As warned, Reddit has taken a bundle of money from "Open"AI and will use it to further monetize what you -- and the volunteers who moderate it all -- contributed for free.

It's the norm now, and particularly slimy in this case.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/16/24158529/reddit-openai-chatgpt-api-access-advertising

As a former librarian I wish a very friendly Fuck You and Die to book publishers. They are the scum of the Earth.

They hate libraries. Did you know that they induce artificial scarcity by making libraries pay for each digital copy of a book? Despite ebooks being infinitely replicable, they make libraries pay for more than one copy at a time. Publishers deliberately force a limit on the supply of digital library books to extort more money out of libraries for popular titles.

In addition, publishers lobbied (in the UK) to make library ebooks only work through their apps on mobile and PC, and not compatible with any Kindle/Kobo/etc so people wouldn’t get a good experience. There is a cartel — made primarily of a company called Overdrive. Their app is absolute buggy dogshit. A far cry from the breezy and simple interface of an e-reader.

But it gets worse. Original proposals from the publishers wanted it so that service users could only download ebooks while physically in the library, thus negating the convenience of them!

Despite ebooks being cheaper to produce than a traditional book and infinitely reproducable, Overdrive will sometimes charge more for an ebook than a supplier would charge for the equivalent copy.

Publishers would have lobbied against the invention of public libraries if they could. And take it from me — public libraries are one of the few open spaces left on this planet where one can just exist at without needing to pay for anything.

A new study shows a whopping 87% of games released prior to 2010 are no longer available for sale or download by any means other than the second-hand market and archival/"piracy": http://gamehistory.org/87percent/

Proof if you ever needed it that the community is doing the work that corporate interests won't do to preserve gaming history and the slice of culture it represents.

We are living in an age when it is so astonishingly cheap to keep copies of things around and yet the perverse incentives exist for companies to memory-hole anything that doesn't perform well or that might compete with newer offerings.

IMO, in the big picture this is what legislation is for, correcting a horrible tendency that the market will have if left to its own devices, and there should absolutely be legislation protecting archivists of content that's no longer available for sale, or even requiring that content creation companies keep content available in SOME form. Until then, we depend on each other to do this.