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There’s not a straightforward answer to this because it’s far too context dependent, and even a CEO at a small company won’t have absolute control over the culture of that company; I’ve seen company culture turn from amazing to toxic after losing only a couple key employees (good managers are gold dust).

To draw a comparison: staff pizza parties are so widely scoffed at not because people hate pizza, but because, when set against a backdrop of employees not actually being respected or valued, it makes them feel worse. Good will can’t be bought, whether by pizza, extra days off, or field trips. Some of those things can help, but much more important is the cumulative culture that’s built at the company.

Most decisions like discretionarily giving someone time off to look after family are going to be made at a level lower than CEO. Sometimes great policy ideas arise from a great manager using their discretion to make a sensible call, and then going “maybe we could put [idea] in place for future”.

One of my favourite things is the one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science”:

On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

" …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."

Source: https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/docs/borges.pdf

The anti-benefits rhetoric is fucking dystopian. When I highlight the harms of making vulnerable people jump through hoops to get basic support, people often respond that it’s a necessary evil to prevent “scroungers and cheats” claiming benefits.

The minuscule number of people committing fraud is a large part of why I oppose this, but I would feel the same if there were 100x more fraudulent claims than there is now. Fundamentally, there are always going to be people who slip through the gaps, and the only choice we have is whether we’d rather that involve: disabled people and other vulnerable groups not accessing support they need; or people getting away with fraud and getting money they aren’t entitled to. For me, the choice is obvious, because I think by sacrificing vulnerable people’s wellbeing to prevent fraud is absurd when the entire point of the system is to help those vulnerable people. It undermines the whole concept — though I imagine that for many politicians, undermining it is the point

An interesting component here is that it’s possible that the video creator is responsible for this silly level of ads, but it’s impossible to know. Creators can select points in the video where ads will happen, which they can use to preserve the video’s flow as much as possible. In theory, you can even select to not monetise your video at all, which is a useful tool if the topic is something particularly dense or sensitive. In practice, I’ve seen plenty of creators apologizing when an inappropriate ad plays at a sensitive part of the video, despite them having tried to disable ads on the video. It must suck to have so little power over one’s own work.

In your case, I suspect this was a creator choosing to maximally monetise their video, given the regularity and number of ads. However, it’s possible that this is a 100% “Fuck Google” situation, given how opaque they are. I find it frustrating that when we have poor experiences like yours, we don’t even have a clear target to get angry at. It leads to accountability so diffuse that it’s like homeopathy. Getting angry doesn’t necessarily help change things (at least individually), but it can be incredibly cathartic even then

It often does, yeah. Not always though. I got one of the adblock warnings last night, and it refused to play the video. I fixed it by heading into ublock settings and manually updating. It always makes me laugh how rapidly the ad-blocker arms war progresses

I’m reminded of some business-person(?) saying that people often forget that “store this on the cloud” is basically saying “store this on someone else’s computer”. I have used this reframing a few times to help ground discussions around data infrastructure.

What’s your favourite track on the Disco Elysium soundtrack (if you have one)?

I’m not clear on what you mean by “a life wasted” — can you elaborate? I’m getting the sense that you’re quite jaded from the early internet dying, but I don’t understand why you consider this to be a waste (or what you mean by being a cautionary tale).

Part of my curiosity comes from the fact that I am probably similar levels of nerdy as you, but I am somewhat younger than you . This means my early experience of the internet is quite different, and I am endlessly fascinated by what came before — in an odd way, it feels like learning about my own “cultural heritage”, so to speak.

I’m low-key glad for the Reddit API debacle that caused me to migrate over here. Although it seems that Reddit has become especially awful nowadays, Lemmy made me realise that this degradation had been happening for years.

Part of what masked it is that my favourite parts of Reddit were the niche communities that still had quality discourse in them. I especially liked the craft subreddits, which were full of vibrant users and useful resources. In hindsight, by the time I left Reddit, I was spending most of my time in these small communities, rather than the defaults.

To some extent, Reddit’s front page and default subs have always been a bit of a cess-pool of toxicity, but it wasn’t always as bad as it was when I left. It seems like it’s even worse now though. I wonder how much of that is because people who care about quality discussion migrated to platforms like this. Given how much I enjoy the vibe of Lemmy, my gut says that surely must have had a significant impact. However, my brain says that I’m probably overestimating the significance of our little pocket here.

Regardless, I’m glad to be here, and I’m glad you are here too. I hope that people like your partner will eventually find their own pockets of enjoyable psuedonymous community, whether on Lemmy or elsewhere — I’m not a drama enjoyer myself, but it’d be nice if people who like that could have a place where they can indulge in that without the unpleasantness you describe. I sympathise with people who feel overwhelmed by the fediverse, and I sometimes have to try not to evangelise too hard.