Ublock Origin does not work on my main browser Librewolf (based on Firefox, runs on linux) - its currently disabled (last time I checked was last week) as are all ad-blockers on Mozilla add-ons page. On android stuff I use Vivaldi browser (based on chromium?). I add vpn, use dns redirects, and similar stuff to anonymise/block ads and trackers. Usually stops this kinda thing but occasionally something gets through like this Guardian pop-up.

Nope. That is not the issue.

In UK, media is struggling to raise enough revenue from either ads or subscriptions. Many MSM titles have introduced a paywall where users are forced to fund the service by either commiting to a subscription or turning off ad-bkockers and seeing ads. In contrast, Guardian’s ‘unique selling point’ was that it would ‘never’ do this which was why people should prefer it to other news sources. Then, without acknowledging what it was doing, Guardian quietly introduced the same paywall as everyone it had criticised. My complaint is not about funding a service but about the hypocrisy of a service saying ‘I would never do that’ and then quietly doing it.

Moreover, this change is not consistent - you do not always see this paywall when visiting the Guardian. This paywall seems to be in ‘trial’ stage where Guardian is testing to see how much push-back they get from users. We either push-back or Guardian goes same way as rest of British MSM. That would be an irreversible loss. I think what Guardian is doing is not help its own survival long-term.

I see no difference between Guardian strategy and changes in other media (YouTube or Netflix, for example), where the owners are struggling to generate as much revenue as they expect (as they used to do). Instead of asking why their content is not popular, or why users are leaving/using ways to by-pass ads or subscriptions, they just try to squeeze out as much revenue as they can from those still willing to pay subs or see ads, while their once reliable ‘goose who lays golden eggs’ slowly stops laying. I say Guardian deserves to die if it does not keep track of what readers want and it is only ensuring its own death by trying to cash in on the remaining goodwill of a dwindling readership instead of attracting readers back or reaching out to new readers.

They are going up a cul-de-sac and it has no good end for Guardian. I cannot save them from themselves so I just have to find alternatives which are better at this than the parts of the industry that are dying out.

Aljazeera is good. I once read CSM and thought it surprisingly good, not what I expected from the title, but that was around 1980s - have never seen it in recent years!

Cheers!

I am guessing that it is (1) news outlets get main income from advertisers (2) advertisers pay ‘per view’ (3) news outlets create ‘clickbait’ stories to get lots of views (4) £millions changes hands via clickbait (5) clickbait uses crude emotion to hook engagement so evoking fear, envy, anger, lust, pity etc are what ‘news’ is about, not in-depth nuanced reports based on facts, arguments, reason, truth and other relatively unemotional stuff. You can do ‘hot takes’ or you can do investigative journalism. Britain used to be global leader on high quality journalism. Now we just churn out mindless, emotionally manipulative, ‘soap opera’ crud.

WW2.

My dad was RAF. From age 18, he flew from Italy, across Yugoslavia to bomb Romanian oil fields - an essential campaign in order to deny Hitler fuel/win the European war. There were very high Allied casualties. To facilitate a safe air route to Romania, Allies bombed Yugoslav territory including what is now called Albania to knock out anti-aircraft guns, intelligence/radar/communications centres, and military HQs . My dad crashed three times in his war career. (1) a few minutes after take-off, engine failure, plane written off, minor injuries but crew all survived (2) shot down over enemy territory, plane split in half, three crewmen survived including my dad - scratches but no serious injuries, everyone else died, the survivors were found by Yugoslav resistance fighters and smuggled back to Allies in Italy (3) shot down over enemy territory, plane smashed into mountainside, everyone died except my dad, trapped in burning wreckage, he crawled free, was badly burnt on hands and face (everywhere not covered by flying suit), Yugoslav resistance found him, smuggled him onto a ship, he arrived at a hospital in Cairo, Egypt where he was given plastic surgery by an expect on a visit from UK - there to train others in new techniques. Dad was invalided home. Was arrested as a suspected spy because his face no longer matched his official photograph. Was placed in prison until he was vouched for by his parents, parish priest, and former headmaster. He was all of 19 when invalided out of active duty. There were hundreds of boys with similar stories to his. Thousands who died and never even had a grave.

