That may be true in some of the lower priced Midwestern markets, but I sell real estate in Boston and I don’t see big corporate interests in the single family or owner occupied 2-3 family market. as much as big corporations have ruined a lot of things in this country, I don’t think we Dan just wave our hands and say “corporate buyers” and explain away our housing market problems.

We have a confluence of decades of exclusionary zoning and restrictions on building that make meaningfully adding to the supply of housing almost impossible. We have a huge deficit of qualified workers in the building trades, in part because all the work dried up after the great recession and people left the field and in part because we’ve pushed more and more kids to go to college. We have a mortgage system that’s nearly unique worldwide that allows homeowners tremendous advantages in keeping their housing costs low, but inversely provides tremendous disadvantages to having them move around more often and free up housing stock (so lots of aging singles and couples in big houses better suited for young people with kids). We have a society that’s bizarrely fixated on single family living even though we desperately need more density in most markets. And we have the problem of wage stagnation. None of those things are directly attributable to corporate ownership of large numbers of houses.

I’d love for there to be some silver bullet where we could just say “disincentivize corporations from owning small housing stock” and solve the problem, but it’s nowhere near that simple.

Chances are they’re long dead.

Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they’ll keep going even if things aren’t great, but they’ll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there’s a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we’ll have that sort of trajectory.

As for donations, it’s just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?

There’s no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there’s not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there’s a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.

I guess google will just have to suck less if they want us to keep using it.

I’m not sure what to think about the price. I can’t really imagine life without a search engine, even though I was alive for a couple of decades before search engines existed. I pay $400/month for my car, but my search engine arguably gives me more value (I am lucky not to need to drive a lot). I wouldn’t pay $400/month for a search engine. But $5-10 to have a degree of freedom from the tracking and results that aren’t just trying to get my money? I am intrigued.

I had google play music. Then it became youtube music with youtube premium. They just raised the price on my family subscription by 40%. I considered leaving for spotify, where at least I’d be able to share playlists with all my friends, or apple music because I’m an iphone person now, I guess.

But the ad-free, full-featured youtube is the thing that is keeping me. I won’t save significant money by switching, but I’ll be giving up something I really get some value out of.

If they change their pricing so that it is significantly cheaper for me to use another service and premium youtube isn’t just a bonus I get for paying for my music, I may reconsider. But for now, the package is unbeatable even at the new higher price.