media. And maybe if I make it all open, a whole ecosystem of social networks can grow together”. And when Reddit turned to crap, “the invisible hand” acted and people slowly started to migrate over to lemmy and other social media and now reddit is just a bunch of bots

          • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            A few weeks?

            Mate please check my profile. I have been here for 3 fucking years. Lemmy did not magically appear in a few weeks that is incredibly offensive to the sheer amount of work my comrades have put in to make it.

            And calling their work “the invisible hand of the market” is also nonsensical. Because the forces driving its creation, and the rest of us communists that support it, are the destruction of the markets. There is not one single jot of profit motive involved in Lemmy. You seem to recognise some of the problems of capitalism but consistently come to incorrect conclusions about everything because you have spent no time whatsoever getting a real political education and understanding the forces at work.

            And you fail to ask yourself what happens to your “market forces” alternative to reddit. In any scenario where the market is responsible for replacing reddit the market will also bring it back to exactly the same point of self-destruction through pursuit of capital. You will hurt yourself all over again.