In September, the Liberal party of Canada introduced a bill meant to raise the portion of capital gains on which companies pay tax to two-thirds from one-half. The policy would also apply to individuals with capital gains earnings above $250,000.
This was met by obvious pushback from the Canadian tech industry as it makes it even less enticing to start a business or give venture funding within Canada.
Despite the current prorogation, the finance department says the CRA will go ahead and enact this change despite the bill ever going through parliament.
It's pretty scary that the government can implement new laws like this without it ever going through the democratic process of parliament.
Does anyone know the numbers in layman's terms regarding the demand for compute and what our systems/chips are able to reasonably process with this new tech?
I'm curious if the technology is now vastly out preforming the demand here or if the demand for compute is outpacing the tech.
I think the issue with Patreon, and a lot of similar services is that they are too focused on the "creator > consumer" relationship. I think the biggest value that a content creator is creating is acting as a beacon that people can rally behind regarding a specific niche and facilitating "consumer > consumer". Their biggest value add is as a curator. It's often difficult, especially for smaller niches to find a dedicated community around it if not for a content creator creating content and promoting it. In many cases, a content creator becomes synonymous with the niche.
I've been working on a platform called Sociables (https://www.sociables.com/) that gives content creators a place to offer their community as a part of their product offering. The difference between Patreon is it is much more focused on allowing creators to set up a place for their community to interact with each other instead of the more para-social style relationship seen on Patreon.
Most Patreons I've seen use discord to fill that specific social gap, but I've always found it a little odd that they didn't try to fill that niche themselves.
Part of the reason Discord falls short as a social platform is that each community is siloed off from the rest. There is no continuity bridging the overarching platform and userbase. I feel like for a social platform to work, the platform itself should be a community and the users should be able to carve out their own slice within that.
I've been working on a platform that blends social features from Discord with the discoverability of Reddit. What we're building is intentionally not just another Reddit or Discord clone. We're trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts/chat messages.
What if I specifically like the fact that the communities are siloed on Discord?
I don't want people from other circles accidentally ending up on my community just because they were bored and were browsing. I don't want my Discord server ending up on the results of some global search either.
I think what's equally as important as the archiving is the aggregating of the information. It's one thing to have a story, or piece of content documented somewhere, but at the end of the day, people still need ways to find it.
I think that's where social, discussion based platforms come in. I'm a huge hip-hop fan and have been running a page dedicated to giving people a space to discuss and share all things hip-hop.
This law is a link tax. It means the government wants Meta and Google to pay every single time a link to a Canadian news source is shared on their platform (from what I understand, including even in private messages to friends). As far as I'm aware, it will also apply to Google in that they will also need to pay to index/show links to Canadian news in their search results like you described.
Will be curious to see how this comment ages in a year.
I'm of the view that it's Google and Meta that are in trouble here. If they don't want to pay for quality news sources their content continues to noticeably degrade and become less attractive for use. They're likely trying to play hard ball with Canada and Australia because the markets are comparatively small. If the EU or the US see merit in this approach the tech companies are really going to struggle.
Facebook without news content will become more attractive, not less. It was a mistake for them to emphasize news content in the first place; while it might have driven a temporary increase in user engagement it devalued the product as a social network.
The news sites already tried it Google's way for more than a decade, and it isn't working for them. It only works for Google.
As someone clearly entrenched in the tech echo chamber, it will come as a surprise for you to learn that there are many news organizations that do not give their content away for free on the internet.
Some have paywalls. Some require paid apps. Some are -shudder- only available as dead trees.
Many of them are thriving.
My wife pays upwards of $2,000/year for a publication that is not available in any form on the internet. It has offices and reporters in a dozen cities around the world, and continues to grow.
It, and others like it, don't need to suckle at the teat of Google for pennies.
People in support of this need to consider how this type of legislation affects the integrity of the internet.
This bill is not about supporting independent media like they claim. This is first and foremost a link tax, and the result of it is damaging to free press. Independent media sources depend on traffic from social media platforms to function. They themselves are often the ones sharing the links to their own content to drive traffic and readership from in which they monetize through ads. Furthermore, many of these local publishers leverage their social media following to share content on behalf of other local businesses through sponsored articles and posts. The Canadian government playing strong man here when repeatedly warned of the outcome is putting independent media companies in serious jeopardy of remaining solvent.