British needed help from Yugoslavia (specifically from Tito’s communists) in order to beat Hitler and his allies (the Balkan fascists, monarchists, nationalists, the Bulgarian fascists, the Romanian fascists). We made treaties and agreements. We cannot just conveniently forget these debts because time has passed. We British would not be here, enjoying our freedoms, without Yugoslav help. My mam’s family were Jewish, if Hitler had won, she’d have died in a camp. I would never have existed. Britain owes a big debt. I owe a big debt.

There is a much longer historic link. British have interferred in Balkan politics from at least time of Lord Byron and the Greek struggle to leave Ottoman Empire, mid-C19th. We relied on their help to beat Napoleon. We British have long historic links to these places and people. We went there, they have a right to come here. Just like the places our empire colonised are forever tied to use by history, so are the places we were once depending on for our survival. The people forced to be British citizens in the past, have a moral right to come here if they wish. The people who saved us through military alliances, have a right to our hospitality. The only Albanians I would keep out are the people who were then, and still are, our enemies - the Albanian nazis and their criminal gangs. But same goes for Americans, Indians, ANZAC, Chinese - all the allies who fought side by side with us in WW1 and WW2 - all are welcome except the scum who never helped us and never would in a future struggle.

Educate yourself about our history!

Well said!

Mainstream news media (MSM) do not. I opted out of MSM years ago because they filter the news and misinform. Now, if I go to their sites or see a printed newspaper I only do the crosswords or look at the cartoons - NEVER, EVER read readers’ comments or you’ll go mad!

One podcast I enjoy is Media Storm - two young British women doing good, old-fashioned ‘investigative journalism’. They cover the boat migrants stories very well indeed and never repeat dehumanising slanders against them. I use Android apps like ‘Antenna Pod’ (downloaded free from f-droid). It gives free access but sometimes you will hear adverts. I always use my vpn to locate myself in Japan or Cambodia i.e. a country where I cannot understand the language so that if I get ads they are incomprehensible or actually intetesting because from another culture.

I want to recommend the USA ‘Cool Zone Media’ podcasts too - they do a number of different podcasts. I especially enjoy ‘Better Off Line’, ‘Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff’ and ‘Behind the Bastards’. Some of it discusses current affairs like political takes on migration, other programmes focus on history because this stuff is not new and we can learn lessons from reviewing what happened the last time we scapegoated ‘migrants’.

All of these podcasters are creating educational, informative content and are often very funny (although sometimes the jokes are a bit off-colour so might not be everyone’s cuppa tea - makes me chuckly 99% of the time).

What is HEMA?

Watching the birds on the bird-feeders in the garden. I get a good mix of finches and their colours are great - not up there with tropical parrots or exotic waterfowl but still a joy to see.

I support a British charity called something like ‘Save Our Songbirds’ - £25 a year. It’s money well spent. Also, Sainsburys let you order foods for wildbirds and get them delivered with your groceries so that’s handy - keeps my ‘wild pets’ happy, keeps me happy :-)

I always have a jar in the pantry but I rarely eat it these days. When I want the meaty taste but meat-free hit, I prefer miso.

My main way of eating marmite was on buttered toast. But I switched from vegetarian to vegan about 20 years ago and never found a way to replace cow butter and get the same dopamine rush.

I recently discovered Lurpak vegan spread which is almost edible. In general, I hate all margerine - yuk! - but this product is not too offensive. Haven’t tried it on toast with marmite yet as I do not want to be disappointed.

One great way to eat marmite is on spagghetti - cook pasta as normal, meanwhile heat a bit of butter in a pan until melted, add dollop of marmite and a bit of boiling water, let it simmer until it emulsifies. Drain cooked pasta, pour on marmite sauce, stir, serve. Very tasty (and cheap!) I still do this after going vegan but use extra virgin olive oil instead of butter - you can get some very mild olive oil that tastes very buttery - ‘gordo’ olives are the type I mean (avoid the strong oils like Italian Tuscan). Be careful and taste the oil first - some ‘mild’ olives are so sweet they taste like strawberry jam which wont go well with marmite I imagine!

