FaceDeer

I got an SCP Foundation vibe from this, so I asked Bing Chat to write an SCP article for it. It gave me this article about a mind-controlling catgirl. Not bad.

Laughter is the best medicine in the sense that it’s poison to things that are harmful.

I was referring to the Statute of Anne, which was passed by the British parliament in 1710, which was 66 years before America declared independence. That’s the actual “original copyright law”.

The US copied it almost verbatim for their first copyright law, the Copyright Act of 1790, but that was 80 years later. The only change they made was to add maps and charts as things that could be copyrighted.

The original duration of copyright was a flat 14 years, with a single additional 14 year extension if the copyright holder applied for it. So 28 years in total.

It turns out that after 28 years the vast, vast majority of copyrighted works have already earned essentially all of the money that they will ever earn. Most of them go out of print forever before that point. It’s only a rare few works that end up becoming “classics” and spawning “franchises” that last beyond that point. We’re sacrificing the utility of the vast bulk of what should be in the public domain for the sake of making those occasional lucky hits into cash cows.

There’s a great paper by Rufus Pollock, Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term, wherein he uses rigorous economic analysis to calculate that the optimal duration of copyright for generating the maximum value for society is 15 years with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years. So remarkably the original law hit the right duration almost exactly through sheer happenstance.

In an earlier paper he also determined that the optimal duration of copyright actually decreases as it becomes easier to distribute work, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively.

Over here on kbin.social, I simply blocked that community as soon as I heard about it and now the only indication I have of its existence is threads like this one.

Multiply this by a hundred and you have a Gish gallop.

I see no particular need to delete my account or any of its content, personally. I know it’s everybody’s own decision but frankly it strikes me as kind of needlessly destructive, like torching a restaurant because you no longer enjoy eating there. Other people still do, there’s no reason to take it from them.

If Reddit evolves in such a way that I no longer find it useful or enjoy going there, I’ll just stop. I’m actually happy if my old data remains useful to others - lots of times I go searching Google for information and wind up in an old Reddit thread, for example.

I’m still expecting a relatively slow death for Reddit, perhaps even not a total one like with Digg’s quick and complete collapse. I’ll be sticking around Reddit past the June 30 horizon, I’ll just be doing it entirely via my desktop browser. I’ll probably only stop going once they get rid of Old Reddit.

This means that there’ll be a gradual winding down of the communities I pay attention to, accompanied by a gradual migration to places like here. Hopefully little will be lost in the process.