Adderbox76

Welp...I know what I'm doing tonight.

So I never really got into the Watchmen show that aired for a season on Amazon. Bear with me; I'm going somewhere with this...

If anyone remembers that show, there are two scenes that always stuck with me. One was of course the Tulsa massacre. I had never heard of it and it was just chilling to me. That's a whole other discussion, but it's not the scene that directly applies here.

The other scene is (IIRC) literally the first scene of the show, where the cop is at a traffic stop, he gets the persons information and goes back to his car to run it. It comes out that there's something sketchy about the guy (I don't remember what), and he has to call in to a civilian observer explaining the situation and asking them to unlock his gun if they decide that it's warranted...

Anyway, that idea (regardless of how feasible it may or may not be in reality) has been literally burned into my brain from two minutes of a show that I remember literally nothing else about.

Because a substantial number of cops are hyper aggressive, insecure pricks who operate mostly above the law, and very rarely face any meaningful consequences.

Which, I will always maintain, is the reason they wanted to become cops in the first place.

The old adage/belief that you have to respect a cops authority implicitly just because they're a cop gives people like this the shortcut to power that they can't get elsewhere because they're too stupid to become doctors or lawyers.

"I can earn respect through hard work. Or I can go to a basic police academy course for six weeks, walk out with a badge and a gun, and people have to respect my authority"

Cops are essentially Cartman from Southpark screaming about "Respectin' my authoritah".

Yeah...this is humour. But it's exactly what's going to go down.

If Harris wins, Trump will call it illegal because she wasn't the original nominee. He'll take it all the way to the supreme court and they'll rule in his favour.

At that point, the people say you have one president. The supreme court will say you have a different president. So when the time comes to call in the national guard to protect the government...which one do they protect?

I hate to be the doom-crier in the room; but I seriously see this happening.

MAGOMLA - Make America Get Off My Lawn Again

Mental illnesses are real. But the construct of “mental illness” isn’t. There is no such thing as an “illness” that is completely psychological in nature, ie. only “caused by thoughts and behaviours”.

I don't think any reputable person believes that mental illness is just "in the mind". Of course there's a physical aspect to it, there's literally a physical aspect to everything about us.

There is no "soul", or some ephemeral "something" that makes us us. Our memories are nothing more than synapses making connections to each other. Our emotions are a series of biochemical and hormonal reactions as a response to stimuli from other people and our environment. There is no part of being human that isn't physiological, including mental illness.

They were perfectly willing to support and spread the hate right up until it personally affected them.

Hate to break it to you. But that's not a republican trait. That's a human trait.

It's why you'll sooner donate to support the hospital stay of a person in your hometown than you would to a earthquake in zimbabwe. It's the reason we don't sit in a corner catatonic with grief at every little thing that happens in the world. Proximity bias is necessary. While it's not meant to replace empathy, pretending that these people are somehow shittier than every other human in nature just perpetuates a hate cycle that keeps us where we're at.

They didn't believe in Trans people. Than their grandkid came out and they changed their mind. But it's disingenuous to say 'Oh...now that it affects them.'

What's more likely is, being actually personally exposed to something forces you to re-contextualize your beliefs. That's not a bad thing and it's not to be derided.

Well....that's certainly a sentence I read today that I didn't think I would.

Sure she has a chance. I don't think we'll really know how good of a chance until a little further down the road. But as a non-american, I'm optimistic.

Could she screw it up with a bad running mate. Of course. That's politics and voters are fickle weirdos at the best of times. Hell, we're living in a age where half the voters of your country are wearing maxi-pads on the side of their heads and have pledged their allegiance to a diaper wearing 34 time felon with dementia. Fickle weirdos is the nice way of putting it.

When you're dealing with curve-balls of that magnitude, not even Nate Silver could predict her chances this early on.

Sure. Absolutely.

But that's not what this thread is about and that isn't what I was replying to. If you want to start a thread saying "Why PeerTube doesn't need to grow to be a great place." knock yourself out. I agree with you.

But this thread specifically is about, and I quote..

...possibly even becoming a serious alternative to YouTube?

And for that, you need monetization.

Stay on topic.

Nothing is wrong with that at all. But you're never going to get enough content to increase your total subscriber base as long as your creators have to spend most of their time working other jobs.

Content, monetization, and ubiquity.

1. Content: PT skews heavily into Linux and Linux adjacent topics. And that's fine, but when I say I watch more YT than regular TV, I'm not kidding. And its because of the diversity and variety of channels. Things like History Hit or Every Frame a Painting, and silly shit like Red Letter Media. YouTube isn't just "let's plays" and game streaming. So Peertube can't be "Just Linux"

2. Monetization: Creators have to get paid. That's just reality. It would be a fine world if everyone could spend hours doing their passion for free and not have to worry about deeding themselves. If you want #1, you need a certain amount if full time creators, and for that they need to get paid.

3. Ubiquity: Watching more YouTube than regular TV, I don't want to sit in front of my computer to do it. We need to be able to access it from smart TVs, ROKU sticks, etc... And not just a port of the website that requires a mouse and keyboard, but something optimized to work with smart TV remote controls.

The issue with the Fediverse (not that I don't love the fediverse, I do) is that all of those three things require large scale framework and organisational planning; which is the antithesis to what the Fediverse is all about.

Tl;Dr -- Large scale success of PeerTube as a thing is largely impossible without abandoning the concept of federation itself.