@MikeElgan

Aka, paying the Danegeld.

The ad broker industry has a vested interest to promote this thinking.

It is better to move than pay.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danegeld

#Danegeld #Ads

If you don't pay the #danegeld, your product will be pushed down by the inferior products whose sellers are only too happy to pay ransom.

It's a system where everybody loses - except monopoly ecommerce platforms, who enshittify everything and rake it in.

14/

Then, it stopped showing publishers' content to their own subscribers, extorting them to pay to "boost" their posts in order to reach people who had explicitly asked to hear from them.

For users, this meant that their feeds were increasingly populated with payola-boosted content from advertisers and pay-to-play publishers who paid Facebook's #Danegeld to reach them.

13/

Every merchant you patronize has to charge more - or reduce quality, or both - in order to pay this #Danegeld to two of the largest, most profitable companies in the world. Visa/Mastercard have hiked their fees by *40 percent* since the pandemic's start. Forty. Fucking. *Percent*. Tell me again how #greedflation isn't real?

15/

@sinboy @JamesGleick
It is always a frustration in a sharp-divided nation
To hear the House’s Speaker up and say:
“We retook the House last year, and we find our debt too dear,
But we can’t agree on which parts not to pay.”

And that’s ’cause the Speaker’s been gelded,
And the people who did it explain
That without all the parts he once held, it
Is hopeless to keep them in rein!

#Kipling #Danegeld #USpolitics