RSS is not gone - you can read RSS by mail and it’s quite awesome. Check RSS2Email or Nachrichtensortiermaschine

Most people are not really using the OS. All they do is starting the webbrowser and that’s it. They need input & sound from the OS, but that’s it.

TBH: You shoudn’t base such broad historical theories on 7 lines of Reddit comments without sources. There is a broad literature about the fall of the roman empire and its causes and a lot of research into the british empire and also capitalism, so maybe read a few books on the topic before jumping to such far fetched conclusions?

Interesting observation - but I’m not sure if YouTube is the main driver here. Many of the hobbies listed here like photography, gardening, woodworking, knitting, cars etc. were popular hobbies even before anyone even thought about inventing the internet or even television. So it could also be that people are doing YouTube content for already popular hobbies, because people were doing all those things before YouTube.

There are electrical lighters, which work by providing an arc of electricity. And back in the days, I used to light cigarettes on my electrical stove when the lighter was empty.

It does work. People are distracted and are not reading every message correctly. And payment processing in the appstores is also kind of easy - so you might be able to scam a few people into subscribing and they might not notice this directly. You know that you are not checking your credit card bills in details every month. So you can get a nice revenue stream of unsuspecting customers for a few month until you’ve burned down every little bit of trust and user base you had

One of the biggest problems with this AI-spam in every app is that there is no workable business model. You can’t run the AI locally on most end user computers. And running it in the cloud or via OpenAI API is expensive and won’t work in the long term. So you’re looking at another one of those stupid subscriptions, but who really wants to pay monthly for his PDF reader so he can ask it questions?

TBH Amazon has a whole zoo of devices. Even if they are putting a small team of 2 or 3 people in charge for porting this to each device, they might end up with a few hundred people

I have a modest proposal: If a car is too big for a standard parking spot, it gets marked on the licence plate. It then is not allowed to park on standard parking spots as it’s too big for them. Cities and companies are allowed to create bigger parking spots where such cars are allowed to park.

How was their free service abused?

It’s a smart move for a spammer to create a lot of accounts in the early days of a platform, before more restrictive signups with mail verification, phone verification or captchas are in place. Look at how difficult it has become to register on Twitter or Facebook.