Enough Musk Spam

I hope I did not overstate my case: I did not downvote you here (the opposite in fact), nor can I recall having done so anywhere else, I am just offering to try to tell that "other side to the story", to help balance it out.

So, not that I fully espouse this belief myself in any case, here goes: attention is a valuable commodity. So much so that the internet is supported mainly by advertising revenue, so obviously time (aka attention) really IS money! Now here comes your OP (this one, not the RSS feeds, which was a wonderful post, but let's face it the people downvoting you here likely didn't check the cross-post to see that it exists) and whether you or the content source make any money at all from the exchange - as you say, accounts are free - it still takes attention. This post has incurred a cost. Mind you, it's not a monetary one, and I for one have really enjoyed reading it, but even so, it did incur a cost nonetheless.

But it was not labeled as an "ad". Nor did the post label itself as "[full article available with free account]". Instead, it was just a link, leaving people to figure out the rest of their own, and then the article teased a few words, then cut off. That's ANNOYING! 😞 Imagine teasing a hungry person with smells and sight of food - why is that practice considered "okay" in the industry!?

Ahem, regardless, for some of us, with our age and status in life, and knowing the reputation of the sender (you), we decided it was worthwhile (or we read the RSS version:-). But there are kids on this platform, and Gen-Z, and Millennials, and still far-from-retirement Gen-Xers, who have to spend all day working (the mines yearn for our flesh + that of our childrens...), so not everyone is equally receptive to merely seeing a URL as the sole content of a post. Even one that is free, subject to some additional effort required to make an account. But back to the above point, how would someone know that it's free, until they get far enough in to have been teased, baited based on their click, and then "just know" that THIS is one of the media where if you go ALL the way through the steps of making a free account - signing up to receive spam emails (yet another cost) - THIS particular one is free. Others might also be free only to those who will download an app (which incurs yet another cost: your name, your phone number, the listing of every app that you have installed on the same device, etc.). ALL of this requires "attention", and people don't know in advance whether this source is "one of the good ones" (for now... and for how much longer until they change and demand an app installation? Twitter used to not require an account, once upon a time...).

Anyway, they aren't downvoting the fact that the news source or this article exists, they are using the downvote function as intended: to signal that they believe that your comment has lower relevance to them and others who think like them. Bc it comes across as insensitive to their needs for sleep and relaxation at the end of a day of work, or a quick check of the Threadiverse beforehand, or perhaps on a weekend - anyway they don't like it.

Maybe you don't mind that. There's something to be said for good fences make good neighbors, and PieFed in particular has some fantastic thoughts along those lines e.g. restrictions on voting to only community members rather than people who wander in from All. But whatever, that's your call, though I wanted to help explain that you could avoid some of that downvoting by putting some labelling into the post, to display sensitivity to those who will refuse to read it otherwise, and save them from having to be baited and then disappointed at having encountered the paywall.

Then again, my posts range from some of the most heavily downvoted to most heavily upvoted (though FAR more often the former:-) that some communities have ever seen, so perhaps you shouldn't listen to me... except as an example of what not to do?! 🤪