I could see a Wikipedia-style donation model working to keep lots of different servers up. But I can’t see it happening for servers hosting exclusively news + memes + whatever random communities people want to add.

I _could _ see it happening for dedicated broad-topic or semi-niche instances (instances for gaming, investing, Linux, music production, etc.) each hosting a collection of related and maybe more niche communities (for CSGO, Bitcoin, Arch, EDM production).

As they become more popular, server hosting costs increase, and at some point they might need to ask for donations to keep afloat. People are willing to throw a little money towards something they enjoy, especially if it’s their choice to do so. And they feel good about it. And instances that stay around longer gain more users, more usability, more credibility (assuming a non-toxic community).

I could definitely see it leading down a path of growth and prosperity for the platform. However, now that I typed this out, I could see it both working positively, and being abused and exploited, so 🤷

They’re all competing for recruits.

Wow, I didn’t even consider that. It makes them seem so much less human to me, and so much more like a pack of hyenas.

Huh, we had 7 for our school district (one for each branch, and I think the army and navy had two), but my high school alone did have just under 3000 kids.

We had all 7 of these guys (and one woman) going from class to class every day for a month giving four 90-minute presentations per day to pander and force-feed each individual classroom of ~30-50 students a glorified recruitment ad. They even set up one of the portable classrooms as a recruitment office for that month.

I’m curious, did the recruiters hand out forms to kids under 18 that required parent/guardian signatures?

I’m asking because ours did, and I could swear that these forms were a sort of pre-enlistment contract that needed parent/guardian signature in order to waive the 18+ requirement for agreeing to enlist. So although we wouldn’t actually be enlisted until we turned 18, we could agree to enlist beforehand with a parent’s signature. But, as strong as that memory is, I still can’t help but doubt myself because of how insane and illegal that all sounds.

Sure, but they return it as well for a refund or new item. Both the seller and new buyer get reimbursed in full by amazon. Plus, it makes amazon a worse place to shop overall, and I don’t think is a bad thing if irritated customers choose another site to shop from, loosening the near-monopolistic grip they have on online shopping.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a shitty and immoral thing to do, generally speaking. It would make me feel guilty thinking about the poor schmuck who gets whatever junk I send as a return. I’ve been the guy who receives a busted piece of shit in my “new” package from amazon, and it’s irritating as hell. But I think amazon suffers most from that type of shitty behavior because it poisons the overall trust people have in them, and makes it more inconvenient to use amazon’s services.

So you might disagree, and that’s fine, but it’s because of the negative impact that shitty immoral behavior has on amazon that makes me feel 0% guilty overall, and hope the same scummy return scheme spreads like a plague to a point where amazon and wish have a similarly iffy reputation. Because I think they deserve to fall from their throne.

What a disgusting video.

Greedy, manipulative, despicable behaviour like this is why I take no issue with people who just repair their broken things by ordering a new one on amazon and sending the broken one as a return for a full refund. I’m not sure how a person could even feel remorse while pissing in the face of a company pushing shit like this into their employee’s faces.

A surprising amount of people I know like to upgrade their graphics cards this way, returning their old card in the new box, getting free cutting-edge upgrades as soon as they become available on amazon’s dime. Seems to have worked pretty well for them over the years 🤷