Legitimately thanks for that. That had stood out to me as “one of these things is not like the others” but my mind only went to sex workers, I did not think at all about men who bought prostitutes.

Why is that your question?

Kinda hate to show my whole ass on this topic, but I lived through this exact thing 5 or 6 years ago when AI Dungeon accused its entire userbase of being pedophiles.

It’s math like this that convinces me that you can contribute more to the ecosystem by paying even a single dollar to a creator’s Patreon (even when Patreon takes 30% off the top) and watching w/ adblock than paying a monthly subscription to YT.

Didn’t even know proton had a chatbot, tho offhand I can’t remember if I’ve set up a paid account yet. Been too busy and mentally strained the last couple of years to even keep up with all my emails, I’ve still got >100 unreads (not the important ones).

Also I appreciate the bit of self-awareness in your rant. People have become so dogmatic nowadays there’s not a lot of that going around. Also glad to see someone else pumping DDG.

Tho I myself have just made the jump to Lemmy specifically because old.reddit has become locked to lurkers. I even still have a reddit account (which admittedly I hadn’t really used to do more than vote and search for subreddits since the API changes) but I’ve never wanted to use it on my phone so now the mobile reddit experience for me is completely blocked off. Just kinda feels like invoking old.reddit now after they locked it behind an account is a bit off the mark.