Is there a better way to do seller verification? It does seem like an information leak to me. Craigslist and eBay don’t share my identification as a potential buyer. I don’t love the marketplace being tied to a social network, but it’s what many people are using these days.

the only people i would really not want to find out that i look at their profile are spammers and scammers (oh, and stalkers).

so both sides have a fair reason. so guess, if you can, choose the social network that works the way you prefer.

but that person had to put their info into the website, themselves, by choice, and then chose to let their privacy settings be such that others can view them.

if you pin your photo up to a cork board, don't be surprised if people see it

with more and more illegitimate tracking being done, informing those being tracked seems a benefit, not a drawback.

there is a difference however between one institution tracking who all the people are that i am looking at, vs the person i am looking at finding out for themselves who is looking at them.

whether a text has substance isn't important to me. what is more important is whether the text reflects the author's thoughts, whether it is original or authentic. an AI-generated text doesn't do that. i want to talk to a real person, not someone enhanced by AI. (let me get this out of the way, that's why i also don't like makeup. apart from special cases or situations, i consider the necessity of makeup to be able to present oneself in public like a mask that hides the real person behind it.)

when i engage with a topic, my engagement is with the person behind the text, not the text itself. if someone writes their texts with AI, then i can no longer recognize the real person behind it. i can no longer see which arguments in the text are important to the author, and what are the author's own opinions.

the purpose of a dialogue with a person is to get to know that person better and to develop a shared understanding of a topic. that's not possible with an AI-generated text. i can neither get to know the person behind it, nor can i see how their understanding develops. there's a high risk that the person doesn't understand everything the AI says.

(this text was originally written in german, then machine translated but manually edited for style (replaced expressions that i would not use myself))

in particular for jobs, if you think that jobs are controlling you (which is not unreasonable) then switching jobs is not helping you to escape that control.

if you don't want to let someone else control your life you need give up your traditional career and become a freelancer. i did that. i had jobs too in between, but only when they helped me advance my own goals.

My “advice” is also US-centric, where I have observed time and again what truly leads to one getting their fair share.

Freelancing is a way to achieve this.

i too contributed to stackoverflow and eventually stopped because it didn't feel worth the effort. i never asked a question though, so i didn't have the experience GP made, but i doubt i would want to delete everything, at least not without moving all my answers to another location.

once or twice when searching for the solution to a specific problem i was lead to a stackoverflow question and had to discover that the answer that solved my problem was my own from a decade earlier. so i too benefit from posting answers. deleting them would reduce that benefit.

That's my point - maybe FOSS isn't the absolute good we've been lead to believe.

It was a response to locked down proprietary software which increasingly became hostile to its users. And it is (from a user's perspective) better that that for sure. But from a dev perspective, it's not as good as it could be.

> my answers

Exactly, those are your answers, your work. We've spent a lot of our limited time working for other people's benefit because we believed in it or sometimes because it was fun. But ultimately, it's becoming clear other people don't care and will throw us under the bus as soon as we're no longer useful. And then there's people who are just looking for a way to take advantage of us.

And I want to exclude both from benefiting from my work.

We should strive to find methods to make good, productive, pro-social people to benefit while keeping anyone who wants to exploit us away.

People aren't "taking advantage" of you by benefiting from the free work that you voluntarily do. They may be rude towards you, but it's your choice to work for them or not.

If you release your work to the world, there's no license agreement in existence that will prevent "undesirables" from benefiting from your work. See: all of the AIs being trained on publicly accessible code (regardless of its license).

The answer is just, do write open source code if you think it's fun, and you're okay with the worst people you can imagine using your code. If you write a geodata library, it might be used in a targeting module for a bomb, which might in turn be launched towards civilians. That's just a consequence you'll have to accept.

sure, but the amount of nonsense (to avoid the b-word) i am willing to put up with depends on the amount of money i expect to make from the project. for unpaid work that amount is zero. if i am investing my free time and i allow you to benefit from it, you better be nice when you talk to me.

when i run a business then the information gained potentially makes my product sell better. for a volunteer project i may not care about popularity, so the information gained is not necessarily of any benefit.