Meta and Google are in the right here, and I hope they continue to stand their ground. If they cave on this issue, it sets a terrible precedent that jeopardizes the health of the internet as we know it. Companies should not have to pay the source whenever a link is shared on their platforms. It's just backwards.
If you are talking about situations where they are scraping and displaying the contents of an article, that is a different issue, and seemingly not one that is the primary target of this bill.
Newspapers existed before social media. They will exist after social media deplatforms them. Big Tech should not be able to hold the integrity of the Internet hostage.
Spanish newspapers tried this. They failed miserably.
Don't let your dislike for social media blind you from the reality that the world has changed, for the majority of the people in the world. People will spend their free time on these sites/apps, whether or not they have news.
The old local news model is dead. Niche sites like the WSJ, FT, NYT can survive with paid subscriptions, the rest have to find a different business model. This is not a conspiracy by Big Tech or billionaires, as much as we might want to find someone to blame. It's a structural change in the ether of society, information and distribution. Anything with near zero marginal costs of distribution needs is now in competition with the whole world, and unless they have something unique that people are willing to pay for, their days are numbered.
News, even if it's only headlines, has value. Google knows this. If the news headlines had no value, Google wouldn't have launched Google News in the first place.
Try scraping Google's content as a trillion-dollar company and see how long that lasts.
I'm not sure the wedge created between many of the communities and the platform is repairable at this stage without extended displays of good will from Reddit's side.
Lots of communities have started the process of migrating to different platforms. The federated alternatives like Lemmy have had recent success although I question the complexity of it in terms of getting mass adoption. Most of the alternatives seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost the community aspect of Reddit is what makes it appealing.
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just another Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts.
> In fact, some of the communities that closed down in response to the API changes explicitly shifted to Discord.
While Discord does some things right in the community platform space, I don't think its a suitable replacement for Reddit. One of the biggest issues with Discord is how the content posted into a community is lost into the abyss. The discoverability of content on the platform is basically non existent.
Lots of the Reddit alternatives, including Discord, seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost it's the community aspect of Reddit that makes it appealing.
I've been working on a community platform called Sociables that combines the feature set of Discord with the discussion boards and discoverability of Reddit. It's like a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid where the posts are search engine indexable. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform as it feels like the people curating the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.
>One of the biggest issues with Discord is how the content posted into a community is lost into the abyss.
This is something Discord could fix by adding functionality. They've solved the base problem - they have the users. The overlap of Reddit users and Discord users is huge. You need a Discord account these days even if you aren't into gaming or "socializing" on the internet - most programming projects use it instead of IRC or Slack now.
Discord is also in a better position re:IPO/profitability.
That's why when people kept saying "there's nowhere for people to go" I thought Discord would be the perfect choice. If they're willing to capitalize on the opportunity they absolutely could swoop in and start eating Reddit's lunch.
> Lots of the Reddit alternatives, including Discord, seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost it's the community aspect of Reddit that makes it appealing.
Lemmy has this aspect nailed down. Reddit is not special in that regard. Reddit was special in the way it presented itself as a community driven service that was easy to join. Once you get rid of the community aspect, which Reddit's CEO did with his persecution of anyone who protested against his decision, then alternatives such as Lemmy jump ahead as the best option out there for community driven service.
Your site doesn't accept .me emails. When making early-stage design decisions might be a good idea to priotize minimizing friction for new users, even edge case ones.
Reddit's disregard for the stewards and curators from which it derives its value from was strange to see. It doesn't seem wise for them to go to war with the people creating and managing the communities that provide the very backbone for which their entire platform is based on. The recent sequence of events has opened the door for allowing alternative platforms to surface.
Shameless plug, but I've been working on a platform called Sociables that focuses on providing a place for people to create communities instead of just posts. It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them under one umbrella. One key aspect is we have optional non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owner.
This was met by obvious pushback from the Canadian tech industry as it makes it even less enticing to start a business or give venture funding within Canada.
Despite the current prorogation, the finance department says the CRA will go ahead and enact this change despite the bill ever going through parliament.
It's pretty scary that the government can implement new laws like this without it ever going through the democratic process of parliament.