Nah, they’ll just fix the excess inventory with another contest! It worked really well last time!

We really need to do this. Leave them to their own devices and let them reap the results of their politics instead of shielding them.

Right! Even where you can monetize your hobby, if you’re not in it for the sake of your own personal passion, what’s the point?

Great art comes from passion and artistic integrity, not from trying to slap together some garbage to make a buck. If you happen to make money in the process, awesome, but if that’s your whole motivation it’s going to come across in your work and put a bit of a stink on the whole endeavor.

There’s a world of difference between art being enabled by commerce and art being created for the money. The second is self-defeating.

It really does sometimes seem like a lot of people just go through life working and killing time. There are definitely people living their lives for themselves, but I think it’s a pretty foreign concept for some folks who’ve bought heavily into a commerce-focused culture.

This right here. Honestly, if we’re taking the time to hop platforms and start bolstering the next wave of popular sites and services, why make the same mistake again as the last time around?

No matter how much a company talks about how ethical they want to be or how much they value doing the right thing for their clients, once money enters the picture on a wider scale and people start looking in the direction of an eventual IPO, everything goes to shit.

Meanwhile, IRC is still working just fine. No degradation of services after decades. You can still throw your own ircd up on a $3/mo VPS and be golden.

Moving everything to open source, decentralized platforms can only be a boon for all of us in the long run. Anything less is just kicking the problem down the road a little.