I would subscribe. Not well enough to be a mod though. I just posted on this topic in another lemmy community. I don’t want to repeat myself. I am new user - don’t know how to link to my earlier posts. I guess if you search my comments from yesterday/earlier today you’ll see it?

My interest is both practical, political/activist, and academic/theoretical so happy to connect with anyone who shares these various interests.

My disabilities are mental, sensory, and physical. Some are life-long, some developed as I aged. My sense of myself as ‘disabled’ has ebbed and flowed depending on how well I am coping/how others treat me. If you shook me awake from a deep sleep and asked me ‘are you disabled?’ I would probably say no. But every day I have serious health problems and get stumped by accessibility barriers so in reality I am disabled but I cannot see myself that way. It’s weird. It’s like my ‘felt identity’ does not match my actual life. I suspect ‘internalised ableism’ and I think I need ‘woke disability’ to fix this mismatch but buggered if I know how to do this. I get inspired by others’ struggles e.g. people fighting racism or transphobia because I think there is a shared ‘alienated from my own self’ experience behind these struggles. And those attacking ‘woke’ and ‘DEI’ and ‘human rights’ are persecuting us all, dehumanising us all, and pushing whatever it is that is keeping us from being our authentic selves. Starmer cutting disability benefits as an ‘easy target’ is just weaponising this enforced inequality. It’s a complex oppression so it needs sophisticated resistance - this will not go away by rattling cans/fund-raising to set up a community centre or whatever. Nor will a protest with placards outside Number 10 fix it. The problem is systemic so it requires systemic change. Sadly, it’s not going to be a quick or easy fix!

My two-penn’oth. If that sounds like stuff you care about, that makes two of us, and we have the start of a community. Let’s see if others come along too :-)

I am a new lemmy user. I am also feeling a bit lost and noticing there are gaps in the fediverse. I assume if a resource does not exist, I need to create it but I am not able to be a mod of a new community, too ill to volunteer the hours as I cannot predict my health beyond a day or so. So, it seems I need to first find a potential community by posting in general communities like this one, find others interested in making a community (including volunteers willing to mod the community), then together we make a community. I am willing to help create a community on disability/accessibility with you if you are interested?

I have disabilities (mainly communication but also mobility) and accessility issues (cannot talk or use a telephone, house-bound) my problems crop up mainly in offline life but sometimes online. I would like to help create a place where people can (1) describe accessibility problems (2) describe solutions they found (3) describe how they challenged the ableism behind accessibility problems, who supported them, and what push-back they experienced and (4) work out an effective politics for empowering disabled and making access a government priority. I’d like to welcome participation from anyone, anywhere, not have content limited to a specific nationality/language or first world (depending on having mods that can work in different languages - perhaps something to aim for down the road if there is enough participation?)

I am also interested in history of disability and access - I attach a photo of a dish I own. Bought for £5 from eBay. It is from late C18th/early C19th, about 200 years old. The porcelein body was created in China and imported to Europe and reflects both cultures in a complex intersection I cannot fully comprehend. The decoration uses western ‘transfer’ technology and eastern hand-applied colouring. It shows a family group in a garden including an elderly lady in a wheeled-chair. I am intrigued by this object/image because I cannot work out if this is a Chinese representation of a European disability aid, or a European representation of a Chinese disability aid or a cross-over hybridisation of both. I collect ceramics and never saw this design before. I wonder how common it was to put disabled people on crockery intended for an internation trade mass market. I wonder if this decoration was accepted because the disabled person was ‘exotic’ and it was ‘Chinese ethnicity’ that was being consumed by western buyers and they did not see the ‘disability’, or if they were focused on the ‘disability’ in the image and overlooked ethnicity, or if the mix of novelty, exoticism, orientalism, eroticism, gender, ethnicity, racism, disability and loads of other stuff was in the relationship people had to each other and symbolised in making, trading or owning this curious object and it was never easy to pin down its ‘meaning’ for anyone, at any time, in any culture. I sense there is an academic paper waiting to be written about this. I welcome discussion on such ‘high brow’ topics. Maybe I need to help create two new communities - one for ‘activism’ and another for ‘cultural studies / woke disability studies’?

