So by your reasoning... either you are an elected official anonymously trolling nerds on the internet, or you are perfectly happy with everything the government is doing and have no desire to see it changed. Which is it?

There is no market, at least not in the "free" sense that people tend to mean. The ISP landscape is a patchwork of franchises, gentleman's agreements, or both. There is nothing resembling a competitive market where consumers may choose a provider based on price, or quality, or any other vector; or where competitors can reasonably be expected to enter.

Technology isn't neutral. And some technologies are not positive. And some otherwise-positive technologies can be abused in ways or on scales which couldn't be achieved in their absence. Any so-called "nerd" or enthusiast of technology who is not also cautious of technological advancements and their uses is a zealot.

If technological zealotry is indeed a waning trend on Slashdot, so much the better.

In other words, you made up a strawman to attack, and didn't really take the OP's intent at all into account. You're projecting all of your feelings about the subject into it, which is fine but isn't actually a discussion. Done here.

OP never talked about doing any of this. You just made up a strawman and started attacking it. Go back and read the thing you responded to.

Go back and read it *again*. OP was clearly stating that they would gladly pay for a service, and currently do. You attacked them for expressing regret that that option is being taken away.

Wait. You're being a moralizing prick, then chastising a person for doing the thing you consider moral? When that person expressed *wanting* to do the thing you consider moral? I'm lost.

You might want to check your math.

Which most people aren't.

Frankly, for anything I don't already have in my laptop, it's easier to click a YouTube link than to do pretty much any other action. I don't even bother downloading anymore. It's just there because I'm on the Internet.

I do care about audio quality. Generally if I'm going through this process for an album more than once or twice, I'll find a lossless or high-bitrate copy for sale and buy it. But for casual listening of whatever, pretty much nothing beats the search engine's media player.

Do they, necessarily? I've suggested that it is understandable but evidently imperfect—the evidence being the consequence that good non-incumbent content is often unseen. In fact, Slashdot's entire moderation approach reinforces that consequence.

I'm not saying Slashdot should abandon its approach, I'm not even saying that it doesn't work somewhat well. But it has a cost and that cost is much higher for a large community with a large volume of user-generated content. And I think that is worth discussing.

I'm trying to provide some insight into the rough edges of Slashdot's management of user-generated content. If you aren't interested in discussing those rough edges (and so far you have not done so at all), I'm not sure what you are trying to do. Game the incumbent advantage by getting your comment close to another one with a higher mod score? Doesn't that just underscore the problem?

Okay. Pretty sure I made my point. What's yours?

That would basically exaggerate the bias toward incumbent posts.

And some of the most interesting, insightful, informative and funny comments go on forever underrated, and mostly unseen. This is caused in part by an understandable but evidently imperfect bias in Slashdot's design, where incumbent posts (posted earliest, posted by trusted users) are given greater visibility.

Like peer review in journals, it is possible that mostly-positive solutions can have negative consequences as well.

For fuck's sake really? You're shitting all over people who work hard to make ends meet because they're talking about current events to the extent anyone has bothered to inform them? Because, what, they aren't as astute as you think you are with all your disposable income and taste in booze? As if that even makes any kind of sense.

Maybe if you weren't such a tiny, miserable, elitist prick you'd take some time to politely engage your kith, maybe even educate them, hell maybe even yourself. Instead you're bragging to Internet strangers about how much better you are than the shithole you obviously never *really* escaped.

He's definitely a penetration tester.

But that's not a problem with taxes, that's a problem with how people are chosen to use tax revenue, and with accountability generally. And it's also a problem with living in a society where people have conflicting interests.