“We had exercised our right to organize as members of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA in order to bring both Google and Accenture, a Google subcontractor, to the bargaining table to negotiate on several key demands, including layoff protections.”
Google only started accepting contractors and recruiters because they were expanding before the pandemic. They probably wanted to get rid of both of those anyway.
They will show through internal communication that this was planned all along. Any retaliation protection this union thought they had doesn’t exist.
Accenture and Google’s relationship has changed throughout the years. They are partners in cloud services. I’m not sure what their role is in other divisions though.
Yeah, any news like this is heartening but I always take it with a large grain of salt. I’ve got family member affected by Alzheimer’s so it really hits home.
Isn’t this just what many people predicted what would happen when everybody would use adblock? Now most people use some kind of blocker and some browsers even ship with a content blocker. Now pages need to make money in another way, so that’s either subscriptions, donations. or just force people to watch the ads anyway. I doubt people would want to donate any money to YouTube so then you get this.
It is not nice for users, but without income they would have to shut the site down. The same will happen when Lemmy gets popular, people will really have to donate to instance owners or they will also be forced to get money in another way.
This feels incredibly charitable towards multibillion dollar corporations that are in a race to the bottom for pandemic level revenues by making these changes, but I'm no expert.
Oh, you mean the multibillion dollar corporations? The ones that get more per minute than many business will get in their whole existence, not to mention any of us people? No, adblocking is a drop in the ocean for them, that has always been bullshit, same with piracy. What we're seeing is the result of economical effects outside of all this, namely changes in interest rates, all the VCs and shareholders are now demanding the return of their investments at any cost. That's why ALL of them are squeezing at the same time.
And about Lemmy instances? Absolutely! We cannot depend on the generosity of admins forever, and i'm OK with this.
also, you now are required to log in to view twitter. I don’t care that much, but sometimes people would link to tweets and now I won’t be able to view them when they do.
This is the fallout from the technology industry shrinking and coming to terms with itself. See the crash of the Silicon Bank recently as an example. Basically as the positive outlook toward these kind of businesses and pursuits continues to mellow out we'll see these companies look inward to squeeze as much money out of their products as possible.
I feel like this is the best outcome because we've seen people address what really matters to them. People are switching to more local solutions. Engaging with communities they actually care about.
I think companies have seen what happened with Twitter and it has convinced them that they can try more drastic revenue generation strategies with little repercussion. They have all become strong monopolies in their respective domains and users who have grown up with the current offerings are not willing to put up with lesser alternatives.
The internet is basically ~10 websites for most people, only occasionally veering off the path to find some one off information. The casual user sees no reason to put up with the growing pains of alternatives and will put up with a lot from Google and friends if it means not having to create a new account on another website with no content.
How can you possibly replace YouTube and Reddit? Their value is in their user base and it's impossible to replicate that type of "success" overnight.
"The 2030's are going to be a reckoning for how much of the 21st century was built on the back of low interest rates." See Adam Conover's interview with Dan Olson of Folding Ideas.
I was just thinking the exact same thing. Things seems to have accelerated lately, but I don't know if this is something regular users even notice or care about and it just feels significant to us because of the recent twitter and reddit idiocy.
I am super excited about all the attention the fediverse is getting. There are still a ton issues to be solved here, but decentralization feels like the next evolutionary step of the web.
One of the issues is "who's gonna pay for it"? And I think the answer is something like "most users are", in the sense that you'd pay your local instance, the same way you used to pay for newsgroups. Thus keeping it out of the hands of venture capitalists, hedge funds and billionaires in general, because hopefully we've learned that that's a bad thing.
Big tech was basically a big dumping scheme, built on top of cheap money (i.e. low interest rates). This prevented smaller competitors from challenging oligarchs, but now the interest rates are too high for this to be sustainable, so they are scrambling to make their businesses actually profitable without admitting the entire business model was unethical and, well… just plain stupid in the long term.
The corporatization of the world feels like it's coming to a head. You're not allowed to own anything anymore. Everything is a subscription and it's impossible to afford property. You just rent everything putting you on constant edge until you die.
Only the biggest websites are even acknowledging this, it’ll get torn down as soon as it actually goes into effect, can’t keep the Mormons away from their porn.
Easiest solution IMO if you’re already using CloudFlare, even the free version: you can filter out certain countries. Otherwise, there’s probably other alternatives, even open source ones. Good terms to search for with your cloud provider or self hosted software may be middlewares, firewalls, serverless, edge functions, etc.
Spotify wants another $2 per month from me for “numerous improvements and fixes”, like putting Joe Rogan right in my face everytime I start up and not shuffling properly.
I think ts great! Sound quality is as good or better. Ive always discovered new music more from yt than Spotify personally so it has about 10+ years of my listening habits to go on and it dies a good job finding new stuff I like
While downloading is technically locked for free {even revanced) users ther are appa like newpipe or ytdlp that you can use to rip the audio in various formats. .
For organizing large collections and playlists I think both Spotify and YouTube are not really good but yt music on the desktop/webui is great where Spotify has a better interface for their mobile app. This might be more of a me problem though because I prefer organizing my collection offline using something like ex falso and musicbrains picard.
In terms of music library size they are pretty much equal, I used soundiiz ($5 service) to export and sync my library from spotify to yt and it got most everything, playlists included.
I think overall it might take some adjusting to if you’re very used to Spotify and its UI but its a very suitable replacement.
HP is reportedly one of the companies that Humane was in talks with over a potential sale
They didn’t learn the lesson with webos? They lost billions even if that was a good os with good phones.
Can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy this company for more than 1million and that’s just because of patents and devs (acquihire - where the buyer is only interested in ip and devs and doesn’t care at all about the actual product)
Prices will continue to go up until the number of subscribers lost due to the price increase outweighs the additional profit from the subscribers who agree to pay the higher amount.
You would have to be living under a proverbial rock to have no inkling that Spotify is a product still in use, or be willfully ignorant.
It’s like saying:
People still use Google?
People still drive cars?
People still use Windows?
People still go to churches?
…etc
Not that I agree that we should use Spotify. But playing pretend that they are small, irrelevant, and have no effect on the industry they are in isn’t doing us any favors when it comes to pushing back against it.
Don’t argue with morons. They will bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Instead of actually arguing the topic at hand you are trying to drag all repliers down to your level, act in bad faith, and beat them with personal attacks 🤣
Removes ads with the free accounts. You will be limited to free sound quality and other premium features are missing but ya know, good enough for free without ads.
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