They probably can already see that. It doesn't take much to start an instance.

You can

The key is that executives don't really matter that much. The company isn't going to lose our on money of the CEO has diarrhea. The vast majority of work is done by the employees. Unfortunately, employees of the company can't just decide to give themselves bonuses and shit like the board can.

The issue is that I often don't want to comment and engage with some of the psychos that show up on the internet. Downvotes are a passive way to help move hateful/ignorant comments to the bottom of the thread. Having downvotes publicly accessible is giving these psychos a way to directly engage back with you.

I've been harassed across subreddits before by one person because I disagreed with them on something. You can block them but all the sudden they pop up on another account. Some people are just crazy.

I think the issue is just that having votes publicly accessible can lead to harassment. Sometimes I want to downvote bigots or idiots and not want the possibility of them engaging with me.

It sucks because journalists do need to make money to continue reporting. Spamming sites with ads is bad for the reader's experience too. Not totally sure what the solution is.

I disagree. The obscure subs is what I really loved about reddit. Subreddits based on niche hobbies have a much wider userbase from reddit to pull from while you won't have nearly as many people over here. Overall I'm looking forward to seeing Lemmy grow some more but I think lacking active discussion in some of the more niche communities will make it a little more boring for me than reddit was.

Making a website to host AMAs would be an enormous amount of work. Even if they retained their userbase, the costs of hosting a site that wouldn't crash would be significant. If they don't retain their userbase, it ruins the entire reason who many notable people do AMAs which is to advertise whatever they're doing. To make a profit, they would need to monetize it too somehow.

I mean third party apps have had over a decade more time to get polished in comparison to the Lemmy options. I'm not really optimistic that Lemmy is a true competitor to reddit. While I, personally, no longer want to support reddit, only a tiny fraction of reddit's user base has made the switch to Lemmy, and if you go over to reddit right now, not much has changed. Posts are still getting orders of magnitude more interactions than posts here. Some mods will leave but people will eagerly replace them. I also think Lemmy is inherently a little difficult to understand. I'm pretty tech savvy and I had issues figuring it out. The average user is going to struggle a lot which is bad for becoming more widespread.

The issue with Yang is that he's proposing cutting other social safety nets and replacing them with UBI which would put a lot of people in worse situations. UBI would be great but we also need robust social programs.

Exactly lol. Also the swiping on comments and posts to upvote, save, reply, etc behaves differently. I find myself accidentally downloading posts when I'm just scrolling.