The app is asking for a million permissions that are completely unnecessary. They are just as much of a data kraken as facbeook, google and apple, with the exception of people being fully transparent about professional achievements and qualifications. That's a definite reason to never give them access to my phone.
Those poor trees.
IMHO whenever you actively need something and the owner either doesn't make it available or the price is prohibitively expensive, it's justified. That especially includes papers, books and other tuition material that's been paywalled or made expensive as hell without any actual reason, even more so if the author gets next to no compensation.
Downloading series and movies that aren't being streamed anymore, by all means.
When it comes to current movies, it depends on what's available. Unfortunately most streaming platforms don't have Chinese subtitles, and my wife often struggles to fully follow the original audio and the English subs often disappear too quickly.
For software, my personal stance is that if you use something every once in a while, pirate away. If you use it regularly and/or generate income from it, then pay your dues.
Hab mir in meinem Leben 3 Ohrfeigen eingefangen, und die waren sowas von verdient, dass ich den erzieherischen Nutzen nicht absprechen will.
Entsprechend lautet die Antwort für mich trotzdem "nein".
Through investors, who consider the revenue a good indication for future profits. So they float the bill and receive shares in the company instead, and cash out during the IPO.
A global search would be perfect, and ideally only single instance of community names across servers. Else we end up with 20 different meme communities everywhere, and bots crossposting everything.
*billion
And profitability is not the same as generating revenue.
You can earn $200M a quarter and still have expenses of $220M, meaning you're making a net loss.
That's why companies focus on exponential growth first and don't really care about portability, but once the userbase is large enough, they will try to monetize it. Either through ads, or paid subscriptions, premium plans, special avatars, etc.
That will surely piss of some of the early adopters, but usually isn't significant enough to make an actual dent.
The last step (which we have also seen) is then kicking out staff. That has two effects:
1., It brings down the overhead (= salaries and attached taxes & social security) 2. The revenue per capita is inflated, i.e. it looks as if every employee is generating 4000 bucks instead of 2500 (random example), which is something that looks good in an IPO prospectus.
14 years primary account, 11 years alt. Mod in several >1 million communities.
Deleted everything, replaced my comments (>15k total) and posts (>500, including announcements on subs moderated) with a message stating my reasons, and then deleted both accounts. Plus 4 alts I sparsely used, between 3-8 years old.