I'm not the person you asked but I was curious so I looked it up and BYDs sales numbers have previously been under suspicion.
That doesn't prove they were lying then nor does it mean they are lying now.
Also, while BYD's FY2024 revenue was impressive their gross margin fell from 21.9% to 17% and that isn't sustainable now that the tariff headwinds are a blowing.
How their conduct has gone unchecked for so long is baffling.
Is it really baffling? The film industry protects them. It's a simple as that. You don't have to look any farther than the 2003 Academy Awards where Roman Polanski (who fled the US in the 1978 o avoid being prosecuted for sexually assaulting a minor) was wildly applauded for his return.
Where was Roman Polanski working between 1979 and 2004? Anywhere that didn't have an extradition treaty with the United States, including France.
HP can make some neat stuff but I wouldn't hold my breath on this one.
XenoForo is a bit spendy but they're providing the software, hosting and data storage. IIRC the forum I'm talking about is on the "Business" plan due to how busy it is.
there’s no persistence or community.
That's it right there, that's what you are missing. The older forum communities were small enough that you could keep track of whose who, something that isn't possible when the user counts are in the tens of thousands to tens of millions. I think a lot of us olds would like to go back to that but its impossible; our monkey brains can't handle communities of that size.
To use an extreme example, if I saw someone just spamming the hard-R I would want their comment immediately removed.
In the forum days those users would get attacked and / or blocked by other users. If they caused enough havoc for long enough then the mods / admins would step in. The expectation NOW is that the mods / admins will actively monitor every post and comment in order to remove disagreeable content before it can be seen. That's quite the change over the last 20 years!
The funniest part is that this mirrors real life. If someone did that IRL, I would just leave.
"Mirror" is probably more apt than you realize. IRL you would leave but on the internet you want them to leave. I'm not blaming you or saying that you're wrong, I'm just pointing out the difference.
I agree that all forums require some level of moderation in order to keep from turning into total troll-fests however there's a wide chasm between moderating someone because they won't stop posting racial slurs and moderating someone because they're going against the grain / hivemind.
Being designed around persistent topics rather than the ephemeral post model
Hmmm, you're probably on to something there. I think Lemmy could do that but no one cares to set it up.
and more visible user customisation (more prominent avatars, signatures, that sort of thing).
I'm honestly not sure this is a bad thing. Dear God, remember how threads would get blown out by hyper-configurations? Sig blocks that were 20,000 pixels long and endless GIF spam? Not sure I'm in a hurry to get back to that!
One of my favorite forums has been around since 1999 and is currently running on XenoForo which is very phpBB-esque. Anytime I get a nostalgia hankering I drop in for a few minutes. It's not always as good as you may remember. :)
The fact that most internet discussion happens in extremely censored places is bad.
Many people, including a large chunk of Lemmy, are perfectly fine with censored discussions. They honestly want it that way...as long as the discussion is censored such that it agrees with their opinion.
I want the rest of the world to change and this is another tool to help towards that end, not merely an escape.
It's extremely difficult to free people from things that they want.
Tesla employee or not they're almost certainly correct, the barriers to entry in the automobile market are very high. Tesla made it, barely, through leveraging enormous amounts of Venture Capital. BYD made it by using even more enormous amounts of Government Funding plus Venture Capital and those were both done in areas that already had stupendously high levels of ICE auto manufacturing.
Mexico has none of that and they're competing with all of the established players. I wish them success but it's extremely unlikely that they will succeed.
Elon is pissing off a lot of people with DOGE why should the democrats stepping in and take all the blame?
"...when the enemy is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him.” - Napoleon Bonaparte
Or more colloquially "Do not interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
What are we going to do about it?
Do nothing, nothing about it. The great hordes of the unwashed have ruined every single place they've showed up starting in the early 90s. They don't want to be saved from the commercialization that has taken over the internet, to the contrary they thrive on it and are willing to put up with nearly anything to attract and keep it.
If most of Reddit shifted over to Lemmy it would get commercialized into a smoking crater. As soon as there's enough regular people using a thing the companies and venture capitalists will show up and at that point the game is over.
The best of the internet has always been built by and populated with people who don't fit into a box. It's that internet people keep trying to bring back but you can't hold the castle once it's being assaulted by the normies.
So the solution is to do nothing. Let the normies stay in their palaces of commercialization and corruption. It's for the best.
You can. Nearly all of the "off brand" China produced stuff that's sold at Walmart / Target / Amazon can be purchased online from Ebay, Aliexpress, Temu, etc. The "Name Brand" stuff can often be purchased at the manufacturers website for nearly the same cost as buying it from Amazon or Walmart.