In my head Discord = toxicity. Not sure how it got that rep for me but it has gotten it. Thus, wont lose sleep if it dies out. Perhaps I am wrong. Reviewing rationality of this prejudice is on my ToDo List after a million other things…

And someone (on the Far-Right) is always trying to buy Wikipedia, monetise it, X-ify it, or take it down. I think Wikipedia is abusive - exploits volunteer unpaid labour - should have been created by an NGO like UN and kept safe for mankind like our Library of Alexandria. But it is what it is. Preppers download the whole site regularly in order to have that knowledge under their control in case is ever gets taken down or spoilt and they are rebuilding civilisation post-Armageddon. I keep meaning to download it myself (note to self: do that soon you lazy b. no more excuses!)

XDA forum was that for me. Great place to start and then follow links or do more research using the keywords used in the discussions. Just helpful for things like learning if a kernel is potentially fixable or not before buying a second-hand device for a custom rom project. The new look / reorganisation of stuff annoys me though as I find it harder to find stuff than it used to be but that’s because I am using it on autopilot. I guess new users might find it attractive / easy to navigate?

Discord was never ‘user-friendly’. It always gave me nerd, incel, neurodiverse, or weirdo vibes so not something I would miss much although I probably qualify as nerd, neurodiverse, and weirdo (but not incel, never that).

Yup. I loved Mastodon when it was niche. Then people wanted out of Twitter when Musk bought it. A lot turned up on my Mastodon and it turned to shit fast - they did not know how to communicate normally. It was all junk postings for likes, as if they could game algorithms to be popular and then monetise it. They did not know how to just share stuff for its own sake instead of as a product. I still have my Mastodon account but I never use it. Now Bluesky is drawing these people, maybe Mastodon is pleasant again - it is like living in a tourism hotspot, during tourist season life is shit but its great in the off-season.

Capitalism is the problem, not social media per se. And when capitalism infects stuff, I move on. That is not a new problem. Every innovation in modernity gets appropriated by capitalism (capitalists even claim that capitalism invented it but often they do not invent, they only commercially exploit something and conflate ‘marketing a product’ with ‘inventing a technology’). To stop this appropriation, you need laws and regulations, and enforcement to see the rules are kept. That means governments pushing back on predatory capitalism. EU is starting to do this. UK is not. Not sure about other countries around globe. It feels like governments are decades overdue in defending society from these parasites but better late than never?

I use the Stealth app downloaded from f-droid. You log in to read Reddit but without a Reddit account so you cannot post (not that I ever want to). I like Reddit for community answers e.g. how to fix stuff like a broken household appliance, advice about a glitch in software, useful things like that. I prefer it to YouTube (which I access via Clipious or similar apps, also on f-droid) unless I need to see a job done to understand the repair method. I enjoy some of the jokes and memes and nonsense posts so its cheap entertainment. And, to be honest, I learn a lot about relationship skills by the AITA or TwoXChromosomes reddits - on the whole, I am impressed by the lucidity and maturity of the reddit ‘agony aunt’ stuff although there is also a lot of crap which I think of as part of the entertainment - ‘my wife had sex with my dad, now I am not sure my kid is mine, would I be over-reacting if I asked for a paternity test?’ or ‘I came out as a horse and now my kids refuse to visit me, should I cut them out of my will?’ sort of written version of the Jeremy Kyle Show (British tabloid t.v. nonsense). What is missing on Reddit or anywhere else is ‘positive masculinity’ stuff so that is a ‘gap in the market’ for anyone looking for a project. Not sure I could name a living male role model I respect so maybe that is the reason Reddit feels unhelpful at times - you cannot promote what is not there? Men step up, is the take away message on this. Women cannot carry men’s social media activities for them so maybe quite a lot of stuff is dying because men do not make enough effort to keep it going.

It sounds good in principle but would be hard to do in practice because everyone would have to do a lot of work negotiating ‘standards’ (technical stuff and editorial principles like how to handle NSFW content etc) that would apply universally across the federation of forums and as this is all voluntary work it is asking a lot of people.