I would argue that it is currently a big part of the current economy if you know where to look. Lots of labor works via the principles of a gift economy.

E.g., you help your friend move to a new house, they help you redo your deck, you babysit your brother’s kid, they cook you dinner, etc.

The problem with bartering is that it doesn’t handle 3+ way trades (i.e., person A needs something from person B who needs something from person C, who needs something from person A), and it doesn’t usually handle asynchronous trades.

In gift-based systems, people can literally retire based off the goodwill that they’ve cultivated. There are many old people who serve their families/communities for years who then get taken care of when they need it.

Bartering wasn’t made immediately illegal when currency came in. Currency was made to make bartering easier and more fairly divisible.

I pointed this out above, but I think it’s worth repeating: bartering did not exist before currency, or at least there’s no anthropological evidence suggesting it did. People barter when they are used to currency, but don’t have access to any.

Bartering is a replacement for currency. There is no anthropological evidence of bartering existing before the introduction of currency. You would think somewhere there would be, but there’s not.

I’ve seen that happen, too, and sure enough, on my LibreTube app, which pulls from piped, I can’t see any comments right now. For whatever reason, videos aren’t actually playing, either, but there might just be something weird going on with the app.

There are channels that have good, constructive comments

Motorcycles do not burn fuel as cleanly so are more harmful to the environment though so trade-offs

I’m assuming probably not on a “vehicle miles traveled” basis, though.

They monetize your posts by serving ads next to them. If no one can see the content, it’s not monetized. The other thing is using them to train language models and such. That’s a little more abstract, and hard to account for.

Also, not sure if this is still a good way to do things, but there are tools to overwrite all your comments with useless text before deleting it. The thinking is that reddit and any third party websites aren’t going to bother storing multiple versions of a deleted comment.

It’s the same thing as when people reference “the economy”, when what they are really taking about is the stock market

Definitely noticed this as well. Wish I could filter out articles by certain keywords/phrases that pop up a lot. I know that’s an option for some of the paid rss readers, but it should be a pretty simple feature from a code perspective, so I don’t want to pay for it. It might drive me to actually learn how to compile my own app. I also want to get rid of any sports news from my local newspaper cause it seems like 50% of what they put out is professional, college, and even high-school sports