To be fair, variety makes groups more resilient. If Signal were to ever become compromised somehow, people who use other apps like Session will be okay.

It’s not a zero-sum game, either – people can use Signal and other apps.

It has to do with the societal consequences of how them “valuing their time” impacts people. Nurses refusing to do volunteer nursing has little impact on the overall system of access to healthcare.

Healthcare is heavily regulated through legislation, and is going to be free or paid or corporate or not corporate largely as a result of the legislation. Nurses can’t just do what they want. People who are concerned about the state of healthcare should therefore change things by targeting legislation, not by targeting nurses.

Creative work is not like this. Creatives refusing to do do volunteer creative work means that either they will charge for their work, which creates a barrier to access, or they will use (and push others to use) platforms like YouTube and TokTok that make money from ad data.

The former choice results in class differences in access to art, and the latter choice results in everyone using platforms that have proven themselves to be hostile to minoritized groups and progressive causes. These outcomes aren’t legislated – they are the result of creatives choosing to “value their time”.

In otherwords, creatives choosing to “value their time” means that they will happily enforce class-based restrictions in access to art, and will happily support conservative corporations and surveillance capitalism.

And I practice what I preach, too. I have spent thousands of hours developing free software and making free educational materials for people, donating my labour to support progressive causes and supporting others who do the same. Creatives who insist on charging for their work are a ball and chain on the movements I support. They are leeches and class traitors.

Creatives should value other people. Fuck their time.

No, my point specifically relates to creative work. You said in your comment:

under our current economic model people require money to survive and if they do not get money for doing their creative work they might not be able to continue making that work.

This is false, basically. They can do other types of work. Creative work can be done without making money for it. Plenty of people have a day job and make creative work in their free time. The same option is not available for most other types of work, such as government, doctors, lawyers, etc. If you try to do these types of jobs outside of the framework of a regulated business, you’ll get the book thrown at you.

The issue I’m getting at isn’t “are you responsible for the actions you take to make a living”. Rather, I’m getting at the issue of “does creative work require becoming an employee of a capitalist company, thereby siding with its shareholders in having a vested interest in increasing that company’s profits regardless of the societal damage caused?”

The answer to that question is a resounding “no”. Creatives need to grow a spine and get a day job.

you’re not a leftist unless you have daddies money to support you wasting 100 hours on a 20m video.

I didn’t say that, though. Clearly it’s not worth engaging with you.

It is not selfish to want to be payed for working on something like a video that in some cases takes hundreds of man hours of work to complete

Yes, it is, if your desire to get paid causes you to remain on corporate-controlled social media, to the detriment of society.

Not to mention, plenty of people can and do put hundreds of hours of work into projects that they don’t ask for payment for.

“Content creators” who get paid through advertisements are class traitors whose interests are aligned with the capitalist class. They will fuck over society to make a buck for themselves.

To expand on your second point in case anyone isn’t sure what you mean:

Different browsers render webpages slightly differently, because they use different “engines”. The most popular browsers are Chrome or Edge, both of these which use the Blink engine, whereas Firefox uses a different engine called Gecko.

Web developers want their websites to work for most people, so they develop websites that are optimized to run in Blink, which means they sometimes don’t look as intended on Gecko (Firefox). It’s not Firefox’s fault that developers are doing this – of course developers want to reach the most users possible. There’s nothing wrong with Gecko, either – if it were more popular, then developers would build sites for it instead of for Blink. But, this issue of sites breaking can sometimes turn people off.

(Conversely, I develop for Firefox first, so sometimes webpages I make don’t render properly in Chrome/Edge. That’s not ideal, but I don’t care much. I think Gecko is the better + more consistent engine, and I’m not interested in chasing mass appeal.)

“Emo” is one hell of a name.

Strong disagree. A phone call isn’t a demand, and doesn’t mean that you don’t care what the other person is doing. It’s a request to talk to them, and can always be declined. Some things are more quickly and easily sorted out by phone call than text.

Do the people around you do that a lot?

The problem isn’t that people have to do work. The problem is that we live in an economic system where the increase in profit created by technological advances is seized by business owners to make themselves richer, at the expense of the workers who they employ. This allows some to become billionnaires while others have to work multiple jobs or become homeless.

The goal isn’t to be self-sufficient – the goal is to continue to work with others, while abolishing the class of people who would happily seize profit created by your own labour to make themselves an easy buck.

Ah yes, the USSR, a state which considered homosexuality to be a mental disorder and a sign of fascism, and then subsequently criminalized it, arrested queer people, and sentenced them to years in labour camps.

People oppose communism because we don’t trust authoritarians to make good decisions, and when they inevitably make bad decisions, the effects are disastrous and widespread due to how centralized the system is.

There are lots of people with very precise ideas about how to execute it, and most of these people are not widely studied. The communist states that arose in the 20th century are all representatives of a narrow slice of authoritarian statist communism called Marxism-Leninism. If you want to learn about other ways of organizing a communist society, you can read the writings of other figures like Bakunin, Kropotkin, Pannekoek, Öcalan, etc. Many of these people were outspoken critics of existing communist states.

It can also be a trauma thing. Not everything is ADHD.

I don’t think Steam users really represent the average person…

This is a stupid distinction to make. There is no speech that doesn’t affect people materially.

“Free speech” is a morally neutral thing. Most leftists don’t go on about “free speech” because it’s not a value we hold. We value tolerance of people of different races, genders, sexualities, and so on. The issue is not speech in general – it’s the content of speech that matters. “Free speech” sidesteps the issue of what is actually being said.