Money and gold have value because they can be exchanged easily for goods and services that are really wanted. As long as crypto currencies make it hard to trade for goods ands services, they will be, at best, a fad, at worst, a scam. There needs to be market for crypto to work. All I see is promises, no real commitments to it.
Unfortunately, people keep swallowing garbage changes on cell phones. Before, phones had removable batteries, cheap screen replacements, sturdier bodies, etc. since upgrading your phone from a 512 MB RAM to a 1GB RAM cell phone actually made a difference in performance. Now, my almost 5 year old pixel 3a can do everything my pixel 7 does. Companies saw the writing on the wall and started forcing customers to upgrade by crippling phones. Again, unfortunately, many just don’t notice that their iPhone 6S, Samsung S6, Pixel 3 XL, insert_4yr_phone was the peak in needed performance and didn’t need to be replaced. By then, removable batteries are phased out, micro SD are phased out, headphone jacks are started to be phased out, etc.
Aren’t Reddit moderators already volunteer admins? Still, Lemmy has the same issue as Reddit when considering server costs, if not worse. On Reddit, if a post brings in high volume of traffic, their server (farm?) needs to be strong to handle the influx. On Lemmy, the server instance can go down… theoretically. Not sure how much load a post can cause. But, compared to Reddit, Lemmy federated design means high load situations are suboptimal.
The problem is that the artist needs an audience to use arts as a means to survive. If there is no audience to pay or exchange goods for the art provided by the artist, the artist cannot use art as a sole means to survive. Like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc. Twitter is just another platform providing a specific type of audience.
Unfortunately, the artist doesn’t get to dictate the audience they receive from the platform since they don’t control it. In essence, an artist that starts relying on specific platforms for an audience is making a calculated risk that the audience will remain unchanged for the forseeable future.
As for shadowbanning, even if it is a crappy tactic, in the end is just the platform owner(s) shaping their audience to the way they see fit. One can argue that it is just a tactic to go against the artist. The reality is that the owner(s) are looking at how their audience grows and shrinks and are making their own changes to maximise audience growth and, in the case of twitter, advertisement revenue growth.
When someone relies on a service they provide (art) to pay the bills, pay for food, etc. it’s devastating when your service loses customers/audience. Life is a constant risk prediction. Attempting to force change on circumstance outside of one’s control is high risk of failure and, in my opion, an effort best used in finding better opportunities.