• diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
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    12 hours ago

    Do you have a spec of evidence for this supposed “circling money around”?

    I recall there being an extremely specific Wikipedia article but I couldn’t find it, unfortunately, but it was political theory. Instead see: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_capital

    In general, there are a few greedy friends who own Microsoft, AMD and so on and so forth. Each worker in the chain does their thing, produces something, gets a paycheck (usually) smaller than the worth of what was produced and then all of the differences add up so that the people up top may buy another yacht. When they do that a similar thing happens but that’s not relevant. It may seem they only take a little, but together the difference is like 1 to 360. Imagine 1/360th of a pizza, like one metric degree of a circle. There was a meme about that around Lemmy somewhere.

    Anyways, the stuff they have is called capital. They want more. One way to achieve that would be to have more people be aware of their products (because selling analytics…), so they look online (actually just hire someone who will hire someone else to look online but that’s not relevant) for ways to do that. They find a non-profit, then they offer to give a little bit of this amazing shiny capital but ONLY if they put up a logo or something. Cool, they now have some guarantee that people will see their “good” and use the stuff. Now, inside of the non-profit (ahem), they need themselves to advertise to fulfill some of the goals of the partnership. To do that, they buy themselves some symbolic capital in the form of the influencers. They go hi, I am person X, therefore you should like and subscribe. Nerds go cheering, and go to the non-profit, then see that and go to for-profit aiding them to make money, therefore making a circle. Meanwhile the influencers themselves end up using the stuff by the for-profit as well and make a circle themselves.


    My bad if true on Jabrils. I did speak to him when I was bored, his take was that “well I was just asked to be there by open sauce lol, I will see though”, and he wasn’t there so I naively assumed it was related, but I guess not.

    • carlisle@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      12 hours ago

      I don’t disagree that that happens in our world, but Hack Club really isn’t advertising products like you insinuate. And I really don’t see how simply accepting a sponsorship is inherently evil. By that logic, do you also think that open source projects like KDE Plasma, GNOME (both sponsored by Google, Canonical etc), Fedora (sponsored by red hat) etc are also bad because they’ve accepted sponsorships from giant tech companies?

      • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
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        12 hours ago

        Yes, I plan on moving to BSD. I don’t use Plasma anymore.

        Talk a bit on Lemmy, join a few communities, engage in comments. There’s no algorithm which will only show you stuff you like, only defederation lists and instance rules. Come back in a month and see if your opinion changed.